A simple fix for the Sub Bug -- haven't seen it being mentioned

SJ Frank

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I tried giving the sub the "Hide Nationality" flag, and played a couple of test games. I think it works.

I arranged to have my sub being "run over" by friendly AI ships. I had cases where the AI ship sunk or my sub sunk, in neither case was war declared.

The AI does not seem to recognize the fact that Subs are now in fact privateers. For example, I had fortified one of my sub in the middle of a strait. An AI sub smooched up to me, ran a couple of circles around me, but did not attack. I could see him, so he certainly had seen me. If the AI used the sub as a privateer, it would have attacked indiscriminately.

So I think this is a fix that does not affect the game play as far as the AI is concerned. As long as the player does not abuse the hidden nationality of the sub (i.e. by only attacking with sub after war is declared), this fix should not affect game play at all.
 
I'm pretty sure this is common knowledge. Its downfall is that every AI ship goes to attack your sub... I think ;) This is from what i've read, might have explained it incorrectly.

Nice find anyway :)
 
What is this "sub bug" already? I hardly ever play beyond the early industrial era, so please tell me!
 
It's when people accidentaly attack submarines as they can't see them, which then leads to a declaration of war.
 
The sub bug is really really bad, recently in the Middle Ages scenario, my Assassins were underway (I forgot they were 'invisible' and so my rep was suddenly gone :mad: )

Greetz Jurimax
 
It's a bug. The AI, as well as the human player is supposed to get a choice of attacking or moving around an unseen sub. It doesn't happen that way. The bug appeared first, IIRC, in PTW, was fixed, then reappeared in C3C and is now a permanent "feature."
 
wilbill said:
It's a bug. The AI, as well as the human player is supposed to get a choice of attacking or moving around an unseen sub.

Actually, human has the choice but AI doesn't. It's more than enough to mess up international relations, though.
 
ainwood said:
Wouldn't this also mean that you can use subs to attack other civs with impunity?

Yep, so it is up to the human player to act with constraint, and not exploit this fact. As far as I can tell, the AI doesn't. This is just a quick fix anyhow, not a really great solution.

In any case, if this is already a know fact, then that's great. At least there is a way to make invisible units more playable.

Has anyone tried moding the Middle Age scenario this way? If the AI does not recognize "hiddle nationality" like I hypothesized (they don't use the hidden nationality subs like they do with privateers), then it could be a fix for that scenario.
 
Believe me, the AI goes absolutely nuts with Hidden Nationality land units. Ask anyone who ever played the DyP mod. It went so much overboard we saw no way around removing them entirely for RaR.

Because everyone complained about the AI never using Privateers up to PtW patch 1.21, Firaxis drastically increased the AI affinity for HN units with 1.27 (and it stayed that way in c3c). Considering how hard it is to get the AI building ships at all, one can imagine how high 'HN' is on the AI build priority list...they will never build any other offensive unit (except, surprisingly, the odd amphibious unit).

And btw, the c3c/ptw1.27 AI does use Privateers quite frequently (if they see a need for a navy at all).
 
In C3C, the AI has eventually started to use ships efficiently. They routinely send stacks of 3 frigates as escorts along with one fully loaded galleon. This is a huge improvment over all other civ-likes.
 
Thanks for the info, Doc. Anyway, it improves the game greatly. Gone are the times when a few warships were enough to repell any AI attempt at landing on my soil.
 
morchuflex said:
Thanks for the info, Doc. Anyway, it improves the game greatly. Gone are the times when a few warships were enough to repell any AI attempt at landing on my soil.

Especially if you mod transports to have 10, 20 or whatever you like as capacity - the AI is then at least sometimes able to land enough troops to make a sufficent attack.
 
What makes the subs completely useless for me is that the AI always knows exactly where they are- what's the point of building a unit that doesn't have good attack or defence and will always get homed in on?

Grrr
 
classical_hero said:
In relation to this issue, I once had a worker attack one of my assassins in the Middle ages scenario.

Whoa, was that an automatic capture or what happened?
 
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