Ok then I'll make a little video series on it. Considering my upload schedule though expect the first vid to be around 3-4 days

Ail wrote:
I know a Civ3 mod, that had an interesting approach on that: Settlers (Colony ships) could not be produced but instead where automatically produced by the palace one every 10 turns.

Or we could go balls-to-the-walls civ5 mode, and ramp up the expansion disapproval BIG time.

And make more global-happiness-buildings apart of the Wonder to keep it in check.



The automatic expansion has it's merits, though. Atleast for the early game.

My first video is now up, and so far the main problems have been more the balance changes mod that came with this one :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCDJWUtgdWU

I'm aiming to make one of these every 2-3 days but I can't promise anything :P

I know a Civ3 mod, that had an interesting approach on that: Settlers (Colony ships) could not be produced but instead where automatically produced by the palace one every 10 turns.

tbh, the real thing to solve is early colonizing.

MP has more or less everyone with a mineral rich homeworld spamming colony ships, interleaved with alien grafting and heavy isotope refinery, for like 8-10 colony ships.

I've seen AIs roll pretty good after a player leaves (as long as they use his designs.. and don't ♥♥♥♥ up cards), but in the initial part they're atrocious.

Doesn't help that default races are all several kinds of bad, except perhaps Sophon.

Have uploaded a new version of the mod with several changes to the AI so it be less passive. Easier to anger, likely to declare war much sooner, but not impossible to befriend and have deals with. Hopefully this will provide some better challenge for players like Ail who are more geared toward crushing the AI.

Ail wrote:
Not really. None of them declared war on me. It was always me declaring war on them.

I did tweak what does make the AI happy or angry, and how easy they are to bribe. Maybe there is room to change a few more things there. For sure the AI in your game didn't react much to your overwhelming score...

Yes, I did. Their fleets where harder to beat then I expected. The Hissho really put up a good fight and destroyed some of my fleets. With good designs and fleet-composition.

Cool, that at least worked well .

The AI was in a defending postion all the time. I remember only one occassion where they snuck out a fleet to attack me. Thing is I the way how I attacked left no real possibilities for them to attack.

Well, we can't blame the AI to struggle if you do everything in your power to choke it to death. I think i should change how blocade works in my mod so it's not as crippling for the AI. I'm sure human players would also have some troubles fighting back if all theirt systems are constantly blocaded.

I had the governors on all the time. Because that was the thing I mainly wanted to test. I didn't override it a whole lot, especially not later on. So it was okay.

I did a test game today and also let my system mostly manage themselves... The 7 other AIs were getting ahead until i started to manually colonize. I think it's time i experiement with build values.

That's the modifiers in Personality.xml for Hard1, Hard2, and so on. If you set them to 1, they won't become more selfish. And about trading... I posted something in the thread of the Mod.

Yeah, i should tweak that. I had removed those from my mod due to not wishing to mod them, i will bring them back in.

What I noticed aside from the AI and combat was that you buffed some of the more or less useless buildings to make some sense. That is a good thing.

Yeah, did a few buffs to them, but i guess there are more things i could tweak on that front.

I have attached the savegame one turn before winning.

I'll check that out.

Foraven wrote:
So, you seen no diffrence in Ai's diplomacy

Not really. None of them declared war on me. It was always me declaring war on them.

Foraven wrote:
in fleet composition, ship designs

Yes, I did. Their fleets where harder to beat then I expected. The Hissho really put up a good fight and destroyed some of my fleets. With good designs and fleet-composition.

Foraven wrote:


choice of targets

The AI was in a defending postion all the time. I remember only one occassion where they snuck out a fleet to attack me. Thing is I the way how I attacked left no real possibilities for them to attack.

Foraven wrote:


governors usefulness

I had the governors on all the time. Because that was the thing I mainly wanted to test. I didn't override it a whole lot, especially not later on. So it was okay.

Foraven wrote:


how much the darn AI put up a fight when attacked?

As I said, especially the Hissho put up a good fight. But with me blockading all of their systems and just having more systems to begin with, I could eventually overwhelm them anyways.

Foraven wrote:


I believe certain adjustments made by the difficulty settings actually hurt the AI more than it makes it more challenging, like it's willingness to ally, trade or sue for peace.

Difficulty level make the AI more selfish, but that hurt certain races that are focussed on trading and making friends...

That's the modifiers in Personality.xml for Hard1, Hard2, and so on. If you set them to 1, they won't become more selfish. And about trading... I posted something in the thread of the Mod.



