GidMod Politics, concept... |
Okay, I'm working on the design for politics in my mod. Mostly, because the political/relationship (they are the same) AI is so god-awful in stock, that it sucks the fun out of the game for me.
I'll be using this thread to vet some ideas, and get some feedback, as well as hear player suggestions. It'll take a while for me to produce this, as I first have to analyze the current political scripting, to see what (if any) of it I want to keep. The current behaviour is so abyssmal, that I may just jettison the whole mess.
Anyways, this is what I have so far, conceptually. If I can't do anything directly, I might be able to find a way to do it indirectly, so at this point, no ideas are barred.
*Each AI personality should have certain attributes. These first two are a numerical range: **Aggression 1-100: How aggressively an AI persues its agenda. Not to be confused with violence. **Violence 1-100: How prone a race is to violence. Also affects the respect (or lack there of) it has for another empire's military strength. **Flavor: A general category of a race's psychology. ***For instance: Scientists (believe in streangth through technology). Diplomats (try to manipulate other empires through treaties and alliances). *A race's Flavor will also affect how it defines colonies, its military vs infrastructure production, its research focus, etc. *AI should try to renegotiate treaties every so often. *The AI should reject the following treaty stipulations always, as they CRIPPLE an empire (and have no business existing, frankly): **No Research **No Intel **No Planetary Bombardment *Alliances should be seen as a single empire by those outside of them, with regards to treaties and behaviour. *Treaties (and alliances) have no direct effect on whether empires launch intel (or even combat) actions against each other. ***Treaties and alliances affect mood. It is MOOD that affects whether an empire performs intel and combat actions on another empire. *Analysis of an empire (military, technology, economic, population, etc) should have an effect on the mood one empire has towards another. ***The weight of each field should be determined by an empires Aggression, Violence, and Flavor. *Analysis of each empire's treaty/alliance/war status with other empires needs to have an effect on mood and declarations of war/treaties. *AI needs to try to take advantage of an allie's strengths more often. Like asking for economic aid. *See if I can change the mood change as the result of a request to be based on both whether another empire accepts the request, AND whether it does something about it. ***Example: Empire A requests economic aid from Empire B. Empire B accepts. If Empire A does not recieve aid in X ammount of turns, Empire A's mood worsens towards Empire B. ***If Empire B has its own problems (or analysis shows Empire A to be not needing assistance) then Empire B's mood worses towards Empire A, ***regardless of how Empire B responds (though mood will play a part in whether it does respond). *Also try to see if I can have the game judge the quality of the aid it recieves. Building on above: Empire A uses Minerals as its primary resource. ***All of Empire A's resource productions show a surplus, but Minerals is looking kind of low (that is the criteria for the request). Empire B accepts Empire A's request. ***Empire B generates 50,000 excess Minerals per turn. Empire B sends Empire A 1000 Organics to shut it up. ***Empire A is thusly insulted by such a response, and its mood worsens towards Empire B.
Anyways, this should be enought to start with. I'll probably try to implement this in phases, so I don't dump a huge chunk of changes all at once. However, that will be determined by how much (if any) of the current political AI scripting I want to use.
You can see that some of the ideas here will tie in to other AI scripts, like ship orders and intel actions.
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Maybe approach the different variables as a math problem versus a way of thinking.
Personality A: It swings near the Top of the variables.
Personality B: It swings near the bottom of the variables.
Personality C: It swings near the middle of the variables.
Personality D: It swings high here, low there and in the middle.
Personality E: It swings low here, high there and in the middle.
Personality F: It swings high middle, low top and low bottom.
etc,etc.
Script it so that the extreme personalities are limited to rare occurences, middle road more common and variations uncommon.
This way it takes the hard part out of trying to think of who would do what in terms of an alien intelligence. Think of it as cultures on Earth. One culture may see Plural marriage as a crime while another culture embraces it. By setting the reactions to a mathmatical variables it will simulate different cultures/races and their reactions versus trying to apply your beliefs to how the AI should react. Make sense?
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
I'm considering these as fixed values. I figure that 1-100 for each, plus one "mutator" should give me enough range to represent many shades without having extreme cases.
@Romulus, yeah, that's kind of what I'm working on here. Trying to represent such things, within the given structure of the game (a human creation). So, fortunatly or not, I will be somewhat limited in what I can do due to the nature of it being a Human structure in which I'm working.
Funny, I had never thought of Aggression as inherantly violent. Simply as a measure of how doggedly (aggressively) something is persued. Perhaps labling it Determination would be better, due to current modern connotations of the word. Perhaps Determination and Hostility? Or maybe I'm being over-complicated, and just one value (Determination) plus the Flavor (which can also be a determiner of inherant violent tendancies)?
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
I'll definately be looking forward to this mod.
As it stands so far from what I've seen of various AI scripts is that they seem to all behave similarly.
