Campaign AI styles...

first, let me explain what i'm trying to do. after doing quite a bit of research into the Ptolemistic Egypt, its fairly apparent that the Ptolemies weren't interested in empire building. and aside from Julius Ceasar conquering Alexandria and some minor skirmishes with the Seleucids, Egypt was largely interested in just maintaining its hold on the territories it owned.

now, for the modding part: i've been trying and trying to make it so that the Egyptian faction in the campaign will behave like its just defending itself and not conquering everything in sight (which makes them a pain in the arse to beat towards the end of the campaign).

my experimentation has largely involved modifying descr_strat.txt in the Data/World/Campaign folder. first thing i tried was to reduce starting treasury to 200 or less. it worked for the first 10-20 turns or so, but then they'd get some money and start empire building again. so, next i tried modifying the line after the faction is declared in descr_strat. for example: faction egypt, balanced stalin is what it currently reads in my descr_strat file. from what i can tell, this doesn't appear to have much of an effect on the way things turn out.

so the question is: does this line actually do something, and if not, is there a way to adjust the campaign AI individually so that Egypt will behave the way it did historically??

Probably not, ca made the ai so that all factions need to expand to survive. That's just the way the game is. If you care about historical accuracy you should try some of the mods. Also there is a thread about ai personalities but it seems that they don't mean much more than just determining what kinds of units and buildings the ai will build. This does have dramatic effects for certain factions but i'm not sure which is best for the ptolemies. In vanilla they're so overpowered anyways that their 'personality' really won't do much to slow down expansion.

Also, the vanilla egyptians are waaay overpowered (not to mention completely innaccurate in just about every other way) so if you want to balance them, maybe you can try to change their units' stats. A mod would probably be easier for you, though.

This explains the AI personality keywords:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=45212

hmm, figures. well, thanks for the info on the AI personality. that's very useful. :grin:

If you want to keep Egypt peacefull you can use a background script that forces them to make peace each time they attack a neighboring province. This way they won't be able to expand because they won't be able to siege any city outside their own borders. They would, however, siege to liberate any city that would be conquered by another power.