It depends. For island maps it calculates if the players are accessible by land. Sometimes it’s just looking to see if there’s any fish.
I’m not sure if there’s an age limit for fishing boats, but I haven’t gone into it too much. I want to make a trigger at some point to push a big-boy boat boom if the right conditions are met, but I’m not sure what those conditions would be.
Sorry everyone, I totally messed up something a while back and I think it’s what was causing stuck units and bad transports.
Anyway, it’s fixed now and I’m seeing armies sometimes make actual landings strong enough to knock each other out:
I tried the new version and received invasions on my base at the second age, so that part seems to be working ok! Although sometimes I see they stop sending troops, so its not refined yet but it is working!
The bad thing is I noticed AI no longer build towers near docks, leaving them defenceless. They will seldom do it, maybe one tower total, maybe sometimes one TC, and once an Inca ai build a fortress and war hut in a remote patch of beach nowhere near a dock. But in general, docks are now very unprotected, which puts the AI navy at risk.
A good thing is that the AI seems to always build secondary dock locations and have become very good at creating a navy and recover its fishing grounds.
They stopped sending armies for me also. I think they are either not training a big enough army or not scouting enough. Since they do attack in Age 2 I’m guessing it’s the former. Attacks calculate how big of a military they need to have a worthwhile attack. They calculate a bigger force for attacking over long distance and they calculate an even bigger force for attacking over water.
Tower placement can be a bit sporadic. The random patches are supposed to be along the edge of the island, and it’s been that way for a while. Sometime, though, the towers just bunch up in one spot. After the land attacks get fixed I can revisit the tower building.
Edit 2023-09-10T00:00:00Z:
I finally got around to testing it, but thanks to @EaglemutOP the mod now works in multiplayer!
I had a changelog that I was keeping in there, but it caused it to be incompatible with multiplayer. It’s kind of silly in hindsight since I never really looked at it anyway.
Just added some improvements and fixes to the late game attacks. Such things are extremely time consuming to test so please let me know if you can notice any changes!
Amazing. The current version of the mod is working very good, it just needs to identify more maps as “naval”. With what I imagine is a better island expansion, you are going to open many maps for play against AI. Hope the devs are taking a look at your work!
That’s a good point! I get busy with Age of Pirates and forget to go back and take a look at this. I was thinking on certain maps I would do a random roll to see if the AI should try and take the water, given enough conditions were met.
First Archipelago version is here!
I wish I could say it was behaving wonderfully and providing a challenging game, but alas it’s more of a pre-alpha that limps along. Still, hopefully this provides some entertainment even if you need to play on expert with a 100% handicap.
New Archipelago fixes!
Just uploaded some fairly big fixes to the Archipelago script. The AI now makes buildings more efficiently, and in my tests an AI even reached the imperial age in 26 mins. See below for the map:
Also, I forgot to give a special thank you to @NewMercies1775 for letting me borrow his economic gathering script!
More archipelago fixes uploaded 2023-11-05T07:00:00Z! Asian civs are now able to more effectively age up with their wonders. I also fixed the issue causing the AI to not update their desired resource distribution. This issue made India and Dutch unplayable by the AI.
I’ve reworked the fishing boat training, trying to replicate a few different fishing boat booming strategies based on how contested the water is.
I also fixed something I’ve found extremely irritating, which is that caravels and canoes would continue to fish while getting attacked. They now turn around and attack, though in the future I’ll probably improve that to check if they should run away first.
Btw, has anyone tried hosting a multiplayer lobby with the AI enabled, or have any feedback on the competitiveness? I’ve been doing some online testing on Ceylon, trying to see how much of a handicap it needs. I started at 100% handicap and our team got completely smoked. Then I did 50%, and 25%. Next game will be at 15% but we’re currently 0-3 against the AI in 4v4 games.
