Unofficialcrusaderpatch: Updating versions of AIC and AIV.

[Lolasik011]

I think we should update all AIC and AIV to newer versions in the patch. Some authors have newer versions of the files...

It would also be possible to add new authors for diversity ...

[Admiral-Gumpert]

I have a whole new AIC and AIV versions I would be grateful if someone could try them.

[J-T-de]

The easiest way would be, that the content creators upload their data to github and keep it updated there. Then one can include the (hopefully) always updated version in the UCP using submodules, like it is done with Evreys castles. Because, well, always manually collect the data is not so cool...

[Lolasik011]

I have a whole new AIC and AIV versions I would be grateful if someone could try them.

I'll test it.

[Lolasik011]

The easiest way would be, that the content creators upload their data to github and keep it updated there. Then one can include the (hopefully) always updated version in the UCP using submodules, like it is done with Evreys castles. Because, well, always manually collect the data is not so cool...

I agree.

[GRhin]

it would be really nice to have like a repository that the patcher loads aivs and aics from. even if its just a txt document somewhere on the internet with names and links to the files, so the online document gets updated and everybodies patcher automatically sees the updated options.

[Russianstory]

Great idea! Fortresses and AI bots need to be improved ... will there be 20 years soon since the release of the first part?))) It will be cool for 20 years how they changed). And also for those who will improve the AIV of pozhalst, keep in mind that now the healer can heal the lord. It will be great if a couple of pharmacies will be located near the enemy lord and I will periodically treat him.) The game will become a little more complicated and exciting.

=

Отличная идея! Крепости и ИИ ботов нуждаются в улучшении... там скоро же 20 лет со дня выхода первой части?))) Будет круто за 20 лет как они изменились). И ещё тем, кто будет улучшать АИВ пожалста учитывайте что теперь лекарь может лечить и лорда. Будет здорово если пара аптек будет стоят недалеко от вражеского лорда и периодически его буду лечить.) Игра станет чуть сложнее и увлекательнее.

[Admiral-Gumpert]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FtyKxEWid0O_NDP95WaA5CZPeQQeFhCQ , Download those files and make a new folder inside your game directory called "aic" and paste AIC.aic inside it , Dont forget to make a backup of the AIV files before pasting them , Any suggestions and opinions about the AIs are welcomed !

[Lolasik011]

@Admiral-Gumpert

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FtyKxEWid0O_NDP95WaA5CZPeQQeFhCQ , Download those files and make a new folder inside your game directory called "aic" and paste AIC.aic inside it , Dont forget to make a backup of the AIV files before pasting them , Any suggestions and opinions about the AIs are welcomed !

Thank you. I loved it.
Will you further improve your AI?

[Admiral-Gumpert]

@Admiral-Gumpert

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FtyKxEWid0O_NDP95WaA5CZPeQQeFhCQ , Download those files and make a new folder inside your game directory called "aic" and paste AIC.aic inside it , Dont forget to make a backup of the AIV files before pasting them , Any suggestions and opinions about the AIs are welcomed !

Thank you. I loved it.
Will you further improve your AI?

You're welcome , Yes there's always room for improvement but the problem is the map , AIs now make bigger castles and I have tested them on a huge amount of maps and they usually struggle to build their castles without any problems , But yeah I will work hard to improve them :)

Also you may have saw the arabian AIs now use some chapels and churchs , but that doesn't make sense at all they should use mosques or something like that , So I decided to change the appearance and the sounds of the chapel and the church to make them function as a mosque , and it works fine until you see a priest enters a "mosque" :D (which again doesnt make any sense) If there's only a way to make 2 individual humans 1 to enter the mosque and 1 to enter the church , or even to remove it completely without affecting the game

here's the mod if anyone is interested https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1rTD11WO6Mkzv585v6FqFSeuVfRGWnMnv

[Lolasik011]

@Admiral-Gumpert This is Amazing !

[Krarilotus]

I have a whole new AIC and AIV versions I would be grateful if someone could try them.

i ll check them out later today!
Can you tho upload some screenshots, maybe describe a bit what the rework is aiming for, and how you tested yourself so far?

Also if you want my current state of my efficient AI design, just check it out on my github, you can find it in my repository. There is also the newest aggressive AI aic.

The castles are work in progress and are still in the prototyping state. I aim to finish a full polished efficient castle set together with Heroesflorian by the end of 2020 to enhance the AI for low to medium gold situations on various vanilla maps in AI vs Player combat. They should be useable for the vanilla skirmishes and for multiplayer player vs AI matches.
https://github.com/Krarilotus/Stronghold-Crusader-efficient-AI

[Lolasik011]

i ll check them out later today!
Can you tho upload some screenshots, maybe describe a bit what the rework is aiming for, and how you tested yourself so far?

Also if you want my current state of my efficient AI design, just check it out on my github, you can find it in my repository. There is also the newest aggressive AI aic.

The castles are work in progress and are still in the prototyping state. I aim to finish a full polished efficient castle set together with Heroesflorian by the end of 2020 to enhance the AI for low to medium gold situations on various vanilla maps in AI vs Player combat. They should be useable for the vanilla skirmishes and for multiplayer player vs AI matches.
https://github.com/Krarilotus/Stronghold-Crusader-efficient-AI

I'll test

[Admiral-Gumpert]

I have a whole new AIC and AIV versions I would be grateful if someone could try them.

i ll check them out later today!
Can you tho upload some screenshots, maybe describe a bit what the rework is aiming for, and how you tested yourself so far?

Also if you want my current state of my efficient AI design, just check it out on my github, you can find it in my repository. There is also the newest aggressive AI aic.

The castles are work in progress and are still in the prototyping state. I aim to finish a full polished efficient castle set together with Heroesflorian by the end of 2020 to enhance the AI for low to medium gold situations on various vanilla maps in AI vs Player combat. They should be useable for the vanilla skirmishes and for multiplayer player vs AI matches.
https://github.com/Krarilotus/Stronghold-Crusader-efficient-AI

Here's a good example , Richard Lionheart was IMO one of the most unbalanced characters in the game , As he is the great leader of the crusaders and a sign in the game as he should be the primary rival to Saladin (which was also unbalanced by the way). I completely reworked both his castle and personality , I thought he should every single crusader unit in the game (almost) he should be using knights and macemen and also crossbowmen (he is worthy more than so much weaker characters to use such high grade and effective units)

His castle also contains cathedral , Which also does a good job showing that he cares about religion and religious beliefs , And he also uses monks as a bonus.

His castle isn't so big neither so small as he used to build it like . it just focuses on good and efficient economy and also a staggering defense . Those 2 screenshots were taken from a game which he goes up against 3 rats (which I show you also how he was improved) the game was set to normal and 8000 golds for AIs and shortly he made his good fortress and went to attack and his gold raised up to 14k.

And here's The Rat , The single worst opponent you can play against besides sultan , Also I reworked how his castle looks and functions (which he greatly needed) : Now he is a little tougher but he will have his fear factor bonus always set to -5 as he makes everything nearly as fast as possible because we always knew him as the annoying rat he will always spam troops at the start of the game !! , Now he uses tunnelers both for digging and also for the main attack , This screen shot shows him going up against Lionheart in a normal game with also 8k gold at the start .

What is a common change between all of the AIs is the defense , The probability of which an AI recruits a defensive unit is almost triple the time of which he recruits for an attack (expect for Rat) and I Changed in the UCP the scale of the attacks to be 1.5 times , So when an AI attacks he will take a lot of time to prepare the next attack but each time it will be a little more devastating or at least hugely annoying to the target.

I'm currently testing AI around maps with various settings from 8k to 40k and so on , I welcome any suggestions and improvements !
"sorry for taking too long"

[Admiral-Gumpert]

New update : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1FtyKxEWid0O_NDP95WaA5CZPeQQeFhCQ

[Lolasik011]

@Admiral-Gumpert
Your AI is Amazing. But there is one small mistake.
AI sends out the engineers first to attack. So the AI loses its ability to use siege weapons.

[Admiral-Gumpert]

@Admiral-Gumpert
Your AI is Amazing. But there is one small mistake.
AI sends out the engineers first to attack. So the AI loses its ability to use siege weapons.

Yeah I see , I cant seem to know how to fix this btw do you know how to make the main units go to the castle before the engineers? I personally think it has to do something with the variables from "unknown129" to "unknown132"

[Krarilotus]

I dont know how to fix your engineer problem, but putting some troops into the main army that are faster than them and shoot enemies usually helps protecting the rally spot (horsearchers/archers... tha kinda stuff)

I looked over the AIV's. One thing: You dont need to copy the AIV's to have 8 of the same one for one character. One is enough.

Also, maybe give enflameable buildings the chance to get some pathway for the firedepartment?
Oftentimes, your castles are very suseptible to fire. Wolf in particular.

Many similar designs, with the same wall and Tower Box, if that works for you great :D Tho if you have the option of 8 different castles, you might want to position at least the important buildings slightly different in each one, so compatibility is better for more maps...

Overall, there are also some inefficiencies: just example for the wolf: 5 breweries for 3 inns? He will buy hops nonstop, and sell his beer, loosing money like that isnt fun nor any good for the AI. But it should work out with you AIC i suppose, but havnt yet looked to deeply into it. Just keep in mind, that more is not always better, as players dont struggle with the amount but with the attack timings of troops usually and how those troops behave.

Keep up working on these, and i d recommend testing all AI castles also with 2k gold, to find major weaknesses in economy faster. That way, you ll see what AI's go through if they start in a fight or are on a less ressource heavy map. In the End you must ask yourself, if these castles are optimized to fight vs players or vs AI. Hope i could help out a bit :D

[Admiral-Gumpert]

I dont know how to fix your engineer problem, but putting some troops into the main army that are faster than them and shoot enemies usually helps protecting the rally spot (horsearchers/archers... tha kinda stuff)

I looked over the AIV's. One thing: You dont need to copy the AIV's to have 8 of the same one for one character. One is enough.

Also, maybe give enflameable buildings the chance to get some pathway for the firedepartment?
Oftentimes, your castles are very suseptible to fire. Wolf in particular.

Many similar designs, with the same wall and Tower Box, if that works for you great :D Tho if you have the option of 8 different castles, you might want to position at least the important buildings slightly different in each one, so compatibility is better for more maps...

Overall, there are also some inefficiencies: just example for the wolf: 5 breweries for 3 inns? He will buy hops nonstop, and sell his beer, loosing money like that isnt fun nor any good for the AI. But it should work out with you AIC i suppose, but havnt yet looked to deeply into it. Just keep in mind, that more is not always better, as players dont struggle with the amount but with the attack timings of troops usually and how those troops behave.

Keep up working on these, and i d recommend testing all AI castles also with 2k gold, to find major weaknesses in economy faster. That way, you ll see what AI's go through if they start in a fight or are on a less ressource heavy map. In the End you must ask yourself, if these castles are optimized to fight vs players or vs AI. Hope i could help out a bit :D

I already know about the the 7 copies of the same castle but for some reason IDK why I didnt remove them?? , Secondly I was really out of ideas my first focusing was on how to make a good looking castle with tough defense but in the same time to be almost fitting across all maps on the game (quite hard tho)

Also for the wolf he is using huge negative fear factor , that way fewer buildings doesnt mean lower incomes or making , but I will observe that soon :) .

As I'm new to the AIC stuff I cant deeply program how an AI attacks not what his attack contains , As always there's a huge room for improvement

[Admiral-Gumpert]

Also @Krarilotus I saw today your video "Rat(wolfkiller)" and its amazing , nice design great economy and overall defense is staggering , and to build a good AI like yours it usually will have his castle to be larger in overall size , Also how did you control the AI it shows at the start of the video that you can see his popularity , how did you do this? this will greatly increase how someone observes an AI.

[J-T-de]

Well, I am no mod or so, but it feels like this went a bit too off-topic...

[Krarilotus]

Sorry, i wish there was a way people would just ask me those questions directly over discord:
Krarilotus#6749
As i can tell you for the spectator that can actively do things, search for active spectator bug crusader and you should find my video on how to enable it. Also i have 16 maps in my repository with it enabled to test ai's for vanilla style. Most of them are out of the vanilla game.

[Admiral-Gumpert]

Ok I will try to not spam here so much we can talk more on discord :+1: