Jericho as Jericho .. WOOO HOOOO!!

[Martin the Dane]

Well Mark I must admit that now it's almost if not totaly impossible to win as Jericho, I managed to take over the two NorthEastern cities. But since the AI is now set on destroying the player playing Jericho that's not enough, I totaly drained the pop of three provices to make Woriers, just to hold the two of them, and lost in the end anyway.

How on earth does the computer player know where to find me. Even the ones I didn't encounter on my way seemd to go straight for me. No battle between themselves, no: just go for poor ol me.

[vovan]

Originally posted by Martin the Dane
How on earth does the computer player know where to find me. Even the ones I didn't encounter on my way seemed to go straight for me. No battle between themselves, no: just go for poor ol me.

If am not mistaken, as of now, there is no such concept as no contact. Meaning that the AI always knows of the existance of other players. It knows exactly how many of them there are, who they are, and probably where they are. This is being worked on

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Martin the Dane
Well Mark I must admit that now it's almost if not totaly impossible to win as Jericho, I managed to take over the two NorthEastern cities. But since the AI is now set on destroying the player playing Jericho that's not enough, I totaly drained the pop of three provices to make Woriers, just to hold the two of them, and lost in the end anyway.

Ah, Martin I'm glad to see I have crushed your spirit!

I agree its almost impossible to win now. But I thought it was just about impossible before, so what do I know I think with one less opposing city it would be winnable in principle with reasonably good luck. I also have one more idea for how to technically win, Maybe, but it would be a bit silly.

Have you played the second civ yet? They are now fairly challenging, although I'm sure you can win after a few tries. But its no longer a sure thing IMO.

The improvements I made were rather minor. Civs used to Only attack Jericho. Now they attack civs starting at the top of the list until the highest civ controls no squares. Then they all move on to attack the next-highest. That is why those at the top are the most challenge, increasing almost exponentially for the last few. Is that enough of a hint for how you might Possibly be able to win as Jericho?

Gary made the crude AI we have in now quite flexible. It can be modified in an xml ini file. I show some of the values from that initialization file below, but stripped since the xml tags read weird in the forum.

 Old Jericho action orders and weighings (from
 militaryattitude.xml) Chance of picking a particular 
action (FE [goto] enemycity) is a proportionally 
weighted random choice between the alternatives.

  owncapital 5
  owncity 20
  ownsquare 40
  ownarmy 5
  wait 20
  enemycity 5
  enemysquare 5
  enemyarmy 5

New action orders and weighings
  owncapital 0
  owncity 10
  ownsquare 10
  ownarmy 0
  wait 60
  enemycity 5
  enemysquare 15
  enemyarmy 0

At your suggestion that plain squares weren't attacked aggressively enough, I boosted the chance of an enemy (you! ) square getting attacked. Defense is handled mosly by the large percentage of waiting in the new orders.

I think the AI in the other scenarios could be improved too. But its more important for coder time to go into getting the Real AI going IMO. That will blow you away! I Hope!

How on earth does the computer player know where to find me. Even the ones I didn't encounter on my way seemd to go straight for me. No battle between themselves, no: just go for poor ol me.

Yep, they attack only you, if you're Jericho, as I said above. They are currently aware of the whole map as Vovan said. But the AI currently doesn't look at your troop locations. (Except if an order to attack enemy army comes up.) The AI just knows which squares of what type (city, plain, etc.) you control.

Hope that helps!

[edit, fix formatting]

[Mark_Everson]

I WON Jericho as Jericho in D7.2!

I won about turn 130. So there's always room for improvement there. I thought I was going to lose at one point, and almost gave up, but the rush slowed down for some turns enough for me to take the offensive again, and gain ground.

Now, back to Work!


WARNING - Semi-SPOILER Below. . .

I used a strategy based on using everything I know about the AI (see the post above) to keep the AIs relatively small. To win its critical to prevent one (especially the teal one in the NW) from growing too big. I also used the same sort of go-nomad strategy that Martin used so successfully in the D7.1 version.