Forgotten how to take screenshots, so some other AI stuff


d) One additional requirement for sea invasions is that the AI must have ships in the suitable positions, preferably one float near the boarding zone and one near the landing zone... ...it is important the synchrony between trips of the floats and troops creation. If ships are delayed and the troops are ready, they start to move trying to find a land route to the target. In our case the target is so far that they don’t find a way and return to the boarding point, although boarding is then delayed.
This can cause permanent stalls too where the armies and fleets are permenently out of step e.g armies in carthage looking for ships while the ships are by icosium waiting for the armies, then after a turn the armies move to icosium and the ships move to carthage. Then back and forth like that for ages.

I wanted to create a free upkeep ship and spawn one every 20 turns or so to see if it got round this bug. Not sure if you can spawn ships though.


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c) Another important dissuasion factors are walls. Their widespread presence dramatically reduces the aggressiveness of the AI. For a more dynamic campaign, it is necessary to limit walls, both at the beginning (descr_strat) and along the campaign (higher settlement requirements and prices).
This works the other way too. *Lack* of walls makes the AI more aggressive. So, for example, if you mod a faction to not be able to build walls then the other factions are much more aggressive to them.

Walls, or the lack of them also effects the size of garrison the AI leaves behind (especially at game start it seems). So if you remove walls from a faction the AI will want to leave a much larger higher percentage of it's starting units behind on the first few turns.

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4- Behaviour parameters

Finally this parameter seems to have an influence more important than expected. One faction limited by an allied superfaction cannot have the attributes “Caesar”, “Genghis” or “Napoleon” because it will attack to the neighbour superfaction. It seems that parameters such as “smith” or “stalin” are more suitable, as better equilibrium between economy and aggressiveness is obtained. The parameter “sailor” is devoted to ship building, but it doesn’t promote sea invasions.
I need to look at this more. I thought they only effected build priorities.

(May however be an indirect side-effect of what type of units they build--see "AI and cavalry" below)

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Some new stuff from trying to make the sarmatians less passive in RTRPE.


AI and cavalry

I always thought the AI wouldn't siege if they had an all-cavalry stack but they do. They even build siege equipment although they never use it as they can't assault. They will wait out the siege instead. They very rarely do it because of the way the AI calculates the strength of stacks.

Numbers count for a lot. Large units are important and cav units are generally smaller. Also it seems high missile attack ratings are wieghted much lower than high melee attack ratings. What this means is that horse archer type factions have a huge differential between how strong their stacks are for auto-calc compared with how strong they are when a player uses them in a battle.

This doesn't only affect their chances in auto-calc though--it also decides their expansion behaviour. They won't initally attack a target if they calculate the garrison to be too strong for them. (This seems to be initially only. Once they have decided to attack a settlement they'll keep attacking with very weak armies but initially the relative strength of the garrison and their own armies affects them.)

So cavalry-heavy armies and especially horse-archer factions will be extremely passive unless you give them infantry units too or make the cavalry units much larger etc.

If you want to set up a faction as primarily horse archer with few or no native infantry units then one thing you can do is create a second version of their standard horse archer unit. Make them unbuildable, max size and zero upkeep and then spawn a bunch of them with a campaign script for AI only. Tweak the number of units until a starting army moves to attack a nearby rebel settlement. (If there's enough of them they will siege.) As they are unbuildable the AI won't get any more and as they lose men taking the rebel settlements they don't unbalance the faction long-term. Eventually they'll take some regions with AOR type infantry so they'll have a chance to expand normally after that.

This way you can have a very interesting faction for the player, with a very different style (as at the start they have tiny all-cavalry armies) but at the same time the AI version of the faction isn't totally passive.


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Creating campaign timers.

Inspired by a thread on the EB forum and Monkwarriors stuff on superfactions.

1) As mentioned the AI is influenced by the strength of garrisons/walls etc whether or not to attack. The strength calculation is very influenced by sheer numbers of enemy soldiers and their melee attack rating.

2) A number of mods set up immoveable rebel garrisons by having a starting general with a trait that prevents movement.

3) Normally, if a rebel garrison is very large and their movement is not inhibited by a general's trait they'll move out of the city leaving only a small contingent behind.

So, by having a very large immobile rebel garrison and tweaking the starting general's age you can create a kind of timer to influence AI expansion.

For example, you could have some rebel cities where the general is 16 and others where he is 50. If the stack is huge enough to guarantee the AI won't attack then that region will remain as a buffer zone for a very long time. If the starting general's age is set to 50 then it will be shorter.

I was thinking if you had Messana and Saguntum for example set up as rebel with a strong garrisons, romans as faction creator and a high unrest setting (the "chance" field in descr_rebel_factions.txt), you could set the two general's ages to x number of years before the historical roman intervention in Sicily/Iberia. The general would die at some randon time close to this date, the army would move out of the city meaning nearby factions were more likely to target it. Eventually they'd take it and the unrest number would make a revolt to romans likely. Hence providing the reason for naval re-inforcements.

(probably easier ways to do this with script)