Enhanced AI Mod

[anexgohan]

Enhanced AI improves the Stellaris AI.
Complete rewrite of the old mod due to modding changes implemented by Paradox, thankfully the mod works much better than previous one, be careful the AI's do actually bite now and keep you on your toes. Good Luck

This AI is not for beginners as they will do their best to compete with you and each other, all AI's are generally much more aggressive and expansive than before.
The AI's do not Cheat at all, they play at a level playing field with humans no hidden advantages or boosts at all. They will beat you Fair and Square.
Recommended difficulty is atleast hard.

Steam Workshop Link:
Enhanced AI improves the Stellaris AI.

Supported Version:
Patch 2.0 aka Cherryh
Ironman Compatible:
No
Features:

• Enhanced Sector AI
  has been implemented for better sector AI both in field of decision making and management. More Sectors are an actual asset to have now.
• All decision Making have been tested to Min Max extremes to give AI competitiveness against Humans and other AI's.
  
• The AI's do not Cheat at all, they play at a level playing field with humans no hidden advantages or boosts whatsoever. Unlike other Ai modders I do not believe in providing resource boosts or advantages to the Ai, the Ai's will compete, beat you fair and square and you wont feel bad or cheated about it, just type gg after you loose.
  
• Enhanced weighting for better Decision making and threat detection by AI.
• Improved AI to AI interactions no more endless AI Alliances. Ai's will measure the gains from Alliances and withdraw if they serve no strategic purpose.
• Boxed in AI's get more aggressive as they try to expand. With no more room to freely expand / colonize the AI's will start wars with who they hate and can relatively easily conquer. This can turn into huge galaxy wide Alliance wars late game.
• More willing to work with the player.
• No more Unrealistic relations hit with AI empires for taking planets on the other side of the galaxy.
• AI builds better Navy and Armies with better flavor of weapons. Empires will have preferences of weapons they are good at, no longer throw in every weapon available in designing ships.
• Border Friction is a thing now, more you share a border with AI more tension it will create. This is a major variation form base game, it creates a more chaotic and active galaxy. Once Allies no longer remain forever remain Allies entire game as more of their borders collide and no room to expand or grow tensions will rise. Can be countered with good diplomacy and peace pacts. But be careful not to upset your friends too much.
• AI's more willing to Attack and start Wars. Base Aggressiveness and situational aggressiveness both increased.
• Threat Calculations have received major overhaul. Ai's prioritize bordering colonies and strategic interest and choke points more which they can take and hold for themselves in a peace deal afterwards.
• Bigger you are the more AI's will join together against you. What other choice do smaller empires have against you.
• Alliances that naturally form or out of necessity make more sense now.
• AI's more willing to trade now and exchange Maps.
• Better resource management at peace and during wars.
• AI's will mix fleet composition and weapons systems.
• Better Resource management by Sectors and more sensible Builds.

Supported Version:
1.4.1
Ironman Compatible:
No

Planned Features :

• All Planned features that were envisioned are completed and implemented into the Mod. The Mod is now Feature Complete.
• Complete rework of Threat mechanics such that empires which have a reason for being scared of you or other AI's share more threat but not completely ruin your game for taking few planets and making empires on the other side of galaxy who you have good relations or have no ill will feel threatened. Done
• Sector AI, as 1.1 and 1.2 rolls out and I test the Sector AI, a new sector AI will be implemented and integrated within this mod.
  Enhanced Sector AI has Been Implemented please remove Better Sectors Mod or any other mod that alters Sector AI.
• Better Ship designs by AI more mix and match. Done
• Some love towards Alliances and Federations. Done

Modular Nature of the Mod:

The mod is very modular and will be compatible with most other mods unless they change the exact same lines of code in which case it will overwrite my code but still will not cause any issues.

The mod contains two files in folder "EnhancedAI\common\defines" named "enAI_defines.txt" & "enES_defines.txt"

• enAI_defines.txt contains all code related to decision making and prioritizing goals, Buildings and relations, how to handle fleets and designing them, Threat calculations and Station building and Planatery buildings.
• enES_defines.txt contains all code related to Economy and Sector management and resource distribution empire wide and sector wide.

You can delete any file if you just want the other module, for example you can delete the "enES_defines.txt" file if you do not want the Enhanced Sectors part of the mod.

I do not recommend deleting any file as they complement each other and you should keep them both if you want the full functionality of this mod and how its intended to be used.

Recommended and Compatible Mods:
Please check that each mod support the latest version of the game or there will be conflicts that I cannot support.

