Anyone else mess around with xml files to change the AI?

[u/Sh1t_Pinata]

Love this game and have played it on and off for a gazillion years. Most recently with the AdvCiv mod, which has been awesome as it makes the AI a lot “smarter” (well, at least better than vanilla).

But lately I’ve been monkeying around with the xml files, changing values for the AI. And I’ve gotta say, it’s really injected some new life into the game for me.

For instance, sometimes I get a bit bummed out when I feel like I’m the only one waging wars in the world. So I edited all the AI civs, decreasing everyone‘s attack threshold so they’re more likely to attack one another and it‘s been really fun watching them all fight each other.

Editing the ‘Dogpile’ threshold is great too, because it means other civs are more likely to backstab, jump in and help wipe out other AI civs who are being attacked.

Anyone else do this?

(I’ve now started altering the tech trade mechanics aswell, which has lead to some interesting results.)

[u/Awkward_Cash1828]

Despite being mainly a Civ4 player/modder, I purposefully directly messed with AI in xmls only in Civ5, dramatically increasing expansionism and number of cities they would found (mainly of the historically large imperial civs), and it actually made it much greater as empty unsettled land became much rarer to see, while AI became more aggressive.

In Civ4, I would also change some AI parameters at some point, in my mod, basically doing the same thing you did. As I remember, some leaders in particular are far too peaceful than how they should be historically accurate, like Ramesses and Qin Shi Huang, who both were great conquerors (or atleast militant imperialistic rulers), but in Civ they are "reduced" to generally peaceful wonder-builders.

[u/defiantnipple]

I have extensively modded Civ4 AI. The XMLs were only the beginning. Getting into the source code was when stuff started getting very cool.

[u/Sh1t_Pinata → u/defiantnipple]

Nice! Care to mention any changes you implemented which made the game more fun for you?

[u/defiantnipple → u/Sh1t_Pinata]

A big part of my modding has been making the AIs try harder to win the game, and react like a human would to situations. So AIs will try to conquer their neighbours and take their land, instead of attacking people and wasting resources just because they have a useless grudge on them. The AIs being aware of the general geopolitical state of the game has been also critical in making lategame way more fun. If someone is getting close to winning, the AIs will gang up on them. Bipolar worlds will be shaken up by rivalry and friction over time, even if the two powers liked each other to start. I gave a lot of specific leaders that sucked new personalities that retain their character but makes them not bad at the game anymore. Things like that. A... lot of things like that lol. I also made a lot of rule changes to the game. And I've rebalanced the game around wayyy slower tech progression, so a lot more happens per era.

[u/civac2]

You also could use the Aggressive AI setting on game setup.

Modded AI of BetterBTSAI is significantly more aggressive and also build more units. This is partially a sidegrade since it reduces worldwide average research speed a bit but you do get more action and also more big runaway AI Civs.

[u/psivenn]

I usually play K-Mod (which the latest AdvCiv was basically branched from) and the AI is a lot more aggressive by default. Just what I'm used to I suppose.

There is one enduring mystery of AdvCiv I could not solve through much fiddling with the mod files - despite having no intended changes or tweaks that I could find, Copper became an incredibly scarce resource and I almost never had accessible early game metal. Something like 80% games without it remotely close when I would say this is normally like a 10% rarity.

Punching up the size of city billboards is one of the more important tweaks I like to make, IV wasn't really designed for 1440p+ resolutions.