takbal

Join Date 01/2011

[BUG] [1.12] AI diplomacy on expert + other issues

I am playing FE for quite a long time now, and collected some annoying problems which are still in 1.12. Not sure whether other people can reproduce them, or know the solution why I am experiencing these issues, or how to avoid them.

AI diplomacy is non-existent on expert level I am playing on. A few turns after contacting AI players, they are attacking me without an exception, even if they are on the other side of the map. When their stacks of doom arrive, I have no chance against the unified strength of, say, 6 buffed up AI players. This may some consider as a feature, but it makes the gameplay quite flat. I can naturally lower the difficulty, but now the entire game is about whether you can beat the initial wave of all enemies attacking you at once. If the answer is yes, you obviously won the game already, and it is not worthy to play it through. There are plenty of opportunities for interesting gameplay lost without a decent diplomacy at that level. I am not sure whether this is happening because I am the weakest, and they see free prey in me.
Making peace with an AI player is disproportionally hard. Even if they lost half of their cities, they are still asking for a hefty sum to make peace.
AI disregards my efforts of keeping peace, and does not seem to be bound by the rules I have to obey. AI regularly breaks non-aggressive pacts a few turns after they were made, or attacks despite paying a tribute to them. It renders the treaty system a waste.
When I load a saved game, my mana pool seems to increase mysteriously.
The spell tremor seems to freeze armies only for 1 round. After casting, it shows each enemy unit in the stack correctly as frozen for 3 rounds. The next turn some of the units in the stack are already free, while the others greyed out with 0 wait time, and the entire enemy stack is able to move after 1 round.
Please add a button to select all units in a town. I know no other way to do this than shift+click on each of them one-by-one.
If a town was razed, I cannot build in the same spot (which is usually the best one). I think the the raze-happy AI and monsters are already penalizing enough, and forbidding rebuild in the same spot is an overkill.

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1/2/3. Noticed all those myself, except for the stacks of doom. I've been playing on challenging and expert all week and have not once had my cities attacked by an AI player. Occasionally they send a few feeble troops to take an outpost, but I can usually kill them with a single well equipped unit. They declare war constantly, never make peace, but never attack and I can usually wipe out their entire civilization with ease.

7. I believe that is fixed in 1.20. Monsters are probably still going to be raze happy they just don't make the land infertile anymore.

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Diplomacy in FE sucks. I've been harping on about it for years.

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Quoting mqpiffle,

reply 2

Diplomacy in FE sucks. I've been harping on about it for years.

Hello time traveler?

But yes, diplomacy is nonexistant. The AI's are all at war with each other too at the same time, which makes it even more ridicilous.

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Apparently everything in the game is RNG. Matters little what we do, diplomacy-wise or otherwise, it's a crapshoot.

If an AI declares, reload and more times than not they won't re-dec (or the reverse).

This is a very strange design decision for a 'strategy' game. My guess is that RNG is easy to program, and 'intelligent' choices (such as 'if player does X then AI does Y' is time-comsuming. Or maybe it's because 'strategy' games 15 years ago were mostly RNG. Or both...

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Gaunathor

Join Date 04/2006

+170

1. I don't play on Expert, but it is the same on Challenging too.

2&3 Agreed.

4. I haven't noticed this, but wouldn't be surprised. There is something wrong with savegames. It seems, that certain game states are not saved properly.

5. Works fine for me. The turn, in which you cast Tremor, is already counting against the time the spell lasts. The spell description should make this clear, but maybe it could be worded a little better. At the end of the second turn after the spell was cast, the enemy is free to move again.

6. Press V to send all of your units out of the city. There are several hot keys, not mentioned in the manual. This is one of them.

7. Agreed. This, combined with the AIs ability to ignore the 5-turn raze limit, is one of the most annoying "features" of the game. At least monsters will no longer salt the earth in 1.20.

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Quoting Nick-Danger,

reply 5

Apparently everything in the game is RNG. Matters little what we do, diplomacy-wise or otherwise, it's a crapshoot.

If an AI declares, reload and more times than not they won't re-dec (or the reverse).

This is a very strange design decision for a 'strategy' game. My guess is that RNG is easy to program, and 'intelligent' choices (such as 'if player does X then AI does Y' is time-comsuming. Or maybe it's because 'strategy' games 15 years ago were mostly RNG. Or both...

If the AI were completely deterministic, then it would also be completely predictable. How I suspect it actually works, rather than being a pure crapshoot, is that the state of the game world and your actions are used to set the odds of the AI taking certain actions. What you do, diplomacy-wise or otherwise, does matter, it's just not 100% decisive.