What I noticed aside from the AI and combat was that you buffed some of the more or less useless buildings to make some sense. That is a good thing.



I have attached the savegame one turn before winning.
FF1.zip

Ail wrote:


I'm halfway through to the game on hard. I've outcolonized all of the AIs, killed one of them and now am killing the 2nd. My score is at 2200 where the best opponent is as 1200.

The combat actually is harder since my designs don't seem to suite the mechanic-changes very well. Everything else just feels about the same.

So, you seen no diffrence in Ai's diplomacy, in fleet composition, ship designs, choice of targets, governors usefulness, how much the darn AI put up a fight when attacked? That's the thing i modded the most concerning the AI, i did not focus on making the AI roflstomp the players all the way to the finish line. I believe certain adjustments made by the difficulty settings actually hurt the AI more than it makes it more challenging, like it's willingness to ally, trade or sue for peace. Difficulty level make the AI more selfish, but that hurt certain races that are focussed on trading and making friends...

Ail wrote:
Well, modding is not so much about thinking. It's about knowing. The things that determine in what order the AI builds stuff inside a system are all in AIParametersBuilding.xml. In the unmodded game I've never seen a problem with the AI not colonizing certain planets inside of its systems once the requirements where met.

My way of modding is mostly empirical, i try things and often i get unexpected results. I'm probably mistaken, but it seemed to work...

I really don't see how your change would have any impact of inters-system-colonization other than getting those techs a little sooner. Especially since it works just fine without any mod.

If you call waiting 50 turns to colonize a planet in system fine... I don't. I hate how lazy my governors are.

I'm halfway through to the game on hard. I've outcolonized all of the AIs, killed one of them and now am killing the 2nd. My score is at 2200 where the best opponent is as 1200.

The combat actually is harder since my designs don't seem to suite the mechanic-changes very well. Everything else just feels about the same.

What settings did you use besides the AI difficulty? And more importantly, what race did you use (don't complain the AI isn't challenging if you use an OP custom race)?

Well, modding is not so much about thinking. It's about knowing. The things that determine in what order the AI builds stuff inside a system are all in AIParametersBuilding.xml. In the unmodded game I've never seen a problem with the AI not colonizing certain planets inside of its systems once the requirements where met.

Tier 1 has an AI-Value of 3.4 and Tier 2 has an AI-Value of 2.8. Both values are high enough so that without any Prerequisites it should prefer that over almost any building every time.

Tier 3 has an AI-Value of 1.8, Tier 4 1.3, Gas-Giants have 1.7 and Asteroids have 2.4. The values below 2.3 result in the infamous back-and-forth-swap of Exploits in the unmodded game. But setting the values too high would make the AI clonize before getting approval.

I really don't see how your change would have any impact of inters-system-colonization other than getting those techs a little sooner. Especially since it works just fine without any mod.



I don't think that there's anything you can do build- or-colonization-order wise to get the AI to be competative on normal. That requires changing stuff we do not have access to. In my opinion it simply colonizes too slow. (not inter-system-colonization, but colony-ship-colonization)

I think there's 2 reasons for that:

1. The AI does not move it's colony-ships before it has found a system with a colonizeable planet. This means that all but the Amoeba get their 2nd planet later than they should. (Most of the time they have to get Arid/Tundra-Colonization before they move, where a player would move the Colony-Ship in position before getting that tech and then colonize immediately.)



2nd: The AI builds other stuff when it should be building colony-ships. I mentioned that before but building 2 or 3 defenders just for the sake of having them early on throws you very far behind because every turn of delay early on snowballs into a huge delay throughout the game.



I'm halfway through to the game on hard. I've outcolonized all of the AIs, killed one of them and now am killing the 2nd. My score is at 2200 where the best opponent is as 1200.

The combat actually is harder since my designs don't seem to suite the mechanic-changes very well. Everything else just feels about the same.

Ail wrote:
So what you did is changing the multiplier for this value for the case that the AI discovered planets of these types. This means that the AI will research Tundra- and Arid-colonization a little sooner, Desert a little later and Lava a little sooner as well.

You could have done this globally in Registry.xml instead of putting these values in for each race separately. (Actually the whole Personality.xml is just a copy of Registry.xml with race-specific multipliers to the default-values set in Registry.xml)

Adding the Tier1-Planets obviously fulfills no purpose whatsoever since no tech is needed to be sped up to get those.

