AI personalities

Note that changing AI Personality so as to play against DreadLord AI is considered cheating for Metaverse play because it is not an option selectable from within game and because each DreadLord AI receives 20K BC's *per turn* and it's a simple matter to swindle 160K BC's from them each and every turn beginning March 1st of year 0.

Of course for non-Metaverse play you're free to play with whatever options you wish but in general the legitimately selectable options for AI personality make far less difference than how you spend racial ability points or political party selection.

Do you know anything about AIs 0, 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, or anything 12 or higher?

Hi Quaternus,

I was curious about the differences between ai "personalities" too, and have tried experimenting with different settings, then running the game with no human player in cheat mode to see if certain races seemed stronger or weaker with different personality settings.

Here are some observations:

If you switch the evil races to one of the personalities other than 7, they do a better job expanding on large maps. This mainly effects the Drengin and Yor: the Korath do a pretty good job expanding even without colony ships because of their spore ships.

AI personality 8 likes to get the Restaurant of Eternity and other influence wonders. Also goes heavy on the manufacturing upgrades.

AI personality 11 is the "generic" one and works pretty well, although it is prone to one particular stupidity: the Korx and Altarians both will be building troop transports before they even have any military ships that can attack! For some reason this doesn't happen to the Arceans, although they also use personality 11.

I've never tried the other numbers (1, 2, etc..). I think I read they either do nothing or break the game.

Some things I've noticed regarding the AI personalities:

Personality 10 (Iconians and Torians) is what is responsible for the bug where those races don't develop some of their planets. It's not the tech tree as some have suggested - I created a custom opponent with Generic (11) personality and the Iconian tech tree and it used all of its planets fine.

The favored ship types of a race are based on its AI personality. 8 is the only one to make extensive use of Huge hulls and generally tends to favor capital ships. 10 uses Tiny hulls more then any of the others do and generally goes with a "zerg" strategy of large numbers of small ships. 11 and 7 generally use Small, Medium, and Large hulls only, with 7 using more Medium then Large and vice versa for 11.

Switching races with personality 7 to another personality definitely improves their colonizing. Since I don't play Metaverse, I edited my Drengin (the worst offender in terms of not colonizing) to use personality 11 while still using the Drengin dialogue tag, because the Drengin tend to have a lot of unique dialogue. It led to a vast improvement in their behavior.

From my test games, I think this is the product of the Altarian and Korx individual AI modules, not of AI personality 11. The Altarians and Korx, as well as the Terrans and Drath, will occasionally pursue a 'pacifist' strategy where they do no military research and focus on production. The Arcean AI, despite using the same personality, is much more militaristic. Some other features tied to individual race personality include the Korath use of spore ships (setting them to Drengin or Yor will cause them to use transports instead) and other SA-related behaviors. Additionally, the Drath AI appears to heavily buy other races' ships, which isn't done by any other race using personality 8.

Hopefully they will fix the flaws in these AIs...

Can you make your own galactic civlization futalistic with one another ike the goauld.

No, and what exactly does this have to do with the thread?

For what it's worth, the best way to simulate a civilization with multiple, otherwise identical factions is to just make multiple versions of that civilization with the editor.

On topic:

Another difference I've noticed between AI personalities is how they fight wars. 10 is by far the worst at managing its fleets, while 11 is the best and (especially in the case of the Arceans) is the only one that's any good at concentrating its forces.

7 likes to do blitzkriegs, although the Yor are the only ones that can pull off a "genuine" blitzkrieg because they're the only evil race that makes engines a priority.

8 isn't much better then 10 at fighting wars, but tends to do a fair amount of setting up forces before starting one. The Drath, in particular, move fleets to an area and build up forces before an attack. On a related note, the rare instances where an AI launches a sneak attack seem spread across all the personalities: I've experienced AI sneak attacks from the Terrans, Altarians, Yor, Iconians, and Korath.

Nice observations, qrtxian. A few other things: Drengin and Yor with personality 7 also become more competitive if you set the star density to "tight clusters". That way they start off with more habitable planets within their initial zone of influence, which they will colonize normally.

I wish the game's documentation discussed these differences more (or at all).

Sidenote: My ultimate wish for a GalCiv3 (or any type of Civilization-type game) would be for the editor to allow for custom player-modded ai scripts. Think how fun it would be to pit your custom ai against the built-in personalities or against other fans' creations.

Is it possible to write my own AI?

No.

I'm having problems getting the CPU to expand, regardless of AI. They like to stick with 2 planets for some reason.

What file should we be going in to mod these race personalities ? Does Korath from 7 to 8 stop them from using spore ships? I modded the raceconfig file and now in game it says all races are using "generic" under AI personality. what did I do wrong ?

The raceconfig file is the correct place to mod.

As far as I can tell, switching the Korath off their original personality does prevent them from using spore ships. I found a way to handle this, but you have to "cheat" a little - mod the Korath raceconfig file to give them a bunch of extra customization points, then set their aggression very high. This should allow the Korath (who aren't as badly affected by the colonization bug as the Drengin) to survive in the early game and start rushing with spore ships. I think AI 7 is meant to expand by invading anyway, so this works pretty well. I've tried it once, and the Korath, though only getting 7 planets through normal colonization, destroyed a nearby minor race and much of the Korx to wind up with 20 or so planets, same as the other strong AIs.

As far as the "generic" thing goes - AI 11 is the generic AI. As best as I can tell there is no way to switch an AI to use the exact personality of another AI race except by customizing them in-game, which unfortunately also gives them the other race's dialogue. If you don't care about that, I suppose that could be a way to give your fixed races more variety - there are slight differences between each race using an AI personality. For instance, the Drath buy ships a lot as compared to other races using AI 8, and they also seem like slower colonizers, although that might just be because of their pop growth penalty.