AI self destructs

[jaif]

In my game one of my neighbors was banderlog, but it appears that their empire was destroyed by independants. My spy in their capital shows me an independant force besieging their capital. Meanwhile, their dominion was horrible - misfortune, death, turmoil, drain, and the other one all at 2 or 3.

Is this some fancy strategy thing? Can someone explain what's happening? With them out of the way it was easy for me to expand, which makes this game trivial to win.

-Jeff

[Zylithan]

I guess they had bad luck and got an event like barbarian invasion.

As far as bad scales, you can use bad scales to get more pretender points... either to get other scales good, or to raise your pretender dominion or magic (for a bless perhaps).

[NTJedi]

jaif said:
In my game one of my neighbors was banderlog, but it appears that their empire was destroyed by independants. My spy in their capital shows me an independant force besieging their capital. Meanwhile, their dominion was horrible - misfortune, death, turmoil, drain, and the other one all at 2 or 3.

Is this some fancy strategy thing? Can someone explain what's happening? With them out of the way it was easy for me to expand, which makes this game trivial to win.

-Jeff

When playing against AI opponents you should setup the game map so all players start with 3 to 5 provinces... this will provide a surviving chance for even when the AI picks bad scales.
For more intense games against the AI I recommend reading the mapedit PDF guide which will allow you to provide the AI with better starting scales and allow you to ally AI opponents.

[OmikronWarrior]

Long story short, the SP AI leaves a lot to be desired. The only thing it knows how to do is buy troops and attack with them. Pretender "design" seems to be a random picking of whats available. Obviously, the AI is only going to be effective when it takes positive scales.

In the hands of an intelligent player, picking negative scales can allow you to utilize a great bless strategy or have a powerful SC pretender. In general this isn't conducive to long term strategy, but the idea is you start off with a much bigger chunk of land and maybe grab another capital early game. And some nations features that allow them to either ignore or benefit from the effects of negative scales.

[Edratman]

NT Jedi makes a good suggestion that I never heard before, start everyone off with 3 to 5 provinces. I think I'll try it next time.

I've tried making pretenders for the AI, and this was an improvement, but as a rule I think that the impossible setting is a much tougher opponent than a good pretender on normal difficulty which is what you get when you switch from human to computer control. I do flip flop on this when the AI self destructs in a few turns.

Probably the best way is to make a pretender god for each AI using map edit. You can ignore the normal scale points cheat the AI into great scales and magic. It is slow and tedious, but once done you can just copy and paste these pretenders into each subsequent map. I haven't tried it because I am too lazy but I do a lot of map editting and it it should work. I have cheated my own pretenders and I've found that you can use any unit in the game for a pretender.

In fact we could all make a couple of AI's in text format for map edit insertion, submit them and accumulate a bank of map edit AI's available for download.. We could make rules for how many points to cheat the AI, and other issues.
Also someone needs to define the format. I have 4 or 5 text editting programs that all work and all easier to use than notebook. They all make good map edits that work, but I do not have a clue if they are mutually compatable in a reference pretender bank like proposed.

Speak up.

[jaif]

Thanks for the thoughts all.

My major issue with the AI isn't that it took bad scales, but that it took all of them, and heavy.

In all honesty, to improve the AI the devs should just program in 3 or so AIs for each and pick one randomly at start. It will cut down on variety, but I think it will improve the SP game overall.

-Jeff

[Loren]

I just really had a run-in with this.

I was playing around with making the indie's tough. Low money, indie strength 9. Many years into the game there are still lots of indies around.

What do I find 4 provinces from home? I never got a read on his scales but the pretender was a E9D9 lich. He *NEVER* took an indie province, he did take a few of mine. The scales must have been terrible--he had 420 people in his capital when I took it. (Note: This was *NOT* LA Ermor or LA R'yleh.)

[Wikd Thots]

jaif said:
Thanks for the thoughts all.

My major issue with the AI isn't that it took bad scales, but that it took all of them, and heavy.

In all honesty, to improve the AI the devs should just program in 3 or so AIs for each and pick one randomly at start. It will cut down on variety, but I think it will improve the SP game overall.

-Jeff

There is a program available in the modding section that does that. I think it is called Semirandom or RandGen or something like that. One of the players here wrote it (BallBarian?)

[PyroStock]

From what I've seen Misfortune3 makes the AI self-destruct more than any other scale, including impossible level. Does the AI even immediately rebuild the lab/temple in it's own capital if it's unfortunately destroyed?

Death3 & Turmoil3 also hit the AI hard given it's huge dependency on gold/supplies as well as limited use of summons & bloodhunting. The AI doesn't use magic/gems well so Drain3 isn't as serious as the others & the magic resistance boost from Drain can actually help the AI later from a human player's clever magic use. Sloth3 also doesn't hurt the AI as much given it's (lack of) building priorities.

[DigitalSin]

Yeah, BallBarian wrote semirandom, but it comes with instructions so that you can also make your own pretenders for it to randomize in.