Abonner for at downloade
AI ECO+ - AI Economy Improvements

After some observation I've realized that the Gladius AI has some extreme deficiencies in how it manages cities:
1. It can't 'see' the loyalty bonus it has from difficulty. This is why it spams loyalty buildings and never rapidly expands despite having +100 loyalty on every city.
2. It doesn't end up building enough economic buildings at any point in the game, and it often just spams production buildings forever.
3. Instead of building research early it builds it at random points in the game, and it often heavily overbuilds it in the late game.

This mod is my attempt to rectify these problems in a way that's fun for people to engage with. Here is what the mod actually does and my rationale for the changes. Keep in mind that my tools are extremely limited, especially since I attempted to keep this mod compatible with every other mod that doesn't touch the AI's building priorities.

1. I've added a ~+10 loyalty bonus to the headquarters of most AI factions.

This change makes them expand early and often because this is loyalty the AI can 'see' since it comes from a city. Each AI ends up with 3 or 4 cities within 50 turns instead of basically capping out at 2. They will have significantly more stuff at any given difficulty even when the total loyalty cheats are lower than before; AI ECO+ Ultra Hard Necrons can beat base Impossible Astra Militarum.

2. The AI will now spam both production and economy buildings when it's done expanding (turn ~45). You can see what this looks like in the picture above, which is two Ultrahard AI going at it.

This section has a bit of depth required to explain it. First, Gladius' AI is a black box that we basically can't actually interact with. This is why very few 'AI improvement' mods exist. Our only mechanism for interacting with the AI is changing how it sees certain buildings and units. For example, the loyalty building appears as 'loyalty building' and it will build that during a loyalty shortage. One of the highest priority actions is 'stop a shortage'. It is basically impossible to stop it from building ore when it's negative as the Necrons, for example. This is the core mechanism my AI improvements exploit.

Mechanically, I made the AI think that the game's loyalty buildings are actually simultaneously production buildings and economic buildings instead of the actual loyalty building. The idea here is that once the AI is done expanding (it has burned through the initial loyalty on the HQ) it will think it's in a loyalty shortage and alternate between spamming eco + production as hard as possible with bouts of trying to fix all the other shortages it has going on.

On lower difficulties its late game potential is throttled significantly. On and above Very Hard it will basically be at full mechanical effectiveness unless the game goes extremely long.

3. The AI can no longer build research buildings nor influence buildings unless the faction requires it (Tyranids, etc).
Instead, every headquarters has an additional +6 science baked into it (+18 for Space Marines).

Combined with the Headquarters spam, this means that the AI wastes significantly less production while giving it a smoother research curve throughout the game that more closely match the research-heavy openings people use into the AI. It'll still make heroes and have some influence to use abilities just from having multiple headquarters.

Misc notes:
- The Tau AI is still extremely inconsistent and janky and can't hold a candle to the others. I recommend playing vs other factions or cranking up the difficulty to shore up its weaknesses while I figure out what I'm going to do here.
- Just like the base game, the AI can play some factions better than others.
- Some factions with simple lategame plans have a skew to certain kinds of production: Astra Militarum will end up going heavily into vehicles, etc.
- I have not touched the AI's poor unit choice because people have already made mods for that.

Rarely their early expansion can bug out and make their start slower than usual, this is mostly seen with Necrons because they've got extremely strange settler pathfinding I can't do anything about. This mod SHOULD be compatible with basically everything unless it touches the AI's building priorities. I however don't use any mods and haven't tested this at all.

Lastly, huge shout out to Gladius-modding channel on the Proxy Studios Discord and Vaeki in particular for the significant help they've offered. Enjoy!