AI cheating in combat?

I just invaded a Persian continent. I landed several stacks of infantry on hills which were then subjected to mass attacks from Persian immortals. To my astonishment the stacks were mauled. The Immortals were losing two for each infantry they killed. In fact since the second usually survived (at the weakest health) and could be refreshed they were effectively exchanging 1 for 1.

It seems unbelievable when you consider the factors. My infantry are all veteran. Their defense is 10, they are on hills for +50%, and the immortals attack on a 4. So in theory the chance of a hit on me is 4/(4+(10*1.5)) or 4/19 or about 20% for each attack. Effectively with multiple attacks a turn and my troops having 4 health points it ought to take about 5 or more immortals to kill each infantry.

On the other side I made repeated attacks on Persian conscript infantry with my veteran cavalry and found it took 2 cav to take out each conscript!!!

Is the AI combat fixed?

It`s not fixed. But: the Random Number Generator is - IMPO - "stringy": it produces results favoring one side for long times, then for the other. So if you take a few thousand numbers, it`s fair. but for the first 1000 it may be way slanted. Currently I`m on a winning string, but I remember only too well how it was before.....

Also, the AI knows the EXACT risk it takes so it can sometimes just judge risks better.....

Also, I have the distinct feeling that the Babylonians (when AI, not human) and sometimes other civs get an advantage of some kind. I have difficulties taking out Riflemen with Modern Armour.....

"On the other side I made repeated attacks on Persian conscript infantry with my veteran cavalry and found it took 2 cav to take out each conscript!!!"

Infantry defense 10. Cavalry attack 6. Are the infantry foritified in cities? If so they have about 17 defense, so its little wonder your cavalry are having a hard time.

As for the immortals, it sounds strange, though I used to see that happen all the time before I fixed it with the editor. Doubling unit HP's helped to fix the string results, and I increased the values of industrial/modern units by a lot. Also its important to learn that with the original game stats, a few warriors are an even match for fortified infantry

The AI cheats in everything else, so why not combat too??

"Also its important to learn that with the original game stats, a few warriors are an even match for fortified infantry"

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say, "WTF?"

You mean warriors as in the starting unit with an attack of one?

And infantry, the unit that comes with replacable parts? That one that looks like a British soldier?

You mean to say that you have seen warriors attack and kill fortified infantry on a regular basis? Does "a few" mean, say, 1,000? Even then, no way, sorry, I can't believe it. This has to be either a typo or a troll.

Strings of numbers.. Strings. Long strings.
I just took down the Roman civ. They had 63 Inf, 37 Cav and a few knnights and Riflemen. Plus obsolete units. And the navy was insignificant.

I marched with 65 Cav, bringing Infantry along to hold cities taken. Yes, Inf was entrenched in cities, there fore more difficult.

But, a typical city would have 1 or 2 inf, usually regular, 3 or 4 riflemen (conscript--they started with only 5) a cav or knight, and maybe a spearman or two.
I found it took about 10 cavalry attacks to take down the first infantryman, sometimes losing one or two of the ten. The most awesom thing is to see the inf reduced to one hp, and lose 2 elite cavalry units before he goes down.

Undestand Cav agains inf is a tough battle. Once tanks came on line, the pattern changed.... like 3 or 4 tank attacks.

One of my tanks even killed a spearmen...

There seems to be a bias in favor of the ancient unit when pitted against a modern unit. Cav and Inf are fairly close, and tanks vs cav are close. However, tanks against older units, spearmen, pikemen, Longbows, are not as effective as CAvalry against them. Modern Armor is even worse-- being much more separated in time. That is why I keep cavalry in the game till the very end... they are more effective against the ancient units.

Yeah yeah yeah, WHere were alll of you, when people were saying I was lieing?Whne people kept saying I was makeing this up, or that it was a freak occurance and didnt happen often at al, maybe one occasion every ten games.It happens to me every time.It wasnt something that heppened enough to be a problem. Blah blah blah, they are gonna do the same to you. Fireaxis will ignore this as they have time and time again.Or they will just simply say, combat is programmed this way to make battles fairer for anceint units when battleing modern ones.Well frigging excuse me!!?? You mean I have spent tons and tons of cash, and a few thousand years of my time to beat the computer to modern units, only to have them utterly decimated by 2 spear men? I ask the age old question then."Why bother to upgrade to modern units, when its 100X more effective to battle anceint units with anceint units. I will say onething. After much resaech on the subject, there is no bug, no random factor, this is in fact how fireaxis designed the battle system to act.Just load up the ed, and then spend all the time and effort looking through the numbers and factors, and you will find that it is indeed how it is supposed to be. I hope that in the future addon or patch, that they decide to drop this makeing anceint troops effective against modern ones for a more realistic system, Hell make it an option already. Sheesh. Wouldnt wanna make the game realistic at all would we. And I also agree that the AI cheats.Fireaxis adimantly denied this but I still think it does.You can easily tell by loading up save games over and over and messing with the ai.They trade techs before you actually sell them to them ect.They can give you money they dont have, they can attack you breaking a MPP with no bad consequences,unlike the player who is cast out as a traitor for all game eternity for doing such.The Ai has no loyalty whatsover to you for anything you do, hell I could keep this list going, but I have grown weary of preaching upon deaf ears.Give it up because they seem to want to ignore this issue.They did release the combat outcome map, but its severly flawed, and in my opionion puts the test in a vaccume instead of a real in game situation.Its on flat desert squares with no valuse. ect ect. Forget it, find something else toworry about because this stuff has been ignored for a very long long time.

Happens to me too sometimes, but mostly is ok. What is mildly annoying is when people complain how comp;s spearman killed your tanks, but when YOUR spearman wins, then suddenly everthing is cool

The first game that I had modern armor in, I immediately upgraded most tanks to get the better numbers. And found them losing. The remainning tanks did well. Cavalry did even better... I still had a few posted on guard duty on remote borders...
Nevertheless, I still do build the modern units, because the AI will, and if I don't, then the cav go down in piles in front of tanks.
Bottom line: Keep the necessary units on line to meet whatever is sent.

BTW I finally got Liz throroughly mad. Furious. "I would do anything to remove your pain--ah make you happy." I think there is some racial bias built in also. When I offered to sell Liz Amphibous warfare, she said, "Knowing you, you will probably take the shirt off my back... but...how is this.?" Liz, with the shirt off her back? Hmmm. I have not dealt dishonorably with her. Or anyone. but she did sign an MPP with Rome, and then took peace 10 turns later when I offered it. After having lost 70% of her army--almost all her fast units-- and 1 city. SHe sent a stack of 16 cav into my rear--on her border. I dispatched 16 Arty by rail, bombarded her cav to 1, and took out about half of them. The rest retreated, healed and returned. Knights tried, and retreated. by then I had cut her rail lines to her border, and they could not effectively retreat..... But that is not dishonorable, just because it cost her the war....

Here we go again. Don´t you guys understand that the combat system can´t be broken, and this is easy to test!

Do like this:

* Always save before you attack.
* When you lose with overwhelming odds (tank vs spearman, cavalry against warrior etc), reload and attack the same unit with something crappier (another warrior or the so called not-so-broken-cavalry). Did you win this time??? No, I didn´t think so.
* If you lose against the enemy capital, reload and attack another city of the same size with the same odds. Did you win this time??? No, I didn´t think so.
* If you lose 5 battles in a row: reload and first bombard some squares with some 5-10 artillery. Then attack. Did you have better luck this time??? Yes, so I thought. Not a very long streak, was it?

The only thing that could be broken is that some piece of terrain give a different bonus than what is stated in the rules. For example, if mountains for some reson only give 75% defence instead of 100%, it could definately sometimes seem as one side is incredibly lucky. Since you often stack all your units in one square, this could have effects that look as a streak of bad (or good) luck. Nobody has made any claims that this be the case, so I just say it in a hypotethical sense.

But if you really think there is something broken, why don´t you test this instead of making ridiculous arguments about some AI cheating.

If you're fighting spearmen and warriors with infantry and tanks, it's time to crank up the difficulty level a bit.

Is it required that the first thread a person starts on this forum be about suspicious combat results, culture flipping or just supposed Ai cheating in general? And amazingly, those of us who have discussed these things many times before still find ourselves responding to these threads .... damn.

Artillery, artillery, artillery. War is an art. It is a courtship, not a mad hormonal rush at the age of 14. If you rush things... well, its all a big mess.

Just a clarification here. There are no Ancient, Middle Ages, Industrial or Modern units. There is no way to specify or create a unit so that it fits into one of these categories. A unit becomes available when its prerequisite tech is researched. That is the ONLY reason units become available in the semi-order that they do.

The argument that ancient units have a bonus against modern units is complete and total bunk. The main reason people perceive this "phenomenon" is because people remember odd occurences, not normal ones. Your mind does not retain the many, many expected results but the very strange one stays there right in the frontal lobe for a long time. After many, many nonspectacular events another strange one will "seem" like it happened right on the heels of the first one.

I always thought that instead of a direct ratio, something else should have been done. I'd need to have the book in front of me, but:

Spearmen, in mountain: Def. 4 (effective)
Tank: Offence, 24.

What if we take 1/4 of the offensive power and subtract it from _both_ sides?

Spearmen: Def 0
Tank: Off: 18

Ok, that seems reasonable enough. Now let's look at something a bit more even:

Spearmen, in mountain: Def. 4
Longbowman: Attack 4

Well, that's -1 to both, giving a 50:50. Ok, good so far...

Marine: Off, 8

subtract 2 from each. That gives you spearmen, 2, marine, 6. 1:3 in favor of the marine, instead of 50:50. Actually, that looks good, too...

Comments?

""Also its important to learn that with the original game stats, a few warriors are an even match for fortified infantry"

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say, "WTF?""

Okay, okay, a bit of an exaggeration Maybe they arent quite THAT messed up... how about this: with the original stats a few KNIGHTS are an even match for fortified infantry

A couple of observations.
I dont have hard stats, but in an early game at chieftain level, I had better results with cav against the Iroq ancient units. I am not sure now if I actually lost a modern armor to a spearmen in that game, though I think maybe I did. They took a lot more damage than I expected, and I know I did lose some to whatever was there... Iroquios with knigts and spearmen, Germans with knights and spearmen. But my cav rolled over them...

If you save before a battle, and your first attack loses, it will probaly lose with any unit you send if you reload. However, if you first attack with a weaker unit, lose, reload, and next use a stronger unit.... it might win.

In my last game, regent, I had several battles with my tanks against spearmen. A lot of them... When it ended, Liz was building 2-3 tanks per turn, and had finally managed one battleship... but she still had about 40 spearmen as defenders in her cities. Ergo: almost every city I took, the last defender or two was a spearmen, and/or an archer. And she had Leonardo's Workshop!
BTW, I never lost a tank to a spearmen defending a city, but she did send 3 or more spearmen to attack and take a tank sitting in the open.