[FIXED] Diplomacy broken: AI complains about massing troops, but there are none

jacyp

Winter Lover
Joined
Nov 11, 2004
Messages
200
Location
Vitória (ES) - Brasil
Check this out:

crazy ai.jpg

I just need to press "end turn" to recieve the nice visit of Darius asking why am I massing on their borders. :confused::confused:
By the way, my armies are standing there for dozens of turns, just to prevent Napoleon do settle near me.

This is the save: View attachment crazy AI have no clue.rar

That's the second time this happens to me in a game: an AI complains about my forces on their borders without having any. Only this time I remembered to reload the autosave and see if the behavior repeats. It happened 5 times straight.

I think diplomacy has a lot of problems right now. I love that we are kinda blind in diplomacy, but if we could see the bonuses it would be a lot easier to provide feedback on weird stuff like this.
 
An update.

I think I know what's causing this. 9 turns later a settler comes to the place where my troops are.

Somehow the AI sees that land as already her's.

update.jpg

In the other game I had this behavior, my units weren't at the American's borders, but were on their way, ie. I had already told them to go there, they just hadn't arrived yet.

I think the game is taking the destiny's move point into account when determining the AI's diplomatic reactions, but it's causing this crazy behavior.
 
I had this bug yesterday. My forces were over a dozen hexes away across an ocean from the Germans who made the complaint. My forces were all along the Indian's borders instead, just a few hexes outside my own borders. What I did notice was one little German scout ship that had sailed amongst my forces. I'm betting that either

(a) The German is trying to tell me not to attack the Indians and his ambassador has given the wrong message.
(b) or he believes his scout ship owns the world and I have to get away from it.
 
I had already started a thread around the same issue in this forum some days ago. it looks like I'm not the only one seeing it....

IMHO it is either a really bad definition of what is close by the Ai ( this reeks to the BtS liberate pop ups, that checked simply for if the distance from the item in question to their cap was smaller than the distance to our cap ), or simply some AI think the world is theirs and theirs alone ;) Either way this needs a fix.
 
I've noticed this quite a few times, and every time my armies have been near some unit or other of the AI. Clearly the AI measure borders from their units (or need a separate message saying "stay the hell away from my units"), because that seems to be the case here as well. In your picture Darius has a chariot near your forces. That's his 'borders'
 
In my recent game I've had the AI demand for me to remove my troops away from their border - once from the Germans and another time from the Chinese. Trouble is, on both occasions, my troops where NO WHERE NEAR either of their borders. What did seem to happen, though, was that they put THEIR caravels in the middle of my floating army/frigates. So they get in my armada and tell me to get lost. Nice!
 
looks like if the AI wouldn't settle across the continent we wouldn't have this problem... My friend got in a game where the AI litteraly had half their empire on either side of his and would send units around his borders to get them to move back and forth. Easy pickings in a war.
 
It's related to this;

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93309

You can reproduce either point listed by using the world-builder and forcing the situations (that's the easiest way of reproducing bugs like this, rather than hoping for a handy save game), but it does happen in "normal" games just the same (it's not exclusive to world-built scenarios!).

In essence the AI treats *ALL* unit line-of-sight, as "cultural border". This causes at least two issues;

1: Settlers can be launched half way around the world to settle somewhere a scout had line-of-sight on at the time the settler was built (even if the scout has long since moved away), rather than being "restricted" to sticking close to their expanding empire. This is the major cause for the apparently random expansion of AI, when you see cities dotted all over the map, or get them building cities right next to your empire and miles away from their own.
2: You can get the "Unit buildup" popup whenever an AI units sees your army, regardless of where your army is - even if it's in your own cultural borders and you are on a different continent to the AI altogether.

And I imagine this causes some un-necessary slow down in turn processing too, as cultural-border check code is being done on every single line-of-sight tile, rather than exclusively on the cultural border tiles.
 
