[IDEA] AI Improvement Mod

I have been wondering this for quite some time. We all know the AI only does one thing good, and that is hordes of troops without scripting.

And there have been some attempted improvements on the AI (no indies, and some mods that add better starting sites to bad nations).

But, I think there is more that can be done. One of the important things that the AI never uses are SC's and thugs.

But this is something we could improve. We could make a mod that gave the AI access to certain types of thugs and SC's at reasonable prices at certain research levels. You can give them all the resistances and weapons they need, and and use some battlefield spells to give them the battle buffs.

Now, I'm wondering two things, has this ever been attempted before?

And what are some good thug/sc setups to prebuild for the AI?

I actually tried playing a game against the AI with a mod that gave a lot of level 0 free shit I didn't use. Zero gem summons, auto summoners, extra gems in an AI province, research bonus, that kind fo crap.

It was... an interesting game. The AI had me killed by turn 20 with 3 globals up already.

So yeah, I may have overdone it but I can see it work if restriced to AI nations only (in a much reasonable way than I tried...)

A few years back I made a mod for myself that changed a load of non-mage indy commanders to pathless thugs with good base items. The thugs were copies of Bane, Lords, Gargoyles etc, and with most having the fire brand that the Arch Devil gets. They were just 1 gold and 1 res as well, so the AI was fairly good at recruiting them.

But IIRC they ddn't work that well in battles because they have no scripts and so reverted to "stay behind" orders. Meaning they only got into melee if no archers were around. IIRC there is a mod trick that can be used to make a unit auto-berserk (memory cell is saying it's used in Burns's dwarf mod?!), so if you gave that to such units as well then I see no reason they wouldn't work as berserk thugs for the AI.

Not something I really looked into developing though as at the time it served no real purpose for MP games I could see. Unless you had house rules that forbid recruitment of such units, and so they only get used if players turned AI. But it all that just sounded like a lot of hassle to have as a rule in a MP game, and just added to the excuses players can give for cailing. (plus the consequences on game balance when a nation was turned AI were..... likely to be significant)

This wouldn't really be a problem if only the AI nations had access to those units.

If you didn't give the AI any recruitable troops and had a map with no recruitable indies would they just recruit lots of commanders? That coupled with thug/SC commanders could make them much more difficult to fight, although scripting is still potentially a problem I guess.

I don't think there would be much of a problem making a mod that improves the AI in such a way. There wouldn't be need for house rules either.

The tricky part would be determining the amount of help the AI would need to get really nasty and just enough nasty at the right time, as in determining the AIs powah curve.

Obviously you can give the AI Seraphs and what not (like I tired) but that would result in turn 10 globals and shit. Give them too little early on and they're easy targets again.
What Calahan experimented with would be tricky to make work too. The AI's power would depend heavily on the map size and player/province ratio.

As for scripts, the only workable solution is to have all AI thugs and SCs with built in items and auto cast berserk. Mages wouldn't be a problem if the AI got a significant research bonus and a general increase in magic path by say 2 levels. But that would all be very nation specific so it might make more sense to make an AI mod nation than a AI improvement mod. Any thoughts on that?

- Give the AI gem generating mages (the AI would only use them for battle spells sadly but it would still count for something).
- A big research bonus on all mages
- Cheap mages with a lot of random and high level paths. This way they'd get a bit of everything.
- Recruitable SCs
- Cheapest forts, temples and labs
- Dom summon commanders maybe
- A single option for a pretender if possible? Though I very much doubt it.
- Level 0 free summon
- Immortal sacreds!

Calahan is talking about the possible benefit of nations being stronger after turned AI in MP games, in that context there is no way of limiting access to the AI, since those nations would be human players to begin with.

Myself I don't give much of a shit about AI improvements that fall outside the category of either improving battlefield/spellcasting AI in MP games, or improves the relevancy of SP testing of MP strategies. But I can see how it would be nice for people who like SP.

It would be really great if the spellcasting AI improvement project came to be at some point, since that's an actual gameplay improvement for both MP and SP.

AI with crazy dominion spread (by making commanders spread it or whatever) and every unit being immortal would be ludicrously hillarious to fight against.

Though I bet it'd still die to it's own stupidity

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, I was wondering if I shouldn't post this on shrapnel. As that seems to attract more SP players. It was just something I was wondering about a long time. Like the static gem generators and the zombie mod.

@executor, the powercurve point is a good one. Hard to do. You could provide multiple versions of the mod. (Of course ideally, you would have an interface like semirandom where you can select which nation you want to play, and that gives all the other AI players various additional bonusses. But that is not relevant now).

Adding static starting commanders that generate troops that mimic heavy sacreds would also be interesting. (Give them stat bonusses that mimic standard blesses, giants are ideal for this, certain blesses cannot be modded in of course).

Ideally it would create a mod where you don't need to put the AI on very high difficulty levels to create a challenge. While still mimicing MP mid and end game play.

I kinda liked the idea of adding gems to ai mages. What i am not sure of. SHould it add gems coresponded to paths total or to highest path ?.

That does have the problem that charm and enslave mind just steals the gemgens.

Well you could always put 30 MR on the mages

OK, so... total noob to modding here, so this might be really stupid. But you never know until you ask

On getting the mods to affect a MP game:

I know that in theory, it's not possible to change mods during a game, but can it be done (say, if the mod has the exact same filename, could you substitute it and "fool" dom3 into thinking it's the same? The manual doesn't say anything...)

If so, for MP games, you could start the game with a "mod" for each nation that actually doesn't change anything, and if the player goes AI you put in the AI mod for that nation. Cumbersome, but...

(so you'd have a "fake" modified AI Abysia and a "real" one, a "fake" modified Ulm and a "real" one, etc.)

If that works, you can then also have a spell mod to create thugs (it'd be full of spells that are nation-specific to all the "modded" nations - you'd need copies of the spells if I read the modding manual correctly, but we're already doing this the kludgy way so who cares)

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Oh, and another thought: does the AI set up communions? If not, could #onebattlespell - Communion Master and #onebattlespell - Communion Slave work?

MisterDee - that is indeed a possible thing you could do, with regards to fooling dominions with a same-named mod. I would be wary of the possibility of this somehow introducing bugs into the game, and it would require some collaboration with the llamabeast, but it's doable.

I'm not sure if the AI thing would actually be a good idea or not, but again it is technically doable.

As rdonj says, it can be done, and should be a fairly simple job if you have access to the hosting machine. Keeping to one mod file would likely be best as well to minimise bugs, and then just pasting in-and-out the text changes to swap nations over from regular to super-AI as need be. (fuck, I'm sounding like that bearded twat now)

But this would only be possible for llamaserver games with the cooperation of llamabeast. And since he's a popular guy with many demands of his time, I would personally only want to see this sort of option for llamaserver games if it didn't involve him having to get involved each time. Each game would also need it's own separate mod of course, but that's not really an issue.


But the biggest problem of them all regarding this type of mod, and why I don't ever want to see it become a reality, is because of the damage it would cause to our community efforts in regards to trying to stop players bailing on games and turning AI. Since if you give players the wonderful excuse of...

"I'm turning AI now because the AI can put up a better fight than me by using the free SC's it gets"

... then you can be damn sure there will always be players happy to take that option the moment they wanted out of a game. With that moment likely arriving far sooner than it would without such a mod. And I don't have to strain my brain too hard to imagine what a crippling effect that would have on the value of MP games in genera if their balance was constantly being ruined each time a new AI appeared.

So honestly, I really wish all talk of this mod idea being used in MP games would just die already. Because absolutely no good will come of it.