Meanwhile I would keep playing, dying a lot but progressing through the levels. Killing the boss meant dying a few times until you found their vulnerable spot. For some reason, my female friends could take this with Mario Bros, any other game made it too intense. (There were a lot of 'Fighters' but only the Simpsons brought both sexes, and you die a lot in that game!)

My point is, some of us want to play a peaceful game of Civilization or Call to Power. Others want to die and deal death and convert the planet to a wasteland.

Meanwhile I would keep playing, dying a lot but progressing through the levels. Killing the boss meant dying a few times until you found their vulnerable spot. For some reason, my female friends could take this with Mario Bros, any other game made it too intense. (There were a lot of 'Fighters' but only the Simpsons brought both sexes, and you die a lot in that game!)

My point is, some of us want to play a peaceful game of Civilization or Call to Power. Others want to die and deal death and convert the planet to a wasteland.

Meanwhile I would keep playing, dying a lot but progressing through the levels. Killing the boss meant dying a few times until you found their vulnerable spot. For some reason, my female friends could take this with Mario Bros, any other game made it too intense. (There were a lot of 'Fighters' but only the Simpsons brought both sexes, and you die a lot in that game!)

My point is, some of us want to play a peaceful game of Civilization or Call to Power. Others want to die and deal death and convert the planet to a wasteland.

Second, how can I keep the barbarians from ever changing out of the barbarian strategy? Altho I'd like them to minimally build garrisons and buildings when they capture a city, I mainly want them to pump out tons of units. My latest theory is that they seem to change to the default strategy as soon as they get a few cities and/or I build the great wall. I do love seeing the Vandals and Visigoths I must admit and had given a small ability to them in the barbarian strategy to expand. They also tend to become totally passive thus my theory that they've changed strategies to default.

Thirdly, how can we force barbs and AI units to stack before they attack? I just had 2 stacks of barbs attack one by one instead of forming an army. Being that rally is part of siege and attack i would have expected the entire stack to have attacked together.

Thanks.

Second, how can I keep the barbarians from ever changing out of the barbarian strategy? Altho I'd like them to minimally build garrisons and buildings when they capture a city, I mainly want them to pump out tons of units. My latest theory is that they seem to change to the default strategy as soon as they get a few cities and/or I build the great wall. I do love seeing the Vandals and Visigoths I must admit and had given a small ability to them in the barbarian strategy to expand. They also tend to become totally passive thus my theory that they've changed strategies to default.

Thirdly, how can we force barbs and AI units to stack before they attack? I just had 2 stacks of barbs attack one by one instead of forming an army. Being that rally is part of siege and attack i would have expected the entire stack to have attacked together.

Thanks.

Start CTPII, press new game button ( ) and press "select scenario". Scroll down to the Frenzy scenario, load it, and then select your game settings.

try the frenzy ai, as a solution.

Although it's very odd, it does not really affect gameplay because there is no way for the AI to build enough obelisks to make the wonder. So I just continue playing. The only problem is the AI devoting resources to the Gaia Controller instead of other things. Oh well.

If anyone knows why this would happen, please let me know. As magma12 says, the computer obtains the pre-req advance for Gaia but does not have ANY of the pre-req's for THAT advance. Very strange.

Although it's very odd, it does not really affect gameplay because there is no way for the AI to build enough obelisks to make the wonder. So I just continue playing. The only problem is the AI devoting resources to the Gaia Controller instead of other things. Oh well.

If anyone knows why this would happen, please let me know. As magma12 says, the computer obtains the pre-req advance for Gaia but does not have ANY of the pre-req's for THAT advance. Very strange.

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Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

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Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

quote: Originally posted by Azmel2 on 03-15-2001 08:24 PM A friend of mine found a pretty obvious and obnoxious AI bug and I spent the day hunting it down. It turns out that a simple text file change will fix your mayors so they keep your cities happy. To fix the bug, just overwrite the file pop.txt in your ctp2_data/default/gamedata directory with a new pop.txt that has the following first record (before POP_ENTERTAINER) : ## Mayors ignore the first pop record, this fixes the problem ## with low happiness not being handled correctly by mayors. ## (REM031501) POP_ZERO_IGNORED { EnableAdvance ADVANCE_CLASSICAL_EDUCATION Food 0 } Actually, you should probably do this in a scenario and not overwrite the default pop.txt, but do what ever you think is best. If you want to try it with a game in progress, the easiest way to get it to re-read the pop values is to quit and reload the game and then to bring up the cheat menu and remove the "drama" advance. Then add the drama advance back in. I tried it using a game I was sent and it immediately brought most of the unhappy mayor controlled cities to a non-rioting level. There are a few cities that are still under the magic 73 happiness, but I think this has to do with the mayor not adequetly adjusting for unhappiness caused by pollution. There's nothing I can do about that from text file changes. I haven't played an entire game with this change, but you should notice the AI plays better too since all AI cities are effectively under mayoral control. My apologies to the CTP2 community for not finding and fixing this stupid bug before we shipped. -- Richard

Well Azmel2 Thats 1 MORE BUG FIXED>>Thanks and ifin you or your buddies have anymore time..READ FORUMS..We got plenty more where that came from!

