How to make the AI build artillery pieces?

The results are clear... 83% never used it!

TLC here is what i did..... for the last 3 months i have spent hours and hours on modding artillery and came with so far the best results that can be acheived while the AI is programmed to use them in a certain way and not effective at all .. but here are the best results i was able to reach that might help u ....

AI never builds enough artillery as human player does no matter what u try meaning checking the build often artillery etcccccc.... so the only way to make them available in such high numbers to the AI was to set an improvement to generate these ..... u can try this if ur good in adding improvements to the game add a seige workshop that will be available to be built starting from mathematics and let it generate a catapult every X turns then this improvement will go obselete by the arrival of enegenering and a new improvement will be available to be built hmmm ex seige factory that will generate for x turns trebushet and so on and so on make the artillery familly cost very high too and leave them in the production box so u can be able to upgrade them if u remove the artillery familly from the production box in the editor u won't be able to upgrade them.

also if u want the AI to build improvements too like the human player does very simple thing but then u will need to do some adjusting in the cultural vic points just add to any improvement that doesn't produce culture a 1 point of culture but then again u will need to adjust the cultural level wining points AI once this is done will build all the improvements in his cities ......oooo going back to the seige workshop and factory etcccc .. make them produce a 2 production sheilds bonus like the factory and the manufacturing plant the AI will build them u can a;ways make the AI go for production buildings more just by checking the flag in the editor.

now having said of all that still AI will not use them quite as effective as the human player does yes u will see the AI stacking them and it can reach 24 of them in his SOD but very silly stuff can happen let me give u an ex ... i had that scenario on debug to see how things will go and 2 AI'S were involved in a huge war together civ 1 had just upgraded his 23 catapults in a city next to it by one tile while the civ 2 had about almost the same number maybe less 16 or something trebushet with it ....now instead of civ 1 upgrading them and then waiting one more turn and stacking them they left them in the city after upgrading and went on and of course u know what the result of that battle was ......so that is what i ment about not using them quite as effective as the human player will do..oooo and i did give the artillery units familly a more movement rate too it doesn't seem to affect the AI effective use of them .

so finally i was left to decrease the bombard strengh of all the artillery familly units by half and give them a blitz so they can bombard twice in one turn ..and so far it did some ok results cos a catapult that has a 2 bombard strengh instead of 4 can knock down walls and destroy barracks and wound units ...... i made sure too to take down the defense bonus in the editor giving by improvement and citizens too in half ...if u open the editor u will see it set on 16 each in genral settings if u take the improvement down to 12 and citizens to 8 that will do the trick .

something else very important if ur gonna give the artillery units an A/D values do not flag them as offense and defense cos they will attack and defend more like melee units and will bombard very little and that will kill the purpose of artillery ....... and i would advise u not to give them A/D values cos then they will not be captured and i noticed on debug mode that the AI starts only using them once he takes a city and there are artillery units in it then he will start getting his own artillery out of the cities ... i think that the way the use of artillery is coded in the game the trigger of using artillery does not get triggered till they capture a city with artillery in it.

well sorry for the long post but i hope all what i have reached too will help u a bit and will save u hours and hours of trial times .

cheers

Thanks, that's very helpful.

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ur welcome both Weasel Op and meisen ........ AI really is sooooo bad in using right the land bombardement .. if they only used it like they use the sea bombardement things would have been sooooo different ..oo well .... anyway here is another thing , someone in this forum can't remenber his nick name he goes by here ..... to give credit to him for this told me that he gave the land units at least some of them the bombard ability .... so they can act like both artillery and offence defence these units will attack most of the time or defend but every once in a while they will bombard not a lot throughout the game but sometimes and yes a huge SOD bombarding even if they have 1 bombard strengh and 1 rate of fire can also destroy barracks and walls......etcccccc... so in the scenario am testing it's a world map ...i tried something that Rhye's used in his map by giving all the units the wheeled ability except for some and i made open paths on the land like hills or plains or any kind of open terrain in that world map made forests also impassible by wheeled units like other impassible terrain till a road is a built ..kept also the artillery familly units like i described before in the earlier post ....and so far i can say that the game on land is by far more intresting and challenging , cos know not only am facing a huge SOD but they do bombard defensively exacetly what u told me meisen every time u attack them and sometimes if there is a huge tough fight to take control of an open path to be able to invade after that the cities some of these units will bombard while others attack . also gave each unit the ability to stealth attack other units while not being able to stealth attack other kind of units that way every unit has it's ups and downs , the AI intelligence by the way uses the stealth attack ability very well they understand only this and attack and defense on land but does really use them very well

Fuad, thank you for pointing these facts detailed out. The problem is, that there is something terrible wrong with the land bombardement in Civ 3 (Not only the AI artillery units do not work, it seems that precision bombing doesn´t function either).

