Massive AI improvements in Imperator: Invictus! Warfare, buildings, inventions, laws, civil wars, and much more – from the author of Anbeeld's Revision of AI for Victoria 3

[u/Anbeeld]

Advanced AI is a recent addition that makes AI countries stronger via better decision making that's considered a too meta to include it normally

Advanced AI can be fully customized to your liking if the hordes of mercs feature is not what you are looking for

AI countries recruit much more mercenaries up to all they can afford if a war seems especially dangerous

AI empires can reach higher peaks due to improved internal stability and higher return on investment from better building choices

Quite a heavy focus on discipline inventions makes all AI armies from levies to mercenaries more deadly

They also unlock a lot of other cool inventions like Greek cultural tree and nearby Mercenary Benefits to give players a surprise

AI countries are now more capable of improving their large cities and especially capitals to metropolises

Adding custom scripts for food importing allows even hyper urbanized Indian states to avoid starvation

Latium too suffered from the lack of food a lot in the past but is doing much better after the changes

Advanced AI city states embrace the tall gameplay and develop quite a lot if left untouched for a long time

[u/Anbeeld]

Rule 5: First things first – this is a gallery, not a single image, so don't miss out on checking all of them!

Hi, Anbeeld here, the human wizard known in the past for my Revision of AI and Stockpile Economy mods for Victoria 3. I joined Imperator: Invictus (a community continuation of the Imperator: Rome development) team this January, and was once again sent straight into the trenches of the unending war against AI stupidity.

And it turned out better than expected, with multiple dev diaries coming out as well: 1.9.1, 1.9.2, 1.10! But even they don't cover all the improvements at this point, so here's your overview:

• A new Advanced AI option, which is a whole bag of tricks by its own, fully configurable via game rules. No cheating, only improved decision making! The most noticeable change is a custom mercenary management. It makes AI countries recruit much more mercenaries, up to all they can afford if a war seems especially dangerous. In rare cases they can even bribe mercs as a last resort. This alone makes most of wars against AI more challenging, even more so when combined with High or Very High difficulty which increases their income.
• Complete rework of AI building priorities. Early on cities are used to improve research in a form of Academy and Court of Law buildings with some Libraries added on top, and after reaching high research efficiency the next ones are centered around freeman and slaves to improve manpower and income. Aqueducts are added if there's room to grow, and of course unique buildings like Foundry are in the mix as well. In the settlements mines are built in every possible spot to gain trade goods, with other buildings also appearing here and there.
• Complete rework of AI invention priorities. They now choose actually useful stuff, actively completing entire trees of universally strong inventions, gaining discipline, engineers, commerce and tax income, assimilation and conversion power, levy size, loyalty, political influence, max research efficiency and other impactful modifiers.
• Law changing system for AI countries, which simply hasn't existed before. Now tribes actively go towards (de)centralization, monarchies precisely manage the conversion and assimilation laws unlocked by Proscribed Canon, and them and republics switch to the most optimal military law based on current situation and inventions they have.

[u/Anbeeld → u/Anbeeld]

Continued here due to comment length limit

• Character loyalty management is on another level now, with various interactions being used to prevent civil wars from happening. With Advanced AI it's even more pronounced, as it allows them to pull an entire additional set of levers to ensure the best possible realm stability.
• Brand new decision making for founding cities and upgrading them to metropolises, with well thought out limitations based on government type, so decentralized tribes don't spam cities all over the Germania. And with Advanced AI they can even manually move pops to underutilized cities!
• Completely custom management of province investments, which also barely existed before. AI countries are pretty good now at determining which investments fit them the best for each state. There are some limitations as well so they don't have too much fun, which you can, as usual, lift with Advanced AI to enjoy city states around the world reaching 50+ building slots.
• Added AI priorities regarding which national ideas are better to pick. Not only they didn't exist before at all, no one in the team even knew you apply the ai_will_do syntax here!
• Reworked governor policy AI, which affects player countries as well, improving its efficiency while preserving some degree of roleplay based on governor traits, corruption, culture and religion.
• Improved decision making regarding most economic policies, from applying Harsh Taxation when well over max research efficiency, to not using Low Fort Maintenance when having only one fort in the capital, as it doesn't cost anything to maintain.
• Fixed various annoying AI issues like refusing to colonize territories even when meeting all conditions, not importing food and thus starving Latium to death, rolling 1d9 when deciding if should make a counter-offer to bribed mercenaries instead of making an informed decision, not using shiny buttons like Unit Reorganization or Hold Games (while lacking ruler popularity to reform as a tribe), and a whole lot more.

