AI in MOO3

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Widely Reknown


This is a pretty lousy example of an alliance of convenience. The US and France are firmly allied, they just don't agree on every single point in their foreign policy. An alliance does not mean that everybody should obey the strongest member.

You can be pretty sure France would help you out if you were invaded by super-Iraq, though.

Its a pretty good example of game mentality from a player. "I saved their asses twice, I never hurt them, I give them a bit of tech now and again but now they're starting to hate me for invading someone else and turning into the only galactive superpower. Wtf this diplomacy system must be broke!"

If you really want great examples of alliances of convenience, just look at 14th-17th century European history.

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Ozymandous
See this is my issue. I understand that nations and/or empires will look after their own best interest, but I would think that there would be at least SOME sort of diplomatic break-down before war is declared, which seldom happens in the 4X games I play before the AI declares war.

I think we are closer to agreement than we thought.

Originally posted by Grumbold
Can you tell the difference between 'Allied and worshipful' and 'Allied but hating it' in MoO3? I don't know. I would hope that the language of the diplomats and the spy reports would help. Until everyone's been playing for a month and the expert players have come to a solid opinion I reserve judgement.

EU2 was nice because you could see both the status (allied since 1802, expires 1831, diplomatic marriage, military access) and the attitude (+200 -> -200) separately. That might be too much information, since I defy anyone to define US-UK relations as +60 or +160 and give reasons why their answer was true, but some hints would be very useful. EU2 really did make you consider hard whether it was worth the price to keep paying your allies to be friendly or should just let them slide into hatred as you rose to dominate the world.

[kalbear]

That's interesting that you mention that particular system, Grumbold - that's almost exactly what information is listed in the strat guide as being available for diplomacy purposes.

[Master Marcus]

correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the beta testers and other pre-release players ARE NOT at liberty to share some information BEFORE the release. I've read many of the "AI related" and data threads, and we're still speculating. Most of the questions aren't answered. At least said testers, less the four ones having thrown some bone recently, should give occasionally a hug even if "politically correct". Don't get me wrong, I like to discover by myself the details of the learning curve and the data of a game; it's just that MoO3 is a complex game that relies very very very much on the AI coding....

[Grumbold]

*Grumbold nods eagerly to Master Marcus and smiles gratefully at Kalbear* ... now where's that nuke button

[Widely Reknown]

By Grumbold:

Its a pretty good example of game mentality from a player. "I saved their asses twice, I never hurt them, I give them a bit of tech now and again but now they're starting to hate me for invading someone else and turning into the only galactive superpower. Wtf this diplomacy system must be broke!"

Okey, I get your example now, and I see the merits of it.

Sorry if I got ahead of myself and rushed to conclusions. I just find the current trend of animosity between the US and the EU very frightening, and possibly a greater threat to "world-peace" than either Iraq or North Korea.

Don't really want a discussion about it here, just explain why I got a bit upset for no apparent reason.

Sorry, ignore me, back to business! What about that AI?

[Ozymandous]

Originally posted by Widely Reknown
*snip*
I just find the current trend of animosity between the US and the EU very frightening, and possibly a greater threat to "world-peace" than either Iraq or North Korea.

Well this is easy to explain. The US is chock full of people who left Europe, Asia, etc to "find a better life" away from their former rulers and governments. With this in mind it's not that surprising that the different mind-set's would clash regarding how to do things.

Besides, as someone said in another post, a lot of Europe has disliked the US as an entity (not necessarily US citizens, but the nation) for awhile, but it's only recently that the people in the US took notice and now the feeling is more mutual.

Ill-feelings against other nations aren't uncommon, especially when those nations are at odd's on their national interests, like France and/or Germany not wanting to invade Iraq because they have so many lucrative business deals with Iraq.

In any event, back to the topic at hand, as long as there is SOME sign that relations are going down the tubes then I wouldn't mind the AI declaring war, but the "everything is peachy but we're going to war now" thing that most AI's do in 4X games if an insult to the game's players and I hope it's not that way in Moo3.

[Daveybaby]

As an aside... anyone else find it telling that everyone is referring to CivIII in the past tense? I hope this isnt going to be the case with Moo3 in a year's time

[MitchDev]

Not necessarily Davey...

I've seen alot of posts (not just here) with Civ and TBS fans that didn't like Civ3...

Or itr may be frequently mentioned in the past tense as people have moved on to other games...

Personally, I'm ressurecting an old laptop system just so I can get MoM to run again... Nothing I do in XP with compatibility mode or Config.NT gets me the Expanded memory it says it needs....

[Grumbold]

There are definitely posters who still like it, play it, defend it and refer to it in the present tense - even in this thread. I'm not one of them

[delmar]

Do you guys know any strategy game where the player is able to influence (program) the behavior of the AI, by changing rules or setting up new ones? Sort of like writing a script?

After I got fed up with Civ3/PtW (I am definitely not going to refer to it in future tense any more... ), I am thinking that the next game I am going to buy will have to have such a feature. Actually I am a bit surprised that this is not the norm, at least for games like Civ3 where one can mod every freaking thing. Is this perhaps so terribly hard to do?

[Harry Seldon]

Originally posted by MitchDev
Personally, I'm ressurecting an old laptop system just so I can get MoM to run again... Nothing I do in XP with compatibility mode or Config.NT gets me the Expanded memory it says it needs....

Have you tried the shortcut trick with MoM? I had it running on a W2K box a few months ago and I think it'll work with XP.

[Widely Reknown]

Posted by delmar:

Do you guys know any strategy game where the player is able to influence (program) the behavior of the AI, by changing rules or setting up new ones? Sort of like writing a script?

I know Europa Universalis II offers at least limited ability to modify the AI:s behaviour.

The latest patch actually substitutes Paradox's AI-scripts with those written by a fan. Hi's latest project is to modify the AI so that every country behaves differently depending on which monarch is running it at the moment. I think he might have bitten off more than he can chew, but so far he's at least managed to modify four countries. That just leaves 196 more to go :-).

[MitchDev]

Originally posted by Harry Seldon


Have you tried the shortcut trick with MoM? I had it running on a W2K box a few months ago and I think it'll work with XP.

Which shortcut trick? I've edited the "pif" settings with a variety of values... which trick in particular?

I've been fighting with a lot of older games since the move to XP, at least CIV III, SMAC/X, and MoO 2 are running...

[Harry Seldon]

{quote]Which shortcut trick? I've edited the "pif" settings with a variety of values... which trick in particular?

I've been fighting with a lot of older games since the move to XP, at least CIV III, SMAC/X, and MoO 2 are running...[/quote]

Do this: Install the game as you normally would on an older system. Find the executable that runs the game (moo's is orion.com; not sure if it's the same for moo2 as I haven't run it for a while). Right-click the executable and choose send>shortcut to desktop. Right-click the shortcut on the desktop an go to properties. You should have about five tabs that will allow you to change the settings of the VM when it opens to run the app. Configure the Memory tab to 600k of conventional mem and 2048 or 4096 of EMS. I also usually change the fonts to bitmap only, screen size to full, and disable screen saver. I can't remember who, but there's a guy that posts in the MOO1/2 forum that runs it on XP so if this doesn't work you can try over there and see if he'll help you.

Speaking of MOO, I've been playing it in anticipation of MOO3 and thoroughly enjoying its schizophrenic AI (We offer a peace treaty to you, human player. Just surrender to our fleets that will be attacking your systems for the next four turns or we'll attack again). Here's to hoping the MOO3 AI waits until AFTER all his fleets in route have attacked before declaring peace or at least allows you to defend your colony.