I don't know if just observing their general trend of their score (that nice graph the game provides) is any good indication, but it would be nice to see "better" and "worse" AI. Balance Mod they all rise with equal vigor (and I trumped them all by throwing money at more and better tech), GidMod version 4.7.0b the same thing is happening, only this time I R teh suckz and am falling farther and farther behind. Great, the AI is smarter, or at least the scoring is balanced (instead of each tech level being worth 5500,000 points or something obsurd like I was seeing with Balance Mod), which does make single-player harder, but I'd rather face a challenge of 6 completely different entities than "one large computer player that occationally fights with itself" as one frined put it.
Also, if possible, I'd like to be able to use interchangable the AI and Balance Mod's tech tree (or someone else's). It's a problem that SEV's "game types" are more mod-packs than interchangable modifications to the game.
Keep up the good work.
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
There will probably be additional changes to gameplay from this patch that, on the surface, seem unrelated to politics. For instance, I will probably be increasing the size of Research and Intelligence point generating facilities, as well as increasing the size of Space Yards and allowing multiple Space Yards on a planet. Also, resource costs of these structures will likely be going up, in an ammount dispropotionatly large to their size. I might also look in to some sort of inter-related structure dependance (like Research enhancing buildings requiring a certain number of research structures to be present before they can be built).
The reason for these changes is that it allows for each AI to become more specialized in a facet of development (industrial, economic, research, intelligence). Increasing the relative cost, in terms of both space and upkeep, breeds shortages of these areas. That, in turn, encourages specializers. Right now, its too easy for one empire to "do it all". However, if you have an empire that specializes in research, one that specializes in economics, and one that specializes in diplomacy (to bring these three together in a resource and technology exchange, and keep them together) you get a group that is stronger than the sum of its parts. This also means that a race in to conquest (rather than genocide, two distinct AI packages I'm looking to include) would probably do some analysis of itself and its neighbors before deciding who it wants to go after (for instance, if it needs technology, it will go for planets and races that have highly developed research infrastructures).
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Nice. Looking forward to it. 
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Alrighty, to get this going as fast as possible, I'm going to be releasing this as a series of modifications to the current politics AI. I think the default scripting will be an adequate base to work with.
The initial steps will probably be baby steps, as I tweak and adjust values that already exist. My first task will be to see if I can get the AI to try to renegotiate treaties after a certain amount of time has passed.
I'll know more as I get further in to the implementation.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Out of interest, why are you planning to ban planetary bombardment? Is this an issue with the AI being incapable of dropping troops, or a personal objection in terms of gameplay?
And no-research/no-intel projects are a bad thing, indeed, but they're also a suitable sort of demand for a subjugation treaty - if the defending empire is being completely crushed, a suitable surrender-pact would be kinda cool to be possible.
I dunno, 'twas just a thought.
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
The AI will continuously send fleets to planets over and over, even though it lacks troops and is unable to bombard the planet. This is...well...bad. 
Basically, there is no easy way to look up the elements of an already existing treaty from within the AI scripting. I would have to devise a whole system to store the elements of each treaty in a datafile, and this is more complicated (read: time consuming) than it sounds.
I need the AI to be able to call up the details on the treaties it has, in order to know what to renegotiate, and when to renegotiate.
Until that time comes, treaty elements exist in perpituity until the treaty is broken, or the human player initiates a renegoitation. Due to this fact, I have to set the AI to not ever accept being prevented from performing Research, Intel, or Bombardments.
Too often, I have come across AI empires that are in good positions, but are in a terrible state, because they have such treaties between each other. In my mind, it is better to "switch these off" for the time being, than to allow the AI to be butchered by them.
Apart from renegotiating treaties, the rest of the project is coming along nicely. I can use much of the stock game code as a framework, and with a variable amount of tweaks or outright changes, I am getting it to do what I want.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Another one to consider is "no treaties with others" as it's both semi-bugged and an annoyance to the player to read and re-read every single treaty proposed by the mulitude of AIs to make sure it's not included.
The bug it has is all it does is prevent you from sending an "accept treaty" message or "propose new treaty" message. If the AI you've entered a no treaty agreement sends you a new treaty (revised or otherwise) you can't accept it, and you can also accept treaties from other THEN accept the "no treaties with others" with no "penalty" other than the obvious and the above stated. Because of this bug it is impossible sans breaking treaty for either empire to propose a change to the treaty as well, which is probably why when the AI proposed it to me and I got stuck in it and couldn't accept its new treaty and I sent a message to them asking to revise they never replied back.
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Ah, fair enough - in that case, it's entirely logical. I was thinking from a gameplay point of view, rather than a mechanics.
And yeah, the 'no treaties' agreement is really kinda ugly on an AI, too. Of course, it's somewhat bugged in general - there's nothing to stop a group of human players making an unofficial pact, even if no treaties are signed.
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Right, I'll check that one off too.
Keep in mind that I'm just setting the AI to never accept this as part of its treaties. It will still propose it, and humans can still propose and accept it (havn't devised a way to switch the human player's AI off ).
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: GidMod Politics, concept...
Hmm... try changing the word "Aggression" to "Determination"? Just to help the humans who read the code - Aggression and Violence have similar concepts. What you have in mind for the "Aggression" variable could be described by "Determination".
Are Determination/Violence fixed parameters for each race or variables?
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE