BNW patch new ai behaviour

AI seems to be more aggressive as promised, but still doesn't seem to train enough siege units (or any in my case). Also the old warrior spam is back with a vengeance. Seriously the ai needs to use spears/swords more in the early game and build more siege units . Playing as Babylon I didn't really need an army to hold it off for most of the game. Hopefully the shift of iron mining to the bronze working tech will make this a bit easier for the ai.

I'll actually be really interested to see how the movement of iron in the tech tree changes things. Maybe it will mean catapults get their iron requirement back!

I'm sorta glad the AI don't build more seige units though. They can't seem to defend them and end up just wasting production and units all too often. If they could defend them properly (make them stackable and weaken them?) then the AI could perhaps do more effective seiges and force you to make an army to hold them off.

What difficulty were you playing on by the way?

Speaking of iron and strategice resources, has it ever bothered anyone else that they aren't consistent? I mean, I see how horses become useless from a military standpoint (and should become a luxury after a certain point in the game), but iron should continue to be used by the most powerful military units through the entire game - you're telling me a battleship uses no iron?!

I'm playing on prince difficulty- nothing too taxing. But the AI shouldn't have to relly on fixed bonuses to field a better army. I heard there has been some improvement to the AI formations, which means that there might be an opportunity to increase the number of siege units in AI armies. Archers just don't do enough damage against walled cities in the early game

MadMage86 said:

Speaking of iron and strategice resources, has it ever bothered anyone else that they aren't consistent? I mean, I see how horses become useless from a military standpoint (and should become a luxury after a certain point in the game), but iron should continue to be used by the most powerful military units through the entire game - you're telling me a battleship uses no iron?!

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I think the idea there is that after the Industrial Revolution, iron becomes ubiquitous, and no longer a scarce resource. They could have modeled that by increasing iron yields in the industrial era, but they modeled it instead by having iron become "obsolete" in game terms.

MadMage86 said:

Speaking of iron and strategice resources, has it ever bothered anyone else that they aren't consistent? I mean, I see how horses become useless from a military standpoint (and should become a luxury after a certain point in the game), but iron should continue to be used by the most powerful military units through the entire game - you're telling me a battleship uses no iron?!

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All the 'strategic resources' are really designed to keep you hunting for new resources to build new units - they have very little to do with what was actually required to build the unit historically.
They also, in all the Civ games, they miss the fact that the real 'advance' historically was the requirement for vastly greater quantities of materials. You can equip an entire Legion for about 200 tons of iron. It takes 20,000 tons or more to build a battleship, and hundreds of thousands of tons of iron to build transcontinental railroads. Rather than constantly add new 'strategic' materials, there needs to be a transition from 'simple' to 'industrial' quantities. Iron is relatively plentiful in small amounts, but the industrial quantities required after the renaissance would require a lot more effort - which is in keeping with the gameplay requirements.

AriochIV said:

I think the idea there is that after the Industrial Revolution, iron becomes ubiquitous, and no longer a scarce resource. They could have modeled that by increasing iron yields in the industrial era, but they modeled it instead by having iron become "obsolete" in game terms.

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I agree. There's the fact that before the industrial era iron could only be extracted from specific compounds (magnetite and hematite) but now we have a lot more options and therefore iron can be found everywhere.

It would make sense if iron disappeared from the list of strategic resources for the same reason you don't have "wood" even if that's also very important, but I guess you wouldn't like to have your precious iron mine removed.

If anything one should wonder why Jet Fighters and modern armors don't need oil.

I don't think I would expect too much aggressiveness nor quality/quantity of units at Prince. While they need better mix of units, they do make up for it by quantity and quality (i.e., superiority) at higher levels. Learning to do growth, science and gold effectively will allow you to move up and face more aggressive AI. Nothing can humble you faster than facing 12-15 Greek CompCavs and Hoplites with 5 Archers and Warriors.

Playing on King I do see the AI being crafty about assessing my growth and comparative military power and trying to move in on me if they think they can take me. They usually do that after we exchange embassies, so I suspect that is how they learn about my military and defenses.

Beastfeast said:

AI seems to be more aggressive as promised, but still doesn't seem to train enough siege units (or any in my case)

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Must depend on who you're fighting. Atilla just trounced me with ~7 visible artillery pieces on Emp. It was not pretty.

Not related to the AI's skill at warfare, but I just had a game where a couple of AIs made some really odd choices with their late-game social policies. Ethiopia went order with a 3-city tall empire, and China went freedom with a very wide empire (20ish cities with lots of puppets).

I'm wondering if this was some kind of a sneak-peek at the changes in the AI decision making process for ideologies. Those were the wrong choices for vanilla/GnK; but as ideologies in BnW, going tall/order or wide/freedom might be situationally useful depending on what VC they are shooting for.