But still Thanks for that ONE FIX!!

Troll

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Hebrews 11:1

The human ability to react, change tactics and have several different options available is something the AI programming isn't able to compete with right now.

How often in Civ-genre games have you tied an enemy down on one of their borders and got them funneling units to the front like mad, and then crushed them with a tank-based army hitting them from behind ?

But with the production adjustment in the diffDB file, that helps the AI have a bonus of whatever you want. Certainly not the ideal, but workable, and it was a good workaround.

As for unit selection, there are line of type in the strategies.txt file that breaks out the percentage of what the AI will build, so maybe tweaking those in conjuction with some creative relabeling of unit designations (calling a Knight a defensive instead of an attack or flanker unit in the units.txt file) will cause the AI to build more of them. You can also designate a higher level of devoted production for support costs in that file, allowing the AI to field an even bigger army without disbanding older troops, and raise the level of what the AI will tolerate for being in an 'At War' status. But these have to be balanced with the AI needing to maintain a growing infrastructure so it also does not find itself losing the tech war in the long term.

The one thing I would like to see fixed is the purely defensive stacking of the AI, especailly when faced with enemy units. I've seen 30-40 units parked outside of a city that I was attacking, and I was able to whittle down those forces without being counterattacked, before tackling the city. The AI had me seriously outgunned in numbers and could of taken out my stack if it employed a 1-2 punch, but it didn't do so. So I attacked, pulled back a bit and kept sending a steady stream of reinforcements.

Ultimately it comes down to playing style. I'm a controlled expansionist meaning i dont go out to conquer the world from day 1. I build some scouts, a garrison, then start on buildings. I build settlers (which are still expensive) when I find strategic or highly productive locations and I only use force when my borders need additional room or I've been attacked or encroached upon. I figure the results have spoken for themselves as I'm usually on the defensive until at least 500bc and usually much later. The AIs will beat me to about 75% - 80% of the wonders and feats. i've been down to my last city as late as 200ad (didnt take the lead in that game until 1970s). had multi-ship ai navies attack me and been invaded (8 units, 2 of which were settlers) via naval transport. I've seen civs fight long pitched wars among themselves (in one case the barbarians finished off the one civs last 2 cities, hows that for realistic!). All this without any SLIC coding.

Even with these results, the AI still does whacky things and there are too many flags in too many files for me to figure out what each one does on its own so I'm hoping that others will lend their knowledge

Also, I put in special code so if it sees it's Omni on the other side of the screen it won't even give him maps.

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Author of Diplomod. The mod to fix diplomacy.

Players get together on boards like this to share thoughts, tactics, strategies. We have the benefit of learning from everyone else that is playing the game. We adapt at an exponential pace. The best an AI can do is 'adapt' to one player's tactics.

Game companies could look at these kind of forums and then change the AI routines, but no company would keep spending the money required to do so. The game has been released and that is pretty much it.

The only place we might see some change on this front is in the massively multiplayer on-line games. In that situation, the game company is constantly monitoring and changing the game. Adapting the AI to the emerging player strategies might happen there. In the offline world, though , I fear that we are pretty much out-of-luck.

quote: Originally posted by Steve5304 on 03-15-2001 01:18 AM Give it up Patton. This forum is as dead as CTP2 Sales. They've dropped to an embarrassing all time low. The AI is inherently Retarded and it cant be fixed. They build 9 battleships in a square lake, they cant stack, they nver attack,they dont use carrier/aircrat right, They never accept your proposals, they simply have no logic. Craptivision isnt going to give us Pbbem or fix Mplayer. So we can forget that. Go buy Europa-Universalis the AI in that one is really good.

Well...THE ONLY Game I ever had any success with proposals was when I play a 2 city per civ game...then I got all the proposals I wanted maybe 90%...

I will continue to tweak maybe finding a decent or "acceptable" medium?

Troll

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Hebrews 11:1

You said "STUPID BUG"

Now I'm not an English Major..but in order for you to annotate "Stupid"..then since there so many "OTHER BUGS"..perhaps they may be of a higher Intelligence?

Work with me Babe....

I'm thinking "OUTSIDE-THE-LINES" Here....but perhaps maybe you could make those "Smart Bugs"..change there name to say..."AI"..because the AI you all shipped sucks the big one..and well..it would save you from any further harrasment?

LOL..just a thought?

Troll

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Hebrews 11:1