The current settings of units in Civ 3 only work, when they are countered by artillery (or bombing or ship bombardement). They have a plus in defence and get lots of additional boni when defending by terrain, city, city improvements, fortresses and fortifying. The human player can counter this with artillery, but the AI player can´t. So the current settings for artillery in Civ 3 are an incredible huge – and very unfair advantage for the human player.

The consequence is that – in my eyes – all Civ 3 land units, especially gunpowder or better units, have the wrong settings.

These settings must be chanced to get a more satisfying gameplay by the AI. A good first step to get “better” units for the AI was to set them to values used in Civ 2 (see my first post in this thread), as there bombardement as in Civ 3 was unknown and a lot of defense boni for land units still existed.


To twist with the offensive bombardement of artillery units and defense settings of improvements didn´t give good solutions to me. The best solution for me was, to make the artillery units offensive units (you called it a kind of “melee unit”), this means:

High attack factor, a defense factor of 1 (at least, so that you can give the capture function in the editor which you must have to set the unit to “offensive” tactic), a defensive bombardment factor (equal to the former offensive factor, Range “0”) and give the unit collateral damage. When this unit is attacking a city, than improvements can be taken out and it is not only a “melee unit”.

As the AI would build these offensive unit “like hell” it must be autoproduced by improvements. If you set this imp. to a resource (may be saltpeter), that improvement not only needs this resource when it is built, but every time it is autoproducing the unit (so the explanation in the game).

The names of the autoproducing improvements for my mod are:

Guild => cannon (as the production and use of the early cannons and bombards was a
matter of the guilds)

Arsenal=> for artillery (as artillery factory is a word that is too long for me)

But may be you have better names for the artillery producing buildings or better solutions.

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Civinator thank u for ur ideas and they are great by the way ......and yes the way u set them up will make them work and be used by the AI but i have one question cos what i understood in the editor that collateral damage only applies to the units that bombard not attack well that's at least what i understood from the help menu in the editor ...... what ur sayin here is that the colateral damage will work if the artillery familly units attack not bombard the city am i right???? or did i missunderstand something ? as for Guild for producing canons and arsenal for producing artillery it's an excellent idea


meisen i fully agree with u in making allthe artillery familly units free of maintanance cost and and yes ur fully right that the improvement should produce once every 20 to 30 turns too but i never saw a land unit attacking a ship before what i saw was and that was a bug that they didn't fix is ships attacking city and the way to make this stop is to minimize in half the ship movements since i did this no galley or dromon attacked any city that was a bug talked about in the game bugs in the forums .


but guys do u realize that we are heading to the same artillery civ4 style ??? i have no problem with this as long as it will improve game play or make the AI use them correctly

as for the wheeled ability meisen it can't be applied to any random map my fault for not pointing this clearly out the map am playing on is an earth like map that i made so i had the time to put many pathways to it so it can't be a genral thing unless ur doing this map i went even further then what Rhye's did i gave all fighting units the wheeled ability only the non fighting units and the paratroopers and the guerilla were excluded out of this but with the wheeled units i used the ignore movement cost on terrain in a different way to every one of them ...... anyway that's something not really that necessary , it 's just to see if this will improve things or not and it did for that scenario in particular

i did try the small wonder approach in the begining the AI didn't really use them well they use them better when the artillery is produced by a city improvement cos see the AI won't stop a SOD to go to x city and pick those artillery just produced and then come back or won't even wait for them it will just pick on there way so it's better to make the improvements produce them.

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what i meant meisen is that the ships will attack units inside of a city not bombard ..there was a thread about this and it was one of the unfixed bugs in the game too as for the tactic of using ships to soften up cities by bombarding them this is one of my tactics too

now if the collateral damage with land artillery units will work like Civinator explained above while attacking not bombarding then this might help a bit or give a kind of solution here is an idea that i will need to test and see by makin the artillery familly land units army flagged with a transport capacity of one foot unit only and removing the radar ability form them except the R.Artillery one and giving them wheeled and blitz ability and making them same hp as other regular units and making sure if they will upgrade or not
and giving them zoc too and 1 movement higher then the foot units and bombard range 0 and the ability to stealth attack other artillery land units too only not other units , for the graphic thing it will look very realistic whe they will attack cos the artillery will go backwards and fire while the foot unit will go forward and attack but this will depend on 2 things :

first that the collateral damage works while they attack not bombard so they can take down city improvements etccccccc

second that they can be upgraded too.

as for the craters caused by bombardement it's ok to not have them since they won't bombard cos pillaging will do the trick .

fuad said:

what ur sayin here is that the colateral damage will work if the artillery familly units attack not bombard the city am i right???? .

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Hi Fuad, you are absolutely right. When you attack a unit in a city with the normal attack and you kill that unit you have a chance to take out an improvement too (p.e. you kill a rifleman and destroy a temple too). Edited: It seems, that the improvements are taken out by the "0"-range bombardement of the normally attacking unit that has the collateral damage flag.

I laughed a lot, when I saw, that the settings for arty in Civ 4 are nearly the same as I did it with my settings (although the collateral damage in Civ 3 doesn´t work to other units). But what should the programmers of Civ 4 say ? That they programmed a **** in a very central part of their game in Civ 3? But please don´t forget the central sentence in my last reply: If you want to have a more satisfying gameplay with Civ 3, all settings of the land units must be changed. ... And now look on the new (!) settings of the Civ 4 land units (combined with a Civ 2 flag I would call the "Pikeman factor"). And Fuad thank you for the nice words.

Hi Meisen,
thank you for your reply. Most of your questions are answered above. May be the Civ 4 setting for the arty you describe results of the fact that the programmers couldn´t solve the problem for the AI? The arty in my setting can´t shoot at ships and I regard the shooting on ships with normal arty, especially when this arty is moved on railroads in zerotime across a continent as a strategy next to cheating.

The production rate for the autoproduced arty is a case of taste and the production costs of the other normally produced units. I let the imps produce them by a rate of 4 or 5 turns. You still need a lot of arty units if you don´t set the attack factor to absolute killer quality.

Meisen, you are right with the stealth factor. I used it for land units in this way: Pak (antitank gun): of course set to attack all enemy tanks in a stack. Tank destroyers (My loved Jagdpanther: stealth against tanks, same value as tanks but cheaper and no blitz).

The collateral damage flag to bombers is still used in some scenarios and could be a special thread.

Hi Civinator thank u for sharing all these intresting and very helpfull solutions

one more question ...so setting the artillery familly units to army flag like i posted above in details won't work cos u mentioned that the collateral damage doesn't work to other units in civ 3 just with the artillery familly units right??

Hi Fuad,

I´m not sure if I understood your long sentence about the Army unit correctly. I think you can´t give an army unit a normal attack or defense factor. I didn´t use armies any longer, as the AI was very poor in using them. (...okay, I know about TLC´s new army settings and may be, we can use this in SOE for Wyrms´beautiful new army units). You can give the army unit a bombard factor, but in a short test I did make, there was no use of it.

But the creator of this thread, TLC, seems to be the new AI "army-master"
May be, he can say something more about your suggestions.

In the Civ3ConquestsEdit the definition for the collateral damage is:

Collateral Damage - If a unit with the "Collateral Damage" capability attacks an enemy unit and the enemy takes damage, then:

If the defending unit is not in a city, the artillery/bombard value of the attacking unit is used to conduct a bombard attack on that space to determine if any terrain improvements are also destroyed.

If the defending unit is in a city, the artillery/bombard value of the attacking unit is used to conduct a bombard attack on that city to see if any buildings or citizens of that city are destroyed.

So it seems, that a range "0" bombardement factor is enough for the collateral damage. I have to test, if a collateral damage with normal attack and without any bombardement factor is possible. Edited: In a short test, when I removed the "0" range bombardement from my cannons, they destroyed no additional buildings.

hmmmmm....ok Civinator from ur testings i understood that the colateral damage will only work with a flagged offense defense unit with bombard strengh and ROF and without any bombarding range 0( zero). that's what u told me about killing a rifleman and destroying a temple in same turn .

ok question about this will giving them REQUIRE ESCORT flag will work on land instead of them just wondering around alone ???? or it works only with sea units ????

now for the giving the artillery familly the army flag my idea was basicly to have them like armies and without any bombard range but with bombard strengh and rate of fire so once they load a unit in them they will have the attack / defense so they might succeed while killing a rifleman destroying a temple too this is just an example by the way if they are given the colateral damage flag .

The "Requires Escort" flag only works for naval units.

-Oz

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ty Ozymandias for clearing the require escort thing out

To go back to my original question, it seems the only reliable way to make the AI build more pieces is to give them regular fighting stats comparable to normal combat units. I'm not willing to do that, so I suppose I'll end up having them spawned ...

I think that is the only effort firaxis made for arty in CivIV. They obviously didn't spend time trying to actually fix AI arty from Civ3, so they just slapped it with melee ability. Which, IMHO, is very unrealistic.