Reworking the AI bonus system

[Zarax]

The issue here is simple.
The AI will never hope to match human strategic planning so it needs to cheat in order to get a chance.

The question is: how do we do it so it's challenging but not frustrating?

Imho the actual system while challenging does not give a chance for the player to just play slow if he wants, making the game a blitztrieg before AI starts recruiting overwhelming number of troops.
Especially as Pontus or Armenia the player will need to be Hannibal reincarnated to survive, and even then the risk of ending up like him is substantial.
For those with less historical knowledge, he won every battle until Zama but all his tactical skill was nullified by the fact that Rome would just raise more armies after each defeat. Not exactly a desiderable outcome...

What I propose is:

1) drastically cut down the discounts and tax bonuses for AI to half for normal bonuses and completely for reduced

2) remove all pop growth bonuses except for the very first town level

3) replace the colony cash bonus with a small happiness one

This first step will make cash tighter for both player and AI.

Now, how to give AI an edge?

The answer is again right in XGM.

Take a look at this line from the carthaginian monument:

recruit "libyan heavy infantry" requires factions { carthage, }

What it does is allowing AI to recruit libyan heavies everywhere as long as the monument is owned by the faction.

With this, the number of useless levies fielded by the AI is drastically reduced while you're assured to face decent numbers of heavy troops.

Doing this for all factions will ensure the player to face challenging armies while keeping their numbers reasonable.

All we have to do is to elect one or two units per faction that will be allowed to have privileged AI recruitment and test how it works.

AI vs AI balancing:

Some might be worried that without bonuses the smaller factions will crumble quickly against bigger ones.
Let me assure you that it's quite the opposite. Without a blitztrieg player I've had games in which the first faction was wiped out around 230BC instead of the first 20 turns like now.

If loosing faction patterns will develop those can be easily countered by giving them some bonuses but not on global scale like before.
After all, any global AI bonus will only give an accelerated snowball effect, meaning that the bigger they are, more substantial the bonus is, cancelling in fact any hopes of balancing.

What is advisable here is to just give the monument some local bonuses in order to make smaller factions relatively wealthier and at the same time have the effects get proportionally smaller as the faction grows.
By strenghtening the anti-snowball system already in place we could actually make expansion less and less profitable like it should be.

So, just to sum it up:

1) toning down the global tax bonuses and contruction discounts

2) giving more sensible growth bonuses

3) allowing privileged AI recruitment

4) giving localized bonuses where needed and strengthening the anti-snowball system

will bring us a campaign that will be challenging but not frustrating, giving fewer but better AI stacks while giving more weight to player development decisions and slowing down the benefits of expansion as the game progresses plus the added benefit of having a less blatant feel of AI cheating.

What do you think?
Any ideas or alternate proposals?

I will also post this for main XGM so please keep XC ideas here and XGM ones in the proper place.

[Suppanut]

I like your idea about AI previlage recruit everywhere. This thing also help me figure out about how to use it on PMP's player eastern factions too.

I also thing about the new system of AI bonus dependent
1) Historic capital, where that monument will place, mainly on economic which maybe factionwide. Large faction should have more than one and some faction should have more bonus once they expand to their historic capitals. Faction that very decentralized will not have one. such as.
- romans, Rome
- gcs, none(they will depend on core regions)
- macedon, Pella
- seleucid, Seleucia and Antioch
- bactria, Bactra and Taxila
- egypt, Alexandria
- parthia, Nisa, Asaak, Hecatompylos, Ecbatana, and Ctesiphon(they should get fewer bonus from capital)
- pontus, Amasia
- armenia, the current capital
- saba, Mariaba
- cathage, Carthage
- gauls, Cenabum(if have one)
- germans, none(they will depend on core regions)
- spain, none(they will depend on core regions)
- scythia, none(they will depend on core regions)
- thrace, seutopolis and Sarmizegetusa


This capital emphasis on faction wide bonus and this must work along with reduction of AI bonus you propose.

2) Core regions, new hintherland building to indicated core regions where factions pool much of their manpower(effect is local) and tax, trade(effect is local but really high) such as.
- romans, whole italian paninsular
- gcs, several key city like Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, pergamum, Syracuse, Massalia, Cyrene
- macedon, northern greece
- seleucid, no core regions as they build empire on foreign land and already have 2 capital
- bactria, Bactria, India, and Transoxiana
- egypt, Nile valley
- parthia, Persia
- pontus, Anatolia
- armenia, Caucasus region
- saba, Arabia felix
- cathage, North Africa
- gauls, Gauls
- germans, Germania
- spain, Iberian Paninsular
- scythia, Steppe
- thrace, Greater Thrace and and Dacia

With these 2 concept will made some centralized faction would hurt much from blitz like seleucid and macedon while non-centralized faction like germans will need to conquer all Germania to kill them off economically.

What do you think about it?

[Zarax]

Suppanut, the new system is supposed to reduce global AI bonuses, not increase them. The whole project is about cutting the number of stacks and make bonus important only for small factions to keep them alive a little longer.
We could have multiple monuments but only if each gave a different bonus.

[Suppanut]

Yes, I suggest to both hugely reduce and some even splited them(mainly trade and happiness), some of them even made it localized to some regions which count as core of the faction(tax and other recuit bonus).

My suggestion also for prevent blitzing against some factions that not the empires at all, such as Germans, Scythia.

There should also have negative bonus for local player who lost capital too(if faction has one).

[CaesarVincens]

I don't like negative bonuses for players for two reasons: one they way it would have to be coded, the player would think that there is always a negative bonus, and two, the player almost never loses his capitol anyway, unless he intends to, which this prevents.

I do like decentralizing bonuses to some degree.

[CaesarVincens]

I had something of an insight, the biggest problem with high bonuses is that they are applied across the entire faction. What if instead, some factions got one large tax boost, say 40 to 50% at their monument city, and others got somewhere from 5 to 10% everywhere?

[Zarax]

It would be unbalancing in the long run as you would give a snowball effect to some factions but not to others.
The monument effect imho needs to be mostly local (with very small global bonuses) in order to be adjusted to properly help smaller factions while bigger ones can have something proportionally smaller.

[Suppanut]

That why I suggest to move some bonus like recruit bonus and tax bonus to core region via "core region monument" that spread and assign to most of regions in map and kept bonus of capital's monument to small but have impact enough for blitzing to be effective.

idea on core region will be areas that faction will get tax boost and recruit bonus and not getting them from globaly or other place else such as.
Egypt is core region for egypt
Italy for Roman
northern hellas for Macedon
etc...

So their bonus will be limit area and mostly not global anymore.

[aznflea]

i think the bonuses you should give them be minimal. what redfox did was quite effective. giving each recruit 2 exp made the campaign more challlenging and the ai factions less blitzy. i like the idea of giving only a set number of settlements for a faction bonuses though,

[Zarax]

I'm not too keen on the experience level boost, it's effectively just the same as playing on a higher difficulty level.
Further balance will most likely be done in XC4, to what extent I cannot say yet as there is a number of ongoing changes overall.