AI stops colonising at mid/late game

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Dilvish
AI Lead and Programmer Emeritus
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Joined: Sat Sep 22, 2012 6:25 pm

Re: AI stops colonising at mid/late game

#16 Post by Dilvish »

Looks like Mat already corrected himself a bit while I was typing this, but I'll go ahead and leave this for a bit more clarity.
MatGB wrote:Bear in mind: the game is balanced and the AI designed for far more empires, 1:50 is outside the recommended balance and the AI will start doing stranger things at that point, if fighting it will put resources to warships, perhaps excessively so because it can't "know" that it's just you and it or the galaxy size.
Oberlus wrote:Side note, I find contradictory that you and some others told me AI behaves better (harder to beat) when playing on galaxies with 40+ systems per player, and now this comment seems to state the opposite :)
Mat mispoke a bit there about what the AI can know. It can and does know how many empires there are and how many systems there are, and it uses that information a little bit (if monsters are set to Low or None and there are at least 35 systems per empire, or 40 if the galaxy is elliptical, then it will start off with more of an expansion focus. In the AI code, that low empire:system ratio is what is referred to as 'sparse', regardless of the planet density. I used to like low planet density, but I think the AI has gotten better at expanding now and after some prompting by Mat to try high planet density again, he has made me a believer that it makes for the best challenging game.

As far as 1:50 empires to systems goes, I think that's still reasonably within the AIs balance range, at least with this adjusted cap for aggressive and maniacal AIs, and it could be that they still would be better off with some further adjustment there. However, I also think it's important to have at least 5+ AIs to be sufficiently confident that too many don't have poor starting setups (they are less adaptive than a human player for a difficult starting setup), and then with a lot of AIs and a lot of systems the game can wind up taking longer and being more of a grind than many people want, and can bog down many computers. I think those are some significant considerations for the recommended AIs and systems ranges, not just the issue of what the AI can handle OK.
Oberlus wrote:I'd say that colonisation/militarisarion balance should depend on the perceived menace from encountered enemies as well as the colonisation opportunities.
It does. Trying to get its consideration of those factors to work out optimally in a wide range of situations is a tricky matter, though. I expect we'll keep making progress on it, though. I'll be interested to head your feedback once you've played a couple games with the loosened colonization cap on the aggressive/maniacal AIs, as well. (if you still see an issue, please post a savegame.)
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Vezzra
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Re: AI stops colonising at mid/late game

#17 Post by Vezzra »

Oberlus wrote:Maybe Dilvish's change is to be blame of this improvement.
Unless you've built current master yourself and did your last tests with that build, any "improvements" you might have observed don't have anything to do with Dilvish' latest changes, as they haven't made it into the test builds yet. The first test builds containing those changes will be the ones I'll make coming Tuesday. ;)

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