Fixing the AI money script (preliminary tests)

[Sheep]

All right folks, it's time we did something about the money script. The EB team is rightfully focused on adding new content to the mod, working up to EB 1.0 for us. But just because we are not officially on the team does not mean we can't help.

As it stands, every AI faction receives 1200 mnai every turn for every city they occupy. This works out well for the smaller factions, to keep them in the game longer. However, some factions are very large from the start and do not need as much of a boost, but use it to rampage across the map. The most obvious example of this is the Arche Seleukeia ("Silver Death"). Other factions are surrounded by rebel provinces and are able to feast on the independents until they get big and fat and nigh-unstoppable (*cough*Sweboz*cough*), at which point they don't need the bonus as much either. And likewise, the large factions could become smaller and need more help.

So what we need is a script that will help out the smaller factions but not the bigger ones (at least not as much), but which is flexible to account for the changing status of any particular faction.

Eminos64 wrote a nice bit of code in this post. However, it has received very little testing. Eminos hasn't posted for at least a month so I have taken the liberty of extending his code for all the factions and I plan to test it and post the results here. It may be that some of the factions will need tweaking and testing should reveal which factions do.

Everyone is also welcome to test this file and tweak it in their own ways. If you think you have something to contribute to a final product, please post what you did in this thread. It's also nice to see screenshots as visual evidence.

The EBBS_SCRIPT.txt file goes into the Rome - Total War\EB\Data\scripts\show_me folder.
Don't forget: Cool kids back up their files before modifying them!

UPDATE 4/28/07
A few days ago I updated Redmeth's script to his 0.4 version (which he says is stable). Also updated TheErrant's script to 0.4 (which he says still needs work... anyone willing to help would be appreciated). Here are the download links:

Redmeth script: http://rapidshare.com/files/27804675...CRIPT.TXT.html
TheErrant script: http://www.axifile.com/?1839807

Please see the next post for details.

UPDATE 4/24/07
I changed the slave faction bonus to 2700 in my version, on the advice of Redmeth. I also updated Redmeth's script to his latest (excellent) version. TheErrant's update was causing script failure so I wrote a note below to tell people not to use it until it is fixed... seems pretty easy so it shouldn't be long.

UPDATE 4/21/07
I added more alternative scripts for you to choose from. Right now there are several different approaches to this, and we are trying to figure which one of them, if any, is the best. So feel free to pick whichever one you think is the most promising and run with it. Keep in mind these are NOT finished products and are still being tested.

UPDATE 4/19/07
Large empires (particularly the AS) had been nuked excessively with the old code. To counteract this, I increased the bonus for larger empires (600 for 16-24 provinces) and added a smaller bonus (300mnai) for empires over 25 provinces. My hope is that this will keep the AS stable but not excessively powerful.

Here is the original modified EBBS_SCRIPT.txt file for download in case anyone is interested (thanks to TheErrant).