Enjoyed getting obliterated today in our typical 3v3ai when all 3 AI jumped on one of us.
I’ve noticed something interesting : the AI seems more aggressive on the unknown map compared to the other maps. Not sure if this is game or mod related, but just thought you should know.
The AI also seem to build those fortress walls around single artillery units as well.
Love to hear it!
Maybe it’s the civ comp you played against? They will all FF or rush depending on the civs. I need to play with the numbers since they almost always safe FF when I play 4v4’s.
It’s actually the inverse. The AI will place either artillery or towers at the corners of the forts to help defend them.
He notado que Hausa construye fuertes estrella con sus torres y todo menos los muros. En muchas ocasiones he visto que la IA coloca primero los pilares y luego el muro pero en este caso no uno ni lo otro. La otra es que no me encuentro con muros mejorados, siempre empalizadas. Supongo que es por algún propósito, en el pasado si usaban la mejora de “Bastión”
I’ve also noticed the pillars go down first, but I don’t know if there’s a simple way to get the AI to make full segments before going on to the next.
As for the Bastion tech, I did finally write the upgrade in and it’ll be included in the next update. There was a little bit of extra work to it since a couple civs have different versions of the techs. Hopefully just USA, Mexico, Hausa, and Ethiopia.
2024-05-21T07:00:00Z
THANK YOU!!
Until now, I was able to test your mod with the corresponding improvements, and once again, I’m particularly happy that they made me suffer like this.
Wonderful job, as always, and thank you again for asking for feedback and answer to it.
I’m glad it’s working again! There were a handful of issues so it’s good I was able to find it
I’m not sure if we discussed this before, but the inca AI seems to randomly bug out in empire wars (i rarely play vs ai supremacy so can’t comment there).
It stays forever in age 1 and takes TPs and sometimes builds houses. If you attack it sometimes it unbugs and advances to age 2 but it is still overall not optimal inca ai play. Basically it sometimes overwhelms with huge amounts of infantry, other times it just stays passive.
I mostly play the unknown map but i don’t think the map matters.
Weird, I did a test game and say the same thing for all Incan players. It’s especially weird since there’s only 1 change I can find for empire wars. I’ll investigate some more, but don’t get your hopes up because it isn’t an obvious issue.
Figured it out:
They try to train a chasqui but manage to exceed the build limit first, so if you kill all their chasqui you can allow it to train:
I’ll have it fixed the next time I upload. They just won’t train any until age 2.
Test game, everyone aged up on time:
Updated 2024-06-14T07:00:00Z
2024-06-16T07:00:00Z I’ll need some feedback on these two:
I’ve seen sometimes the AI will run around in circles, over-microing its units while they all slowly die. I wanted to try and address that by having them micro less when the armies get really big, so hopefully this is a positive change. It’ll only change when they have at least 50 units.
2024-06-22T07:00:00Z
2024-06-22T07:00:00Z
The AI is quite great now. I think this mod reached a pretty sweet point (we are playing strictly vs expert AI, can’t tell about other difficulties). In fact, the AI is now quite similar to a 1000 ELO player in some situations.
The only problem I can see is that they try to built the star fort walls in places they can’t really fill up, like the dense forests that sometimes spawn on the unknown map in the middle.
And on water maps they are unrelenting. It’s actually quite a challenge to take water away from them. They will even contest heavily entrenched coastal defenses <3
That’s great to hear!
I said a long time ago I wanted to beat @EntombedCurve02 on a water map and as far as I know I still haven’t reached that goal yet, so there’s still more work to do!
Just here to say I have been looking for better water AI since vanilla AOE3, this thread has been a fun read so far, you really seem to put a lot effort into it with regular updates, thanks for that. I am finally now downloading and trying the mod myself. Anything I should pay attention to that you need feedback on currently?
I hope you like it! Keep in mind the land attacks are an ongoing issue.
As for feedback, some of the best things are quick little ideas that are easy to implement.
For people like @Khalmos who play treaty, I have a couple questions for you:
2024-07-13T07:00:00Z Added some fixes designed to improve land attacks on water maps
You will be glad to know that, while I still haven’t lost in all the sense of the word, the AI has become so good at contesting water that I’ve been forced to resign 2 or 3 times already, because the game had got to a point where even rebuilding a navy was hard as my docks were constantly under attack. In fact, I’m sure that ironing the landing logic will make this ai terrifying on water, especially for people that are not used to play water maps. (I wrote this before seeing you published some updates today lol, I will try them). Not only that, but the AI has become so competent on water that it forces me to continuously build canoes, a thing I almost never did before. I’ve also noted that the AI is more eager to defend its allies’ docks with outposts and ships, so that is very good.
On land maps, the ai is very, very good, and those forward bases can really be a pain. I’ve noticed a few updates ago the AI no lo longer build walls in their bases, just the forward ones. I know this is by design for unintended behaviour, but it would be good for some turtle civs.
