In the example below, what does Priority="1" do? How would raising or lowering it effect things? Thanks in advance.

Priority 1 means that it's goes first.



Basically think it this way:

There is stack of Priority 1 thing and then there is stack of normal priority things. Priority 1 is always handled first depending in which order they comes and then comes normal priority.



There was loads of speak relating to this topic in Endless Space and unless I remember completly wrong it was one of the methods along with changing values how modders managed to make better AI.

Because sometimes you want that some changes are made at the end (like giving +10% to the overall net production, so you first want the calculation of the net production)

I saw some lines in the simulation files with a -2 or even with 10. But I'm not sure that 10 would go first.

VieuxChat wrote:
Because sometimes you want that some changes are made at the end (like giving +10% to the overall net production, so you first want the calculation of the net production)

I saw some lines in the simulation files with a -2 or even with 10. But I'm not sure that 10 would go first.

I'm trying to figure out how to make the AI build more units. I think that this is the most basic weakness of the AI. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

JetJaguar wrote:
I'm trying to figure out how to make the AI build more units. I think that this is the most basic weakness of the AI. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Just so you know, forcing the AI an higher priority to build units might not bring the intended results without other tweaks. I'm speculating, mind me, but I have the feeling they'd disband them soon after. In my latest games I tried a certain setup:



1 - All the races were customized to fill out their ability pools (Broken Lords with +dust perks, necrophages with +army slots etc)

2 - All the factions did start with +2 units to give them an early edge against independents

3 - Independents set to easy to further ensure the AI wouldn't get stomped early on preventing them from expansion

4 - Hard difficulty (you can't really test the AI if you give it too many cheating advantages)



Result: everyone's military rating consistently fell to 0 after 3 rounds, except for Broken Lords and Roving Clans, which are obviously the two best at dust economy. Most of the other factions never managed to recover, with the exception of the treehuggers in the map I actually played to the end, which initially settled 2/3 of their continent before the Broken Lords won it over in the late game (Broken Lords with the right perks ain't so broken after all). The behavior was so consistent between different maps (everyone always at the same turn) that I'm prone to believe the AI doesn't only suicide itself on villages: it just disbands its own armies unless it has quite the huge dust overhead.



Thus, I'm prone to believe that even if they are forced to spit out more units, they wouldn't keep them for long unless they are also given a stronger economy (which, in turn, would imbalance many other things). Now, if the AI knew how to keep a consistent reserve force at low cost in their garrisons, fielding them only when really needed, that would be different, but that's a much more involved tweaking that might not even be within our modding reach.

Kadatherion wrote:
2 - All the factions did start with +2 units to give them an early edge against independents

3 - Independents set to easy to further ensure the AI wouldn't get stomped early on preventing them from expansion

each

I made these exact same changes and my results were exactly the same as yours (except that the Broken Lords disbanded their army and the Drakken didn't; Roving Clans kept theirs). and I was playing on impossible difficulty. I could see this on the military power graph. All of the AIs, except two, disbanded all of their armies on turn 4 or 5.



Do you think we should try giving them more dust at the beginning? or would reducing army upkeep be a better solution? or both? maybe we could force priorities to both unit building and dust (having them assign workers to dust and research/build dust buildings).



Thanks in advance

Well, I guess much of it also depends on how much the AI plays by the game rules. In most 4x games the AI actually doesn't for the most part, cutting corners under a much more simplified "ruleset" than the one the player has to follow. For instance, obviously the AI doesn't do quests, so if an AI goes for a wonder victory (I've yet to see one try) the quest rewards are probably given to it at relatively fixed times (also it doesn't even research the tech to parley with villages, since all it knows to do is to attack them anyway). I'd also assume the AI doesn't know how to boost resources, and it sure doesn't know how to use stockpiles, nor it knows how to dynamically redesign and upgrade its units (all neat features, but a bit lame when they are so evidently player specific). As such, I also doubt it does anything "smart" with worker assignment, so I doubt there'd be any way to tell it to assign them to dust more frequently.



It would be helpful, regarding the matter at hand, to actually watch the AI play to understand how much it follows the rules we know, so we could gather where we'd actually have to intervene, but the lack of even a common reveal map cheat (coincidence?) is hindering such observations and we can only go by trial and error. Giving the AI a large initial dust reserve might be a good test: do they disband their armies when they have no more dust, or as soon as they have a negative dust income? Is it really a matter of dust? I thought so from my tests, but on yours the same happened at impossible difficulty, which gives ALL the AIs dust bonuses and should have put 'em all on par with my buffed up Broken Lords on hard. Maybe it depends on the capital city placement: most AIs build their first city in a lame spot and soon go in the red, except for a couple that are randomly lucky; if that's the case, a fixed dust bonus for the capital city might ease the early game issues without having the wider repercussions a generic tweak to army upkeep could have.



Just food for thought and a lot of speculation. But I fear that, in the end, we'll have to just make it so the AI cheats even more than it's usual in this genre. This game has some neat features and concepts that enhance the experience for the player, but they clearly aren't rules well suited for an AI, so it's really struggling here.

JetJaguar wrote:
I'm trying to figure out how to make the AI build more units. I think that this is the most basic weakness of the AI. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

In my mod, I changed how much units they should put in garrison. Moreover I changed the composition of armies.

So the AI build more units in garrison asked the armies are bigger.



You can try my mod to see if it pleases you.