A few comments about 1.20

from Elemental Forums

I managed to roll back to 1.2 from 1.2c and was able to proceed with the game I started. I played under the "extreme" difficulty. 

One thing that's immediately obvious is that the A.I. get some pretty crazy bonuses like 300% food production and 500% gold production. About 30 turns in, 3 A.I.'s declared war on me already and they each had 20000+ gold. I saw the A.I. had like 4-5 defenders in each town and didn't send anything to attack me (it could've easily wiped me out if it did). Once I teched archery, it's pretty much game. Archers seem even more powerful than before, since you can now buy them in groups of 4 without researching a tech. A.I. also doesn't seem to like building them.

The arcane knowledge resource seems useless once all the spells are researched (which doesn't take long). I had one city that spammed arcane labs and that seemed to be enough to quickly grab most of the important spells. Afterwards, I simply demolished all of them to free up money. Would be nice if there's another use for them.

Other problems I notice are:

- A.I. doesn't seem to use spells beyond a few city enchantments. 

- A.I.'s are easy to rip off in trades and treaties but almost never sues for peace in a war at zero cost until the player captures every single one of its city.

- Monsters don't attack A.I.

- A.I. cities are not well-planned (no specialization) and are usually loaded with monuments (if empire). 

- Capturing an A.I. city can be bothersome. For example, I had to demolish Shanties for Villas and Archivist for Libraries. It would be nice there is a gradual conversion of buildings.

elemental
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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top



- A.I. cities are not well-planned (no specialization) and are usually loaded with monuments (if empire). 

End of quote

This is probably the most unforgivable missing piece of the AI. Its as simple as, have AI set a flag on each city: Tech city, arcane city, gold city, materials city. Build those types of buildings in that city, select those % bonuses for that city, if city reaches population max then build a hut, continue until out of food. If building with % bonus for that resource is available then build first. If you have less than four cities then sett multiple flags on one city and alternate buildings. Congratulations, the city build order is now better than the current city build order for the AI, whatever that may be. This is essentially what I do myself and is not exactly a difficult algorithm to code. If we had a much larger, more complicated selection of buildings, then it might start to get difficult, but as it stands its a very simple process. Now a good player will still probably be able to come up with a slightly more optimized build order for any given situation, but something this simple would still be an improvement.

The only more unforgivable AI problem is its abysmal performance in tactical combat. Such a simple mater as, AI makes sure it always gets first attack is such a simple problem there no forgiving not having at least improved it. Have you ever played the game where you have 13 coins and two players, players alternate taking coins away, they can either take 3, 2 or 1 coin. Player with the last coin loses. This is basically the problem facing the AI in tactical combat to ensure it gets the first attack (only difference is that you can add coins, you can move away from your opponent). This is also a problem with a solution that can be found in most intro Algorithm books, and if the AI is put in the wining position initially, one that it should never lose. Now you throw in some added complications with mixed armies of units with different amounts of movement, and such things as you could move one unit forward and the rest back, which do you pay attention to, etc.) but incorporating any logic of this sort would be an improvement. Even if you don't want to go that far just add a check to see if moving to a given square would put an AI unit directly adjacent to an enemy unit, if true, don't move there. Currently, the tactical AI seems to be obeying the following logic: Run forward, die.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Imho, there's no need for a materials city as there are very few bonuses to materials being in the same city. In addition, as it is so important to long-term military production, putting it in the same city would leave the Ai highly vulnerable.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

True. I was just trying to make it as simple as possible. Change instead to, build a workshop for every 4th building in all cities until you have x amount of materials per turn, x being max amount of materials you can use per turn creating units/buildings etc. Bottom line is that its not difficult to come up with some simple rules, which were the AI to simply follow them under all circumstances would lead to better cities then what its currently churning out.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

All very good general points by the OP. It goes back to what I've been saying for a long time: so much of what is wrong with this game come back to the now byzantine city planning system, which the AI clearly can't get it's head around. A clear system that just limited cities to a given number of studies/workshops/laboratories at each city level (and thus abolished gold maint thereof and citizen requirements) would both be simpler to play & code for, represent all the options and specializations the game is trying to represent, and make it more or less impossible to design a poor city. City growth needs to be more something that just "happens," rather than something that allows you to win the game by choosing the correct tech or build order. The War of Magic should be the important thing.

I'd also argue that the way the AI behaves at the moment makes a compelling argument against the specialization doctrine most people seem to have. Some specialization is great, sure, but when taen to extremes it leads to bizarre situations, like the all-factories strategy in GalCiv2. People have overplayed the "specializations" of historical and literary examples. Venice & Milan are more similar than they are different, because they are both centres of human resources. If you optimally have to have 1 city for each aspect of the game, then surely by extension this means that a balanced economy must have more cities. Ie, specialization means more city sprawl, not less.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Is my game bugged or something? I can only build one of each building type save for huts. So as far as specializing cities? I dont see the point unless your talking about where to build the one per kingdom/world buildings?

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

that is the 1.3 patch and also was in the 1.2e&f beta patches, & frogboy did that to try to reduce the city spam(failed).

harpo