I just want to say my bit about the naval aspect of the Civ III AI.
The study is based on PTW 1.21f, which has probably the best AI of all versions as there is just a ton of tweaks and additions not present in vanilla Civ III. Material here are an amalgam of stuff I posted at Apolyton. But since it looks like the devs are making a last call for suggestions, might as well post it here.
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The study is based on a specially designed continents (tiny) debug map with 2 of the 4 Civs tagged as Naval Power (build often). And I did get to see quite a few intercontinnental wars.
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Findings.
1) AI invasion forces are highly fickle. They sail back and forth midstream when the target changes. (ie: a city it is aiming for it taken by another unit.) Instead of reinforcing the garrision at the city, it moves on to the next target. I really have to wonder how many landing parties we never see in our real games because of this effect.
The same effect also happens if its target city is taken by an ally. I've seen an AI landing party sail back and both between targets for 5 turns. The AI made peace before it had a chance to land its troops. In this case, the AI's ability to see all units work against it. The happy accidents that humans sometimes get, when they send in fresh troops only to find that they just arrive in time to save the city from a massive counterattack never happens with the AI. The additional forces headed for a target just sail off elsewhere, even when it is prudent (for a human) to reinforce a city anyways.
2) The invasion convoys rarely carry enough troops, and usually, it carries NO defensive units and thus cannot hold cities when counterattacked nor can it protect the attackers the turn after it lands.
3) It likes to spread itself thin. Offensive units will immediately move on to the next target instead of securing the city and waiting for reinforcements.
If 4 Siphani lands and 2 of them takes a city, the damange units will stay in to heal and there will always be at least 1 unit defending. The healthy units will however go on in their own little thing, usually, getting killed attacking or in a counterattack in the next turn.
When enemy units arrive to retake a city there's not enough Siphani left to defend. Instead of 2 damaged Siphanis and 2 healthy ones ready to pop out of a city to cut down the attacker, you have 2 helpless units waiting to be killed.
Conclusion:
A lot of it seems to me like insufficient programming. In the search for general subsystems that works for all occasions (not a bad thing I might add), most of the work went into more general unit algorithms and not enough thought was put into how units should behave in the very uniqe situation where it lands an invasion force in foreign soil and must hunker down to defend its position.
The AI can get away with being a little sloppy if its figthing on land because its cities are usually near enough to reinforce a position and there is usually fresh troops streaming in. Naval invasions badly need a new set of if/then statements for the AI just so it can be somewhat competent at it. I don't think anyone is expecting anything more than that.
Recommendations
I'm not a programmer nor do I pretend to know the challenge of programming an AI that can do naval invasions justice. But I hope my recommendations help the programmers and designers think of something. The problem with naval invasions is TIMING. It is all about TIMING. The AI either fails to amass enough troops, or do so but fails to land sufficient troops to overwhelm defenses. The fickle landing party syndrome I discussed earlier is probably important here.
A possible fix could be to simply TELL the AI to co-ordinate naval invasions like a land stack. Instead of multiple galleons or escort/transport pairs acting independently and often very inefficiently in picking up troops and dropping them off, the AI should simply pick a spot on your map, load up its troops, move them to some point out in the sea and move in all at once. There could perhaps be an alterate strategy to the above idea where the AI will split its forces and attack multiple points or time its attacks to have fresh troops arriving over multiple turns.
RE: Marines, The AI do use them somewhat more frequently in PTW than in the unpatched vanilla CivIII , but they need to use them as the tip of the spear. At minimum a transport with 8 units of marines is required. 3 Marines, 2 longbows and 2 Cavs isn't the kind of Combined Arms tactic that is effective.
This will not fix the ineherent weakness of the AI in naval invasion and may not result in anything significant against seasoned players, but if you play the odds, and Civ III AI decision making seems to be built on playing the odds, you can score a higher chance of success against human and more importantly against other AI civs by landing more units instead of going piecmeal. If more can be added to this, then even better.
From a gameplay perspective, if AI civs that can do better at invading on an intercontinental scale, it can make things much more interesting. Even if human players can fend such invasions off, AI civs may not, and it would be nice to see some of the intercontinetal wars result in something more substantive than the usual phoney wars where nothing happens and minor skirmishes. An AI civ landing a force that actually takes cities, holds them and take more cities as reinforcements come in will change the dynamic of a game quickly. As it stands now, the AI Civs on a landmass that is separate from the rest pose ABSOLUTELY ZERO threat to anyone, on other landmasses, with the possible exception of small island colonies of these Civilizations. This weakness in the I needs to be addressed.
