How to make the AI more aggressive towards other AI

I apologize if this is not the correct forum to post this question, but does anyone know of a way (cough...mod...cough) to make certain AI factions more aggressive against other AI factions. The best example is the Seleucids. I would love to see them lasting into the later stages of the game and be the super power they were. I tried everything I could think of, from increasing their starting treasury to 900k to increasing the tax income of all their cities (204 instead of 51), to giving them more units with better experience. I even put a diplomat near their towns and drowned them in denariis, 100k+ at times. Nothing seems to work. It is sad that a faction with such a powerful array of units always gets trampled on by even minor faction like Armenia and Pontus. It seems like they have no incentive to attack other factions even when they have the resources.

If anyone has any solution to this issue please let me know.

Someone in the Selucid guide in the RTW guide section played as the Brutii and bribed off armies to get Selucid to the end game. He had good results. Perhaps you should look for the no fog-of-war how to if you want to get best results from it.

You can't mod The AI To be more aggressive as it is Hard-Coded so your best doing what antisocialmunky said.

Gifting cities is also a good way.

Whenever I tried giving them cities as gifts, they literally ignore them and not build anything or recruit any units there until the city revolts or some other faction captures it.

Bribing is not a very practical option after 1.2. and even if you do bribe invading armies, the seleucids would still not be aggressive and would invade anyone.

I was wondering if changing any of the faction traits would help, like Caesar/ Napoleon/Stalin or the other ones like Smith/Bureauocrat/Religious. Any ideas on that? :help:

That will change what they build...but be carefull:the build AI is screwd enough in vanilla.

Many is the time i have fought an all peltast army...

Someone (I think it was Kraxis) had a thread about a month ago about a change to the Carthage AI setting that helped out, even got an invasion of Rome out of it. I think he changed it to sailor/caesar, and also upped the stats slightly of some of the Carthaginian infantry. Can't find it through the search function though, not really sure what to look for...

Gifting doesn`t seem to help, the AI just screw it all up.

As for the seleucids I`ve found somthing that works excellent:

Give them 900K denarii, boost their population, make all their starter units have 9 experience and give them the trait craftsman caesar(thank Kraxis for that).

That was very heavy modding I agree, but at least it worked.

I also did some negative modding on Egypt, but I don`t know how much that helped.
If you give Egypt –900K denarii then it would not be required to let TSE cheat that much.

Here`s the result:
http://img125.echo.cx/img125/8527/tse6av.jpg

I have not helped TSE in any other way than securing trade rights with them.
TSE also had a plan of invading Carthage too, but the load savegame bug screwed those plans.

Hope that helped.

It does seem impressive, I have never seen the SE this big under AI control. I'll try this in my next campaign. Thank you all.

Probably the best way to screw Egypt over (IMO) is to only allow thier cities to have a governors palace and a wall. Also so they do'nt get romped to heavily is to mod in elite units in thier core cities. This way Selecids can be a step ahead of Egypt in the tech tree

I give the Seleucid 900K plus I add armies like pikeman,arches to all there cities and give them cataphast horse usally 3 per city. I do nothing to anyone else the area of the Seleucids. So far I'm at year 247BC and I'm Macedon and I just got a map fromthem and they are hugh. So I just Started getting my armies together To go to war with them. ~:cheers:

If you want to boost the AI Seleucids by giving them more starter units, give them lots of scythed chariots. All AI vs AI faction battles are fought in autocalc, and chariots are very good in autocalc.

i've found giving them more starting regions (even just 1) can dramatically affect they're progress. I didn't see much difference, in terms of the number of regions captured, when changing the AI settings. the tutorial here goes into changing starting regions.

true. I had the same problem and gave them Halicarnassus and also Palmyra plus some (10) chariots. The result was impressive: They lost at the end, but it was a great struggle against all their neighbours (they captured Jerusalem for a couple of years and killed two Pontic faction leaders). It even enabled me (Numidians) to evade the Eggy onslaught in Siwa as they were too occupied with the SE. ~:cheers: