Strategies' goal effects

[WesW]

I figured out the slider settings in the const.txt, and now they work as they should. We will have to see if this is proper, or if the Actigrammers changed them on purpose.
Getting back on topic...
Can someone explain what "squadclass" refers to in the goals.txt

[Daniel Frappier]

The lines that control the Wages are in gamedata\const.txt

-----------------------------------------------------
UNIT_WAGES 1.0 # what does 1 notch mean
BASE_WAGES 4.0 # gold per person when slider is zero
-----------------------------------------------------

Wich means that the Wages at the middle of the slider is 4 gold and that each tick on one side or the other is worth 1 gold and for example

UNIT_WAGES 4.0 # what does 1 notch mean
BASE_WAGES 12.0 # gold per person when slider is zero

would gives possible wages of 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20.

I am not sure I understand you're comments about handicapping the AI, i can tell you that personnaly i hate it when the AI start with a lot of stuff because i feel it unbalance the early game and everything becomes a catch-up race BUT i think bonusses through out the game are good and necessary.

In my experience nothing as as much impact as a Production bonus, I think you can't go without one. I got to run my wife is angry and my kid is shouting , next time i will list the bonusses i gave and i hope you will not go without some, the one in the game are seriously wrong.

[marc420]

Just a thought on AI Attacks that I wanted to throw out.

To some extent, having an AI that doesn't attack as much may be considered an improvement over earlier AI's in civ-type games.

In the past, I've defeated civilizations that were more powerful than myself by using a "rope-a-dope" strategy. That is I would set up a strong defensive position, then let the AI send wave after wave of attackers at me.

Often, with a combination of defense and counter-attack, I was able to inflict very heavy losses over a long stretch of time upon a powerful AI civilization. This was a resource drain on the powerful civ, and thus over time I was able to catch up or pull ahead of the civ, and eventually go over to the attack myself against this civ.

So, if the AI in CTP2 is not going to spend hundreds of years producing units and throwing them against my strong defensive line, then this might be considered an improvement in the AI's intelligence.

Or at least its possible that this sort of change in behaviour is what Activision was aiming at, and maybe they just missed the balance a bit by making the AI too cautious in attacking.

[MarkG]

marc, it is certain from the strategies.txt file that the ai evaluates your stack(according to how many units of each kind you have) before attacking

i saw this "live": an ai stack of 5 units gets close to a city of mine. i dont have the time to rush build city walls and just leave it with the 4 units i have inside. the ai attacks and gets my city. i eeer reload a previous save and build one more unit. the ai stack turns around and heads to another city

[FreeChina]

COmpletely unrelated, but it's pretty funny that "Destroy city" the D turns into a

[colorme]

SO I was experimenting with adding some military AI code of my own (using SLIC2). But, I cannot figure out how to keep the AI from over-riding "my AI code".

e.g. I wrote some SLIC code to select the biggest army the AI (of one of the civs) has, and to make it move to a particular location. The selecting part works (I put in an appropriate message to indicate that), but the moving part of this doesn't work.

Does anyone know how this is done in SLIC1 (or better still in SLIC2)?

[MrFun]

People are complaining about a weak AI and then you go ahead and reset when you lose a battle to the computer!?

Oh well, I am sometimes guilty of that too.

[Locutus]

colorme,

I haven't messed too much with this yet, so I could well be way off, but I think that if you want to override the AI completely, you'll have to work very, very thoroughly. Don't just send the AI to it's final destination, send it to an adjacent square first. If it has movement points left, send it to the next square, and then to the next, etc. That will probably work better. Also, there are a lot of ways to move the AI (much be like 5-10 events that are movement related), so trying a different event might help.

If you get stuck, send me what you've got and I'll have a look at it, I'm currently working on a more or less similar thing for a scenario anyway (restricting movement to a certain 'zone' to be more precise, not quite as complicated but still similar), so together we might be able to work it out.

BTW, in SLIC1 you couldn't tell the AI to do anything, not moving and not anything else either, so we're working on ground-breaking territory here

[colorme]

Locutus,

Thanks for the tip. I'll try what you said. BTW, I do this in my spare time, and that's getting a little too spare I guess the same holds for you too ...

[OmniGod]

Okay can someone tell me how to make the AI start building a civ right away... it's 30 turns in and only the Canadians are smart enough to build a city... some civs aren't even moving around to find a good location, they're just standing there dumbfounded... is the the large map that confuses them, or are they just looking to be knocked off in the first 100 turns, by my army?

Omni - how do you fix this?

[skorpion59]

Omni,

Even on massive maps, the Civs will move, settle, etc.
You have the 'Ghost Civ' problem. Stems from the scenario getting messed up internally while it was being created. Generally, although not always, this comes from not deleting the original settlers before playing with the 'Set Start Loc' options.

