SP dominion kills on turn 1

[Snacktime]

Lately when I start SP games, I find multiple AI nations eliminated on turn 1 by dominion kill. I don't understand why that's happening. I mean how is it even possible to lose all dominion on turn 1? These are large enough maps that they should be a few provinces away from any other capital.

Any ideas? It's annoying.

[krpeters]

I've played lots of SP games and never had this happen. What settings are you using? How many provinces per player, what difficulty?

[BewareTheBarnacleGoose]

I've had AIs die on turn 1 when I play on a map with fixed starts but accidentally chose too many AIs. Could that be what happened?

[Admiral_Aorta]

The AI is really dumb and sometimes takes really low dominion on their pretenders. This combined with dominion reducing events and other nations close by can result in a domkill.

[Knai]

I'd also add that the AI is really incompetent with some nations. For instance, Mictlan doesn't get automatic temple checks, and as such tend to die horribly (despite being a domkilling powerhouse nation).

[llamabeast]

Yeah, I'm not surprised if it was Mictlan. Mictlan has a special property whereby their dominion is not spread by temples etc.. This is easy to overcome by blood sacrifice, but the AI won't do that.

[Kelan]

Originally Posted by BewareTheBarnacleGoose

I've had AIs die on turn 1 when I play on a map with fixed starts but accidentally chose too many AIs. Could that be what happened?

Yeah, it is more than likely this, imho. I had this problem recently testing a map for MP and had this happen systematically every time (Especially since you say that multiple AIs are killing off). Test it a few times with the same map and same number of players and if this is the problem it will happen every time.

[Gandalf Parker]

If you turn on debug it will often tell you what is happening. (also helpful when testing a map for MP)

Im guessing this is vanilla (no mods involved)? There are maps, mods, 3rd party programs to improve AI and soloplay.

[Snacktime]

I'm using CBM 1.92. This happened to me on a couple maps, but yes I believe they are maps I downloaded with fixed starts, so it may be that i added more AI than fixed starts. Still, pretty asinine and I'm still surprised how much I'm seeing it happen. It seems like even if the AI picked stupidly low dominion, he'd still only be dom killed on turn one if you have a very close high-dom neighbor or some unlucky event. In one start like 5 nations died from dom-kill on turn one! I feel like something else must be going on here.

As far as ways to make the AI play less dumbly, I am all ears. Better Independents helps but of course doesn't make their pretender design any less dumb or avoid these turn one dominion kills.

I tried starting with all nations human so I could design their pretenders, but then when I converted to AI control I couldn't figure out how to increase the AI default difficulty, so overall I didn't see how this would help in the long run. Is there a way to set difficulty when you are converting from human to AI?

[Gandalf Parker]

If you turn on debug you can see how much trouble the game goes thru trying to place many nations on small maps. The variables are extensive.

The SemiRand program is one of the things designed to fix the bad gods problem. The pretender, scales, dominion level, etc are better. (or at least as good as a human player altho it could still use some help from players in choosing better for AI)

The AI difficulty level is mostly just how many points it has to create the pretender and choose scales. You can turn off cheat-check but that still doenst give you extra build points. But you can text a file that builds better pretenders and scales with more points than you would be allowed to use, then attach them to a map.

Here is one of the threads discussing other AI improvements.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44783