AI Personalities

[z3n]

Not that I am aware of, I focused my testing and efforts on the descr_campaign_ai_db. If anyones interested in testing that we'd all be curious however.

[Lusitanio]

Started testing tzar knud in EBII for some factions like Rome and for now, with very few testing, I have noticed more agressiveness from AI Rome. Will need more testing.

[bitterhowl]

It's good that research still goes on.

In my tests tzar is rather aggressive too.

[Firnafin]

Would be interesting to have the same description used for the "old" personnalities for the kingdom personnalities.

By the way, those descriptions we're written based on testing done prior ? I don't know where they come from.

I'll be testing personnalities with my Kingdom Grand Campaign submod that I'm currently working on and report back once sufficient coherent informations may be described, even though the campaign_ai might not be the best one available currently.

[z3n]

By the way, those descriptions we're written based on testing done prior ? I don't know where they come from.

They're from the CA devs in a thread I discovered a while back. I believe the link to the thread is in OP.

[bitterhowl]

Well, new revealed tables data according to beermugcarl's conclusion that "knud" is the most optimized one for recruit profile.

And another question is - why CA developed so many new profiles for M2TW and then avoided them in vanilla?

[makanyane]

I can't answer the question. Just posting to say the tables referred to have been added to the Wiki here:

https://wiki.twcenter.net/index.php?..._Personalities

by Serious Potato

[z3n]

One thing I did notice was "missing" from those tables was ship recruitment. As that can matter too for naval invasions, no naval invasion could happen without the ships.

That was one of my main focuses at the time (aside from the troop selection).

[Jadli]

BTW, it seems that "tzar knud" that you were recommending, is actuallly "balanced knud" as tzar is a recruitment personality, not a building one, right? (the game reverts to default if there is an incorrect one)

[bitterhowl]

Seems to be so - with "tzar". Revelations are very necessary for verifying such things.

So you think that "balanced smith" is default personality, and when we set no personality at all engine set "balanced smith"?

As for ships they say it's always 0 value.

[Serious Potato]

All ships do indeed have a weight of 0, but the AI's affinity to recruiting them can easily be tweaked via EDU stats. As mentioned in the wiki article, stats directly correlate to the hidden "unit value" which makes the AI want to recruit fewer or more of them. And stat changes of ships will not influence land combat at all, so go wild with them.

I do however recommend using the lowest possible stats that still give you a sufficient amount of ships as many campaign AI setups factor the total naval strength in when making attack decisions on land.

[Jadli]

So you think that "balanced smith" is default personality, and when we set no personality at all engine set "balanced smith"?

Well, Serious Potato said the building personality reverts to "balanced" if there is written a building personality that it cant find. I assume "smith" is the default recruitment personality then

[Serious Potato]

Yes, balanced smith is the default.

@bitterhowl: Your earlier statements about faction aggression are not connected to AI personalities. They might indirectly if the AI somehow recruited more effective armies due to build order or unit preference, but personalities do not influence aggression itself at all.

[bitterhowl]

Well, I agree with that. AI behavior is too complex. At that period I had only good old campaign testing after changes in mod files.

Have to say that trader personality in our local forum tests for example make faction less recruit and more buildup for economic growth. So indirectly this faction will be less aggressive because of less manpower in field.

Also meet opinion/rumor that ai_label (first part of it) is somehow influence on battlefield behavior. Can't find a link now, there were told about fortified one.

[Jadli]

Yea, as z3n lists in the other other thread...

The files that affect the campaign AI are listed here.

1) descr campaign ai db located within the data folder- effect - faction based cai are controlled through this method, rules for the factions can be put into place.

2) descr campaign db located within the data folder - effect - game wide cai changes and campaign changes

3) export descr unit located within the data folder - effect - recruitment cost/upkeep controls ai recruitment of units

4) descr win conditions located within data/world/maps/campaign/imperial campaign - effect - controls ai settlement priorities

5) descr character located within the data folder - effect - campaign pathfinding (also groundtypes affects this too in data/world/maps/base)

6) descr missions located within the data folder - effect - affects settlement attack priority (disabled)

7) descr diplomacy located within the data folder - effect - affects player/ai diplomacy and partly influences cai invasions

8) descr strat located within data/world/maps/campaign/imperial campaign - effect - controls ai invasion decisions based on unit strength in rebel settlements/starting settlements, if you created a faction based CAI within your campaign ai db, you must also add an ai_label in this file for the faction with the right AI label

9) campaign script located within data/world/maps/campaign/imperial campaign - effect - controls economics for ai, debt causes much less aggressive ai (also it cannot handle it)

10) export descr building located within the data folder - effect - controls ai building (based on calculations per region and cost benefit/effects of a building)

11) export descr character traits located within the data folder - effect - can add several ai only buffs, e.g. movement point increase, line of sight increase. (either of these have an effect on ai decisions)

12) descr regions located within the data/world/maps/base - effect - can set horde targets here

13) descr sm factions located within the data folder - effect - naval invasions can be set as 'preferred' here if you wish to encourage said invasions

Hence also testing can be hardly comparable with other mods in lot of cases I suppose...


BTW, how you guys avoid AI going bankrupt? As it basically makes the much less agressive, right? Just giving them money when they dont have money via script doesnt seem like a desirable solution...

[Callistonian]

BTW, how you guys avoid AI going bankrupt? As it basically makes the much less agressive, right? Just giving them money when they dont have money via script doesnt seem like a desirable solution...

It would be interesting to get Serious Potato's / Jojo's insight on how the AI decides between recruiting units vs. constructing buildings. In my experience, if you give them script money when they go bankrupt, they always blow it on units and you end up with really weak AI factions with tons of full stacks and underdeveloped settlements in the late campaign. I would definitely be interested to know if there's a way to balance how the AI decides between units and buildings especially if we can base it on their financial standing.

The "Treasury" condition requires an individual monitor for each increment (bin) you use, but it could in principle be used to change the AI label based on the faction's current finances. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, the AI labels (in descr_campaign_ai_db.xml) only handle the AI's invade/defend decisions and not their recruitment/construction decisions which seem to be entirely based on their unchangeable personality set in descr_strat.

Instead of changing the AI behavior, my mod uses a version of the Carl the Taxman script. The basic idea is to give the AI only a small amount of money (~100) when they go bankrupt, not enough to recruit units but enough to construct buildings with substantial, AI-only construction_cost_bonuses.

[bitterhowl]

This money script idea used in Azumi's AI Debt script and it works just fine. I have another issue - how to lower too high treasury for AI faction, because it's a bad situation too.

AI always makes worse performance with too many troops and money because ltgd.log parameters goes just crazy. PiterAI's author repeated this issue and I totally agree.

[Serious Potato]

Can't say how the AI decides between units and buildings, but I noticed the problem you described as well. Kinda makes me suspect that it is simply a matter of the order of execution, that the AI first puts units into the recruitment queue and then builds from the remaining money. This can probably be tested without even going into the code, but we will continue to investigate deeper nonetheless.

We are also using an economy script that basically just prevents AI factions from going into the red, but without the AI-only construction cost decreases. Personally I see the bigger issue in the AI's defend and invade decisions. After analyzing some of the popular campaign AIs (descr_campaign_ai_db.xml that is) I noticed a common problem: They generally go along the lines of "we are weak -> retreat, we are strong -> attack". Depending on the conditions (especially settlement count!) this can lead to a situation where the losing AI never goes into attack mode again, regardless of how many stacks they stack up (heh).

Been writing a new campaign AI from scratch the last couple of days and it works great so far. Details probably go beyond the topic of this thread. Though I would recommend using less defensive behaviour in emergency situations and avoiding defend_minimal and defend_deep.

[bitterhowl]

I decided for my campaign AI to use defend_normal for most cases, for AtWar stance - definitely, except situations when target is human - want to set defend_deep more often for settlement defences. Defend_fortified is useless because AI forces tend to seat in a fort in any case, so this decision is limited for me for factions located in mountainous regions only.

And I want to share my investigation about defend_frontline - this is not a defensive decision at all I use it only when stances are Neutral or Allied for gathering forces to invade. Such an Yin Yang relations when black part contains a bit of white - so as here defence contains a possibility for attack.

Also, some more wisdom from Peter93x - he told that building phase happens only when faction is not at war.

[Jadli]

You mean that factions build buildings only when they are not at war? Thats definitely not true.. in my mod, every faction has minimally one additional non-rebel faction that they are at war with for the entirety of the game, and they build up normally.