Another update 2023-12-23T08:00:00Z, this time adding a fix for King of the Hill. The AI should now attack and attempt to hold the fort, and did so enough times to beat me in a big FFA:
Latest update 2024-01-06T08:00:00Z includes tweaks to attacks and defenses. The AI can now reinforce it’s armies on more difficulties (now hard and above) and it shouldn’t retreat when attacking human players. It should also be a little better at defending its allies, though I haven’t been able to thoroughly test that yet.
I think I can safely say there’s enough changes that this isn’t just a naval AI mod anymore. There’s improvements to land competitiveness (especially in prolonged age 2 fights), fixes to some commonly requested bugs like livestock gathering, and reworked logic for attack retreats. I also brought some features only seen in Extreme difficulty to the Hard setting as well.
King of the Hill is now fully playable, with the AI able to both capture and hold to fort - proficiently enough to win against full human teams in even match-ups.
Communication has been significantly improved this update. The AI can now inform allies of their attack plans and signal their targets, providing enough notice that human plays can join in with their attacks if they so choose. For the full list of chat changes, see the details below:
AI Chat Changes
AI now tells you when & where & what they plan to attack (includes minimap ping)
AI is more likely to call for help when their base is attacked
AI tells you when an attack fails (and retreat logic is improved)
AI will taunt you if nothing happens for a while
AI taunts when KoTH is within 1 minute of ending
AI has a variety of explorer related taunts for when they go down/get rescued/etc.
AI doesn’t whine as often about losing or giving up (waits 10-15 minutes between sending)
AI varies its starting taunts, so each one has a % chance to send if it applies. Probably most relevant for people who play the same map or same opponents repeatedly.
AI more likely to join attacks & defenses when prompted (lower army size requirement, especially when you request help defending)
As always, I look forward to any feedback any of you may have, and I hope you enjoy this update as much as I do!
That’s been a nagging issue for the water maps also. My best guess is that as the player starts to catch up in army size the AI starts (rightfully) calculating that it can’t win an attack with the army it has. Unfortunately that also means there’s no easy solution.
Would it be possible to have it bank up resources and then send a continuous wave of units in? I think this should challenge most people macro in the late game.
It’s everything. It’s economy, it’s more production buildings, it’s taking into account your unit’s veteran status, it’s seizing territory and pushing forward even if they’ve already made a forward base. It’s just a ton of stuff. Stuff I’m chipping away at, but it takes time.
I was looking at that the other day. Ideally I was going to have the AI ask for help via the “attack here” command, but I couldn’t find any way for the AI to send it. Otherwise, the only way to know who teammates are attacking is to see who they are already attacking (too late to help) or tie it to something like score, but that gets too predictable and not very fun if the humans always have the low score. There’s just no good way that I know of for the AI to know when other players are starting an attack plan.
What if AIs take their combined resources and army into consideration when deciding to attack, and compare it to just one player? Would that be possible?
Yes, though some of that may be in there already and I’m not sure you would even be able to tell the difference. What I want to do, is eventually switch the attack pattern in the late game so the army slowly creeps forward while moving the forward base along with it. Unfortunately that idea has been on the back-burner for a good 6 months.
Also, stay tuned for some improvements to historical battles:
Offense/defense disposition appropriately set for attack/defend battles
AI aggressively builds Italian city state sockets (but still gives you a chance to build them)
AI no longer spams the chat on Italian Wars
Unfortunately I can’t make them build the tower sockets, but I tried.
I’ve also seen they mount better defenses, and their bases are overall better structured and harder to invade. Hell, one ivan the terrible even walled off a block house at the exact range so you couldn’t torch it down and was spamming strelets from it. Impressive.
Haha I’m glad you liked that little trick. Unfortunately I removed it from blockhouse style civs to avoid trapping too many units, but others still have it.
It’s basically what I said above. AI can now make trading posts in the City States (the old fashioned way), and AI’s on The Eighty Years War & The Great Turkish War are now set to an offense/defense disposition depending on whether they are the attackers or defenders. Unfortunately I can’t get the AI to build via the socket button, but they can at least capture some sites now.
