I noticed a possible issue with the AI logic to retreat ships (damaged i.e.) from cities in danger to be lost.

What happened is - i was besieging a city, the AI had 2 damaged galleys there. The siege took a few turns (it's hard to bring enought siege in a Galley Driven Naval invasion :lol:)...

So those 2 enemy galleys retreated form the city as i landed my troops. The next turn the AI apparently changed its mind, and they returned. And then retreated again, and returned.
3 times in toal untill i took the city.

Apparently once the ship is out of harbor the AI will re-evaluate its orders - like "Oh, those are damaged, they need to heal" - and send them to the nearest harbour - which in this case was still the besieged city.

This was i.e. :smoke: as the ships were damaged - if they stayed in the besieged city to heal, they would have been ready in time to try to sink another 2 of my reinforcement galleys.

Very interesting note. Thanks.

I've noticed similar AI behaviour on undamaged stacks of ships. Usually, from/to a city I am blockading or something. Although, it may be widespread behaviour that I'm just not seeing elsewhere because I don't have visibility.

The AI will move a large stack of ships out of a city, then move them all back the next turn. Repeat.

As a side note, the AI is pretty stupid about attacking other ships. It will happily attack a single ship (like a privateer), but if I stack two privs together the AI usually won't dare attack. I think that's a weakness in the AI. Not sure what the fix is, though, as you don't want to make them suicidal.

It also depends on what the AI has available to attack with.

I've seen it afraid to use a handful of Caravels to attack single Privateers, for instance. (I doubt that it realized I had devoted so much production to new Privateers and would have just moved a fleet of them in if I had to, like I did to a different AI player earlier in that game.)

I also saw them stack a pair (or trio) of Frigates or SOLs and go after an equal or larger stack of Privateers.

Sending a single Frigate after a pair of Privateers happens, but not often, because usually the Frigate will be killed by the second Privateer, but I've seen it. (Especially when that Frigate can duck back into a city!)

That said, it's highly unusual to have a stack of ships get attacked, but I think that's more due to my tendency to have overwhelming naval superiority past the gunpowder age, and before then, I tend to not get in wars requiring naval support.