AI Balancing Mini-Mod

[Redmeth]

I pray to the mod god that they do. After over 10 years in the game, I'm seeing some of the old tendencies. A lot of cheap skirmisher heavy armies, and a whole lot of armies roaming around at that. I would love to see this ported to 1.0, please, please, please do.

In 1.0 the script is coded differently but the sums the AI receives are roughly the same. If you used the balanced EBBS.

Anyway if you really want this take section 4a and 4b from this and replace 5a and 5b (make sure you backup of course).

[Dooz]

How about the Merc part of it? And wasn't there also work done on recruitment and whanot to make the armies as awesome as they were? How would those be incorporated?

[Redmeth]

How about the Merc part of it? And wasn't there also work done on recruitment and whanot to make the armies as awesome as they were? How would those be incorporated?

The recruitment was the result of AI getting a lot of money and building up their MICs.

The merc part was different but the 1.0 merc part uses a different idea (pools) but the replenishment times are low perhaps lower than in the minimod.

I am not saying 1.0 is balanced perfectly and this is the way it will be from now on, it's an important objective I'll have on my list, if you still feel this is better you can adapt this to 1.0 (the new unit mercs will not be recruitable though) and it might unbalance other factions that were tweaked in other ways.

[Dooz]

20 years in, AI expansion has been looking good. The problem I've been seeing is army composition. Was there anything at all done with that regards in this mod? It seemed like every army I saw with the balanced mod was perfectly varied and had good troops and everything. Were there any priority changes done? Now I'm seeing a lot of cheap unit armies. Also, there seem to be more armies around than with this mod, and it was better with fewer making battles matter more and so on.

[Spoofa]

I just noticed that in 1.0 Vanilla there are about 10 mercs avalible all around Greece, meaning the AI could sum up an army quite fast in one turn.

[mcantu]

I just noticed that in 1.0 Vanilla there are about 10 mercs avalible all around Greece, meaning the AI could sum up an army quite fast in one turn.

But that merc pool is for a larger number of territories and replenishment is much slower

[Aymar de Bois Mauri]

Redmeth is an EB member for quite some time now.

[Dooz]

You know what? I think I jumped the gun a little bit. Now I'm 30 years in and armies seem to be nicely varied around the world. I guess they needed a little bit of time to build up economy and MIC's, I should have taken that into consideration. I just took a look around with the spy script on and I'm loving what I'm seeing. One problem seemed to be greek type factions, like the KH and Maks. They seem to have a lot of hoplite levies, and the Epirotes have a few cheap armies too. But compared to the overall armies I've seen it's not that big a deal. Unless it's something that happens in every campaign I suppose...

So hey, factions are progressing well and armies are composed nicely. Looks like EB 1.0 has caught up to the AI balancing mini-mod, so kudos to the team and Redmeth for getting on the team and helping out to make it so. Great job guys!

[Danzifuge]

though this mod seems impressive, i was wondering if there was a way to tackle one of the issues that bugs me most about the early game in EB. the first few turns are spent waiting for your income to rise to where it should be from the start. what exactly is this supposed to represent in the game. the only thing i could think would be some sort of revolution. but it happens to the human player (and probably only the human player) no matter what faction he chooses. can someone direct me to the script i can delete to remove this?

also, quite often the solutions everyone chooses too balance the ai is to give more money to the small and less to the rich. why not forget giving assistance, but have increased upkeep of buildings (i'm a newb, so i'm not even sure if this exists) so that large empires have to deal with paying for a lot of buildings, as well as enforcing higher corruption rates on a city to city basis (based on their size and distance from the capital). one more idea, might be to make unit cost and upkeep much cheaper for the first 20 or so units a faction has. and from there on a sliding scale, increase the cost to the norm. this would enforce the idea that the soldiers in small factions understood the need to protect the kingdom and were willing to take cuts in pay to do so. these costs would only apply to units recruited in homelands of course.

just my two cents

[overweightninja]

though this mod seems impressive, i was wondering if there was a way to tackle one of the issues that bugs me most about the early game in EB. the first few turns are spent waiting for your income to rise to where it should be from the start. what exactly is this supposed to represent in the game. the only thing i could think would be some sort of revolution. but it happens to the human player (and probably only the human player) no matter what faction he chooses. can someone direct me to the script i can delete to remove this?

The script does not affect directly affect the players money. Most factions will be going into debt at the start of the game, this is because of the high upkeep of the units mainly, and the main two strategies are too dispand or conquer, refer to the FAQ in the main EB forum for more details.

why not forget giving assistance, but have increased upkeep of buildings (i'm a newb, so i'm not even sure if this exists)

Sorry, no it doesn't :)

one more idea, might be to make unit cost and upkeep much cheaper for the first 20 or so units a faction has.

Again I am not sure this is possible even with scripting.

Also note AFAIK Redmeth's work is now part of the official release, so I suppose that leaves this thread redundant (hence no replies since 1.0 was released ). This thread may be of interest to you though:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=93151

Cheers

[Danzifuge]

@ninja

yeah i kinda figured the redundancy after trying it out on rp mode and noticing no difference whatsoever.

the thing that bothers me though is, although everyone may start headed for debt with cities losing up to -2000 a turn, even if you do nothing for your economy this loss of income for each city slowly turns around for no reason at all. this implies there is a script that hurts your income that gradually lessens per turn. i'd like to remove this, so the player has a better standing to start with. and i doubt it applies to the ai. playing as epirus, i defeated three macedonian armies of equal standing (number and unit composition), took their two main cities (pella and demetrias), and what do i see the next turn? an army of 12 macedonian units settling squatting near corinth, while i'm in debt -8000 and have built no new units since the start of the campaign. so, i played as macedon just to see if they really had a numerical superiority to start with. they do, but only very slight as they start with two medium sized armies, but it would be impossible for them to recruit armies as fast as they did as the ai if they were imposed with same negative income.

thanks for the link. i'll check it out.
EDIT: that links nothing but the AI progression thread, a place to put up screenshots of how the ai is doing.

[mlp071]

I wouldn't call some parts here redundant.

Mercenary part and EBBS scripts is redundant(EB team did great job on Mercs file), but money script part (in EBBS script) still works.It probably requires some minor tweaks to streamline 1 or 2 factions progression, but other then that it gives more AI units (how many is dependant of which script).Rebels money script is still same.

I am using one of them, because i am finding , for my own purposes, 1.1 script not sufficient enough to provide me any challenge , specially after 260.For my comparison, i would equal 1.1 script on Very Hard to 0.81 vanilla EB script on Medium difficulty( talking about finance part).Again , this is my personal opinion only.

Still , i can't recommend it till some changes. And if you want to use it, do that at your own discretion(money part only) , due to mentioned progression reason.

[Skandinav]

Is the roleplaying mod compatible with EB 1.1 ?

[belliger]

hallo redmeth.
i installed your AI mod, the challenge one.
i wish also to install the Spoils of Victory minimod, by v.t. martin.
do they interfere? can they be installed and work together?
i ask it because i see that some files to change are the same, despite that sometimes they don't have the .txt end.
thanks

[Fish-got-a-Sniper]

Is this compatible with the EBBS script mod that eliminates the client ruler script? I want to download the RP version of this but I don't want to have to worry about spending hours of pressing delete to remove the client ruler script again.

[Strategos Alexandros]

@ Fish-got-a-Sniper It won't be compatible and it might not work with 1.1 anyway.

[sfmain]

is there any way to make this compatible with alex.exe E.B. 1.1?(specifically the challenging mod)