I've heard the Naval AI in BNW is really bad. But what about at Immortal difficulty?

NiceOneEmlyn said:
Yes, good point about Carthage. I can't imagine Polynesia or the Vikings forming a decent sized Navy though! I think these types of games are very rarely played by the majority of members, so we have very little to go by.
Click to expand...

It's great that a game as old as Civ 5 can still have so much uncharted territory!
 
NiceOneEmlyn said:
Yes, good point about Carthage. I can't imagine Polynesia or the Vikings forming a decent sized Navy though! I think these types of games are very rarely played by the majority of members, so we have very little to go by.
Click to expand...

With Viking, you can choose to land your embarked land units and won't lose any kind turn. What does that mean? That means that you can continue to move your embarked unit on land without having to wait for the next turn and then move your unit that landed. If you use the Viking UU, their amphibious promotion allows you to attack through rivers and they're also healthy because you can plunder an enemy improvement and still continue to move. Viking looks dominant unique in the seas.
 
reddishrecue said:
With Viking, you can choose to land your embarked land units and won't lose any kind turn. What does that mean? That means that you can continue to move your embarked unit on land without having to wait for the next turn and then move your unit that landed. If you use the Viking UU, their amphibious promotion allows you to attack through rivers and they're also healthy because you can plunder an enemy improvement and still continue to move. Viking looks dominant unique in the seas.
Click to expand...

They are like Songhai (I think it was?) in the sense that their unique abilities are potentially very strong.... BUT, the AI still has absolutely no idea how to leverage that potential most of the time.
 
ThorHammerz said:
They are like Songhai (I think it was?) in the sense that their unique abilities are potentially very strong.... BUT, the AI still has absolutely no idea how to leverage that potential most of the time.
Click to expand...

Well, yeah.. kind of, but without the extra defense from embarkment. The good thing that Songhai has is that it can get more gold from capturing encampments and its mud mosque faith..
 
NiceOneEmlyn said:
I played a couple of these at epic (easier) speed, and I was taken aback by the size of Portugal and Holland's Navies... I havn't played against Turkey yet but I would imagine they could also be quite formidable!
Click to expand...

Thanks for bringing those three Civs up. I've definitely seen the Dutch Sea Beggar swarm. I'll take a look at Portugal and the Ottomans in my next game. :cool:

I think it's already been mentioned above, but naval Uniques are usually (if not always) exploited by the AI.
 
I do love water maps and have seen some absolutely huge A.I. fleets before. Early on, certain civs may go crazy and spam galleasses to the point they have 15+ hanging out by their capital (diety difficulty). Luckily they have problems upgrading all this because they need iron for frigates, and later oil for battleships. The AI still prefers to use their oil on bombers in the late game it seems. However, nuclear submarines are an AI favorite if you let the game go that long, and you can see huge numbers of them roaming around.

In terms of actual battle tactics of the A.I., it always seems pretty terrible on land to me and they are no different in the water. They will sometimes do weird things like surround an isolated submarine with 5 of their own submarines but never actually fire. I'm not sure what's going on there, but at the same time they have actually put up resistance effectively. The one problem I continually see is that they don't seem to rally their naval units together when they are being threatened. I can see their fleet leaving a few turns earlier and it never returns when I declare war and take their capital even if the siege lasts 5+ turns.

I'm currently posting video's in my deity Let's Play for Carthage. My goal is a late game domination victory using only a navy. I have definitely met my match with another AI and their nuclear submarine spam. Even with superior tactics it is very hard to knock them out of the game just do to the sheer numbers. If you are interested in seeing late-game naval warfare, you can check out the videos. I promise you missile cruisers!
 
BruinBound said:
They will sometimes do weird things like surround an isolated submarine with 5 of their own submarines but never actually fire. I'm not sure what's going on there, but at the same time they have actually put up resistance effectively.
Click to expand...

The AI isn't allowed to move AND shoot on the same turn. I strongly suspect for reasons similar to how having your fleet of 12 nuclear submarines wiped out in a single turn by 12 nuclear submarines from the AI would not be fun. Basically, ships can move too far AND fire too far. A composite bowmen moving and shooting goes from 2 range to 3 (in effect). A submarine moving and shooting goes from 2 range to 6.

They CAN surround your ships and stop them from running, though.
 
shaglio said:
Or you could combine the two and play . . . Ring I thing it's called (I'm at work so I can't look it up) and have both an inner sea and an outer ocean, while still playing a single landmass.

EDIT: Or maybe it's Donut I'm thinking of. One gives you an inner sea and the other gives you a choice between an inner sea and an inner mountain range.
Click to expand...

I have since tried Inland Sea and Oval.

Inland Sea does not wrap left/right and the “ocean” and there wasn’t really enough water to be interesting, but then the whole map seemed small -- as compared to pangaea or fractal with the same settings.

Oval is just roundish pangaea. It was easy for me to get four coastal cities, but naval units seemed less important than usual.

Donut looks to be a more gamish version of Inland Sea, I have not tried that one, but it the one where you can have mountains in the center instead of water. Based on that option, I am assuming the donut hole has to be relatively small.

Ring is the one with an inner Sea and outer ocean, and I will probably try that one next, but I am not optimistic that I will like it any better than good old pangaea plus.
 
The AI was never good at naval battles. It was even worse before the patch came through that didn't allow the AI to move then shoot in the same turn.

The AI likes to swarm its fleet around you, almost like its trying to block you from escaping. I get that this could be a good idea, but its not good on sea. The AI doesn't seem to try and attack your units effectively before you can get the upper hand and destroy their fleets.

Although with Galleass units they will usually try to defend their coast and never go for your cities. They do this quite well though, this is probably the best you'll see.

