Game AI stuff (1.5)

[nikolai1962]

Monkwarrior,

I started looking at the carth-roman thing on the vanilla map before i got side-tracked onto my simple one. There were a bunch of things i thought needed to be done to the map to make it work right (from the carth side) which i'll point out here. Your map is probably different but it may have some of the same problems. I only changed the first one (sahara) as i didn't know how to edit the other map files then.

1) The AI prioritizes adjacent land regions. For carth this means they spend a lot of time in the desert both south and east and especially if they get into a war with egypt, which they nearly always do. This is a big waste of time imo and stops carthage ever seeming like the regional superpower it is supposed to be. My solution as shown in the image was to make a huge sahara that touched the sea so it was the border region with egypt. Siwa and nepte were too far away from each other for egypt and carthage to ever fight whereas nepte was close to the coastal regions so carthage could take it without a long trak into the desert. I also made nepte low population/fertility and made desert regions (hidden-resource) unable to build lots of pop growth stuff like farm upgrades. This meant it wouldn't keep rebelling, as that was another distraction for the carthage ai.



With the carthage ai undistracted to the east and south all it needs to do to become land-locked and therefore naval-orientated is to finish expanding west along the coast.


On the vanilla map it seemed the cartage ai sometimes (not always) had a problem getting to Tingi. The bends in the road shown in the second image are the reason (i think).



I added a region between Tingi and Cirta because at first i thought it was a distance problem but it still happened some of the time so now i think it is a path-finding glitch related to bends. You need Carthage to take Tingi as Tingi-Corduba works as a naval expansion path to Iberia. I know now that moving Tingi, that ford to the east or something else should clear the path-finding glitch and let carthage target Tingi properly every game without stalling

With Tingi taken, and the huge sahara blocking expansion eastwards, Carthage becomes a naval expansion faction (ignore sicily for a minute). Its closest naval expansion target is Iberia and so once these things are done Carthage should always fight hard to expand in iberia.

There is another map glitch here though. When carthage has been pushed out of iberia and is re-invading from Tingi they sometimes land near where i placed the carthage army in the picture. These stacks sometimes seemed to get stalled. After my tinkering with the simple map I'd bet it is because of those mountains between the landing zone and corduba.

So I'd say to make carthage act like carthage on any map you'd need:

1) A huge sahara (or something) blocking egypt and carthage
2) Smaller/closer desert regions to let carthage take them without long slow journeys.
3) Make sure those inland desert regions don't rebel too much by fixing the pop growth.
4) Make sure there is clear path-finding along the coast.
5) Make sure there is clear path-finding between the African and Iberian regions that are closest together.

Lastly i saw a glitch on Siclily once where carthage had lilybeum and syracuse and got stalled moving to messana. I think it is the bendy road shown in picture below.



When i get back to tinkering with the vanilla map i think i'll make sicily more triangle shaped with the mountains in the centre so there are three straight-ish roads between lillybeum-syracuse, lilybeum-messana and messana-syracuse. I think this will make sure the ai doesn't glitch here.

Apart from making messana-italy have a clear naval expansion path (or a land-bridge) i think fixing these things (or the equivalent on other maps) will make the carthage ai much better.

I think it will be much trickier to get the roman ai acting like historical romans though.