I think you are wrong (or at least, it's not working as it should). I did end up changing those weight initially not because of the AI but because of governors: i was frustrated with my governors overlooking planets in my systems even if i had every requirements met (tech, industry, population and even approval). Changing those values did make my governors do it. Since the AI use the same governors, it improve them as well. Those weights affect governors rather than tech research (or only tech research). Maybe it affect both at once...

The thing that actually does speed up inter-system-colonization clearly is the change where you reduced the required pop to 80% instead of Maxpop-1.

Nah, i did test it with the minimal pop requirements removed, and that would not make the AI colonize sooner at all if the AI didn't want the planet. However, with high weights those planets would get colonized before the basic infrastructure was even built!

However, I am a player that plays for the win and I will continue testing your Mod on "Hard" for the first and if that's too easy on "Serious". In my opinion the Ind=>Science change could potentially be one, that has bigger impact. Because very often when I used the governors, I would have to manually override Ind=>Science so I wouldn't have a deficit. And since the AI doesn't have this option, it would have to raise taxes in the same scenario, which hurts it on the long-term with slower pop-growth. I think I will almost definately do something similar in my Fixes-Mod.

All the extra difficulty does is give bonuses to the AI (ie make it cheat). My goal in tweaking the AI is to make challenging without requiring handicaping the player. When i test my AI i do it on normal.

Foraven wrote:
In the personality files, where it list planets with weights... Added the 3 tier one planets and ajusted the weights so more desirable planets have weights above 1. Does seem to help the AI colonizing it's planets sooner.

Uhm... I have to tell you that you completely misunderstand what these values are there for. ^^



They affect the research-pattern of the AI.

See AIParametersTechnology.xml

there you will find entries like this:









So what you did is changing the multiplier for this value for the case that the AI discovered planets of these types. This means that the AI will research Tundra- and Arid-colonization a little sooner, Desert a little later and Lava a little sooner as well.

You could have done this globally in Registry.xml instead of putting these values in for each race separately. (Actually the whole Personality.xml is just a copy of Registry.xml with race-specific multipliers to the default-values set in Registry.xml)

Adding the Tier1-Planets obviously fulfills no purpose whatsoever since no tech is needed to be sped up to get those.



The thing that actually does speed up inter-system-colonization clearly is the change where you reduced the required pop to 80% instead of Maxpop-1.



The other thing, where I could imagine that it could alter colonization-behaviour are the values in AIParametersBuilding.xml that look like this:















But since you didn't touch these, I was rather curious about how you could think you have changed that. ^^



However, I am a player that plays for the win and I will continue testing your Mod on "Hard" for the first and if that's too easy on "Serious". In my opinion the Ind=>Science change could potentially be one, that has bigger impact. Because very often when I used the governors, I would have to manually override Ind=>Science so I wouldn't have a deficit. And since the AI doesn't have this option, it would have to raise taxes in the same scenario, which hurts it on the long-term with slower pop-growth. I think I will almost definately do something similar in my Fixes-Mod.

Gameslayer989 wrote:
Ok then I'll make a little video series on it. Considering my upload schedule though expect the first vid to be around 3-4 days

Cool, always nice to see how other players see it and what they are thinking. I wish i could make videos like that... But since i keep finding things to tweek and fix, my vids would be quite dull to watch .

Ail wrote:
May I ask how?

In the personality files, where it list planets with weights... Added the 3 tier one planets and ajusted the weights so more desirable planets have weights above 1. Does seem to help the AI colonizing it's planets sooner.

I like that idea. I think I had something similar too unless Meedoc changed it. But how meedoc did it doesn't work properly. Which isn't his fault but after the turn the value for $(.../ClassEmpire:MoneyNet) is changed when the AI goes through the systems, so often you could still have it making Ind=>Sci despite being <0.

I would, however, try to find a better value than 200. A variable one that is computed. I really am not a fan of hardcoding numbers in formulas. Something like Population*5 or so. ^^

It was a pain to make it work properly but in the end it works; basically i just forbid the AI to covert to science before empire's income reach 200. It doesn't always get it to 200 but at least the AI's coffers are filling.

If you think you found something that really improves the AI in general, not just something mod-specific, and think it should be in the game in general, try contacting Meedoc about it. The G2G is not a myth!