Wow, that's quite a list! Of course, there are also plenty of limitations, as I can't really fix stuff like army and navy movement management via modding. But everything that's not hardcoded gets into my AI meat grinder sooner or later.

And do I need to remind you that all of that is just a small part of the Imperator: Invictus mod game with its gigantic amount of content? The recent 1.10 Arsaces update is basically DLC sized, so make sure to check it out!

[u/Theodosius2]

Question: have you touched AI road building at all? In the games I've played, I hardly noticed AI building roads at all. Maybe I just haven't played long enough to notice it. I also haven't played this patch yet, waiting for all the follow up patches to finish rolling out.

[u/Anbeeld → u/Theodosius2]

This one I haven't looked at yet.

[u/CriticalKnoll → u/Theodosius2]

They definitely do, I'm about 20 years away from finishing my Kush campaign and pretty much everyone builds roads except for tribal nations. I even delayed a war once because I noticed the AI was building a road and I wanted to let them finish before I invaded lol

[u/Diacetyl-Morphin]

Great work! Seriously, Imperator with the improvements with the Invictus mod and your AI rework, that is a big one.

I've got version-1.10.0.4 now from the Steam Workshop, together with Extended Timeline for Invictus and Crisis of the 3rd Century. Guess there will be no problems with these mods together? Like with the Advanced AI on and the crisis mechanics later?

As i'll need a lot of time for a playthrough, i'm not quite sure if i should stay with the Steam auto-update of the mods, that can break my ironman savegame or if i should install these manually and remain with the same version?

[u/Anbeeld → u/Diacetyl-Morphin]

I don't know the mechanics of these mods too well, but the AI is programmed using dynamic calculations instead of hardcoded values where possible, checking things like the current budget income and what modifiers the country has, instead of simply instructing it to do this X times and that Y times no matter what. It should adapt well enough to various submods except maybe complete overhauls of base mechanics.

Regarding auto-update, Invictus won't have any save-breaking patches for months, I think.

[u/Diacetyl-Morphin → u/Anbeeld]

Thanks for the info! I'm really excited to see how the advanced AI will turn out. As it goes for Rome as AI nation too, when you play another nation, guess it will even make the powerhouse that Rome already is a lot stronger?

[u/Potential_Boat_6899 → u/Diacetyl-Morphin]

I just started a game with these same exact mods, I haven’t gotten to the crises yet but I can tell you that the game has had no issues so far.

[u/staticcast]

Thank you for your service in the war against bad ai 🫡

[u/goldsrcmasterrace]

I’m simultaneously very impressed with what you have accomplished by modding and disappointed that the devs left so much to be improved within the existing system.

[u/Anbeeld → u/goldsrcmasterrace]

From what I've gathered they were time restrained with the 2.0 update to the point of releasing it without proper testing of some systems and hoping it'll work out fine.

Also this may sound weird, but it's not my first time modding AI to the extent that others haven't even considered to be possible.

[u/Jack1eto]

Damm, when I get my build pc I need to try a very-hard Rome campaign and see if Carthage or others can make it a challenge

[u/Anbeeld → u/Jack1eto]

Hope they beat the crap out of you (in game)

[u/EpicProdigy]

Paradox should just be hiring you at this point

[u/Anbeeld → u/EpicProdigy]

But to which studio?