AI Testing

[donnie_1974_texas]

Nothing will stop the AI from doing, by human standards, pretty dumb stuff. Can't be helped as best I can tell.

I have been experimenting a bit with modding the VP values of certain bases, out of all proportion to their current values. If one believes the manual (yeah, OK, I know, I know...) the AI logic for defending and capturing objective bases then it will fortify and attempt to capture surrounding bases as a means of protecting or seizing its main objective.

So, I have been postulating, and unfortunately, don't have the bandwidth to test this adequately, what would happen if one took the VP values for certain bases, say northern Australia and made them 1000 VPs or 10,000 VPs for the Japanese? Would the AI for Japan actually invade Northern Australia?

This would need to be an AI vs AI test and would probably have to run to end 1942 to see if there was any movement in that direction.

Has anyone tried such an approach to controlling the AI. The scenario editor is not much use as best I can tell in this area and I believe, based on some of my results, that there may be some hard coding of ports, objectives for the AI in the game itself.

[DuckofTindalos]

Sounds interesting. Go ahead and try it...

[JeffroK]

I had thoughts about this but was knocked on the head.
 
Something has to drive the AI in the campaign scenarios, this sounds as good as anything.
 
Drongo set up a scenario where the AI worked well (got a bit obnoxious and counterattacked!!), I believe it works better in shorter scenarios than the campaign. I

[pad152]

Sorry but the AI is scripted (with a hard coded target list for the campaigns), this is why you see it invade the same places time and again. I've built a scenario where I had the AI invade different places on day 1, it worked but as the game went on the AI would not even try to resupply them.

[el cid again]

This is essentially correct. However, there are things one can do to help the AI. One of them is placement of HQ. In less than campaign games you also have some modules you may program. And a technical trick is how you set up stockpiles. If they start at 90,000 or more - AI takes that as a signal of some sort "this location is a destination for that type of stuff" ....