The AI in CTP 2 needs some tweaking and here is how.

[Matte979]

I found a few basic changes that need to be made to make the AI more challenging.

1. Put the offence goals on aggresive civs slightly higher than defence

2. Lower the half the support and lowerd the build cost for defensive units.

3. Raise the priority for defence and offence build lists to just below growth.

4. Change the Power Bonus in goal on defence and attack i raised only attack goals.(Thanks Omni i think it was you that found this one, YES i think it works seems its realted to if the players has higher powerbonus)

5. Double the Evaluate and Max execute for all strategies.

6. Raise the factor of Navy and Air units with 5-10 procent remove the same percent from defence and Ranged

7. DiffDb. Add slightly more production bonus. But most important raise the max ahead numbers. Lower the start happiness and add a capital distance penalty to the human player.

Optional 8. Change the sliders in const and remove producion bonus from sea. Add more production bonus to
Mines. (I made other changes here as i like the old CIV 2 terrain affects)

Optional 9. Remove the regard penalty for moving units in other players territory. You will get a penalty as you break the no tresspass agreement.

Now i think i will move on to do some slic code to fix diplmacy and some other AI baviour.

/Mathias



<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Matte979 (edited December 23, 2000).]</font>

[MarkG]

how about making all these changes a mod for us anti-notepad people?

[hexagonian]

...or indicate the files we need to go to, what text we need to change and what to change it to.

Computer semi-illiterate here.

(I'm still having error messages on making government additions - I've followed instructions exactly, and I'm getting error messages for missing numbers in the govern.txt files, even though they are there. grrrrr)

Can't wait for MedMod2

[claytonres]

I have watched the AI mass units on their coast, move transports around willy-nilly, etc. Make the AI smarter so they don't waste space on transports. They also see an enemy unit right next to their coast (helicopter, troop ship) and do NOTHING. WHY??

[BlueO]

So far, I have seen a vast improvement in ai after making some of the above changes. I didn't change the unit costs and support, and I didn't change the diffDB file. I did however increase the UnitSupportPercent to 50ish, and put more percentage in offensive units instead of defensive units. I also increased the siege priority to the highest, and lowered the defensive priority a bit, so the computer won't spend all its forces defending. Oh, I also increased the ai timeslice by 10.

Actually, the above changes didn't seem to do much, until I increased the Siege Powerbonus in Goals.txt as someone had suggested in the forums. After changing that, I noticed right away, the ai are actually killing off their weaker neighbors! Before I changed the powerbonus setting, the ai had problems lanching successful sieges, and cities rarely changed hands between the computers.

In my current game, all I have to say is wow! The ai is much more agressive, launching attacks after attacks against my cities. I had to keep a small reserve army behind to recapture back cities. I had cities taken and retaken so many times, I lost count. And when I capture enemy cities, I usually had to recapture it back again, if I leave it too weak.

I did notice that the Chinese no longer had 2 to 3 stacks surrounding each city, so it did make it a bit easier to conquer cities. But the Chinese still launched wave after waves of attacks against my weaker cities, and in my opinion, that is much more fun than wiping out sitting ducks.

Oh, another interesting note, when I invaded the French later, they had a city with 2 big stacks surrounding it. I took the city and was surprised when those 2 stacks moved toward my empire! I lost 2 well defended border cities right away. Took me forever to retake them, but now the French is mad at me. Before, the ai was quite passive, letting me take over their cities without any reprecussions.

By the way, I also increased the SpecialUnitCount to 10ish, and the map was flooded with slavers early on! Enslavements were going everywhere. For every slaver I killed, 2 more poped up. It was quite interesting.

Right now in my game, i'm just into early Modern Era. Can't wait till we get nukes, and see if the ai will actually use them. (oh, I changed the nukecity parameters, so it will consider using nukes, but don't know if the NukeCity goal is implemeneted or not)

One last thing, I reduced the entrechment bonus from 0.5 to 0.1. After all, how can entrenchment give higher bonus than walls and terrain? Its ridiculous. Doing this, also allow ai to successful capture cities. That entrenchment bonus pretty much gave defending units invulnerability...

Wish, the game had shipped with the aggresive ai, the game is so much more fun. My first two game without any text editing, was so boring, I nearly trashed this game. Luckily, I read somewhere that there were ways to improve the ai.
[This message has been edited by BlueO (edited December 24, 2000).]

[Changmai Beagle]

Sounds like there are some fruitful modifications here. Perhaps we can get a series of mods of the kind of AI we'd like to play against that we can plug in for different games. I suggest some sort of characterization of the AI style (maybe leader names or just something for the range of aggresiveness from defensive to berserker). Beware the Napoleon AI mod??

[colorme]

Hey Changmai,

That's a good idea. So you can download different personality types to a play against ...

One difficulty though is that it isn't clear what calculations the AI makes to transition to different diplomatic states (see diplomacy.slc)

[ACOLKitty]

I made some of these mods along with some other suggestions and the game is vastly improved!

Good work. Now get to work on making the wonders cool.

[jkadabomb]

Making the AI agressive would be an excellent improvement. However I would like to see more realistic diplomacy with the AI also. Can some1 make a mod to where the AI will actually have treaties with each other and follow the treaties they sign with their human opponent (like no trespass).

[Bed23]

i have seen many players disapointed by AI lately sooo....

BUMP