Quote Originally Posted by Glenn
you seem to have discovered a mod that needs no development - am I right in believing that - with instruction, a player can give preliminary directives to each faction in the game - and then play the campaign at his leisure?

Or is this not so flexible?
The victory conditions seem to work in two directions:

1. Given two valid targets, one being a VC the other not, the AI tends to attack the VC town first. Example would be the Romans, who tend to go for Segesta or Bononia first without VCs, but usually attack Taras first when that is assigned a VC-town.

The problem is of course, that there is no way to make the AI regard a town as a valid target. For example, both Karthago and Rome usually aviod Rhegion, Messana and Syracusae, even when these are assigned as victory conditions.

Another example would be Baktria. Baktria's targets are all recent Seleucide lands and none of the Saka. Nevertheless she starts allied with AS but as war with Saka. The result is a Baktria expanding North and leave the South alone. But that is only until AS and Baktria become hostile. In this case Baktria seems to pay much lesser attentions to the steppe - often losing much ground there - but pushes very hard into Seleucia.

So, when you give the Sweboz Roma as a target you won't see them packing and trecking South in turn#1, but given the situation at one point in the game that they might either attack Roma or another town they will most likely go for Roma first. You might make a path of VCs towns between their starting position and Roma, and provided all these towns are regarded as valid targets and at none they will definitly fail to take it, you'll have them standing at the gates of Rome one day.

2. The AI seems to pay much more attention to defend VC towns than attacking non-VC towns. That's the reason behind Makdonia surviving in most of the games since using this file: Pella is a victory condition for them, any towns on the Balkans are not. So they usually do not waste their armies on Serdike while Pella is under attack from KH and Epeiros but keep larger forces in reserve.

That makes the AI a bit more defenisve, up to the extreme in my first tests when AS had been asigned all starting towns as VCs with the result that she did not field any armies but used everything as garrison. That works a bit regulative in the way that the closer an AI faction will come to achiving it's VCs the more passive it will become.


How successful are you so far?
Testing it is a bit problematic because you have to run tests really long to see any effects of changes - the opening moves of the AI are always more or less the same. I will try to give Rome VCs North of the Alps to create a path into Spain and Greece. Giving targets that require to cross a watershed seems not to work to well. Karthago and Epeiros are another problem; all other factions seem to do pretty well what I want them to do in most of the games