Brainstorming Ai expansion

[Shaggy1973]

This may sound a little strange but for the roman mini-mod I want to slow down the Ai expansion to add more of an historical feeling to the game (plus I like to fight and conquer the AI factions, not have half the factions disappear before I get to them - leaving super huge factions with countless armies). I have had a couple of thoughts...

RTR used the auxilia system where each faction got its own auxilia tech tree which it progressed up. One criticism of this is it promotes lower unit armies (as this is mainly what the ai has access to in this system).

I think that each building tree has seven slots (anyone confirm?) so with three full building slots we could have a unique building for each ai faction. Now if we make it so that all the ai's units and buildings require this building to be able to construct, we could set the build time to say 10 or 15 turns and the ai would expand more slowly against each other. It gives the AI more time to counter attack the enemy incursion, preventing the invader from instantly training units in newly acquired territory.

Possible problem with this is the AI will not expand as fast against the player, but as the AI rarely manages this anyway would it be too big a problem?

Other possible avenue would be to give make temples almost faction specific (have two factions at opposite ends of the map share one temple would do it) and have this temple give bonuses to the owning faction, but any invading faction cant get these bonuses, but instead gets penalties. This makes the city more difficult to hold onto.

Anybody get any ideas or comments? I prefer the first thought, an AI colonization building which controls the building/recruiting possibilities.

That said, a really well balanced map can also give this kind of results, but it is very difficult to do.

[DARTH VADER]

This is an idea I had to implement in my past DarthMod_6.0 for 1.2. I dropped it bcs I could not built these "culture" specific buildings without CTDs.
But if you can accomplish it it would be a very good idea which I support.
These buildings should be linked as you say (maybe this was my fault for ctds the 7 building hint) and name it "culture" buildings (roman,greek,barbarian,eastern)
and would make it easy by then.

As for temples it would be nice too.

But as you say ...we do not want to fight low quality AI armies. If this concludes to crap AI rivals it would be very nice as a system but no fan to play.
I did not want to risk that and so left Darthmod with a balance to create powerful AI armies.
But I think there is a solution to everything so if you can manage this you say ...I could balance this out.

[Shaggy1973]

Yes I definately think the way to go is to either let the AI recruit all their units, or none at all. That way when they first conqeur a province their army remains at the end of a long supply chain. After 10 turns they get access to all the troops buildable in a city of that size as usual.

Ive never set up unique units before, but pretty sure I can set up building trees and recruitment to require this one building for each. Then we have agressive AI, but also Ai that sticks closer to their starting locations for longer.

[Veresov]

Yes I definately think the way to go is to either let the AI recruit all their units, or none at all. That way when they first conqeur a province their army remains at the end of a long supply chain. After 10 turns they get access to all the troops buildable in a city of that size as usual.

Ive never set up unique units before, but pretty sure I can set up building trees and recruitment to require this one building for each. Then we have agressive AI, but also Ai that sticks closer to their starting locations for longer.

Shaggy,

You may want to try making the AI units accessable through the governor buildings instead of the normal infantry, cavalry, and missile barracks. I find the AI makes better choices and the army composition is more challenging.

To do this you need to assign a human player a specific faction like the WRE. The rest of the factions are AI then.

[The Border Reiver]

@Shaggy...I like the ideas above, especially the idea of a colonization building and then perhaps a roman citizenship building....but if we add these you need to make it more worthwhile then just tacking on a 20% happiness bonus.....maybe triarii can be recruited from here.

Also I really would like to see the temple system kept the same, this was one of the downsides of RTR ...which I played every single version of! They dropped all bouses apart from happiness and made it uneventful to build a specific temple. One idea perhaps is that romans should be able to make all roman temples available to all factions.

@ et al. One very important thing that makes Darth Mod successful and I'm not sure if this was planned or not is maintaining base farm levels of Vanilla levels in the descr_regions.txt. This is another area where RTR bombed out, they simply made every faction base farm level 1 or 2, and that literally meant small field armies, very imited growth. (I'm not bagging RTR, just pointing out shortcomings....as I spent many sleepless nights)

Previously I had always used the theory that only good agricultural lands should have a high base farm level (as in real life). I gave all desert factions 0 and found that they never developed until quite late if ever.

But this is a game and in this game the AI is programmed to use the base farm level rate at (1 = .5% & 2 = 1% etc). Also, If you stick a grain resource on any region it also increase population growth further. By keeping these relatively high levels huge strong armies are currently being produced.

In conlusion, I only play at VH/VH and therefore don't know how the easier options play out. Furthermore, my point here was to show that the current resource availablity and base farm level are some (of many) key points that needs to be taken into account when talking about army size.

PS. good balanced diet = strong large armies :original: