Question about SAP v 2.0

[ucla_vince]

I'm a total newbie, and know nothing about mods, but I noticed the SAP and figured it sounded cool so I downloaded it.

I have 2 questions.

1) After I installed the mod and started a new game, my settlers started moving around by themselves like they were being controlled by the AI or something. I have restarted several games and it continues to do this. Any idea why?

2) I noticed a discussion on this page about pillage vs attack priorities for the AI. Now, as I said, I don't know squat about this stuff, and several different people mentioned several different values. Could someone dumb it down a little for me and tell me *exactly* what I should do to correct these priorites if I was so inclined?

Thanks

[Immortal Wombat]

Hi, ucla_vince

1) After I installed the mod and started a new game, my settlers started moving around by themselves like they were being controlled by the AI or something. I have restarted several games and it continues to do this. Any idea why?

We got bored with the whole concept of having full control of your own units, and added this feature whereby the wandering settlers have little minds of their own. Its the closest we could get to simulating pre-civilisation nomadicity. Unfortunately, they are very stupid minds (Activision AI ), so merely wander backwards and forwards from the square they are on.

Heh.



But in truth, its a bug. See the FAQ

[ucla_vince]

ah, thanks for the info

now how about those attack/pillage priorities?

[Immortal Wombat]

Depends what you mean by "correct".

The priorities in question are in strategies.txt, with values for each strategy within it. Taking the default strategy as an example, the values are:

    GoalElement { Goal GOAL_ATTACK              Priority   720000  MaxEval  25  MaxExec  25 }
...
    GoalElement { Goal GOAL_PILLAGE             Priority   753000  MaxEval  10  MaxExec   5 }

As you can see, the Priority value for "GOAL_PILLAGE" is higher than for GOAL_ATTACK. Now on the scale of these values, the difference isn't too great, but it does mean the AI is more likely to pillage before attacking. To change this situation, reverse the values, or just decrease the value for GOAL_PILLAGE. The way I play the game is with a relative priority of pilaging to attack of about 300 000 (compared to attack = 720 000) maybe. But ask anyone: I'm not very good at actually playing the game...
Probably 550 000 to 600 000 will give you fairly good results.

NB: never tried any of this myself, but since nobody else answered...