Hardly , just pointing out history, realism, and possible improvements, more so considering many have stated a preference for tactics and formations becoming more relevant, which units not going through each other would automatically provide, in good part   Sure, but it's a theory/practise issue. Shouldn't increasing the radial repulsion force at a given distance (in physical terms, the elastic constant k, or stiffness) of land units achieve a more "solid" effect? Would this be costlier to simulate? I wonder how your cavalry turning would look in that case, for example.

thanks, @Emacz   That's great to hear, and close to what phosit suggested above: named openings instead of Petra's threshold flags. I had a look at your repo (Emacz2/classical-warefare-aea); the expertDecision/ stage machine and build-order planner are very much the "hands" side done well. A few questions: 1. The AI looks tied to Classical Warfare units (Athenian Marine etc.). Is there a version that runs on vanilla, or an older build with the 4 random strategies? I'd like to use it as a second, stronger baseline in my headless harness (fixed seeds, Petra vs Petra). - will be funny, to have different AI battling each other  2. "Breaks Very Hard by 10 min, then 15 more to finish": the finishing problem (when to commit and end the game) is one of the questions I want to measure. Any intuition what it's missing there? Happy to compare notes; your work is a good deterministic baseline against which anything model-driven has to prove itself. Where I think we differ, and why I'm not just doing the same: your expert AI makes Petra stronger, with a well-tuned build order and a stage machine, and it works. What I'm after is variety: a Petra that plays differently as Sparta under Leonidas than as Carthage under Hannibal, that holds a pass on one map and builds a trade network on another, and that reacts to what the opponent is doing. Strength is a side effect there, not the goal; the "expert" doctrine could well be one of the openings a civ picks. So the two are complementary: your work is the hands, mine tries to be the head.

Okey, altough there does not seem to be much interest,  I promised it... there is a little tent left, that rome captured and does not decay after destruction of all the rest, and this keeps rome for the engine in a state "Not lost all critical resources". Altough a tent despite a house can not train woman, so it is over for rome. What is special, due to the palms next to the tent it is almost invisible in the mini map.

Thanks @phosit, this is exactly the feedback I wanted. PRs. Fair. Those were low-priority fixes I made while setting up my local environment on macOS (not easy) and to test the AI-assisted workflow I'm using now. I'll reopen the ones that still make sense (#8976 fixes the still-open #8975; #8977 I owe you the commit split) and answer the pending reviews. No hard feelings. I agree, and I'd put the line here: the model never writes behaviour. Every stratagem, every question and every fallback rule is plain JS/Python you can read. The model only picks between options we wrote, and the rule arm (a hand-written distance rule) exists precisely so the model can be swapped out and compared. - i am building it now with laya, but it should allow easily swap to use other like Jev - At the end of the day the model will pick up which "function" in the system to use.   Two tasks in one system. Partly a misunderstanding on my side of the post: hero "playbooks" are strategy (Fabius = delay, Leonidas = hold the pass), not unit micro, and the actual fight stays Petra's. But you're right that "hold / strike / fall back" every few seconds sits between strategy and tactics. I'll keep the questions at the strategic level (which stratagem, where, when to commit) and leave "when to end an attack" to Petra's existing attack-plan logic unless the data says otherwise. Starting strategies. Looked at startingStrategy.js (configFirstBase): flags from land/food/wood plus the personality axis, chosen once, no civ or enemy input. That's a natural home for the civ-doctrine part (a named opening per civ instead of threshold flags), and a smaller, more upstreamable change than what I described. I'll start there for the early game. State as language. I won't feed raw commands. The state is a short readable summary ("enemy army of ~30 units, 80 m from the pass, moving toward our tower; our 25 units garrisoned"), which is what these classifiers are trained on. I measured Laya locally today: ~40 ms per question on a laptop CPU after a one-time 55 s load. I'll publish the exact input format with the dataset. Host-only model. You mean #8786, I think. That one moves all of Petra to the host and clients stop simulating it, so a modified AI would be undetectable; I understand why it stalled. This proposal is narrower: Petra keeps running on every client (so the OOS hash still covers it) and only the hint is a host command, the same class as any command a human host sends. The residual risk is a host sending sabotaging hints to an AI slot, which is a "bad ally" problem, not a desync one. It's not doable as a pure mod, agreed: the server must accept that one command type for AI slots. That's a small engine change, and single-player needs none of it. And yes, using a model to find where Petra is weak is a good use too; the labeled game states from this work could feed that. To be clear about the goal. Performance (Petra's or AI lag in general) is not what I'm trying to improve. The goal is a smarter Petra: strategies that fit the civilization and the hero it's playing, the way those armies actually fought. Whether that needs a model at all is an open question. Right now this is a prototype, there's plenty of room for improvement, and I'm fully open to dropping the model if a deterministic, hand-written way gets the same result.   

Ive been using AI to help improve Petra.  I have an "expert" version that comes with Classical Warfare AEA.  But I'm you could easily just download the AI files. ALthough it does specifically work with some of our overall changes.  It can randomly roll 4 strategies, p1 rush, p2 military tech push, p3 max pop max techs and I forget the 4th one  It beats very hard 95% of the time (and only has a 20% gather resource bonus instead of the 56% that VH has)  but I'm still trying to get it to be more efficient.  A lot of times it will basically break very hard by 10 min, but then it takes another 10-15m to actually finish the gam