Thanks for being upfront, that's useful context. I think the difference between us is one line: you make the civs differ in the data (units, techs) and the AI exploits it; I'm trying to make Petra play the vanilla civs differently, on the data everyone has. Both are valid, and if things like "charge" land in the base game they'll help my side too.  The whole idea rests on a table like this:

Appreciate you response @josue valencia. Juist so we are clear, I know very little about what I'm doing, AI is doing most of it for me I basically send replays/interesting log and send to chatGPT and then tell it what i see think should be improved and it writes the changes. Yes the AI is tied to Classical Warfare, so you would have to download the AI only and probably recode some of it. However, I think we are trying to be similar in ways that you might not be aware of.  In general we changed CWA so that the Civs were a little more different and represented their heroes/styles better.  For example greek hoplites are a little stronger than most spearman and the first melee attack tech is aviabile in p1 for greek city states.  So in the p1 rush for Greeks the AI is supposed to try and get that attack to give it an advantage.  There are still llots of little things that need cleaning up.  ANd I continue to work on it daily.  Would be great to bounce ideas off someone else, but yes I realize it is mainly tied into the changes we made to CWA and some, if not a lot of people may not want that.  Although some of those changes will probably be coming to newer versions of the base game, like "charge" type behavior and other things I think.

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.