Current Impossible Strategy

[Seravy]

'set the priority to fortress to about 10 million, or some other silly number that can never be reached, and ignore targetting rules based on target strategic strength

It's pretty much these things :
1. "if stack strength is 300+ and it's intercontinental or on the same plane as any Jihad fortress, attack the first such jihad fortress".
2. Set the priority of picking that continent as the main action continent to a huge amount.
3. Reduce the number of garrison units needed, especially strong ones
4. Tiles with jihad enemy units on them count as empty for purposes of finding paths towards a target. (but not for anything else!)

Note that "1" does not use priorities at all, it's not increasing the priority itself. Doing so would not allow the AI to ignore targeting rules. It merely adds a different kind of attack check before the usual.

To go through towers, that would also need to be special cased that way and I don't think we have that sort of space at least for land attacks.

So you are effectively asking for a new attack type that is evaluated before normal attacks but after fortresses, and says "if primary jihad target on other plane exists (and no jihad target on this plane exists?) and tower exists on continent then move to that tower." as well as"same as above then set the continents with the tower highest priority as main action continent" plus the same attack type for intercontinental to target the nearest tower.

btw, what if the tower is blocked by a player who is NOT the jihad target? Then the AI rams into the units and takes it back due to that "target" not being an enemy - and I can't and won't make an exception to that. Note that stacks on the target matrix do not store their owner, only their strength so the AI has no way of knowing this.

Anyway, I don't think this can be done, due to land attacks not having another 3-500 bytes of free space for such a complex check. If you really want, I can check for space but I'm 99% sure there isn't any.

[Seravy]

...actually one idea.
If we made jihad override the targeting priority on towers that lead to the correct plane as well as the army strength then the AI could attack them. That part might have space for that.
Problem is, towers are added to the target list last (and this shouldn't change). If there are 25 total targets without the tower, the tower won't even get on the list in the first place.
...I'll keep thinking about this.

[Nelphine]

Ah. Yeah I definitely do want AI to smash into neutral controlled towers if Jihad exists. But I forget how bad chokepojnts are - I assume a unit can't move to a tower and switch planes, and move onto the other plane all in the same turn? That means we can't attack other AI in the tower, you're absolutely right. That's fine, at least all the ai end up trying to send units through the towers.

So, why not just do silly priorities? I'm not sure why you need a seperate attack type. Change step 1 to:
During jihad for any stack with strength 300+, set jihad fortress to 10 billion priority. During jihad, if no jihad fortress present on plane, set towers to 10 million priority. Still do steps 2-4 as you already have.

Oh the 25 list limit. Can we change the order targets are added during jihad only? Blegh, yeah that would be a lot of space.


Actually there are only 6 towers. Why add them last? Even if all 6 are valid targets, which usually won't be true in normal circumstances, that's only 1/4 of the list?

[Seravy]

Because in order for a target to be picked, it has to both have the highest priority and meet stack strength requirements. To skip the latter, we have to do it outside of the normal attack priority system.

... I have an idea though that might solve all the problems in one. Instead of attacking, or targets, we can directly modify the "map matrix" far before anything else.

If we add
"If a jihad opponent exists, all tiles containing a tower that leads to the primary jihad opponent's plane has a strength of 300" then the AI would observe normal targeting and priority rules (owner, etc), but would attack the tower as though it had only 300 worth of defenders. It wouldn't prioritize doing so over other targets but at least allow the attack to happen without bumping into other players and other such problems. Chances are the tower is the only remaining target, anyway.

[Nelphine]

That would work.

Any thoughts on why my tower got attacked?

[Seravy]

This :

Reuploaded 5.02, should now contain the fix for towers not being recognized by intercontinental stacks.

Intercontinental didn't have the "in tower = both planes" exception in it.

[Nelphine]

Oh oh I understand now. My bad.

[Seravy]

Can I have your save file? I'm going to need one with blocked towers to test the new feature once it's done.

[Nelphine]

Yeah, I'm not precisely sure what turn it is, but I can get that later today.

[Nelphine]

Here's the save.

Can you check how long before Jafar researched SoM?