Some things I sill notice in water play:
For some reason I’ve seen sometimes ships stop moving/working, most of the time when it happens is fishing boats, but sometimes warships too, even with units inside. Even one time I saw an army that had successfully crossed the sea stay idle with an undefended base right beside them. In the specific case of ships, this is very detrimental, as when they have units inside they are effectively reducing the AI’s pop cap.:
I’ve also seen this weird behaviour that happens sometimes with transport ships, as if they have two conflicting orders, or one order overriding the other in a loop:
In fact, this behaviour, where the AI seems to try to complete conflicting orders, seems to be appearing to be a recurring issue, as in the case of this indecisive explorer trying to build a Trade Post on the island. This happens every time and explorer is trying to build a TP , native or from the trade route:
Or in this case, where an AI doesn’t seems to know where to park its ship so its units can go in, resulting in them chasing the ship all along the coast. I believe this also could happen because the ship gets the order to pick them up and then immediately receives another to explore or fight, and then again the one to pick them up, hence the loop:
I even thing this is the reason that sometimes the AI can’t transport artillery. Check how every time they want to go in, they then have a micro stutter, like they received other orders and then immediately cancelled them to go in the ship, as you can see here:
I don’t have a recording of the exact moment the ai manages to transport the artillery, but I have seen it happening, and in that case the artillery does not have that micro stutter, it stays still and even manages to get them in having the ships moving a little. All of this makes me think the issue with artillery is also a case of conflicting orders, maybe they are ordered to be transported and to defend the docks at the same time. The problem in this particular case is that the ship that tries to transport those bugged artillery pieces get stuck for the rest of the game. Here you can see an example of an Ai simultaneously sending artillery in a ship and having troubles putting other pieces in another boat:
Another thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes the AI’s units go to the shore to get picked up, cancel that order and return to base, and then get shot by canoes without defending. It even shows some falconets trying to fight and then trying to run away, without connecting one shot:
Or this examples of 2 Frigates transporting a sizeable army, with 8 falconets included, and lose them all to some cannons ashore because they started fighting units and cannons ashore instead of landing their units:
Judging by where were they moving when they engaged, it seems the ai wanted to land the units by the enemy base and not the closest piece of land on the island, which put them at a disadvantageous position, and after receiving the first attack, they forgot to land them. Could it be possible to add a condition so the ai land its army on the closest shore if it sees its on inminent danger? I belive if it had landed that army right there and then, it would have wiped out the enemy army. Ironically, there is a shipment for the USA that increases the attack of ships if they have militia garrisoned ###### ##### so this behaviour could be very beneficial to them if they learn to use the card.
One last thing I wanted to add is that I’ve seen some ai dealying the construction of their TC’s with wagons until they have a dock assigned to it. So, for example, if an ai gets to age 3 and gets a wagon, but it has already defended docks, it will wait for another dock to be buil in another location so it can then move the wagon and build the TC as defense. While is good that TC’s defend docks and waterways, specially if the ai gets the appropiate shipments, but I also think that delaying the building of a second TC also hurts them economically, so maybe the AI should take that decision faster and maybe even placing the TC before a planned dock, so it doesn’t waste time before it can start producing villagers.
Speaking of shipments for the USA, there seems to be a “bug” or something with the ai, even unmodded, in which it always chooses “Recruit Manilamen” as its second age ship card, even when it has a 600 resources cost. Evidently, this prohibits the AI to sent it early at age 2, disparaging its navall force compared with other civs. Instead, It should chose the free shipment “2 Sloops”, which is free and its the equivalent of any other civ waship card. Can this be fixed in any way?
Oh and also, very important: could there be anyway to add to the European water decks, at least on island maps, their Battleship shipments? Every euro civ has access to 2 of those cards except for Britain, and it would be terrifiying to find them on water maps. It could also be good if the Ai could train them in European maps if they are allied with a Royal House.
I have some more feedback regarding the AI building on different islands, is working good but can be ironed a bit. I will reserve that ##### I play some games of Ceylon, Archipelago and Mediterranean to better get a grasp of those mechanics, as these maps encourage migration the most. I hope this can be of use to and can’t wait to test the new version. I saw on the Age of Pirates discord that there was a beta AI, is it more advanced in development that the Assertive AI? I’d like to try it too if that is the case.
As always, Im up for any testing of a new mechanic or behaviour if needed. As I said, besides these things, the mod is working better than ever and have even managed to take control of the water away from me, as I was treating it as a mostly passive AI and it surely surprised me. I would have surely lost that game if the 4 enemy ais would have landed us with all their might.
That’s certainly a good start, though I still need to see that town center going down. I went AFK for a couple minutes in this game, but something like this:
For some context, there’s 4 different ways for units to transport:
The last two are my creations, and were made with the artillery loading delay in mind. That should explain why you see some artillery load and some others get stuck.
I think I’ve got a solution, hopefully it works!
I recently found a mistake causing this, it should already be in the most recent update.
It certainly is possible, I’ll try to keep it in mind as I work to improve the transports.
I watched this today, and what’s going on is the AI is failing to find a suitable position for the TC’s. I’ll have to take a look and see why that is.
I’ve been noticing a lot of civs missing their 2 caravel/sloop shipment, I think I’ll force that to be in all their decks. It’s one of those must-have cards, up there with factories or 3 vills as far as I’m concerned. I’m still decently happy with the AI’s ability to get some towers down or bring some artillery forward if it doesn’t get the caravels out.
