AI not surrendering when you think they should? Save and send it right away!

[x4000]

TLDR: If you ever hit a point where you think "this is it, this AI should be offering surrender to me right now," then please send us the save as soon as possible into that period (in terms of turn count I mean), versus a number of turns past that point.  That way we can look at that savegame and put in code to say "yeah okay I give up in these circumstances."

More detail, from this conversation:

What constitutes defeat for an AI race?  I blew up a Peltian city, razed it to the ground I did.  Town hall included.  Looks to me like they had misc, military buildings, extractor/harvester buildings, breeders and some terraforming buildings (I think) that I couldn't target and destroy (these need to be destroyable).

They definitely should offer subjugation in those circumstances.  Any savegames you have where you think the AI should have given up but they did not, please do put those on mantis.  We have a variety of detection rules, I forget all of them, but we need to introduce more as things pop up.

Wiping them completely out means destroying all their buildings if you're going to do that.  Forcing them to surrender is a trickier thing, because with all games that have that sort of mechanic it can be very slow to happen or way too easy to happen.  We err on the side of too slow, but when people say "what gives, surrender dude!" then that's a great chance for us to look at the savegame, see what the reasoning is for why they should surrender, and then put in code that is specific to that while being as generally applicable as possible.

That way the game never gets over-eager to surrender, but still surrenders when it makes sense.

[nas1m]

Here you go .

[Shrugging Khan]

The Krolin will fight to the last crab!

[kasnavada]

Here.

That's my very first game - got the video there :
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,17663.0.html

I've destroyed 90+ of their buildings, they've got no way to retaliate.

However, in that save I can't speak to them. Should it be an issue when surrendering ?

[kasnavada]

Burlust this time. AFAIK they've got only the extractor on the East side of the map. Then again the idea of Burlusts surrendering is odd, but if they can't build anything (No seen anything new at least) shouldn't they surrender / be eliminated ?

[TheVampire100]

Here is my Zenith save.
I destroyed EVERY single Burlust building, even the ones underground. At some point in their game they SHOULD have surrendered.

[TheVampire100]

Thoraxians never surrender. This was said already multiple times. They also don't count to the ictory condition.

[crazyroosterman]

deleted it sorry about that I completely forgot.

[Zebeast46]

Just found another instance of the burlusts not surrendering in my krolin game, gonna report it tommorow as I dont have time today. But damn monster pits are fun to use, but a little op, I one shotted the burlusts main base with one of them 

[kasnavada]

I went quite far militarily in my last game, and I beat up 4 or 5 AI and the "first" to surrender were the Zenith. That's actually the first to surrender ever in my games - but I didn't generally focus on beating them.

As far as how AI work, for most there seems to be a "core" building which enables them to build other stuff, and "small" structures, basically everything else. Some seem to have multiple of the "core" buildings (I think the "core" for the Spire is the "mother" ship, but not sure). Anyway, for me there is two cases:
- either the point is that vassal become your allies in some manner, so they NEED to be able to build. In that case, I'd put the surrender condition to "core building destroyed at 80%" or enable them to rebuild their core building (at your discretion, by some kind of diplomatic demand) once vassalized.
- or you don't need them to be able to build. So once the core buildings are down, they surrender.

So basically, depending on the cases above, I'd suggest "once core buildings are destroyed" + proposal to have them rebuild some "vassalized" version of their core building in order to make them "usable" allies.

Next proposal would be their behaviour once "killed". Chasing every last underground / aboveground buidling will get old kind of fast, as would shooting them to get the "resource" you want. I'd propose to have complete vision of your vassal's buildings, and the ability to destroy their building with the "destroy" action. Yes, I know you can still shoot them while vassalized, but I'm a benevolent dictator . I don't want to systematically shoot them. Bulldozing their homes and farms is sufficient =).

Another idea would be to "tie" their core building as a necessary part of their "existence". For example, once it's killed, all buildings would decay, unless you allow them to rebuild the "vassalized" core building (1% cumulative damage to all buildings / turn).

For this idea to work, I think it would be necessary to make the core building much more offensive than now - territories seem to be able to help there. Currently their (very low) range is a liability - core buildings might also need multiple attack and attack types per turn. The idea would be to make them "capital-like".