XAI 4.0 Baseline BETA of KGCM

[Lubo]

I'd love to have the free upkeep anyway. How can I turn it on?

Btw, started playing on HARD as a Campaign difficulty, will inform you about AI's behaviour. Hope won't be unnaturally aggressive, that's why I didn't start with VH. Plus, I set battle difficulty to VH, and in the first battle I managed to get AI's archers right at the beggining with my cavalry, as they went to far from their army.

EDIT - ok, taken over two cities. I was shocked to see that taking over the middle of the city won't make me win.. Can I change this? I don't like it.. makes the battles more unpractical, longer. AI played poorly.. but they surprised me in some ways. For instance, they charged with missile cavalry :-). I was pleased to see it.. very unusual. Will write again.

EDIT - He guys I think I need to talk to some of you.. playing for Antioch and yet very easily invading Turks. Two castles sacked already. They tend to be somehow passive.. I discovered two armies standing on the borders doing nothing just watching me sucking the castle. Tell me how can I make sure XAI is working properly? Had KGCM 4.2, copied the files from Christmas patch, then copied XAI 4.0 files (for KGCM), cleared cache according to "readme". Did I miss sth?

And one more thing - caste conversion. Why is that turned off? I can't convert any cities, or castles... I miss this to be honest.

[xeryx]

Lubo, the stuck units, are usually cause from a saved game restart. Start over and play. Then things usually work out less buggy. Oh yeah and you can never turn of the game, and never save it. Then the Med 2 bugs cant develop. Try it and you will see what I mean.

Archer's will never seem to stay "fixed"

[Lubo]

No worries, archers are no too bad.. but what I would really like to change is mentioned castle/city convertion possibility. I miss this! Any way of turning it on?

How could I make sure XAI was implemented and is working correctly?

[Achilla]

I'd love to have the free upkeep anyway. How can I turn it on?

Btw, started playing on HARD as a Campaign difficulty, will inform you about AI's behaviour. Hope won't be unnaturally aggressive, that's why I didn't start with VH. Plus, I set battle difficulty to VH, and in the first battle I managed to get AI's archers right at the beggining with my cavalry, as they went to far from their army.

EDIT - ok, taken over two cities. I was shocked to see that taking over the middle of the city won't make me win.. Can I change this? I don't like it.. makes the battles more unpractical, longer. AI played poorly.. but they surprised me in some ways. For instance, they charged with missile cavalry :-). I was pleased to see it.. very unusual. Will write again.

EDIT - He guys I think I need to talk to some of you.. playing for Antioch and yet very easily invading Turks. Two castles sacked already. They tend to be somehow passive.. I discovered two armies standing on the borders doing nothing just watching me sucking the castle. Tell me how can I make sure XAI is working properly? Had KGCM 4.2, copied the files from Christmas patch, then copied XAI 4.0 files (for KGCM), cleared cache according to "readme". Did I miss sth?

And one more thing - caste conversion. Why is that turned off? I can't convert any cities, or castles... I miss this to be honest.

Turks are easy to exploit due to vanilla game bugs. It seems that they are constantly aware of possible aggression both from Antioch and Byzantium, and it's paralysing them. I've seen it over my own games a dozen times, it's something we can't fix. We can't mod the 'core AI', so that the AI knows better how to invade/defend exactly, we can't even fix such an annoying thing like AI leaving it's cities with just 1 troop, ready to get sacked/exterminated with ease. It's a complicated matter, but unfortunately there is just so much than can be done after all those years. Some stuff is coded by hard, we don't know how it works and can't mod it at all. Similar with battle AI. It's bound to happen you will see something idiotic/ridiculous, and bang your head against the wall with anger.

Free upkeep and castle/city conversions have been removed for aforementioned reasons - AI doesn't make good/any use of them, and they create room for exploit from the player. AI will never convert settlements and it will often park entire garrison out of the city few tiles away from it, effectively losing money instead of preserving it. Compare that situation to a player which just parks 20-militia armies in border cities, and then issues a blitzkrieg campaign next turn to take 2-3 settlements, since he has the money to pay for few turns for an army, which he wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. It was matter of choice. People very often judge the AI performance by exploiting every possible core flaw in the game features, and then claim what-not about the AI, even if it wasn't taught in the first place to make use of said features. That's a bit like laying off a programmer, because he can't fly a Jumbo Jet.

[Lubo]

haha, you made me laugh. Thanks for such an exhausting answer. Yes.. Turks are so simple to defeat. I won already 28 battles, lost zero.. but Byzantium is growing too. I will wait to see what the future brings. Once Turks are no more.. and I'm rich, for sure Byzantium will come.

I just wanted to make sure XAI is working fully. Again thanks for this, tell me what do you think about orriginal AI in KGCM, in 4.2. I played for awhile, and I was impressed.. quite good. Did they modulated the core files as well?