Reduced AI Black Ark spam in Campaign
This should work for both Mortal Empires and the Vortex campaigns.
CA set the ritual_weight state for the Sacrifice to Mathlann rite to its highest value (10). This means that every Dark Elf AI faction capable of producing Black Arks via the rite will prioritise this every 25 turns.
Dark Elves tend to confederate into one or two superpower confederations (usually Naggarond) the longer the campaign lasts. Each time they confederate, the Black Arks from the confederated faction will be added to the bigger faction’s roster.
The result of this means this massive superpower faction ends up with a very large amount of Black Arks (usually 20-30) by the time turn ~150 comes around.
As many will have noticed, the AI in Warhammer 2 cannot use Black Arks properly in that they are incapable of attacking ports. The AI still has some sort prioritisation that means they will surround certain settlements with ports, but without anything happening. This usually results in the situation in the mod picture (which is a Warhammer 3 screenshot, but you get the idea), where the Dark Elf superpower has a massive strength campaign ranking (usually top 3) but this is predominately made up of their gazillion Black Arks huddled round some coastal settlement they are desperately all trying to attack.
The mod makes the following table changes to the ritual_weight table for Dark Elves (original vanilla values in the brackets):
wh2_dlc10_ritual_def_drakira 2 (0)
wh2_main_ritual_def_mathlann 1 (10)
wh2_dlc11_ritual_def_anath_raema 2 (1)
wh2_dlc14_ritual_def_warmaster 3 (2)
wh2_dlc14_ritual_def_witch_king 4 (3)
wh2_main_ritual_def_atharti 7 (6)
wh2_main_ritual_def_hekarti 2 (1)
wh2_main_ritual_def_khaine 7 (6)
The Mathlaan rite was reduced to the lowest value of 1 and all other Dark Elf rites were raised by +1 to provide some extra overall weighting towards non-Mathlaan rites. The Drakira rite, unique to Har Ganeth, is at 0 in vanilla – there may be a reason why CA chose this to be the case (along with the Tomb Kings Ptra rite), but given that it provides a number of straightforward buffs I didn’t see any reason to not raise it alongside the other rites. I have not noticed any ill-effects as a result of the Drakira change, but would welcome any confirmation from others!
The result of this is that Dark Elf faction campaign AI should now, in the round, prioritise other rites over spawning Black Arks at every available opportunity. Dark Elf factions can still produce Black Arks, as despite their broken implementation for AI, they are still used for global recruitment and replenishment, and are reasonably effective as a way for the AI to exercise force in coastal seas – the ritual weight edit in theory should tone down the mechanic without removing it completely.
Nonetheless, you should see a more reasonable number of Black Arks (typically ~10 in my end-game campaigns), which allows the AI to complement this with more land-based armies. This should make Dark Elf AI more interesting in campaigns overall.
Please do try the mod out and report any unintended behaviour!
Should be compatible with Black Ark Caps that caps Black Arks to 3 for all Dark Elf factions and increases the slave cost and turn cooldown of the Mathlann rite.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
