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I'm not sure if this is a suggestion for improvement or not, as I'm not really sure what's going on.
I see Athena, playing the Union, using it's Suspend Habeas Corpus card quite often. However, it doesn't make sense to me why she's playing it in certain locations. For example:

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I didn't start any demonstrations there, or send raiders there, or anything. The population is overwhelmingly Union, so...
Does anyone know what the story here may be?

Maybe she does it to further increase the loyalty as it brings bonuses.
It's worthwhile to play these cards in high productive areas to further increase the production you get.
But this case, I doesn't seem like Schuylkill is a very productive region.
It doesn't seem very logical to me. I have seen this in my games too.

I see it with other cards that don't make any sense. Athena will lay telegraph cable in northern tier of states. She'll scorch regions far behind her own lines. Athena could use some help playing the cards.

I was going to mention some of those problems, as well. Thanks for bringing it up.

Maybe I should repost this in the improvements forum.

That's noted as a low priority improvement

It may be low priority, but it is easy to make a big improvement. Just limit the set of regions Athena is interested in using development and loyalty cards to cities with high production and using draft and requisition cards to cities with low production.

In the past Pocus has asked for volunteers to help with teaching the AI how to use RGDs. Apparently it is a non-coding project, using DBs or somesuch.....

Pocus wrote:That's noted as a low priority improvement

ArmChairGeneral wrote:In the past Pocus has asked for volunteers to help with teaching the AI how to use RGDs. Apparently it is a non-coding project, using DBs or somesuch.....

Probably LUA scripts. I think.
Which I could do. I just need someone to point me towards some primers on what's what.

Actually you can parametrize all AI behaviour on RGD within the excel sheet. I know a few betas who did that for us for AJE and EAW, just ask a question in the modding forum and you should be rolling. At worse I'll answer myself if nobody steps in.

Got it.
I'll have to work on this later this week. Real life is, unfortunately, putting a crimp on things. As usual. *sigh*
Anyone have one of those $1000 a week for life winning lottery tickets that I can "borrow"?
heh

Yea, I've got to get working on this...

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I sincerely hope that you take the time to do so, it would constitute a significant improvement to the game. I can't help with the scripting/DB work, but I have a lot of ideas on what she should be doing with them, so if you need a sounding board....

An unintended consequence of teaching her RGDs is that as it stands a player who does not wish to use them suffers no net penalty, since Athena's misuse of some of them roughly balances out her gains from others (the last patch included AI improvements for certain cards IIRC). When the game first came out the RGDs were described as "optional" and as primarily "flavor" by the designers. If she were using them effectively the human player would be need to use them as well, or else cede her an advantage. Currently, the human player gets this advantage (one side using cards while the other does not) but it is "optional" as to whether they want to mess with them since there is no (net) disadvantage to ignoring them.

Yea, agreed.

Feel free to offer suggestions on effective use of RGD's for the Union. I almost never play the Union, so...

I'll tell you, what really made me notice a problem (other than seeing Union Athena playing them on random locations) was the complete lack of use for either the Martial Law card (Union Athena doesn't seem to play any sort of demonstration cards at all, which would be really great [and historical] to use in eastern Tennessee, for example) or the counterintel card (see above). That just kinda sucks.

Hi,

This is indeed something that demand only basic knowledge in file editing. The Spies decision should be working correctly though:

AIImprovedCalc = 1
AIModChanceMoneyLevel = 1
AIModChanceNoEnemy = -50
AIModChanceEnemyChunk = 5

You edit a text file (or better the source XLS) and then add values to some parameters helping the AI. Here you see that the Spies decision is now using improved calc, this is what we want in the end for all decisions. Without any other parameter, this gives a base chance of 5% to play the decision in valid region. For each money level (ranging from 0: no money, to 6: plentiful), the AI gets a +1% bonus. If there is no enemy, you get a -50% penalty, so the spies should never be played by the AI in a region devoid of any enemy. And then for each enemy 'chunk' power points, which is 100 power point, +5% chance to play.

I altered Telegraphs, Habeas Corpus and Scorch Earth so that the AI should be clever enough on these. If someone want to step in to make a complete pass through the decisions, be my guest, the file is now proposed to the public in the modding forum, although without my latest changes to the 3 decisions.

Awesome, thanks! I'll take a look in the modding forum. I've been looking at the files, but it's a bit overwhelming at first (especially with very limited time).

I've only played a few games (as the Union), and each game Athena scorches the crap out of southeastern Texas.

No partisans in Kentucky or Ohio or Maryland - but slash and burn from Dallas to San Antonio

Rod Smart wrote:I've only played a few games (as the Union), and each game Athena scorches the crap out of southeastern Texas.

That's not really anything meaningful. All it is, is units moving through the terrain. There's no supply out in (the vast majority of) the Far West, so pretty much any unit that isn't in the immediate vicinity of a city has to forage (and thereby "pillage" the province that it's located in) for supplies every day.