I'm running into a problem where the AI may not be consistently expanding. I've tried a few games with the Shadows expansion, each time on hard. The first couple games (Normal map size, 6 players) the AI seemed aggressive and would actively settle or steal territory I lost, but my current one (Large map, 8 players) is not the case. It's turn 170 and the 7 AI's have mostly 1 region with a couple having 2 or 3. I do have the independents set to hard if that might be interfering with them?

How has the new trade AI been so far? Right now I'm having a hard time trading techs for resources. Even really good techs for useless resources.



For example, a faction at peace with "Blood Brothers" status would not give me any Grassilk in exchange for Imperial Highways + Cargo Docks. And I mean literally nothing - they would not even give up a tiny amount of a trade-boosting resource in order to learn how to trade. OK, I thought, maybe they're a turn or two away from trading, so they won't pay for it. Instead I offered two era 6 techs (dust-driven distillery and serum of iteru), for which they were willing to pay 1 grassilk. In this case those techs were completely out of reach for them for many turns, and would have made quite a difference!



Maybe this is an edge case because I had already bought up the Grassilk in the marketplace. Still, I feel like their valuation is off by a huge amount here. Right now I can pretty much only trade resource for resource - if I offer techs the AI isn't impressed, even though they'd benefit far more. What are other people seeing?

EMW wrote:
How has the new trade AI been so far? Right now I'm having a hard time trading techs for resources. Even really good techs for useless resources.



For example, a faction at peace with "Blood Brothers" status would not give me any Grassilk in exchange for Imperial Highways + Cargo Docks. And I mean literally nothing - they would not even give up a tiny amount of a trade-boosting resource in order to learn how to trade. OK, I thought, maybe they're a turn or two away from trading, so they won't pay for it. Instead I offered two era 6 techs (dust-driven distillery and serum of iteru), for which they were willing to pay 1 grassilk. In this case those techs were completely out of reach for them for many turns, and would have made quite a difference!



Maybe this is an edge case because I had already bought up the Grassilk in the marketplace. Still, I feel like their valuation is off by a huge amount here. Right now I can pretty much only trade resource for resource - if I offer techs the AI isn't impressed, even though they'd benefit far more. What are other people seeing?

This has been mentioned before, but I just ran into the opposite situation where I was able to get 3000 dust and 5 techs in exchange for 10 moonleafs

So far, no real improvement to the AI has been made, I think thats what the team is working on now that the shadows expansion is out.

I confirm what HapyHead has stated. AI currently greatly overvalues the Luxury resources relative to diplomatic treaties, techs and Strategics. Before Shadows you basically farmed AI from Strats and Luxes with techs. Now you can make Truce after sneaking AI's Capital with 5 Gold or Hyperium. And farm most Strategics with your surplus or leftover Luxuries.



Playing as Forgotten, I wasn't able to negotiate a Truce with giving Roving Clans their Capital back, but 7 Hyperium made it a deal

0_o

So currently it goes like this in terms of relative value for the AI in diplomacy:

Luxuries>>>Strategics>Techs>Treaties. Dunno about Dust though.

I feel like tuning luxuries WAY down and improving Treaties value would do the whole deal.

HappyHead wrote:
This has been mentioned before, but I just ran into the opposite situation where I was able to get 3000 dust and 5 techs in exchange for 10 moonleafs

So far, no real improvement to the AI has been made, I think thats what the team is working on now that the shadows expansion is out.

Based on the fact that there has been no improvement in this area, the programmers may be better served to just put fixed values (or at least a fixed max value) on everything instead of weights. In Civ 5 i knew what i had to pay and would get for a luxury every time and it was harder to rip off the AI then in EL. 7GPT or another luxury that the AI has at least 2 of, if i tried to take a luxury that the AI had 1 of, they would charge me an arm and an leg (or two legs).

I think the AI overvaluing resources has been an issue for a while now. I recall winning a Science Victory on the Vaulters 6 months ago just by buying the end technologies from the Wild Walkers for hundreds of tritanium.



Speaking of which, the Wild Walkers seem extremely overpowered for the AI. Every game I've played with an AI-Wild Walkers, they seem to conquer half the world and have twice the production of anyone else by the end. Is it because they're overpowered? Or because the AI has trouble running the other factions?

MikeLemmer wrote:
I think the AI overvaluing resources has been an issue for a while now. I recall winning a Science Victory on the Vaulters 6 months ago just by buying the end technologies from the Wild Walkers for hundreds of tritanium.



Speaking of which, the Wild Walkers seem extremely overpowered for the AI. Every game I've played with an AI-Wild Walkers, they seem to conquer half the world and have twice the production of anyone else by the end. Is it because they're overpowered? Or because the AI has trouble running the other factions?

Most likely the AI can't play the other factions as well. Wild Walkers are the most straight forward faction.

My global perception about the A.I in Endless Legend :



- The A.I is not brillant, but it is acceptable, it can make war and protection himself well. More than all, I don't really care about A.I because I mainly plan to play multiplayer. To finish, I am tolerent with the weakness of A.I in Endless Legend, because I know the combat system with units, retreats and others complex features, are hard to programme contrary to Civ V system, with one square units and no tactics (I am tolerent with the A.I weakness but I am not tolerent with some the annoying very small problems in EL which prevent this game to touch the perfection ! ^^).



My feedback on A.I about the Shadows features :



- Pillaging : A.I is intelligent enough to fight the pillaging units, which I much use when I play the Forgotten. It is good they can do it.

- Pillaging : A.I seems to don't be able to chase an army of stealth units when A.I had detected it the precedent turn. So you can easily avoid his units.



- Spying : A.I seems to know when purge his city, to protect himself from spying. That is good.

- Spying : A.I seems to prioritize the "damage the production" and "reduce the population" action. It is not interesting action to do. A.I should prioritize tech steal and, if it plan a war, the moral malus or the fortification reduction.



The worst things about A.I, which need more than all a work :



- Fight : A.I tend to always use his garrisonned forces when you attacked his forces outside the city. The consequence it's you can easily kill all his force without have to wait the reduction of fortification. In my opinion, this problem into the A.I is the most important because it considerably facililate the conquest.

- Fight : When you attack with a strong army a small army which has already retreated, for exemple a one isolated unit, the A.I tends to always reinforce this isolated army with all his others armies. So, the battle become easy for you because you have all your units deployed, whereas A.I have only two units coming at turns. Second worst problem of the A.I I think.



- Trade : A.I don't know the price of ressources and can be extorted easily.

- Trade : I got impression, but maybe I am wrong, that an A.I which is close to be defeated, from which you have conquered some cities, tend to accept any truce deal including technology exchange, even if in peace, the A.I would never accepted a deal like that. It is a kind of exploit, I think A.I should not accept truce like that, even if A.I is near from total destruction. Moreover, it can be exploited in multiplayer.

So it sounds like in some casees the AI has improved in the base game from when EL first came out, and others say its still not "excellent"



I recently picked up both Shadows and Guardians and may try to find time to start up the game again for a bit so I found myself curious about the AI as well. There was a mod I had that made some tweaks to how the AI handled units but I'm not 100% sure if its still functional with the current sate of EL.

Dzhel wrote:
I'm running into a problem where the AI may not be consistently expanding. I've tried a few games with the Shadows expansion, each time on hard. The first couple games (Normal map size, 6 players) the AI seemed aggressive and would actively settle or steal territory I lost, but my current one (Large map, 8 players) is not the case. It's turn 170 and the 7 AI's have mostly 1 region with a couple having 2 or 3. I do have the independents set to hard if that might be interfering with them?

Turn 170 and only one region? Holy cow O: Might I have the save?

EMW wrote:
How has the new trade AI been so far?

Jojo_Fr wrote:


- Trade : A.I don't know the price of ressources and can be extorted easily.

- Trade : I got impression, but maybe I am wrong, that an A.I which is close to be defeated, from which you have conquered some cities, tend to accept any truce deal including technology exchange, even if in peace, the A.I would never accepted a deal like that. It is a kind of exploit, I think A.I should not accept truce like that, even if A.I is near from total destruction. Moreover, it can be exploited in multiplayer.

Going to reply to all the comments on trade AI at once here



The change that we made recently means that instead of the base value of a given resource being static (1 Wine is worth 15 dust) the values are now based on the market (1 Wine is worth somewhere 8 and 32 dust). This doesn't fix the greater problem though. Currently luxuries are evaluated based on what they provide. Blood Crystal, for example, provides buffs to the military so AIs currently interested in their military will want Blood Crystal. This sounds good of paper but in practice there are two issues:

[LIST=1]

An intense desire for War can potentially increase the value of a set of resources by orders of magnitude that make variations in market value entirely insignificant, and the AIs inherently exploitable.

You can exchange something that prevents military action (say peace or a truce) for something that buffs it (say Blood Crystal). The AI is unable to understand that it is shooting itself in the foot.

