Abominable Intelligence – AI Overhaul
Something I’ve been meaning to do for many moons is improve the AI pointers for the non-historical Total War titles in my possession. Unfortunately, due to the larger scale of the WAAAGH!ammer titles, I’ve put this off time and again in favor of not being bored out of my skull for several days.
Now, that boredom has been (mostly) suffered, I’ve got the framework for a somewhat competent Campaign AI (CAI) laid out and can focus on refining aspects as needed. While this is technically a beta, the principles involved haven’t changed since the days of TW: Empire, and many changes – such as those to building and recruitment priorities – ought to be readily apparent in any game.
- All CAI construction priorities are altered. Military, landmark, and defensive buildings are a much higher priority for all factions, while growth and public order are typically lower priority. Resource and income buildings are also typically higher priority, but not overwhelmingly so.
- CAI budget policies are reworked to encourage more aggressive military expansion. Likewise, AI personalities have been rekeyed to more appropriate diplomatic profiles and turn-based aggression ramping has also been enables.
- CAI threat and diplomatic assessment variables have been refined to both increase strategic aggressiveness and reduce the suicidal tendencies of individual armies.
- All recruitment and army composition templates have been replaced with a much larger selection of handmade templates. Most AI factions have the potential to make doomstacks on purpose now, particularly in the late game.
- All AI factions now have pointers for important settlements to attack and defend. Many of these overlap, so as to encourage wars between factions.
- AI factions will more frequently use agents in armies, rather than have them hopelessly follow armies they can’t successfully use actions against.
- (In-Progress) Each faction’s contextual evaluation of diplomatic deals has been altered to more accurately reflect how a player might handle diplomacy for said faction.
This does not affect the Battle AI, as only tiny, conflict-prone segments are exposed for modding.
Q:Why is the AI is spamming stacks of trash?
A: The AI needs buildings to recruit units, just like the player does. The AI might not always build military buildings, particularly if a faction is getting curb stomped. Using a mod like Unshackle AI Recruitment can mitigate this somewhat.
Q: Will you make a SFO/Radious/etc. version?
A: No. Do it yourself. I spend too much time working on things I care about. The tools needed to do it yourself are easy as sin to both find and use.
Q: I found a bug!
A: That’s not a question, Billy. Put as accurate a description of the issue and situation in which it occurred below and it’ll get looked at Soon™ if it’s a plausible issue within the scope of this mod.
Q: Can I use X in another mod?
A: Knock yourself out. The idea of intellectual monopoly is so 1715 AD. Just be sure to give credit where credit is due, and let me know (if you’d be so kind).
- Initial stability testing noted increased campaign load times, likely due to changes in AI task generation.
- Due to the "intricacies" of the 9 separate Chaos subcultures, no additional army templates have been made for Chaos at present. Chaos factions will remain as a baseline for template testing until I am satisfied that the AI pointers are working correctly.
Fully save game compatible.
Should be compatible with nearly anything that does not touch AI’s handling of recruitment, construction, diplomacy, skill selection, agent handling, or strategic, task, and threat management.
Does not affect recruitment of custom units. In fact, since custom units will typically either not have military_generator pointers or use vanilla ones, the AI is unlikely to recruit them under normal circumstances.
Links to both of my Total WAAAGH!ammer workshop libraries can be found here:
Check them out here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198039493969/myworkshopfiles/?appid=594570
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198039493969/myworkshopfiles/?appid=1142710
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Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
