siegfriedfr
08-13-2010, 18:16
Hello,
Been investigating on money assistance lately and noticed a strange behavior at the beginning of the game, regarding to the ingame "financial" graph.
The EB-MA works like this (or should be...): if the treasury goes under 5K at season 4, the AI is granted 20K; the ai also get an allowance of 1200 mnai per turn witout conditions; the ai can also get an allowance of 300/600/900 mnai if it has under 16/25 settlements and the player has more.
What i observed with money assistance:
1) Many factions skyrocket to 50K in the first twenty turns (baktria, pontos, hayasdan, notice they are factions with mines in their starting cities)
2) some other go down and never go up (arverni, aedui)
3) the big factions have a strong economy and do neither: they remain mostly stable
Those observation completely contradict how the money assistance should work.
1) The emergency 20k should ensure that the AI is never in debt, and the 1200 mnai that it can either build or train - no AI should just remain flat broke.
2) Also, it's completely impossible for some factions to skyrocket to 50k, especially considering the AI never disbands units: all the factions listed go in the red within a 2-3 turns with the initial armies when played by the human, and the "emergency" 20k are only given when the treasury is under 5K, so it cannot "pile up".
But there is more.
I entirely deleted the money assistance section in the EBBS_script and started a campaign.
Some things were different, but one wasnt: the aforementioned skyrocketting factions... also skyrocketed to 25-30K... before going completely down (so at least the script was having an effect, that's reassuring).
So i guess the question would be:
- is there some hardcoding money assistance in the .exe which inflates all the add_money commands for certain AI faction?
- is mining income inflated for the AI?
- maybe the AI has an hardcoded "free upkeep" for the first few turns?
Thanks for your insight :)
Been investigating on money assistance lately and noticed a strange behavior at the beginning of the game, regarding to the ingame "financial" graph.
The EB-MA works like this (or should be...): if the treasury goes under 5K at season 4, the AI is granted 20K; the ai also get an allowance of 1200 mnai per turn witout conditions; the ai can also get an allowance of 300/600/900 mnai if it has under 16/25 settlements and the player has more.
What i observed with money assistance:
1) Many factions skyrocket to 50K in the first twenty turns (baktria, pontos, hayasdan, notice they are factions with mines in their starting cities)
2) some other go down and never go up (arverni, aedui)
3) the big factions have a strong economy and do neither: they remain mostly stable
Those observation completely contradict how the money assistance should work.
1) The emergency 20k should ensure that the AI is never in debt, and the 1200 mnai that it can either build or train - no AI should just remain flat broke.
2) Also, it's completely impossible for some factions to skyrocket to 50k, especially considering the AI never disbands units: all the factions listed go in the red within a 2-3 turns with the initial armies when played by the human, and the "emergency" 20k are only given when the treasury is under 5K, so it cannot "pile up".
But there is more.
I entirely deleted the money assistance section in the EBBS_script and started a campaign.
Some things were different, but one wasnt: the aforementioned skyrocketting factions... also skyrocketed to 25-30K... before going completely down (so at least the script was having an effect, that's reassuring).
So i guess the question would be:
- is there some hardcoding money assistance in the .exe which inflates all the add_money commands for certain AI faction?
- is mining income inflated for the AI?
- maybe the AI has an hardcoded "free upkeep" for the first few turns?
Thanks for your insight :)