[/LIST]

So the market price is a step in the right direction, but really what we need to do is strip out the whole system and start again from scratch. And that's the plan

Slashman wrote:
Most likely the AI can't play the other factions as well. Wild Walkers are the most straight forward faction.

Yeah, WW are very economy and construction oriented, and computers make good accountants In fact originally a "computer" was a person who did calculations for a living.



Factions with "tricksier" gameplay are harder for the computer to handle.

Jojo_Fr wrote:


- Pillaging : A.I seems to don't be able to chase an army of stealth units when A.I had detected it the precedent turn. So you can easily avoid his units.

As mentioned by Soren Johnson in his talk it's hard to deal with notions like "I vaguely think there may be a unit over there". That being said we initially did have a system for tracking invisible units. Testers found this frustrating though, because it felt like the AI was psychic. It felt unfair. So we removed it.

Jojo_Fr wrote:


- Spying : A.I seems to prioritize the "damage the production" and "reduce the population" action. It is not interesting action to do. A.I should prioritize tech steal and, if it plan a war, the moral malus or the fortification reduction.

Fun fact: Steal Technology is actually one of the AI's favourite actions, but as the target is only informed if the spy is injured or captured it is an action that will often go unnoticed by the player



This being said AIs will tend to prefer using violent actions against empires they dislike, and I've noticed better players tend to play very aggressively - which annoys the AI to no end.

Jojo_Fr wrote:


- Fight : A.I tend to always use his garrisonned forces when you attacked his forces outside the city. The consequence it's you can easily kill all his force without have to wait the reduction of fortification. In my opinion, this problem into the A.I is the most important because it considerably facililate the conquest.

- Fight : When you attack with a strong army a small army which has already retreated, for exemple a one isolated unit, the A.I tends to always reinforce this isolated army with all his others armies. So, the battle become easy for you because you have all your units deployed, whereas A.I have only two units coming at turns. Second worst problem of the A.I I think.

Hmm... yes this would be worth looking into I think. Reinforcements could be handled better. Thanks for your thoughts Jojo

Niteshade wrote:
So it sounds like in some casees the AI has improved in the base game from when EL first came out, and others say its still not "excellent"



I recently picked up both Shadows and Guardians and may try to find time to start up the game again for a bit so I found myself curious about the AI as well. There was a mod I had that made some tweaks to how the AI handled units but I'm not 100% sure if its still functional with the current sate of EL.

There are still some areas holding it back. I'm really optimistic that they are being addressed though.

wilbefast wrote:


The change that we made recently means that instead of the base value of a given resource being static (1 Wine is worth 15 dust) the values are now based on the market (1 Wine is worth somewhere 8 and 32 dust). This doesn't fix the greater problem though. Currently luxuries are evaluated based on what they provide. Blood Crystal, for example, provides buffs to the military so AIs currently interested in their military will want Blood Crystal. This sounds good of paper but in practice there are two issues:

[LIST=1]

An intense desire for War can potentially increase the value of a set of resources by orders of magnitude that make variations in market value entirely insignificant, and the AIs inherently exploitable.

You can exchange something that prevents military action (say peace or a truce) for something that buffs it (say Blood Crystal). The AI is unable to understand that it is shooting itself in the foot.

[/LIST]

So the market price is a step in the right direction, but really what we need to do is strip out the whole system and start again from scratch. And that's the plan

I dont think the market price is working how you intend... this is with version 1.2.1

This shows me purchasing luxuries for 100 gold, and then selling them for 700 gold or a technology. There is no outrageous demand for any particular resource, just over valuing all of them.

I replayed a battle that i posted in January. I even played it differently this time. With the same results. AI still way over values wounded units without looking at terrain or unit location. Every unit targeted the wounded archer in every round. It would of hurt if those Daemons had decided to take 1-2 steps and AOE my archer cluster.... but they didn't since they were running for opposite map corner. You can access the save file by following the link.



/#/endless-legend/forum/22-gameplay-and-ai-issues/thread/6388-ai-battle-testcase-library

Caotico09 wrote:
I dont think the market price is working how you intend... this is with version 1.2.1

This shows me purchasing luxuries for 100 gold, and then selling them for 700 gold or a technology. There is no outrageous demand for any particular resource, just over valuing all of them.

Hmm... ok that is an issue. Not certain what's causing it, but if prices can fluctuate to such a degree it may be worth rolling back to the original version while we wait for the new system to be ready.



I will put a priority on fixing this ASAP.

Caotico09 wrote:
I replayed a battle that i posted in January. I even played it differently this time. With the same results. AI still way over values wounded units without looking at terrain or unit location. Every unit targeted the wounded archer in every round. It would of hurt if those Daemons had decided to take 1-2 steps and AOE my archer cluster.... but they didn't since they were running for opposite map corner. You can access the save file by following the link.

I don't believe the battle system's targeting has been updated much other than to fix the over-prioritisation of colonists, so it's not surprising there's the same issue as before I'm afraid.

wilbefast wrote:


I don't believe the battle system's targeting has been updated much other than to fix the over-prioritisation of colonists, so it's not surprising there's the same issue as before I'm afraid.

Is the battle system something that will be worked on? Or is it considered a low priority?

wilbefast wrote:
Turn 170 and only one region? Holy cow O: Might I have the save?

In my recent Drakken game I noticed that the Forgotten didn´t expanded at all and it is already past turn 240. But since they are on a diffent contient with the Cultists as their closest neighbour I don´t know if they are/were at war with the Cultists and lost all their cities beside their capital. I don´t know if there is a different cause for this or it was the war with the Cult.

Caotico09 wrote:
Is the battle system something that will be worked on? Or is it considered a low priority?

It has a high priority but it's also a can of worms, a Pandora's box. The battle system wasn't finalised until just before release: there was a lot of back-and-forth between ST, the designers and the VIPs - a lot of different systems were tried and scraped. This is good in one sense: the system was iterated on until we were all satisfied with it. However AI team didn't really have time time catch up.

Teslaflux wrote:
In my recent Drakken game I noticed that the Forgotten didn´t expanded at all and it is already past turn 240. But since they are on a diffent contient with the Cultists as their closest neighbour I don´t know if they are/were at war with the Cultists and lost all their cities beside their capital. I don´t know if there is a different cause for this or it was the war with the Cult.

Astounding! Please send your save - I'd really like to see what the AI's brain is doing in your example. Anything else would be speculation...

I had a look at Caotico09's save - so apparently there was a hiccup introduced when we started taking market-values into account.



So well spotted Caotico09 - points for you



Got a tentative fix ready, just testing now to make sure it work. Here are the original exchanges with the new evaluations:











Seems a little more reasonable. It is worth bearing in mind that just because the market value is taken into account it doesn't mean that AI will buy and sell at exactly the market value.



Tested flooding the market with resources - here all luxuries' prices are at their lowest possible value on the market:







Tested buying out the market - here there are no luxuries left on the market, so their prices are at their lowest possible value:







Barring any issues encountered during testing this should be patched in.

wilbefast wrote:


Astounding! Please send your save - I'd really like to see what the AI's brain is doing in your example. Anything else would be speculation...

Here are several save from my game. Also the Roving Clan Ai is very passive, maybe because I blocked it a bit(it can still expand southwards(which it has done later) but was so passive I ignored it completly).

My goal in this game was more or less to get the quest or the wonder victory but I was a bit slow (and wiping out the Necrophages doesn´t help because I need to be not in war and cold war seems to count for this quest as war, which makes sense). I never attacked somebody until I had to.





https://www.mediafire.com/folder/fnydekp1ephtt/AI-Drakken_game





It seems that the Cult and the Forgotten were at war because I just noticed that the Forgotten were defeated(I don´t know when they died)

Hi, I come to report certain specific AI problems I have encountered in my last games. Bring some images to accompany.





The AI ​​cannot reach their desired goal so stands still.







In the red X I had a hero, they killed him, and then, they wanted to attack the unit to which they had no direct access, as they can´t access to him, simply they could not move and you can attack them every turn without losses.



City poorly positioned.







AI founds a city on a border, this is almost always a bad idea, because you do not take the whole territory, also does not try to develop a sense for Level 2 districts.

The city of the image its probably not better example, I see worst places every time.



Disoriented settler.







I can assume that this settler was preparing to colonize a region in the north, but another faction was faster and could not colonize on time. What was your reaction? It stood there 20-30 turns, even when loading game was still there. This does not make much sense. I do not remember when or why just leaving (I did not attack him).



Cultist villages.



I cannot understand, Why the cultists do not use the armies of the villages, I have seen on many occasions as the city was under siege, and had large armies from neighboring villages, and during all shifts that lasted the siege not never used, when they could easily win the battle. In the end they lost the city without using those armies at all.



Technology of roads and trade routes.



They are technologies with a huge benefit for mobility and economic bonds simple valid for almost all factions (Not for cultist or islands). Why the IA never investigated and build this? ( I think it's a mistake and help them much in the mobility of the armies)



I always build roads in the conquered cities because they never have.