Part 77: Wizard Personalities and Objectives

Here's your mechanics post for the day! Today's topic: wizard personalities and what they mean for diplomacy. As usual, all behind spoiler tags.

In Master of Magic, there are six possible personality types that can be assigned to an AI wizard: Peaceful, Lawful, Chaotic, Aggressive, Ruthless, and Maniacal. Their effects are:

Peaceful - Has a +20 Personality Modifier. Nothing else special.
Lawful - Has a +10 Personality Modifier... but they double all penalties for breaking oaths and double all diplomacy point losses in interaction. Lawful AI players will never attack you with a standing treaty; they will always take a turn to formally break the treaty before doing so.
Chaotic - Has a Personality Modifier between -40 and +40, at random, which is rerolled every single game turn. Additionally, there is a 2% chance each turn that a Chaotic AI player will declare war on another wizard with whom they have contact and are not currently at war with, chosen at random, with no provocation.
Aggressive - Has a -10 Personality Modifier, and is twice as likely as any other personality to build Settlers.
Ruthless - Has a -30 Personality Modifier. Nothing else special.
Maniacal - Has a -50 Personality Modifier. Additionally, they halve all diplomacy point gains and double all diplomacy point losses in interaction.

AI players randomly reevaluate their relations with each other player every 3 to 25 turns. (Each player is on a separate timer.) Based on this evaluation, it will determine how hostile it is against that player from one of four levels, which the official strategy guide refers to with the terms None, Annoyed, Warlike, and Jihad. The reevaluation always starts by setting hostility to None. The game then checks if there is an active state of war; if there is, hostility immediately is set to Warlike, and a further check is made to see if the status will, from there, increase to Jihad. The chance of this happening is 40% for Maniacal wizards, 20% for Ruthless wizards and 10% for Chaotic wizards. All of this gets overridden if the wizard is casting the Spell of Mastery; if he or she is, the chance of Jihad is 75% regardless of personality!

If there is an active peace treaty, wizard pact or alliance, hostility is set to none and that's the end of the reevaluation.

If there is no active agreement and no active war, then a Hostility Chance is calculated, based on the current level of diplomatic relations. If the total diplomacy points (DP) are currently negative, Hostility Chance is half of the absolute value of the negative DP plus 25 plus or minus the wizard's Personality Modifier (PM). If the total DP are currently positive, Hostility Chance is one-fourth of (100 minus the positive DP) plus or minus the Personality Modifier, minus 5 for every time the player has violated a treaty (10 if this is a Lawful wizard evaluating). The game rolls 1d100; if the roll is less than or equal to the Hostility Chance, the hostility rises to Annoyed, and the game rolls again. If it is less than or equal to the Hostility Chance again, it goes up to Warlike, and so on - it keeps rolling until either A) hostility is at Jihad or B) it rolls above Hostility Chance.

AIs with no hostility will never (intentionally) attack your cities or units. They will, however, steal unguarded nodes or Towers of Wizardry from you.
AIs who are Annoyed will attack your units if they think they have the advantage, and will attack your cities if their force is at least twice the strength of your garrison. They will also cast offensive spells against you.
AIs who are Warlike will attack your units or cities if they think they have at least even odds of winning, and will cast offensive spells more frequently.
AIs who are in Jihad will ignore all other wars they may have had (including Jihad states with other opponents) to relentlessly attack you (but never with less than equal odds). They will frequently mobilize portions of their garrisons to make attacks as well.

That's half of the picture. Each AI wizard also has one of four objectives:

Expansionists are twice as likely to build Settlers, and will settle every bit of ground they can, even if the sites are poorly suited.
Militarists are twice as likely to build or summon new units.
Perfectionists are twice as likely to cast enchantments that benefit their own cities than any other kind of enchantment. They are also twice as likely to build city improvements instead of units.
Theurgists prioritize building city improvements which produce magic power and prioritize taking nodes over any other sort of offensive action.

Every wizard's personality and objective are chosen at random every new game; the choice is weighted based on the wizard's spellbooks and retorts. The precise weighting is a bit too technical for me to delve into in this post, but suffice to say that Nature spellbooks tend highly towards lawful perfectionism, Sorcery towards aggressive theurgism, Chaos towards chaotic militarism or expansionism, Life towards peaceful perfectionism, and Death towards maniacal or ruthless militarism or expansionism. Maniacal is fairly uncommon for Sss'ra.

As a final footnote and something of a cheat: pressing ALT-P on the main map screen will randomly scramble the personality and objective of all AI wizards.