AI Buildings and Armies

[♔atthias♔]

snip

Actually I did take a look at it and the value of recolonizing is already very high for the AI, especially on very hard and legendary. There's no point of increasing it if it works at all. I noticed than in vanilla during the first few turns the Skull Takers usually destroy Pfeildorf and the Red Horns destroy Norden. Only 1 or 2 turns later you will see Averland colonizing Pfeildorf and Nordland colonizing Norden. When Kislev is at war with Varg and loses Zoishenk or Fort Stragov or Erengrad you will see an army of Nordland or Ostland immediately comes and claims those ruins without waiting. Same with Kazhrak destroying Carcassone/Parravon and then Estalia comes a few turns later to recolonize everything. The key factor is that the AI has to be in a peace state of mind. CA designed 5 states for the AI: peace, tension, war, total war and last stand. At peace the AI recolonizes like crazy but it seems to be disabled when it is in one of the other states. I absolutely don't know how to change it if it is possible at all. Besides I will stay away from changing the CAI behavior on the campaign map because there are tons of values, half of them nobody knows what they do or even if they work at all (most of them were here with Shogun 2 then Rome 2 then Attila, a whole bunch of them are certainly obsolete). To change the AI's behavior, if it is possible, you will need to tweak those values one by one then see if it does something in game, then change them again, repeat etc. This would take weeks if not months of work!

ask junadi83 de bodemloze on how to do this
he probably knows how to do this

[Arayel]

Ok managed to get myself through another 30 or so turns this morning and had one of my gobbos do some proper exploring at the same time.

For those following my campaign story it went sort of as follows.

Tidied up in the south, made a non-aggression pact with the Top Knotz and promptly went to war with Karaz-a-Karak by having Grimgor (who was actually on his way to find Gitsnik) murder Thorgrim Grudgebearer. With 4 full stacks by this point and their main army annihilated I put two of their provinces under siege and went about my usual business. The ambushed me with an army I didn't know they had, it was only 6 units but all were tier 3, coupled with a garrison and I took a heavy loss, but I did kill a lot of stuties too and was able to re-engage the seige with an advantage still. They sallied forth from karaz-a-Karak with one hell of a garrison army but Grimgor was too much for them (his army is pretty battle hardened by now even if it's not the highest level.)

With most of the fighting here done and Barak Varr under seige from the Top Knotz I took the opportunity to build a sneaky Goblin army full of Night Goblins and took the rest of Barak Varr's territory pretty uncontested. When Barak Varr itself rebelled againt the Top Knotz that became mine too, basically meaning by around turn 70 I owned everything from the silver road south. Everything I could see to the West was Top Knotz white Apart from Akendorf that had been a complete cluster for many turns. Even the now wandering Azhag turned up to get involved with the Top Knotz, Princes and Vampires. I pity any poor soul who actually lived there!



This was the first settlement I saw of theirs that wouldn't be without RO. It's small and I'm guessing on the receiving end of pretty consistant fighting, but it's a sensible build.



Around the rest of the world the Skull-Takerz finally got killed by someone, probably the Vampires who even tried pushing into the Border Princes until they met the Top Knotz and changed their mind. Brettonnia is a mess, Mousillons ghouls are keeping everyone from settling down and Reikland is pushing in too. Malagor was even over in Couronne just hanging out looking a bit the worse for wear. In addition I finally found a province, a Karak owned by one of the Bret factions, that showed some decent signs that your mod works fine with RO.




In the Empire most of the factions are still around apart from Wissenland and Stirland (now Dwarf and Vampire respectively). Zhufbar is also owned by the Von Carsteins as is Templehof and the rest of Sylvania. It's not pretty, they have around 8 stacks of varying sizes that I've seen.

Kislev is the other powerhouse at this point owning, well Kislev, plus most of the Northern Worlds Edge mountains. So of course once I settled down, with Grimgors next quest up there also I decided to go to war with them, after all Chaos just reared it's head also and Grimgor needs a proper fight. Fortunately It also provided more evidence that RO has no significant implication on the mod as Kislev had build just fine in their new mountain strongholds.



Which of course they are going to need every man from if they are to survive this......




So as I round turn 80 most armies, my own included are still mostly tier 1 and 2 troops with an occaisional tier 3 in there. I'm yet to field any black orcs but night goblins are pretty consistant now. The Savage orcs have yet to start using Big Uns either. The Human Armies are largely still tier 1/2 Swords, Spears, X-Bows and basic horse. There's the odd mortar here or there but not much else. Vampire are actually one of the more progressive I've seen with Grave Guard, Black Knights, Vargheists all showing their faces. And everyone likes their combat heroes.

The Beastmen hordes still seem to be suffering from an inability to camp and recruit. Malagor ran around for about 20 turns with the same 15 units before he finally decided to engage and got smashed by the Savage orcs. Azhag is the only army I've seen with anything like a tier 5 but the auto-resolve had him beaten by a Vampire Stack, I'm not sure what said Vampire stack looked like but I'm pretty sure it didn't factor in the higher level units very well.

So I think the issue I'm having is because of my own changes to morale. I hated the constant rally until death mechanic so I altered it to be more like the TT where shattering happens at 15% on the first break, and 20% on the second and automatically on the third. This means even in a solid defeat most units survive the post battle situation and the ai never needs to recruit new ones. I may go looking for the setting that decides when too few soldiers have survived and up it slightly to force more units to disband after a fight.

In terms of building despite my Empire and 10k a turn income I was by no means particularly ahead. There are plenty of other tier 3 and tier 4 settlements about, which considering the sheer volume of war going on in this game is a miracle unto itself. I finally hit a tier 5 with black rock around turn 75 I think.

It will be interesting to see if the Chaos invasion proves to be a big step forwards as armies are actually wiped out and the new ones built come out much stronger. This is kinda what I'm expecting to happen now, so when I play through the next set of turns I'll be watching closely to see who goes up against them and with what. I'm kinda looking forward to what happens when Chaos meets Vampire...should be a pretty big crash!

I think one of the big issues with the mod, which is nothing to do with the mod, is the famously bad auto-resolve between ai armies. I've seen quite a lot of my battles where the auto-resolve power bar is nothing like the power bar when I load up the battle. I don't know how complicated the weighting system is for judging auto-resolve but it it's definitely something that needs looking at in the future, I would hope by CA but also by myself, especially after I do my next set of adjustments which is going to include a tone down of hero-hammer for sure.

Finally one thing that has happened with this mod that I love, there are far less reinforcement battles. In previous play throughs I've hated the fact that almost every fight was multiple stacks and I had to put up with the annoying as hell reinforcement situation. For some reason the AI is now much more willing to attack with individual stacks and actually stick around for 50/50 battles, or even battles slightly against them. In fact the only time I had them send reinforcements was when they were trying to break my seiges. I saw the same thing with the Top Knotz, laying seige with single stacks and the Vampires heading to Akendorf with a single stack despite having 2 or 3 more just the other side of blackfire pass. This has definitely made things better for me as I hate the reinforcement system in TWW.

So all is good so far!!!

[Horace35]

I only played a few turns into my Dwarf campaign on very hard. I basically just rushed at Black Crag after nobbling Gnashrak. Unfortunately he returned a few turns later




Grimgor was running around with this (and a Waaaagh)



I am mainly going to be playing versus campaigns so I think dropping down to hard may be required, especially since fighting humans every battle is way harder

[Celtik]

Hey guys, now that the new game update and DLC are out my mod is not compatible with them obviously. But I will work on it quickly to make it compatible and even better. It will take a bit of time because the DLC adds new units and I need to balance the mod to be sure the AI recruits them and do it well so I'll need to run lots of tests. But it won't take weeks don't worry, I'll try to update it for the week end so you guys will be able to play the updated game and the new DLC with this mod on. Stay tuned.

[Horace35]

Looking forward to it, now back to work!

[Črt]

same as above thank you for your work, cannot play without ,)

[Celtik]

Hey guys,

I'm still working on updating the mod to make it fully compatible with the latest patch and DLC. I haven't had a lot of time this week end to work on it but I should be able to release the new version later this week.

The build order and spending logic is improved from the previous version for all factions. Here are some screenshots of random AI armies post patch. Work is done for Dwarfs, VC and Greenskins (and Bretonnia, Norsca and Chaos but those were already fine in the latest version). I'm working on the Empire now.

Dwarfs

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Vampire Counts

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Greenskins

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Horace35]

Awesome, just in time for me to finish my current campaign.

I will start a play-through and report back on what I see

[joedreck]

Great job.

Please just be carefuly not to change normal units against elite. The mix is that important. For example empire screenshot: 3 steam tanks are to much. Better 2 anti big more. Or vampire armies. 2 blood knights and the other riders are to much. Also Agent and two Terrorgheist. Just 1 elite such this should be in. So just one agent, one blood knight and one Terrorgheist. Rest normal mixed units.
This are my thoughts.

[Celtik]

Hey mate thanks for the support. Regarding elite units yeah their number should be limited but the AI will recruit more than one if it can. A regular player will often have 4-5 terrorgheists, giants or demigryph you know. The AI won't have so many of them anyway, a couple of each to keep things balanced. I can't do anything about heroes though. I highly recommend an agent limiter mod, I've made one for myself that put a max limit of 2 heroes per each type, it makes things much better. I'll release it separately when the main mod is ready.

Some more screenshots:

Random Norsca, Dwarfs and Greenskins armies

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some early and late game Empire armies

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Bonus: The Fantastic Four

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

If my late game tests are fine tomorrow I'll release the new version of the mod right away. Stay tuned!

[Fallen851]

Very much looking forward to starting my new campaign with this mod since I finished my first campaign.

[Påsan]

I'm thinking that the chaos armies could be a bit more thematic, like the everwatcher with almost all corruped monsters like trolls, spawns and the like, Kolek with a lot of dragon ogres and Archeon with mostly knights and chosen.

[Horace35]

Awesome looks great!

Do this edit the startpos at all? I have made a mod to put Victory conditions back into multiplayer games and am not sure how compatibility works

[Aelfric]

When is the new update coming, wanna try a new campaign with your mod.

[MrSiradil]

And where is download link? I can see only hotfix link.

[Celtik]

I'm thinking that the chaos armies could be a bit more thematic, like the everwatcher with almost all corruped monsters like trolls, spawns and the like, Kolek with a lot of dragon ogres and Archeon with mostly knights and chosen.

Yeah that would be pretty cool but unfortunately this is not possible. You can choose which unit will be used and how many of each and even add a bit of randomness like I did to generate armies different from one another. But the armies are all spawned using the same script and then the lords are randomly assigned to an existing army.

Awesome looks great!

Do this edit the startpos at all? I have made a mod to put Victory conditions back into multiplayer games and am not sure how compatibility works

I didn't make any modification to the startpos file so you should be fine

When is the new update coming, wanna try a new campaign with your mod.

And where is download link? I can see only hotfix link.

New version of the mod is pretty much ready now but first I need to check for a possible bug. See that screenshot of Archaon above? He spawned at level 1 when he should be level 20+ like the others. I need to see if this is a bug from my mod or from CA's update.

[Črt]

Wiiii can't wait i hope it's done today and since it's friday time to pull "all nighter" tho my lady is going to beat me up in the morning

[Aelfric]

Can you release today? I really want to try a campaign today and i don't have much time tomorrow.

[joedreck]

I'm thinking that the chaos armies could be a bit more thematic, like the everwatcher with almost all corruped monsters like trolls, spawns and the like, Kolek with a lot of dragon ogres and Archeon with mostly knights and chosen.

Would be great if this would be possible. Im not sure it's possible to connect characters with recruitment.
I play as chaos and do build my armies like this.

[Deftones21]

Damn this mod look sick, had to try something new and this is it. May the update be released quick!