• FasterShipUpgrade (Shameless Plug of my own mod)
• ZBeautiful Battles (Name says it all, beautiful mod)
• A Better System Scale (Makes space great again)
• UI Overhaul 1080p (Makes UI great again, cannot play without it)
• Galaxies Unlimited 1.0.2 (More Starting galaxies more fun)
• Expanded War Demands (Can do more than take or liberate Planets)
• More Spaceport Modules (Great concept, makes Spaceports great again and Enhanced AI handles MSM quite well) < Redundant after patch 2.0 >
• Reduce Aura Graphics (Now you can actually look and be amazed at your little death machines.)
• Remove stranded foreign stations (Since Enhanced AI's now build more stations and strategically place stations and outposts this is a must to get rid of those stations after war)
• Any Cosmetic Mod or Namelist Mod.

Incompatible Mods:

Better Sector Mod by norad (Not compatible with Enhanced AI as Enhanced AI has its own Enhanced Sector AI integrated which far exceeds the scope of Better Sectors Mod.)

Special Thank's to Reth for inspiration:
AI Rebalance by reth (Not compatible with Enhanced AI for obvious reasons.)

Word from author:
Ai is complex and improving it is an ongoing process, I can always use some suggestions and user inputs, please let me know what you think, what works for you what not, what you like and what you hate. Suggestions and Interaction is the only way this mod will become better and better.

Spoiler

Please Rate if you find this useful so others can find it as well.

 

[lifehole]

Interesting mod, is there a list of changed values?

 

[ramius3443]

Compatable with Beautiful battle mod?

 

[anexgohan]

Interesting mod, is there a list of changed values?

The list of changes is huge and growing, almost everything related to how AI's work has been tweaked, currently working on an integration of Enhanced Sector AI within the mod.

 

[anexgohan]

Compatable with Beautiful battle mod?

Yes it is compatible with Beautiful Battles, as long as mods don't change AI related values and opinions they should be compatible, if not let me know and i'll send a mini patch your way.

 

[lifehole]

Wow, after testing, I really like this mod. The AI actually left an alliance when it didn't fit it's interest! The diplomacy feels much more realistic and pragmatic, and stuff actually changes!

I think all that needs to happen now is some more internal instability in AI empires that causes overextension to be more of a problem.

However, I do think the factions blob a little bit too fast. I haven't seen many effective coalitions form, but the coalitions that do form and the people who leave/join alliances make sense. Most of the time they stand little chance against the large blobs that form, though.

 

[anexgohan]

Wow, after testing, I really like this mod. The AI actually left an alliance when it didn't fit it's interest! The diplomacy feels much more realistic and pragmatic, and stuff actually changes!

I think all that needs to happen now is some more internal instability in AI empires that causes overextension to be more of a problem.

However, I do think the factions blob a little bit too fast. I haven't seen many effective coalitions form, but the coalitions that do form and the people who leave/join alliances make sense. Most of the time they stand little chance against the large blobs that form, though.

Thankyou, I'm so pleased to hear you are liking it and having fun. The AI will bunch up as they explore and find one another, also when someone will get aggressive they will retaliate more against him due to Mutual threat modifier.
The Internal Instability will come when there is less and less room to expand and AI's will start declaring more risky wars due to the boxed in and less colony multiplier.
Also if you don't mind could you simply copy paste your post over at steam workshop page in the comments section to help get this a bit traction.
While i'm at it the Enhanced Sector AI integration is half way done and will be implementing that as well today itself hopefully as the vanilla one is just awful.

 

[Kenshi]

Sounds great! I will give it a try! One question: I am playing an Ironman Game in the moment, what exactly does "Ironman compatible:no" mean? what will happen to my game?

 

[anexgohan]

Sounds great! I will give it a try! One question: I am playing an Ironman Game in the moment, what exactly does "Ironman compatible:no" mean? what will happen to my game?

I think it will no longer be an Ironman.

 

[Kenshi]

I think it will no longer be an Ironman.

ok, i can live with that

 

[lifehole]

After looking through the values you've changed, I pretty much agree with everything there. However, I do think the 'boxed in' aggressiveness for non-expansionistic empires is slightly too high. Either way, great job with this.

 

[Kurisu Paifuaa]

anexgohan,

How are you balancing with regard to the AI aggressiveness setting (1.1 beta)? Normal setting, or maximum?

 

[anexgohan]

anexgohan,

How are you balancing with regard to the AI aggressiveness setting (1.1 beta)? Normal setting, or maximum?

I'm testing it currently for normal Aggressiveness and it works perfect, so I would suggest choosing that, but having looked at the high settings I would recommend that aswell but beware you will have lots of AI wars going and a much more vibrant galaxy. All my mod does is try to make sense of all things AI, so don't expect a friendly AI declaring war on you unless it has a reason to and the power to back it up with.

 

[anexgohan]

After looking through the values you've changed, I pretty much agree with everything there. However, I do think the 'boxed in' aggressiveness for non-expansionistic empires is slightly too high. Either way, great job with this.

Thankyou for your constant support it means a lot, I came to those values after a playtest where I boxed in 2 AI's and this was the most human like they seemed to be on, they both formed an alliance but not a federation as no other empire wanted to support them as they had nothing to gain from their war, so the two AI left their seperate federatiions to form an alliance between themselves and attacked me as I was the one who was boxing them in. Actually they sorta won and I agreed to release 2 planets. Loosing to an AI never felt so good.
I'm constantly testing this, so let me know what you think should I reduce the values by half or 75% maybe if it seems too harsh.
My thinking was Expansionist or not the AI should be in it to win it and not be fodder for me or aggressive AI's to eat up.
Also, above is the reason I'm currently working on integrating an Enhanced Sector AI and just a general builder AI into the mod so the non expansionists can build tall and have heavy defenses to bleed you for every parsec of their territory.

 

[lifehole]

Thankyou for your constant support it means a lot, I came to those values after a playtest where I boxed in 2 AI's and this was the most human like they seemed to be on, they both formed an alliance but not a federation as no other empire wanted to support them as they had nothing to gain from their war, so the two AI left their seperate federatiions to form an alliance between themselves and attacked me as I was the one who was boxing them in. Actually they sorta won and I agreed to release 2 planets. Loosing to an AI never felt so good.
I'm constantly testing this, so let me know what you think should I reduce the values by half or 75% maybe if it seems too harsh.
My thinking was Expansionist or not the AI should be in it to win it and not be fodder for me or aggressive AI's to eat up.
Also, above is the reason I'm currently working on integrating an Enhanced Sector AI and just a general builder AI into the mod so the non expansionists can build tall and have heavy defenses to bleed you for every parsec of their territory.

I was actually testing on high expansion (was used to setting it to that because that's the funnest with 1.1b) but after changing it normal I'm seeing soem really interesting stuff. On a medium elliptical galaxy about 300 yrs in interesting stuff is still happening so that's about all one could ask for considering that stopped at about the 40 yr mark in the base game.

 

[anexgohan]

Enhanced Sector AI has been integrated and implemented inside Enhanced AI mod, please remove Better Sectors Mod or any other mod that alters Sector AI.

 

[lifehole]

Sorry if I'm spamming this thread, but I just wanted to add more interesting observations.

So, in the games I've tried (observed), a lot of interesting stuff happens. But one very fun thing I'm seeing now is that due to all the war, the ethics that the galaxy doesn't like are quickly purged. People also federate around ethics and mutual interest in more interesting ways. I had a game with over 30 empires in the end (one of which had 2200 pops and owned half the galaxy), and one thing they had in common was that all but three of them were.. spiritualist. Only 3 weren't, and they were the current target of the horrid wars of the galaxy. Most were fanatic. The 2200 pop one was an evangelizing zealot. All the rest were in alliances of 'spiritual seekers', while the 'evangelizing zealots' were quickly eaten up into the greater 2200 blob.

In another game I tried, it was the other way around. The galaxy was seperated into 3 alliances/federations. One was a materialist alliance, with a Peaceful Trader, Ruthless Capitalist, and Erudite Explorer. They owned around 40% of the galaxy (in pop). The other was a gigantic, massive federation filled with tons of xenophiles and pacifists, mostly materialists, mostly Federation Builders, Flocks, Explorers, Traders. They owned another 40%. The one thing these two massive alliances had in common: Nobody in them was spiritualist. At all. Because the spiritualist/materialist AI personality archetype split fundamentally divided them.

The other 20% of the galaxy was the scourge, and a rapidly dying alliance of purely spiritualist empires that were being munched on.

Both of these games were about 300 years in.

Great mod. I wonder if you could add additional AI archetypes, to spice things up? It's super fun as it is and I imagine that would be hard to balance, but I think that'd be moddable?

 

[lifehole]

Also, I just had a game where one AI empire conquered the entire galaxy. I've never seen that before.

So far that's 3 different outcomes, while the base game only had 1.5 (federation gridlock, sometimes one empire got a large amount)

 

[xarvos]

very nice mod good work =) althou I have bit of a problem when I use enh ai mod for some reason sectors build like 10 spaceports all on top of eachother and when I disable ai mod then it works normaly again. I haven't been able to pinpoint the reason why it does that because my game is modded like very heavily I just love tweaking stuff. according to steam 203hrs played already hahhah

Edit: sectors work normaly with ai mod and vanilla 1.1b sector_types. I didnt have time to pinpoint the space station stacking problem tho. Will try to find the problem when I get off from work

 

[Wouter445]

I am a bit skeptical about this, AI is one of the most difficult thing's to program/moding.
but i give it a try none there less what's the harm.