Dumb AI, again

The A. I. may be dumb, but short of a memory allocation failure, it has good recall.

Quite unlike Emperor Rusty of the Vikings, who after a long war vassalized Gandhi and then continued the war against his vassal Tokugawa, vassalized him, and then decided to shift his armies and airships to face Hannibal.

That war with Gandhi started because I ascended to top dog, and he started poisoning my water and sabotaging my stuff. I retaliated by supplying Hannibal who had been losing a war against the Gandhi alliance. It was very gratifying to watch G's unbeaten armies whither before Hannibal's machine guns once I gave him railroad. Then I decided to wade into the fray with my Berserker CRIII Grenadiers , and my vassal Gilgamesh pitched in conquering three cities.

You guessed it... Hannibal willing became my vassal once I joined the fight. So I was planning a military campaign against a guy who was already my vassal.

Another one... It’s always fun to declare war on an AI when their SoD is occupied fighting someone else, but this takes it to a new level.

Sulaiman has always hated me. Religion, borders… me not giving him monopoly techs and my refusing to declare war on my only friend didn’t help either.

Suly was #1 in military and Arabia was #2. So when Sulaiman declared war on Arabia (Shiites vs Sunnis?) and took Medina and Mecca, I figured now was as good a time as any to secure my borders with Turkey and remove some of their industrial base. Arabia was halfway across the map from Turkey, and Turkey’s heartland was relatively undefended.

So, I declare and take a couple of border cities and one nicely cottaged core city. Of course, Suly makes peace with Abu Bakr and by the time I am getting my stack sorted out, his stack shows up. 60 units – Trebs, Elephants, Horse Archers, Longbows, Pikes, Swordsmen, and Crossbows. My own stack is maybe 35 units, and it’s spread out among my new possessions. So I offer peace and get it – even getting 10 turns of tribute from the Turks.

15 turns later, Arabia and Turkey are at war again and the Turkish SoD is nowhere in sight. So I declare again, this time capturing Suly’s capital, his unit pump, and 2 more cottage cities. Again, the SoD rolls back across the continent and again I make peace.

I’ve now managed the same trick a third time, as Sulaiman is now busy trying to take Spanish cities with the same SoD – which is now up to 80 units. Too bad Sulaiman’s territory now consists of 2 small island cities, Medina (down to 1 unit defending) and 2 culture-pressed former Spanish cities. The land he started with before the first war, is all gone.

In short: It’s never a good idea to walk your entire army halfway around the world, leaving your homeland unguarded. It’s even worse to make the same mistake 3 times.

To be fair, humans tend to leave the homeland unguarded too. We just get away with it. But it's certainly a mistake.

The second and more annoying mistake the AI does in your example is accepting peace rather than to reconquer some of the lost cities. That's just bad AI coding.

As always, K-Mod improves this.

I have a game going right now, small Pangaea 5 civs, already destroyed Napoleon with an early rush. Out of the 5 that remain, me (Monty), Zara, Justinian, Willem, Genghis. Justinian founded Buddhism, Willem founded Hinduism. Buddhism spread to Willem, but instead of spreading Hinduism he spread Justinians' religion. All civs except the Dutch are Buddhist. Willem spread not his own religion, but his rivals to all the other Ai and myself. Now he is religiously isolated. Willem could have divided the map by religion, but has only put himself at odds with everyone else. I must say I've never seen this experience play out before.

Just finished a game, Prince difficulty, Continents, Standard size, playing as Hammurabi. In early wars which I wasn't prepared for, Stalin and Saladin both sent stacks of melee units, independently of each other, that were too weak to capture any cities but were big enough to pillage a lot. Both stacks pillaged a few tile improvements before suiciding against cities with Bowmen and Aggressive Axemen (which had free Shock from an event).

Later, the global tech pace was far too slow (Gandhi was isolated, everyone else had mediocre traits and were held back by wars) for Space victories. In 1800AD, Mao had by far the highest score, with me, Saladin and Montezuma close to each other in score. Mao had about 1.5 times as much power as everyone else put together, and was one of the leaders in tech. Around this time, I decided to push for Culture (max on slider, building culture in two of my future legendaries, but only one religion and bad National Wonder distribution for Culture), to stop Mao winning Domination or Time. Despite Mao being Cautious with me for most of this, he, and his peacevassal Stalin, went after backwards Montezuma (and his capitulated vassal Washington) instead of me. Won Culture in 1960AD, several turns after the Russia+China vs Aztec+America war ended.