Has anybody seen the AI build tanks/panzers?

smallfish said:

They can always churn them out from their own production cities double quick.

And Rocketry is a great tech. Rocket Artillery is nothing to sneeze at, and outside of a bottom tech really lategame unit, SAMs will laugh off anything you can throw at them from the air, in addition to being able to hold against Industrial/Modern ground units on their own.

I just lost a full-health Siege II GW Bomber today... because this AI had a SAM two tiles away from the target.

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That's why I *always* do a fighter sweep of the target before I launch the bombers... Not sure if AA stuff shoots at sweeps, but it sure keeps any fighters from bothering my bombers.

If you are playing on lower difficulties than you should and beat every other AI to Flight and start pounding on them with bombers... It only makes sense that the AI would respond by beelining for AA guns.

Just sayin.

Barghaest said:

Yeah, it's all based on unit flavors. If I were to just nerf the stats of Mobile SAM without touching the Flavor, the AI would still churn them out because it reads the flavor more than game stats (which is why AI won't touch new units unless you add a Flavor rating for them)..

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I'm pretty sure AI looks at unit stats and what a unit can do when building. They are not hardcoded to build a unit blindly.

My comment was more the fact some AIs will variably build SAMs while others wont because of perceived threat.

Friendly AI civ, doesn't care about my bombers and with no one else with an airforce near him doesn't build any.

Rival/guarded/hostile AI civ with a history of DoWing me sees my airforce and builds sams to counter it

dexters said:

I'm pretty sure AI looks at unit stats and what a unit can do when building. They are not hardcoded to build a unit blindly.

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In the Units.xml there's an entire section devoted to Unit_Flavors. It is this that is processed by the AI as to whether or not to build a unit (mainly because it's easier to have the AI compare set variables than compute all unit stats/free promotions). Flavor ratings should include these things in an easier format.

So, if you add a brand new unit but never add flavors for it, the AI will hardly (if ever) use that unit.... if you want the AI to build less of something you reduce the flavor without altering the stats.... if you alter the stats without adjusting flavors, AI will produce the exact same amount of the unit as before.

Granted, I didn't program the code for AI in Civ V; however, I've done a lot of xml tweaking in my time (quite a bit related to units) and this is logical deduction based on my observations... I've got an entire scouting line in my current mod-in-progress and it's combat strength is a small percentage shy of the spear line; however, the AI doesn't spam the units because it has 0 flavor for Attack/Defense and just a slightly increasing flavor for Recon so the AI produces about as many of that line as it would Scouts in comparison to Spearmen and uses them as intended - to do reconnaissance.

When it comes to statistics/promotions the AI does appear to be blind, if I alter either of those (add more promos, reduce existing ones, lower CS or RCS) it will have no affect on AI production of said units unless I follow it up with a similar adjustment for Unit_Flavors. If I do see an overwhelming amount of Mobile SAM or an underwhelming amount of Tanks from the AI, I will simply adjust the flavor of the units so the AI strikes a better balance.

Play at least on emperor or the AI will usually be a pushover.

nokmirt said:

Play at least on emperor or the AI will usually be a pushover.

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That I will do after last game became boring on king difficulty. I started really close to Attila, some say this is a casue for re-start. But he was kind of dumb, declared war, then could not kill my composite archers on the hills, all while under fire of my capital, after 5 turns he made peace and offered no less than his second city (we all had two cities at the time), which I took and gave it to his neighbor Dido who ever since became my best buddy. From there on the came was too easy, the usual. England was the hegemon on it's continent, but fell really quick once I decided to go after them.

TLDR; Next game will be emperor.

Edit: I played my first Emperor game and won. And I saw Ethiopian tanks (before even I had tanks). It really was more a challenge than King, though I had a tough start (used Perfect World 3 map script which often creates a lot of mountains). I noticed some really huge AI cities (Korea had freakishly huge cities).