POSSIBLY, if you go back in and delete all the settlers, then set the Start Locs again, it might fix it. Although, quite often, once the scenario gets messed up, it is toast and no longer usable.

[WesW]

Poor name for the thread, but the best I could come up with right now. Anyway, I have been trading emails with Darryl (Gemini) all morning about what he has been able to figure out about the goals settings found in the strategies.txt. He is still working on his Ctp1 mod, but everything he has been working on seems to be a problem still in Ctp2, so I think everyone will be excited to hear what he has told me. Here are edited excerpts from our correspondence:

Darryl, if you get time, write me up a brief description of the major improvements to AI behavior that you have been able to achieve, and what settings you altered to achieve them.
Wes

Well, I just recently implemented them but so far I have seen the ai attack in stacks of 9 for air and naval units. To do this I set the priority for attack_troops_priority to the highest priority for all the aip files. It seems when other priority's took precedence that the ai would stack very ineffectively, for example you might see a stack of two or three for air and naval units when the explore or seige priority took precedence. Since I set the attack_troops_priority the highest in all aip files it takes cities a lot more effectively and more often.
Also, it seems that adjusting the min_attack ratio and max_attack_ratio to from 9.0 and down(i have 14 different aips for the war settings so I decrease this in each file) tends to have very good results for making the ai more inteligent about where to attack and when. Although I have tested this it is only the attack_troops_priority that seems to really get the ai to stack naval units in 9 a stack.
Also the distance_from_unit as well as the other distance priorities seems to have been interfering with making the ai a tougher opponent. Setting all these priorities to 0 has made the ai attack from farther distances and also made the ai less choosy about the cities it takes. For instance the per_capita modifier would make the ai not take easily taken cities, instead waiting for what appears to be a larger city to come into play. If that larger city doesn't come into play the ai seems pretty stupid and will just pass by or wait??? Crazy, but setting it to 0 has made the ai much more aggressive. I especially enjoyed it when I saw the Japanese attack the US mainland (seeing as my map is 120x240 at first it would only attack it's closest enemies), sending troop transport after transport to the mainland. I have also seen it use the aircraft carriers(but not often, still working on that).There still are some quirky ai behavioral problems going on but hopefully fixable.
Also I have set the num_city_defenders to different integers depending on the aip warsetting. I have randomized the aip files to switch on a random basis. I have created 14 seperate aip files just based on different styles of war to conduct and how many city defenders the ai will prioritize. Anyway, those are the major changes I can think of, sorry about some of the spellings for the priorities, I'm at work right now and I am going by memory.

Darryl states in other letters that increasing the max_eval numbers seems to get the AI to attack more, perhaps because it evaluates more cities and thus finds more opportunities for success.

I haven't really examined Darryl's comments to see how they could be used in the Strategies.txt, but I know this info will help us.

[lozina]

the whole diplomacy ai really stinks... but 2 things that stand out right now are:

1. all civs find it necessary to pirate your trade routes every once in a while. this is annoying not only because they do it totally arbitrarily- dosent matter if you're on good terms or not- but also they consider it "ok". sometimes i pirate their trade routes in return and then send proposal that ill stop if they stop - and they always reject! meanwhile his regard would be at "respects you". i just dont understand it... piracy should be something more hostile civs do and other civs should lower their regard towards a pirating nation. also- you should be able to avoid making trade routes through another nation's border- at a cost of more caravans of course. or maybe even plot the whole course yourself...

another thing is how civs value cities so minimally. id offer another civ a size 30 city for some size 1 hamlet they snuck into my borders (so i can then disband it) and they always reject... or if i offer huge cities for something like a peace treaty they reject that too. cities should be more considered much more valuable to the ai... just imagine usa offering New york city to canada!

why am i posting this stuff on this forum? because i wanna know how to customize the diplomacy so i can make these changes. does anyone know what files i need to edit and if i need to know their SLIC scripting language? ive been fooling around with various files ever since the game came out and still cant find how to make such changes in diplomacy. pls lemme know!!!

[Matte979]

My feel is that the didn't finish the diplomacy.

First. There are alot of things in the files concerning dipolomacy that isn't used. The computer players don't do any diplomacy between themself.
They are almost always at war.

Activision needs to go through the whole diplomacy system.

/Mathias

[OmniGod]

Most of what you want to change is based in the diplomacy files, and in general through out the whole AI files... I've started to glance at them for an upcoming scenario where I need to overhaul the people involved... but if you take the time to read, cross reference and such you'll see that there is possibility in the AI dip.... no special knowledge needed as of yet, but it never hurts to know slic, just in case

Omni