Hope for Combat AI Improvement?

AriochIV said:

Yes, the AI penchant for sending its units swimming in the midst of combat has always puzzled me, but in particular for the fact that it will do so without any regard for the presence of enemy naval units. That couldn't be terribly hard to fix.

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The thing is it always does this no matter the situation. It seems to me like they have the Boolean statement backwards. If "is there Enemy Navy within city borders" = "Yes" then attack Navy with nearest melee unit...

If they fix the tactical AI so that each unit cycles through more options, then turn times could go back to being problematic, especially for players on older machines.

Gamewizard said:

If they fix the tactical AI so that each unit cycles through more options, then turn times could go back to being problematic, especially for players on older machines.

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I don't think the kinds of things we're talking about are heavy on the processing power (is there a naval unit nearby? -- YES -- then DON'T GO IN THE FRIGGIN' WATER), but I'd take slower turns for better AI any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And my computer is ancient.

One more question about the bad AI... someone said somewhere that the AI is programmed to HAVE to move it's pieces each and every turn if possible. A simple change to that would help a lot. If they were under attack and allowed to just keep their units surrounding a city, that would make a big difference.

AriochIV said:

I don't think the kinds of things we're talking about are heavy on the processing power (is there a naval unit nearby? -- YES -- then DON'T GO IN THE FRIGGIN' WATER), but I'd take slower turns for better AI any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And my computer is ancient.

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It can't be that simple of a fix. Don't you think they would have patched that in by now?

Gamewizard said:

It can't be that simple of a fix. Don't you think they would have patched that in by now?

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By this logic, anything that's currently wrong with the game will never be fixed, because it's too hard to fix -- or they would already have fixed it, right? I'm not buying that. I think it hasn't been fixed because it's just one of a thousand little things that we would like fixed, and their priorities are not the same as ours.

Zaimejs said:

One more question about the bad AI... someone said somewhere that the AI is programmed to HAVE to move it's pieces each and every turn if possible. A simple change to that would help a lot. If they were under attack and allowed to just keep their units surrounding a city, that would make a big difference.

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I've not seen anything saying that, yet I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it were true. I can understand the benefits of an AI having a mobile defence force but border cities and city-states just moving their troops here and there for no real benefit has always struck me as terribly odd. Changing it so that they didn't move things unless they actually needed to be moved would be good, it might actually decrease turn times too.