Investigation of AI reassessment upon reload

[Bromley]

FIRST: Apologies, but I have missed out Rhodes (Greeks) in all of my tests. It's immaterial to the conclusions though.

Summary

Thanks to RB for mailing me his files. I've looked at them and have concluded that they in no way contradict the statement that loading the game damages the AI expansion.

Any other conclusions/theories about the effect of alliances on the AI are for others to advance. My only objective in this test was to determine whether or not save/load produced results that I might expect from earlier tests.


Details

RB supplied 3 files which I refer to as "12", "14" and "19". Those numbers don't directly translate to turn numbers. Assuming that we call the first turn (270s AD) Turn 1, then they refer to turns 14 (264w BC),16 (263w BC) & 20 (261w BC) respectively.

The tests use "12" and "14" and run until 261w BC, which is when "19" was saved. The first thing to note is that these tests cover relatively short periods (6 & 4 turns), so I've also performed an couple of extended runs on "14" that go for 6 turns to 260w.

Thanks to Bhruic for telling us how to turn FOW off on someone else's save. That made the comparison a lot easier and allowed me to see a lot of interesting stuff that I would have otherwise missed. BTW, anybody trying it may find that they have to type it into the console twice to get it working properly.

As well as recording the territory data, I've also listed a bunch of locations that I found under siege in some of the runs. This is not necessarily comprehensive, but they do account for many of the sieges. x means that it wasn't besieged, s means that it was (followed by who is doing it) and lifted means that it was no longer sieged (note that this may have occurred in the previous turn). Likewise, taken means it was taken (duh!) but not necessarily in this turn. If there's no mark then I didn't check on the status.

"12" Test

A simple one to conclude. Look at the increase in total territories from 74 to 81 when no loads are made. As we've come to expect, zero growth with save/loads every turn. Also note that the no-loads column (interval=NIL) has a bunch of cities under siege, whereas the save/load every turn (interval=1) column has none. This means that the difference between the two runs could be expected to increase if we continued for a few more turns.

"14" Test

You'll see that the total territory only increases by 1 up to 261w BC whether you load or not. However, this is not too surprising as there have only been 4 turns. As we're already 14 turns into the game, it's reasonable to expect that the AI has already taken many of the easy Rebels. Indeed, we know that there have been 6 Rebels taken by the start because I recorded to total territory in 270s in my earlier tests as 71.

When I extend the test by 2 turns to 260w BC, you see a huge change. The save/load run shows no change at 78. However, not saving or loading for those two turns allows the AI to expand by 8 territories! That's huge when you think that in the preceding 20 turns it had only expanded 7 territories.

The reason can be seen in the Sieges box. There are a huge number of outstanding sieges at the end of the first 4 turns without saving. A large number of these succeed, along with a bunch of others that I didn't record like Noricum.

So again, this is evidence of the loadgame feature being pants.

"19"

Included for completion, this is RB's save at 261w from when he was playing the game. One possible conclusion is that he reloaded approximately every 3 turns when he was playing, as the total territory increase is similar to my interval=3 test that I ran previously and that covers a similar length period. In fact this conclusion probably applies to "12" and "14" because they similarily exhibit relatively little expansion.

Strangely enough, I did not replicate RB's results where he saw territorial expansion compared to "19" using "14" up to 261w BC. However, I did note that Pontus managed to expand by 1 territory despite save/load every turn. Also, there were a few sieges in place when I finished that run. Maybe sometimes with save/load an army will siege a Rebel and, as the Rebels have their turn at the end, the Rebels may sally before the turn ends? That way, the AI would be able to win a siege in one turn even with walls being present.