Well, once i'm confident it works and is bug free i may consider doing that. It's still quite a lot of guesswork and wishfull thinking, i'm still waiting for a true confirmation that it actually make things challenging for real players (ie players trying to win the game rather than decifer it's inner workings).

They actually consider stuff like that! Oh, and if you do so, please put me on CC, I'm always interested in knowing what's going on on that front.

I'll keep you informed if i get there, never fear .

Alright guys (and girls), i've been doing my Fair Fight mod for a while now and i want to know how well my AI fare against the veteran players here who pride themselves about beating the best vanilla AI's can throw at them. The stock AI has many flaws for sure, and even with huge boost to production, damage and income it can be crushed by a dedicated player. Now, my mod change some of the game rules (mostly combat, making it more difficult to win fights unscratched) but i also tuned it's AI (the best i could with what can be modded) to be more ruthless, make better designs, use it's combat cards more efficiently and manage it's systems/planets better. I believe my AI does way better than the stock one, but i have yet to put it to the test. So i need test subjects to use them on .



So, anyone want to challenge my AI?



Fair Fight mod

Foraven wrote:
some good planets can remain unsettled for ages for no apparent reason (but i did boost it in FF so it should be less of an issue)

May I ask how?

Foraven wrote:
I changed that in FF so if it has less than 200 dust a turn of income it will try to convert industry to dust on it's idle planets (beyond that it will convert to science). That seem to help the AI immensely keep it's cash flowing to buyout stuff and upgrade it's fleet.

I like that idea. I think I had something similar too unless Meedoc changed it. But how meedoc did it doesn't work properly. Which isn't his fault but after the turn the value for $(.../ClassEmpire:MoneyNet) is changed when the AI goes through the systems, so often you could still have it making Ind=>Sci despite being <0.

I would, however, try to find a better value than 200. A variable one that is computed. I really am not a fan of hardcoding numbers in formulas. Something like Population*5 or so. ^^



If you think you found something that really improves the AI in general, not just something mod-specific, and think it should be in the game in general, try contacting Meedoc about it. The G2G is not a myth!

They actually consider stuff like that! Oh, and if you do so, please put me on CC, I'm always interested in knowing what's going on on that front.

Gameslayer989 wrote:
It depends. Do you feel the AI can still beat a player on newbie? What about normal?

If you feel your AI is good enough to challenge a player without the AI getting many extra bonuses and the player being severely handicapped then I might make some video's detailing how I fare. However, first I need to know what difficulty I should optimally play them on for the greatest amount of challenge with the least amount of BS :P

I believe normal should be good enough. I tried to boost the AI in ways that don't require it to cheat. It should provide some challenge on normal depending on galaxy size and what race you are up against. You can even throw in the Pirates, in FF they are more a nuisance than a game breaking feature, even though they can be quite a pain if you neglect to build a fleet to fend them off.

Ail wrote:
In my opinion the AI is massively crippled by building military-ships too early at the expense of making colony-ships. I refer to those moments when you find their home-system and are greeted by 2 war-ships... could have been colony-ships instead.

While on very small maps with lots of players that actually might make sense, it is not sophisticated to do so on average maps.

But one would need some sort of observer-mode or replay-feature to really observe and see where the AI does ineffective stuff.

^



I don't think it's a bad thing that they build some ships early on, AI's are very vulnerable to early rushes and Pirates (pirates in FF are a lot less crippling, but still need to be chased away). I think the most crippling aspect of early expansion isn't it's fleet building but the low priority it put into colonizing; some good planets can remain unsettled for ages for no apparent reason (but i did boost it in FF so it should be less of an issue).

While the handling of this issue was improved by telling the AI how to better handle monetary-troubles the actual cause was not taken care of properly.

The AI has a very poor judgement on how many ships to build. It builds too many of them most of the time which slows their developmenet in other aspects and then it scraps them if it notices it can't actually afford it.

I noticed the stock AI doesn't use Industry to dust conversion unless it run out of it. I changed that in FF so if it has less than 200 dust a turn of income it will try to convert industry to dust on it's idle planets (beyond that it will convert to science). That seem to help the AI immensely keep it's cash flowing to buyout stuff and upgrade it's fleet.

It depends. Do you feel the AI can still beat a player on newbie? What about normal?

If you feel your AI is good enough to challenge a player without the AI getting many extra bonuses and the player being severely handicapped then I might make some video's detailing how I fare. However, first I need to know what difficulty I should optimally play them on for the greatest amount of challenge with the least amount of BS :P