Another problem with the AI is that it is extremely passive in water type maps. It seems it wants to settle rather than conquest. It also seems to have trouble getting to its destination. The AI really should only declare war on the last moment so it can come out for a surprise attack.

The AI also needs to learn how to massive produce RANGE naval units. Since ranged naval units are what destroy boats and capture cities with having some melee boats here and there. The tactics for the AI also need to change, they shouldn't just charge in without shooting, it gives the player the advantage, not the AI. Although it can do this with melee I think the combat part is just better off with ranged.
 
At immortal difficulty AI can sometimes easily abuse you with ships since most of the time the AI has superior technology. You have to be really nice to the AI so that you can continue with them because if the AI attacks you with its superior technology, you can end up not having the nnecessary technology for the ships that attack nor the necessary production to get the needed amount of ships up on time.
 
In my immortal games I can usually keep up with the AI in terms of tech. (It depends on how I play it out really but yeah).

I don't think the AI usually rushes to frigates, it more goes down the Printing press/Gunpower line in my games, I don't often see the AI go for Navigation tech until it gets at least one of those technologies, so I can rush Frigates immediently (which are overpowered anyway) and crush them.

I haven't really play a deity game yet so my experiences there are zero. So I'm not going to attempt to argue with that difficulty, but having played immortal from my experience I usually get to Frigates faster than the AI can.
 
beetle said:
I have since tried Inland Sea and Oval.

Inland Sea does not wrap left/right and the “ocean” and there wasn’t really enough water to be interesting, but then the whole map seemed small -- as compared to pangaea or fractal with the same settings.
Click to expand...

This is because Inland Sea has its dimensions forced by Firaxis to be 2 sizes smaller than what is listed:


Code: 
	-- Inland Sea is a regional script, nearly all land, all fertile, so use grid sizes two levels below normal.
	local worldsizes = {
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_DUEL.ID] = {24, 16},
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_TINY.ID] = {32, 20},
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_SMALL.ID] = {40, 24},
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_STANDARD.ID] = {52, 32},
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_LARGE.ID] = {64, 40},
		[GameInfo.Worlds.WORLDSIZE_HUGE.ID] = {84, 52}
		}
	local grid_size = worldsizes[worldSize];
 
The inability to move and shoot in the same turn is by far the biggest failing of the naval AI. All of your wars will basically come to this:

1. Cluster up your ranged ships.
2. Move in 1 tile.
3. Is there an enemy unit within firing range? If yes, blast it to bits. If no, go back to step 2.

And that's pretty much it. You can avoid damage by just hiding out of range until you can swarm another unit the next turn.

The land AI isn't perfect either, especially once you get planes and artillery, but the openness of the sea, lack of rough terrain, and the vast superiority of range ships compared to melee ships accentuates their problems. The only way they'll stand a slight chance is if they have layers upon layers of range ships so that you can't just sit back and pick them off, but the odds of that are slim, especially with limited resources.

I've won huge-map Immortal domination games by just turtling up to battleships and cruising from capital to capital, curbstomping everyone, no matter how big and powerful, in 5-10 turns. Even when the last target, Germany, had probably 40 nuclear subs floating around Berlin they didn't manage to so much as damage a single unit. And I didn't have some crazy carrier fleet of bombers either. I only had about 6 battleships, 4 subs, 2 destroyers, and 2 missile cruisers. Naval warfare on Immortal is about as hard as land warfare on Warlord.
 
Lanijon said:
The inability to move and shoot in the same turn is by far the biggest failing of the naval AI.
Click to expand...

I think it's a feature, not a failing. If you have 6 nuclear subs roaming the world and then in one turn you lose all six of them to the AI's 6 nuclear subs (one shots)...well, that's not much fun. It's also practically impossible to protect ships like Aircraft Carriers from nuclear submarines when they can potentially move 7+ tiles and fire another 3. Even a ring of Destroyers/Missile Cruisers several tiles out from the Carriers in a giant ring won't do the trick against a player or if the AI was "competent."

Ships simply move too far and do too much damage per shot. A composite bowman moving one space and firing another two for 30 damage against a land unit is very different from a ship moving seven or more tiles and firing another three for 100 damage versus a naval unit.
 
LordBalkoth said:
I think it's a feature, not a failing. If you have 6 nuclear subs roaming the world and then in one turn you lose all six of them to the AI's 6 nuclear subs (one shots)...well, that's not much fun.
Click to expand...

I disagree: it is most definitely a failing, and not a feature.

If it was a concern during game balance, then Firaxis would not have given naval units as much movement as they have (which is another intricate and very annoying design issue created from building the entire game on 1UPT), and would certainly not have given the ability to move and shoot for humans, but "somehow disabled it for AIs" - the flaw in question is that the tactical AI is simply extremely poorly programmed to function in a 1UPT environment. Land units do not have a large pool of movement points, and yet they suffer from the same shoot-and-move issue. Why? Because the existing algorithms simply do not support the ability to move-and-shoot on the same turn. If they did, implementing a "is this a naval unit" boolean check would be trivial.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

O
AI is snowballing at Classical Era
Replies
7
Views
1K
martindo
M
AcaMetis
Nobles' Club 352: Joao II of Portugal
2
Replies
20
Views
1K
MeowZeDung
MeowZeDung
F
What are the different "types" of games for you, that feel very different and scratch a different itch?
Replies
8
Views
1K
Gumbolt
Gumbolt
AcaMetis
Nobles' Club 339: Charlemagne of the Holy Roman Empire
Replies
9
Views
2K
Kernigh
K
AcaMetis
Nobles' Club 338: Willem van Oranje of the Netherlands
2
Replies
28
Views
3K
pigswill
pigswill
Top Bottom