I'm afraid I'll break the AI

[Naharez]

Hello everybody,

I'm new to modding (which means I have no idea how it works and never did anything like it in my life) and I wanted to "fix" my Gladius a little so I could enjoy it more. I play vs the AI mainly so any changes I'd make would probably directly affect AI viability and thus potentially break the game.

Three things which are my main concerns when playing against AI in Gladius are

- special ressources don't seem important enough in my humble opinion.
- once you destroy the first city of your opponent the rest usually turns into clean-up (chore)
- late game unit compositions don't seem realistic

And I wanted to fix that by adjusting a few values.

First of all I'd like to make it easier to recover when losing a city. I'd like to change the effect of the loyalty value (which goes up when you lose a city). So I wanted to try making it have double the effect (instead of -2%/+1% make it -4%/+2%), see how that plays and go from there. But this might completely break AI behaviour, so Idk if I could just do that without also having to modify AI behaviour.

Then I wanted to make special ressources give more... ressources. I'd like to quadruple the effect of them (so instead of +1 to something they give +4) to make capturing them more valuable and thus creating more focus on territorial control. This might also break the AI, because their usual expansive early game playstyle could maybe now easily be countered by unit rushes and gaining early map control. Idk what effect it would have before testing it.

Last but not least I wanted to make early game units cheaper to put more focus on them, even in the late game. At least I hope that'd be the effect. Or maybe just make all late game units more expensive? I think that'd be the cleaner approach.

But again, I don't know how the AI would react to this. Would they maybe just continue producing late game units, even though they'd be more expensive? The situation I want to produce is that armies consist of mostly basic units (guardsmen, boys, gaunts, etc.) with a few strong units in between. You know, the way it should be.

Could anyone help with this? What should I consider changing? Where is the data I'd have to look at. How would the AI react to these changes? Would this actually make sense at all?

I'd appreciate if I could get someone to help here.



Greetings

[Alex20na]

Hello everybody,

I'm new to modding (which means I have no idea how it works and never did anything like it in my life) and I wanted to "fix" my Gladius a little so I could enjoy it more. I play vs the AI mainly so any changes I'd make would probably directly affect AI viability and thus potentially break the game.

Three things which are my main concerns when playing against AI in Gladius are

- special ressources don't seem important enough in my humble opinion.
- once you destroy the first city of your opponent the rest usually turns into clean-up (chore)
- late game unit compositions don't seem realistic

And I wanted to fix that by adjusting a few values.

First of all I'd like to make it easier to recover when losing a city. I'd like to change the effect of the loyalty value (which goes up when you lose a city). So I wanted to try making it have double the effect (instead of -2%/+1% make it -4%/+2%), see how that plays and go from there. But this might completely break AI behaviour, so Idk if I could just do that without also having to modify AI behaviour.

Then I wanted to make special ressources give more... ressources. I'd like to quadruple the effect of them (so instead of +1 to something they give +4) to make capturing them more valuable and thus creating more focus on territorial control. This might also break the AI, because their usual expansive early game playstyle could maybe now easily be countered by unit rushes and gaining early map control. Idk what effect it would have before testing it.

Last but not least I wanted to make early game units cheaper to put more focus on them, even in the late game. At least I hope that'd be the effect. Or maybe just make all late game units more expensive? I think that'd be the cleaner approach.

But again, I don't know how the AI would react to this. Would they maybe just continue producing late game units, even though they'd be more expensive? The situation I want to produce is that armies consist of mostly basic units (guardsmen, boys, gaunts, etc.) with a few strong units in between. You know, the way it should be.

Could anyone help with this? What should I consider changing? Where is the data I'd have to look at. How would the AI react to these changes? Would this actually make sense at all?

I'd appreciate if I could get someone to help here.



Greetings

Go to : Documents\Proxy Studios\Gladius\Mods and Create a mod folder in My Documents folder, you want it to look something like this:

"Documents\Proxy Studios\Gladius\Mods\Mod Name\Data\World\Features". Copy the "Data" folder from your game into the Mod folder you created after the example I just showed you. So, if u want to modify the "Grox pastures" and other resources, just go to the "Features" folder. In regards to strong troops being a few and basic troops being like 80% of any armies, you can make the strong troops a lot more expensive and/or modify the turn it takes to build the respective unit. Let's say I want to make the guardsman more expensive and to take more turns to be produced:

I go to Mod Name\Data\World\Units\AstraMilitarum\Guardsman and modify the following values :

<foodCost set="10.0"/>
<productionCost set="24.0"/>
and maybe <foodUpkeep set="1.0"/> too.

Hope it helps. Play with the values until you like what you see. Don't expect to be perfect, in late game the AI will still try to to build only the best troops possible, so you will see more vehicles/bullgryns/tempestus scions than guardsman for an IG AI.......even tho they are expensive the AI will still force itself to produce the best units. You can activate the mod in the "extra" menu in the Main menu in game.

[Naharez]

I tried these and the AI was suddenly producing mass carnifexes. When I made stronger units "weaker" by making them more expensive, it just made the AI weaker in general.

Soooo, I guess I will have to trick the AI into producing mass infantry units by reassigning which buildings build what. If there''s a building only for guardsmen then the AI will only produce guardsmen in this building. At least I think that's what'll happen.

I'll keep you up to date.

[Alex20na]

I tried these and the AI was suddenly producing mass carnifexes. When I made stronger units "weaker" by making them more expensive, it just made the AI weaker in general.

Soooo, I guess I will have to trick the AI into producing mass infantry units by reassigning which buildings build what. If there''s a building only for guardsmen then the AI will only produce guardsmen in this building. At least I think that's what'll happen.

I'll keep you up to date.

I tried it with tyranids because I wanted to simulate how they got lots of gaunts that overwhelm their opponents and I did this months ago....and didn't change it since then, I can't understand how I forgot to tell you this. For example, they can produce Hormagaunts, Termagants and Gargoyles not only in the infantry building but also in the "Thropes", "Vehicles" and "Heroes" buildings. That combined with expensive units and you'll get more basic infantry than special units or vehicles. Try it and come back to tell me if it works, for me it does, but tried it only with tyranids and to a lesser degree with orks.