Why does the AI choose Death Scales all the time?

[jscott]

Is it just me or does the AI choose to weight its scales towards Death with nations and pretenders when it doesnt' make any sense?

I am just about to finish off an Arcocephale AI nation whose scales are heavily weighted towards death. Obviously the tactic of death scales is annoying to deal with because of low supplies and the generally decimated state of provinces when you occupy them.

But does this dominion setting really help the AI? Arco uses huge armies of weak units and I could watch them die off due to supply issues all the time. In particular I remember one huge stack of Arco infantry of 300+ units that kept shifting around his territory. When I finally faced it, it had only about 100 men.

My question is does the AI choose death too often and is there any reason that they do it?

[Halancar]

The AI chooses its scale at random, so it should be abouth half the time (well, 3/7th), not all the time. But it is clearly not based on any strategy on its part...

[Sombre]

When playing SP with the AI, since the AI pays no attention to starvation or supply issues, it's best to set supplies to 300%

[jscott]

I will do that from now on.

[NTJedi]

Typically I will use mapedit commands to also provide AI opponents with a 3 growth scale as well since it suffers several ways with a death scale.
1) Gold income for the AI will steadily decrease
2) Supplies for its lands will also shrink hurting the AI more than humans
3) These points spent on pretender magic paths are almost always a bad investment since the AI's don't organize armies using the blessing bonuses.

I also recommend setting supplies to 300% for helping the AI

[jscott]

How do you use mapedit to change the AI's growth scales?

[Edi]

By forcing the AI to have a specific type of god, then you can set the scales.

[Endoperez]

#scale_chaos <nation nbr> <(-3)-3>
Forces the dominion scale of a nation to a value between
-3 and 3. Other scales that can be altered are lazy, cold,
death, unluck, unmagic. 3 means that the scale is fully
tipped to the right and -3 means it is fully tipped to the
left.

To give Marverni (nation 3) Growth 3, insert

#scale_death 3 -3 to the xyz.map file of the map you want to use. The modding pdf has more recent list of nations, if you can't find the one you are playing against from the map-editing pdf.

[NTJedi]

Edi said:
By forcing the AI to have a specific type of god, then you can set the scales.

Actually the #god command is separate from the scale commands. The AI god will still be random when using the scale commands.

On a side note the #god command only works at the capital.

[Edi]

Thanks for correcting me. I hadn't paid enough attention, so I didn't know that.