(April 17th, 2020, 19:47)Seravy Wrote: Another thing we might be able to use is the total number of cities owned : the more cities the AI has, the more they need to summon for garrison to have the same amount of defenders.
But now that I stop for a moment, these two (partially) contradict. More cities means the AI will have a stronger military so they'll prefer to attack more, but they also have more they need to defend.
In fact this is a core contradiction, not specific for this feature but the entire game overall :
The more territory you have, the more likely it is to be able to win through holding that territory, but it also makes it easier to expand further, as more territory leads to a resource and military advantage. Meanwhile less territory means you are going to lose if you don't expand, but you don't have the tools to expand either.
So...in either case it doesn't actually matter which of the two the AI chooses, a larger/stronger empire means more success for both offense and defense as a strategy, it doesn't specifically help either more than the other.
So I'm actually starting to doubt this even matters. If the AI is leading, whatever they do works. If they aren't, whatever they do will not help anyway. So maybe the main thing to consider is what's more fun? If the AI only stays on the defense that's boring but if they spam doomstacks and leave everything poorly defended that's even worse. So maybe the equal ratio is good? Hard to tell.
The contradiction only exists if you use the direct military rating (either the historian or int. agent). By using the militarization ratio as I defined above which considers how well covered the empire is, it allows the AI to distinguish between conditions that are favourable for offense as opposed to the need for more defenses.
For example, if you have more cities, your overall historian rating is higher. But you also need more troops to defend it. If you have 100% "coverage", you are adequately defending all parts of the empire. You can then use the excess for offense. But would you want to attack if your opponent has an even bigger excess than you? Even if they're technically smaller, if they are more militarized, they might well have more troops to fight you with. If it's fighting on two fronts, or three fronts, this could help the AI judge when it has the ability to take on both opponents at the same time and expect to win, and affect the willing to peace or not.
Plus, there's the active management of overextension. Each time you conquer territory, you need to actually hold it for it to have value. You won't snowball if you lose it just as easily by not having enough forces to cover the new territory. The militarization ratio will drop every time you conquer a new city, as the denominator increases and numerator either stays the same (no combat losses), or decreases. Thus, the AI learns to hold and reinforce its new territory.
It is not always true that more territory = stronger. Because of racial differences, non-city sources of Power, and personality focuses, it's quite possible to have lopsided militarization ratios. This will hopefully allow the strong military focused AIs to organize offense and identify opportunities better, while making the more economy focused AI to play better at defending themselves.