Single player with #allies

[Maerlande]

Hi folks,

I've been trying different things to improve my single player game. I use RanDom to at least semi-random the starting gods and choose the races. Recently I've been trying out the #allies command. I've been editing the semi-random maps and adding the #allies command just before the listing of gods and starts. However, it's not giving a great result. I've had one case where I tried putting six AI's all allied against me hoping for a tougher game, but I saw that Ctis and Pan started fighting. I'm wondering if they can fight each other if there is a fight over a neutral starting a war.

It almost seems I get the most challenging game when I choose 2 tough races and some weak ones and hopefully one of the tough gets strong enough to be a challenge.

Any suggestions on making a tougher single player game?

Regards,
Maerlande

[rdonj]

Use map commands to give the AIs pre-defined empires? You can start them with extra provinces, forts, temples, labs, magic sites, even armies. You should be able to make a quite strong AI opponent with a little work.

[pyg]

Originally Posted by Maerlande

I've had one case where I tried putting six AI's all allied against me hoping for a tougher game, but I saw that Ctis and Pan started fighting. I'm wondering if they can fight each other if there is a fight over a neutral starting a war.

Huh, sounds like something is not right. I've never had allied AIs fight each other (or I've never observed it anyway). Are you sure you did it right and put the right nations into the game (a 6 AI team has 15? #allies commands) I know it's simple, but double check. 6 on 1 sounds super tough to me. What rdonj says works too but is a bit more work.

[Maerlande]

Thanks guys,

I misunderstood a few things using #allies.

Here's what I added literally.

#allies 10 1 17 20 24 23

Of course, I did not realize that command isn't the correct syntax. So basically I would need to do the following if I understand pyg correctly.

#allies 10 1
#allies 10 17
#allies 10 20
and so on.

Rdonj,

This is my first experiment with map commands and obviously I got it wrong. But, semi-random does do a pretty good job creating the custom gods with gear and starting armies. It doesn't give extra provinces. The only disappointment with editing the map directly is you lose some of the surprise. But still, it's manageable.

Cheers

[Gandalf Parker]

Im glad you ironed that out.
What I was going to mention, in case you see it later, is that the ally command keeps AIs from ATTACKING AIs. However you still might see some combats. Such as, when both AIs think they are attacking independents but one takes it first and the other army walks in on them.

Glad to see you are enjoying SemiRand. I think its a fantastic program.

[pyg]

Originally Posted by Maerlande

#allies 10 1
#allies 10 17
#allies 10 20

adding

#allies 1 17
#allies 17 20
#allies 1 20

... gets you [EA] Ermor, C'tis, Niefelheim, and Hinnom all on a team. Good luck, you are about to get creamed.

[Maerlande]

Heh. Yeah, pyg. I'll probably just make them teams of 2. Since I wasn't doing it right at all before.

I agree Gandalf. I've been making great use of RanDom and SemiRandom. However, I find I prefer to semi randomize great maps (like parganos) rather than the randoms. I just can't seem to get satisfying random maps. Now I need to make my own god files. I've just started learning the map commands.

[rdonj]

Ah. I've never tried using the #allies command, so I didn't really have a response for that. So I made a suggestion for another way to make the AI harder. In any case, you know what to do once you've beaten 6 allied AIs now

[Gandalf Parker]

Have you seen my maps?
http://www.dom3minions.com/maps.htm

Here is some of the code from one of my map generator scripts.

SZ=400
GCOL1=" 50 100 50 250 "
SCOL1=" 20 50 80 220 "
BCOL1="  111 194 21 50 "
SBCOL1=" 36 119 202 29 "
OTHR=' --mountpart 50 --farmpart 20 --mapnoise 110 '


for x in `seq 1 9`
do
  uptime >>$LOG
  dom3 -T --makemap $MAPNAME_0$x --mapsize 2400 3200 --mapprov $SZ \
    --mapaa $OTHR \
    --mapgcol  $GCOL1   \
    --mapscol  $SCOL1   \
    --mapbcol  36 119 202 29 \
    --mapsbcol 111 194 21 104

It sets colors (I really prefer my maps green)
and it sets the moutains much higher to create lots of strategic chokepoints. I tend to run them in large batches on my server then look for ones that I feel are particularly worthwhile. Such as...
http://www.dom3minions.com/RandomMaps/Keepers/

[Maerlande]

Gandalf,

I've used your settings in Random quite a bit and I've jumped onto a couple of your AI chaos games although I didn't go far. I play with the fiddle provinces set very high for a surprise every game so it's similar but not as severe as your chaos games. Those are vicious

I'll have a look at your keepers. Might be pretty cool.