The study is based on PTW 1.21f, which has probably the best AI of all versions as there is just a ton of tweaks and additions not present in vanilla Civ III. Material here are an amalgam of stuff I posted at Apolyton. But since it looks like the devs are making a last call for suggestions, might as well post it here.
---------------------------------------------------
The study is based on a specially designed continents (tiny) debug map with 2 of the 4 Civs tagged as Naval Power (build often). And I did get to see quite a few intercontinnental wars.
---------------------------------------------------
Findings.
1) AI invasion forces are highly fickle. They sail back and forth midstream when the target changes. (ie: a city it is aiming for it taken by another unit.) Instead of reinforcing the garrision at the city, it moves on to the next target. I really have to wonder how many landing parties we never see in our real games because of this effect.
The same effect also happens if its target city is taken by an ally. I've seen an AI landing party sail back and both between targets for 5 turns. The AI made peace before it had a chance to land its troops. In this case, the AI's ability to see all units work against it. The happy accidents that humans sometimes get, when they send in fresh troops only to find that they just arrive in time to save the city from a massive counterattack never happens with the AI. The additional forces headed for a target just sail off elsewhere, even when it is prudent (for a human) to reinforce a city anyways.
2) The invasion convoys rarely carry enough troops, and usually, it carries NO defensive units and thus cannot hold cities when counterattacked nor can it protect the attackers the turn after it lands.
3) It likes to spread itself thin. Offensive units will immediately move on to the next target instead of securing the city and waiting for reinforcements.
If 4 Siphani lands and 2 of them takes a city, the damange units will stay in to heal and there will always be at least 1 unit defending. The healthy units will however go on in their own little thing, usually, getting killed attacking or in a counterattack in the next turn.
When enemy units arrive to retake a city there's not enough Siphani left to defend. Instead of 2 damaged Siphanis and 2 healthy ones ready to pop out of a city to cut down the attacker, you have 2 helpless units waiting to be killed.
Conclusion:
A lot of it seems to me like insufficient programming. In the search for general subsystems that works for all occasions (not a bad thing I might add), most of the work went into more general unit algorithms and not enough thought was put into how units should behave in the very uniqe situation where it lands an invasion force in foreign soil and must hunker down to defend its position.
The AI can get away with being a little sloppy if its figthing on land because its cities are usually near enough to reinforce a position and there is usually fresh troops streaming in. Naval invasions badly need a new set of if/then statements for the AI just so it can be somewhat competent at it. I don't think anyone is expecting anything more than that.
Recommendations
I'm not a programmer nor do I pretend to know the challenge of programming an AI that can do naval invasions justice. But I hope my recommendations help the programmers and designers think of something. The problem with naval invasions is TIMING. It is all about TIMING. The AI either fails to amass enough troops, or do so but fails to land sufficient troops to overwhelm defenses. The fickle landing party syndrome I discussed earlier is probably important here.
A possible fix could be to simply TELL the AI to co-ordinate naval invasions like a land stack. Instead of multiple galleons or escort/transport pairs acting independently and often very inefficiently in picking up troops and dropping them off, the AI should simply pick a spot on your map, load up its troops, move them to some point out in the sea and move in all at once. There could perhaps be an alterate strategy to the above idea where the AI will split its forces and attack multiple points or time its attacks to have fresh troops arriving over multiple turns.
RE: Marines, The AI do use them somewhat more frequently in PTW than in the unpatched vanilla CivIII , but they need to use them as the tip of the spear. At minimum a transport with 8 units of marines is required. 3 Marines, 2 longbows and 2 Cavs isn't the kind of Combined Arms tactic that is effective.
This will not fix the ineherent weakness of the AI in naval invasion and may not result in anything significant against seasoned players, but if you play the odds, and Civ III AI decision making seems to be built on playing the odds, you can score a higher chance of success against human and more importantly against other AI civs by landing more units instead of going piecmeal. If more can be added to this, then even better.
From a gameplay perspective, if AI civs that can do better at invading on an intercontinental scale, it can make things much more interesting. Even if human players can fend such invasions off, AI civs may not, and it would be nice to see some of the intercontinetal wars result in something more substantive than the usual phoney wars where nothing happens and minor skirmishes. An AI civ landing a force that actually takes cities, holds them and take more cities as reinforcements come in will change the dynamic of a game quickly. As it stands now, the AI Civs on a landmass that is separate from the rest pose ABSOLUTELY ZERO threat to anyone, on other landmasses, with the possible exception of small island colonies of these Civilizations. This weakness in the I needs to be addressed.