Yes, I’ll definitely take a look!
Typically Age of Pirates lags behind Assertive AI just because that mod is quite a bit larger and we don’t want people having to redownload 500 mb all the time. Age of Pirates does remove the artillery loading delay, and comes with a decent amount of rules specific to that mod. It should be possible, however, to just run Assertive AI at a higher priority to get the more updated AI, at the cost of not getting those AoP specific rules.
My approach was always to control the water before trying to land troops, so it’s good to hear that the first part is working well! I’ve done a bit recently to try and address the landings (fixing some of my own bugs along the way) but I also want an AI that’s capable of cracking a heavily defended coast as well, hence the longer landing process.
2024-07-20T07:00:00Z Mod updated!
An example with AoP enabled, which fixes the artillery transport:
A bit late to the answer but I’ll leave my feeback as I try it once. I’ll give further details later.
1- We play 40min treaty. We play vast style of maps (not only treaty maps), sometimes with random ressources to speed up the start.
2- Does this AI ever successfully build a forward base, well one try but too forward and water was in the middle of his scheme so it wasn’t successfull.
3- They moved forward, may be not immediatly. We wasn’t sure at first the mod was really active as they didn’t wall their base as we though they would.
4- In general we put ourself in front of base or in the first good line with objective (trading post), but as we do 2v4 or 3v5 in we don’t put in the middle as we are generally overrunned if not support by a good foward base.
For the first game it was weird. AI Deck was… basic (too much short terms decks with army and crates), they was pretty fragile or slow to start at first minutes of the treaty but once they put their military building in front of their base (like 10 barracks or so), well their was challenging to fight.
The Italian IA was onto arty (wasn’t terrible and mass arty is not very fun to play against). The others (japanese Lakota Chinese) was hard to fight.
The Italian was very eager to put his forward base (with constant flow of settlers like 20-30 in several minutes) to make it and take me off-guard.
I hope this inside is useful, I’ll give you more info when we will test this AI out.
Would you consider this an improvement on the decks? It’s included on the latest update from yesterday:
Yes sounds better already ^^ Couldn’t test yesterday we launch a game without the mod by mistake because of the update haha.
Still improvable (mines huntables and ships card for age 2 and crates and units for age 4 are dispensable, and one infinite units card are enough.)
But it’s day and night with older decks. I’ll look after non-european civ to see about their deck as the logic could be different.
Awesome. Yeah I know it’s not perfect but aside from making sure fencing school and riding school are in there I think I’ll probably call it good for a while. There are a lot of weird quirks involved with this and it’s a huge PITA to track down every weird/necessary card for every civ, while also making sure you don’t break things.
Again, I’m going to congratulate you. We suffered, enoughly to have fun. Usually we play 2 human v 4 (Assertive!) AI, Extreme, 30min, each one with 10% economic advantage.
But today, to try the new update, we did not give them the advantage. And still, we faced hundreds of cannons.
Thank you again.
Hi
First off: Thank you very much for making this mod.
Things like the behaviour on sea maps or in king of the hill should really have been implemented by the developers long ago.
The fact that you could do it shows that it was never impossible. Though it may be hard to get all the details right and iron out bugs.
Since the mod seems to not only focus on ship behaviour anymore, I have some suggestions for additional AI adjustments:
After quite a bit of testing, it seems to me that the two weakest civs by far (when played by AI) are Malta and Mexico.
It’s hard to say how much of this can be changed. Because it comes from the AI simply not understanding / using certain game elements.
Malta simply gets rushed very easily and seems unable to defend itself.
This is mostly because it does not seem to prioritise unit production. I’m not sure but it seems to be even more the case with the mod than in the vanilla game (maybe because of the different possible strategies the AI selects from?).
It also produces mostly sentinels, which isn’t bad. But Malta builds an artillery foundry very early on. This means it could make more use of the fire throwers. Especially in the beginning against infantry rushes.
Speaking of fire throwers, there are numerous cards to upgrade them, but the Malta AI rarely does that. Sometimes it takes the “Rockets” card into the deck but waits for a long time to actually send it. Usually, it is already defeated at that point.
Malta also never builds any Depots. In combination with the fire throwers, those can be effective. And in the case of a rush, you could blow them up.
It could use the fixed gun to defend itself. This would also be great for harbour defence behind a dock for example.
However, the AI does not know how to use that either. The explorer never builds one, even though he could.
Sometimes Malta even sends the card “Fixed Gun Wagon”, which is a team card that sends a wagon to every allied player as well. No AI player knows what to do with that wagon (including Malta itself). It is sent to the front like a military unit, then back to the base and then repeat until it’s dead.
With Mexico, I think the problem is mostly that they are supposed to make heavy use of the revolution mechanic.
However, I have never seen any AI revolt in a game ever. So maybe this behaviour has no logic that was ever implemented?
In that case it might not be fixable.
I’m also not sure how effectively it uses the Hacienda, but I will have to look more into that.
Anyway, thank you again for the massive AI overhaul.