This was originally posted by Azzer007 over at forums.2kgames.com - all credit to him.

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93309

The AI players seem to consider anything within line-of-sight of any of their units, as their borders. This causes issues in two circumstances:

1: If you have units in YOUR borders, and an AI who's closest cities to you are the other side of the world happens to move any unit (be it a scout or otherwise) past YOUR borders and so gets a line-of-sight on more than a couple of units, you get the popup of the AI detecting a build up of units on THEIR borders and asked whether you want to declare war or not - even though your units are absolutely miles away from their ACTUAL borders.
2: If the AI has a settler ready, and one of their scouts happens to have line-of-sight on a good spot, the settler will be sent there to build, even if that spot is the other side of the world and even if it's next to somebody elses borders, rather than only expanding "within cultural border range". This has been the cause of a lot of this "random settling" you see in games where AI seems to send settler's half way across the world.

While I can't confirm this, I would also suggest;
3: This probably causes much slowdown in turn processing, as the game is processing all "cultural border checking" etc. for every single tile that there is current line of sight on, rather than only actual cultural borders.

I've tested this to death since encountering it with some random games, including creating a scenario that forced the AI to walk a scout past my borders with a load of units in, and sure enough the moment the scout hit a hill that gave line of sight in to my units, instant pop-up. I also managed to "force" the AI to send settlers to specific locations dotted around the world by creating a scenario where they had scouts set up in certain locations, and settlers set up by their home city - they would often send the settler to wherever the scout was at the time.
 
Azzer himself already posted this in other thread and it is clearly confirmable.
Moderator Action: Thanks for the link, now it's one thread. The_J

Anyway, thanks for posting it as a separate bug. It surely deserves it ... now we only have to find the relevant code and try to spit a quick fix.
 
I've encountered this numerous times. Does not require settler.

Everytime I've reproduced this it has occured with their warships. the AI of a neutral faction (not at war) sees my units massing near a target I am at war with and questions me about massing troops with their warships. Napoleon x2 with his destroyers. Dairus x1 with his frigate.

massing massing troops by 3 City States I intended to take over very close to my own continent, Napoleon's destroyer, who was there bombing Florence saw the buildup and he queried me what the build up was.

May simply require AI to 'spot' your troops to trigger it.
 
Been encountering this bug still, even with the new patch (it wasn't listed but I hoped they just forgot to document it or something). I haven't scouted the map since my first scout died, and so the only way I met the Russians in my latest game was due to them scouting and bumping into me with a scout they possessed. They freaked out because their scout encountered a bunch of troops.....except they were miles away (again, I don't even have a single Russian city scouted out) in my borders to prevent the damn Chinese from declaring war on me again. The Americans did the same thing with me. It already didn't get caught in one patch, so.....maybe the next one Firaxis?
 
Been encountering this bug still, even with the new patch (it wasn't listed but I hoped they just forgot to document it or something). I haven't scouted the map since my first scout died, and so the only way I met the Russians in my latest game was due to them scouting and bumping into me with a scout they possessed. They freaked out because their scout encountered a bunch of troops.....except they were miles away (again, I don't even have a single Russian city scouted out) in my borders to prevent the damn Chinese from declaring war on me again. The Americans did the same thing with me. It already didn't get caught in one patch, so.....maybe the next one Firaxis?

This bug is probably related to the AI, so the fix will probably come in a AI related patch. So far the patches are focused on crash bugs, obvious easy-to-fix balance issues and some minor UI improvements.

I believe major balance and AI improvements will come in a later patch more likely to be released at the end of this year or the beggining of next
 
When having open boarders with allies, I'm getting complaints from them, concerning massive build-up of my troops within or near their boarder, when infact it's their troops that are inside mine, and mine seldom leave my empire.

It feels very awkward having to reassure them that my troops are only passing thru, when they're not even close to their empires, and it's their troops within my empire that triggers the dialog...
 
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