Quoting Gaunathor,

reply 6

1. I don't play on Expert, but it is the same on Challenging too.

Strange... I play on the difficulty where the AI first starts to cheat a little (one step past Challenging; "Hard", I think?) and have never seen an immediate declaration of war by the AI. On the contrary, unless their faction power rating is substantially higher than mine, I find them rather sycophantic - even if they're from the opposite Kingdom/Empire alignment, our relations tend to drift upwards and never come back down, no matter what I do short of starting a war myself.

Quoting Gaunathor,

reply 6

6. Press V to send all of your units out of the city. There are several hot keys, not mentioned in the manual. This is one of them.

In my experience, that usually works, but there are some cases (I think they're related to the city being adjacent to coastlines, mountains, or other impassable terrain) where I can hit "V" all day and nothing will happen. But I don't really think this "select all" request is entirely a city-related issue, multi-selecting units should be reworked in general. As it stands now, the only way to multi-select is to hold ctrl or shift, which makes it a bit of a nuisance to deal with anything other than the extremes of either just one unit or the whole stack.

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Gaunathor

Join Date 04/2006

+170

Quoting nDervish,

reply 7

It's not always the case, but it does happen. Usually when I have a bad start.

Quoting nDervish,

reply 7

In my experience, that usually works, but there are some cases (I think they're related to the city being adjacent to coastlines, mountains, or other impassable terrain) where I can hit "V" all day and nothing will happen.

True. My guess is, that the pathfinding interferes in those cases. The units want to leave the city for a certain tile, but that is blocked. So, instead of moving to a different tile, they just stay in the city.

Quoting nDervish,

reply 7

multi-selecting units should be reworked in general.

Agreed.

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Quoting nDervish,

reply 7

Yes, there are odds/RNG or something. I've postponed wars a couple of turns with reloading saves, but never for long. Given X amount of turns and different power ratings, the stronger part will always declare at some point. (except if you are the strongest obviously) The end result of this is a huge FFA between AI's, though they seem to focus more on you than each other.

Quoting Gaunathor,

reply 6

6. Press V to send all of your units out of the city. There are several hot keys, not mentioned in the manual. This is one of them.

That's the button I have been looking for.. and I single clicked everyone... Thanks

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It's not random at all actually. The problem is that the AI accrues a stacking negative diplomacy hit for having a stronger army than you. There's 3 separate hits for having a stronger military, for -1, -2 and -4, they stack, plus there's an additional -1 to -3 hit that stacks on top of that for basically the same thing ("You are weak"). Then there's a blanket modifier based on game stage, starts as +1 ("We're still settling.") and shifts to a -5 late game ("It is time to unite the world under us."). Basically there's nothing you can do to counter those negative weights and it causes the AI to instantly declare war on you if all of them have stacked. Treaties and Caravans combined are only +2-3, and same Allegiance is only +1 late game (or -4 for different), a few random AI specific +1s wont really help either. An overall difference of like -5 means they are going to declare war eventually (might take a couple turns, you might be able to reload and it avoid it a few times, but they will keep trying), so you can see the issue.

Add to that the fact that the AI really doesn't understand army strength and thinks more units or overall health or whatever means they are really strong despite the fact that one of your unit stacks could steamroll their entire empire, and you get a really warhappy AI that ends up being unable to put up any real fight.

I've fiddled around with my CoreAIDefs.xml to add a bit more positive to treaties and caravans, and a bit less stacking negatives to army strength and game stage and can now actually keep AI's in the cool to warm range and actually go a few dozen turns without them declaring war on me. I suppose it does make the game a bit easier actually being able to control when and who I fight, but at the same time it actually allows me to use things like tech treaties which are otherwise impossible by the time I research them (everyone's usually at war by that time).

I think what needs to change going forward is that treaties and such should gain value the longer they are maintained, and each treaty should have it's own value, so you can pick your friends early on and keep them as the game progresses while every other AI starts getting angrier and angrier until they declare war. They also of course have to make NAPs and tribute treaties function as advertised so you can pay for peace while your treaties build relations.

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^Good post.

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This explains a lot. My guess was also that they simply perceive me as being weak.

I think people not attacked by stacks of doom are mostly lucky, as the AI is usually waging war or multiple fronts, so it can be that they are just not the primary target in that game, and the AI is wasting its resources on fighting with each other. At the same time, the AI should know and exploit the advantage of fighting on a single front at once only.

I think fixing the non-aggressive pacts and tributes to work as advertised would be enough. People willing to delay military strength build-up should pay a high price in gold for peace, but it should be possible. Even better if we can get protection through negotiating defensive pacts.

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I don't think that is down to luck either. I think the AI is smart enough to know when it has no chance of taking a target and wont send any stacks at it. It's not smart enough to factor that into it's decision to declare war. So it thinks "I have 100 of these really weak units that adds up to 1000 power, they have 5 really strong units that add up to 500 power, I'm much stronger than them so time for war." Then it does a separate check where it realizes it's best stack has zero chance to defeat any of my stacks, so it ends up never attacking.

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