It seems almost impossible, or at least extremely impractical, to manipulate the weights fruitfully without knowing how they are implemented. I am guessing it might be possible for someone with a lot of time, but I doubt they will come up with any major improvement without expending an unbelievable effort compared to what it would take if you could at least know how they are used (much less tinker/add/rework them to a personal approach to the problem). I am almost certain by the time a problem is solved via playing with the weights, it will no longer exist in the game anyway. 

I could be wrong though, but I have tasted how hard even simple problems in producing intelligent behavior can be to solve, and this isn't simple.

In one thread I tried to give someone advice on how to make the AI quit declaring war. This isn't trying to improve the AI, it is just trying to eliminate a behavior. There were weights called something like warPriority in that file, one for each stage of the game, which had some small positive value, and I thought setting them to 0 would have the effect of the AI not declaring war. It seemed reasonable, but it apparently didn't work that way. That is the extra problem, you would have to tinker with something, see if your hypothesis on how it even works is accurate, and then fine-tune it if you ever got to the point you understand what it does (if it happened to do something relevant). That extra step of removal from an already difficult problem seems like a nightmare.

I would be fascinated if someone actually made significant improvements this way, but I am dissuaded from even trying it because of the above difficulty. It seems a little like making blindfolded swings at pitches to me.

Really eager to see what you come up with. Wouldn't even mind if you post a quickie-mod on this thread.

While I am BY FAR not an expert in AI, I just wanted to comment on the Factor Power. I am currently playing with World Difficulty set to Hard and AI difficulty set to Challenging. It is my hope that Challenging will mean just that: Difficult AI without requiring them to 'cheat'. In the game I'm playing, Spring of 194 AC, I'm at 90 FP whereas the next closest faction, Yithral is only at 37 FP. It doesn't make sense. We haven't been at war or anything like that, but they are a decently sized faction and I've seen them pack a punch against nearby monsters....probably better than my faction currently can.

In anycase, I suppose my point to all this is that as you go through your redevelopment of the AI, I am hoping that the Faction Power will also be modified as a result so that Challenging becomes...well more Challenging.

Thanks.

Any update on the AI love? I would love to know what's going on!

Brad probably made the AI too good and it beat him bad. Probably too embarassed to share the results.

The AI figured out how to cast strategic spells in real life.  Now our only hope for salvation lies in the hands of the one man brave enough to lead us: John Connor.  (Fortunately, Dereck never designed a "time travel" spell for the game, so I think we're gonna be fine.)

ah, but there is the autosave loophole....move anywhere on the map for free by just setting autosave turns to 1 and continually reloading your game.  

My take on the AI is this: As long as the tactical AI is not able to kill player units, all strategic improvements will not do much. Just look at DAS24680 ongoing letsplay on youtube. He was able to eradicate his biggest rival faction in just a few turns without loosing any unit. The AI needs to focus on killing the weakest player units. If it can not decimate the player armies, bigger numbers on the strategic level won't matter. The player will just get stronger. 

EDIT: Just look at the battle in DAS latest episode starting around 22 min in (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhkeBZLPhsU&html5=1). The AI player is superior in terms of raw power. However, instead of going  for the healer and the mages in the back it wastes its strength by attacking the hardest to kill units in the frontline. If the AI had gone for the softer targets, the battle would have seen a different outcome. 

Zarkis, the tactical AI will definitely benefit from some love as welll, but one thing at a time. Frogboy has said he's planning to sit down and watch all those youtube videos before he starts improving the tactical AI. I assume the tactical changes will be added to a later patch than the strategic AI.

The strategic AI can benefit from some aspects of the tactical. For instance, if it were to build more effective troops then the tactical AI would struggle less. Even better, if the strategic AI could analyze whether or not its troops would be effective.

Could you have players opt in to upload troop effectiveness stats for some en mass machine learning?

Don't get me wrong. I am grateful for all the changes to the AI made. Stardock is definitly doing more when it comes to polishing their games then most companies I know. I just think that a better targeting logic for the AI on the tactical map would be the most direct approach to make the game more challenging.

I haven't had time to play LH in a while now so haven't posted much on the forums recently (that time thing again!). But I wanted to just pop in and point out that this sort of problem is exactly why you still have people like legaceez creating his (poorly written) rant thread. Like most of the people on the board I am pleased that LH is more polished than any of the previous iterations but the fact remains it is still remarkably buggy and full of exploits.

Before you say I'm being unreasonable, let me ask you a question. If you played Civ 4 or 5, one or two expansions after first release what do you think the chances would be that when you reload a game it would be in a substantially different state from when it was saved? OK, it was a rhetorical question because I'm going to answer it for you, the answer is negligible. How about the chances of there being such an easy and overpowered exploit as queuing pioneers to completely get around the city population limit and ensure you always get maximum growth? Again, negligible. Yet both of these are known problems that have existed for ages in LH/FE.

There are plenty more, mostly less critical, but in total they are still rather frustrating. I would really like Stardock to focus on polishing the game more. Maybe they will next?

And yet, for all its polish, Civ V is still an utterly boring exercise in button pushing. 

They should fix the save bug.  They might address some exploits (not requiring resources to upgrade units) -- though I doubt it.  I think, in a few weeks, we'll see a patch to upgrade the AI and maybe a couple more like that over the next 6 months as long as Brad's interested and then Stardock will move on and leave LH to the modding community.

I think Civ IV BTS is clearly a better designed strategy game than Civ V but I would still rate Civ V in its current form (ie after the first expansion) as a well above average 4X game.

In any case my point was more about the polish of the games. As you say hopefully there will be further patches fixing more bugs and exploits.

Not sure if this falls under "AI" exactly, but I've had terrible experiences with pathfinding on a few occasions.  You tell a unit to move to a map square two steps away, maybe across a river or a swamp, and instead of moving in that direction they rush off in the opposite direction looking for a road to use so they can get there in 4 turns. Not funny when you're trying to intercept an enemy(monster) that's moving on your city or outpost.

On at least a couple of occasions I've had problems of this nature on tactical battlefields. try to get a unit to advance, and instead it rushes to the back ... I have a suspicion that this may have to do with elevation and the 'click' gets intercepted by inaccesible terrain, just like it happens with ranged-targeting from time to time; I've had enemy units sit in the bottom right corner of the battlefields that could not be targeted by archers or mages. It is those situations where the pathing problem also seems to occur, have to lead my attacking units in, baby step by baby step.

Ok, not the battle AI, or the strategic AI, but definitely two issues there i.m.o.

I would like to see the AI polished more and it's kind of sad that it has to be an after action item to clean up simple stuff like the AI focusing fire for swarm attacks or prioritizing obvious targets.  I'm not that great of a player and immediately grasped how ludicrously overpowered the swarm mechanic is - the AI should be locked in to maximizing it like crazy (otherwise it gives the player a ridiculous advantage).  You would think that even the most basic testing/playing would reveal the completely obvious things (and if *I* figure it out it must be pretty obvious).

Target priority is a tough one because players are going to have lots of different opinions on what should be taken out first.  Some targets may seem obvious under certain circumstances but what's obvious to a human could involve a boatload of "thinking" for an AI.

Ultimately the tactical AI is decent.  I would like it to be stronger but you have to realize that there are a bazillion factors that a human processes for every battle - factors both pertinent to the current battle and the big picture.  The AI does pretty well for the most part considering the complexity.

What does this have to do with a discussion about AI and bugs?  But I'll bite...

I love Civ 5 and consider it best in series but there are times when mid/late game drags and/or I don't finish a game that's a sure win due the tedium of finishing long drawn out games that are sure wins.  I'm hoping the xpac spices up late game a bit more.

However.

I don't think LH is any different and most 4X suffer the same thing.  Mid/late game is often less exciting and/or the turns get longer and longer as slug thru wrapping up games.  I find LH tedious in mid/late game because:

- tech tree seems tiny, once you get rolling there's little left, it removes some spice when have nothing to look forward to for tech.  Picking the next 10% repeatable upgrade is pretty much button pushing and is unremarkable regardless.

- I love the tactical combat but the autoresolve is so iffy that I often feel that I need to manually do what should be trivial battles at times, multiply buy having several active armies needing to resolve 1 or more battles in a turn and you get some long turns.  Manually slugging thru trivial tactical is just button pushing (and holding down shift to speed it up).  It requires next to no though for me to get thru such battles and I don't often use magic or any hero abilities for them, but too often if I leave them to autoresolve my armies take incomprehensible amounts of damage.

- road system is ultra wonky, not easy to get a "road builder" (I don't really wanna give a hero that ability), maps are huge, takes forever to get armies to places they can be doing something.  Slowing to a crawl on roads in enemy territory is necessary but brutal.  Setting long paths for units is generally not a great idea since you have no idea how/where they might path and/or what random stuff they may encounter in the fog, controlling every single unit/army for every single move ends up being a LOT of button pushing.

- early city management is interesting.  Once your core cities are "done" and you're conquering, it's a little less interesting to clean up the AI cities you capture, especially the runts they tend to eventually spawn at former outposts (I'm guessing they upgrade the land via spell then create a city on the usually crappy resulting plots).  You can raze the runts but if there's any space to build a city and a spot to build it on, then as in most games of this genre, if an AI can build a crappy city, it will build that crappy city, no matter what.  So, mid/late game city management is less thrilling.

- one reason I sometimes don't finish civ 5 games is because I just don't want to slug out the latter part of games - I personally usually find the earlier stages of the game more interesting, the exploring, the REX, trying to grab some early wonders, fighting early wars to establish a solid position, early worker actions that have more impact, overcoming the threat of barbarians, etc.  I feel pretty much the same way in elemental.  The world is less exciting once you clear most of the monsters, have every reasonable city plot settled, and are to the point where your armies are ludicrously powerful (either by xp, gear/unit size, or both).

What I usually say when people discuss this particular topic is, so what?  It's how the genre rolls.  Like it and play, or don't.  It's not something that can be easily cured because the very nature of these games is to usually create a huge empire, or have a long term goal, and things like that take time.

But it's kind of silly to bag on Civ 5 for having mid/late game tedium when it's something you can almost always find in the genre, and when LH is surely not lacking for it either.