AI naval invasions

[smallfish]

Has it ever successfully pulled one off in your games of King and above?

Please do tell.

 

[Gucumatz]

Can't say it has. Its amazing when they even try a naval invasion. When I discover they are trying a naval invasion they tend to not bring any ships either and make for easy pickings.

 

[lietkynes]

I have seen the AI trying to invade across the sea but they just send land units. The concept of having naval units protecting embarked units is completely unknown to the AI, so once they declare war 2-3 caravels are usually enough to destroy their whole army before it can even land.

 

[Sir Betti]

I have once been on the wrong side of a French naval attack that really caught me offguard. I was using the mod "unofficial patch and vanilla gameplay" on huge and Marathon. I think I was just entering the Rennaisance era also.

It was a flotilla of near 15 units. These were melee and ranged units not seagoing ships though.The city they attacked was one of my least defended and it was a fairly fresh one also. I dont think I ever finished the scenario as i updated the mod and that broke that particular game. But I was caught with with a dull sword and I suspect I would have lost one or two more young cities if the attack was pressed.

That is one good mod!

 

[smallfish]

Ok, how would ya'll rate this effort by Babylon's Emperor AI?

Spoiler :

 

[orangecape]

In a patch the AI was updated to try naval invasions better. Sometimes it will send 1 GG, 2-3 escort ships and 10 or so regular units in a tight pack to invade. I have seen this several times with mixed success. A player who spots it early will obviously be able to defeat it but some city states sure did get smashed in my games. The AI gives it a solid try now (some of the time...) but they still do plenty of idiotic things with water.

 

[Gucumatz]

That Babylon one seems like it didnt send many units but its not a bad try for an AI at all. A human in multi would bring 5-12 ships for an armada along with units.

So while that is a fairly nice job by the AI, its still nothing in comparison to how humans treat the water.

 

[smallfish]

That Babylon one seems like it didnt send many units but its not a bad try for an AI at all. A human in multi would bring 5-12 ships for an armada along with units.

So while that is a fairly nice job by the AI, its still nothing in comparison to how humans treat the water.

Yeah, I was kinda amazed that it actually bothered to use this formation instead of sending in driblets. If it had massed its forces several more tiles south AND backed it up with a larger land assault to the north, its quite likely my position on that runaway continent might have been overrun. As it was, it just got into sight range of both jet fighters and SBs, and got picked into oblivion. I actually felt bad while doing that, because I don't usually see much effort placed by zee AI in doing amphib ops like this or better.

 

[Haig]

I bet that in the upcoming G&K expansion AI will do them more aggressively and as you can't just run over embarked units anymore and with the new melee ships, it's going to be easier for an AI too.
(actually I sent a question about this to the Dennis Shirk Q&A too)

Also it's frustrating to play Terra map script where the AI doesn't colonize the new world. :/ Hope this isn't the case anymore in the expansion!

But currently sometimes the AI does pretty nice invasions, once I was in war with Mongolia (I was Germany) and my ally was Polynesia but they were a big body of water away from the battlefields, so I didn't count on help. Thing was a stalemate and my riflemen were basically fortified and sucking in cannon shots. Then suddenly shore was filled with Polynesian troops that attacked Mongolia from the sea! Surprised and relieved.

I was surprised when in a game America attacked with subs and carriers, the distance between the continents wasnt huge that time though. But it's nice to see subs built too.

 

[TyBoy]

That looks pretty good in theory, though obviously it would be pretty easy to pick apart. At least they're trying to group a force up and bring some escorts.

The very high ratio of movement to visibility that naval units have has long been a problem in Civ and AI ineptitude at protecting their fleets seems to just be the manifestation this time around. Really though, I think the problem is just that it takes so many ships to defend a modest transport fleet against a somewhat competent attack. Human players probably aren't doing a much better job, the AI is just so much worse at exploiting the weaknesses in our convoys so we don't notice. I would be surprised if MP CiV games saw very many attempts at moving large transport fleets across the map relying on a local escort, they're almost indefensible.

It's interesting to contrast it with civ4 where the same fundamental characteristic (fast ships with low visibility) created almost the complete opposite effect because of unit stacking, no ZoC and the ability of a healthy transport to defeat a damaged warship. In that game it was hardly ever worth maintaining a sea dominance type navy since controlling the seas in a meaningful way was nearly impossible. Since you could only see them coming a couple turns away from landing and you had to have your ships spread around to see even that much you would at best only be able to bring a few warships to bear on their invasion for a couple turns. Go 50/50 with a few escorts and you might easily fail to stop a single transport from reaching the shore even with a good net of warships watching your coast.

I'd be pretty happy just to see them stop embarking units randomly when I have warships nearby. I think dramatically increasing the oversea visibility of later game naval units would be a necessary first step to fixing the problems with convoys though.

 

[Jimbo30]

I had a game with Egypt on King which I won basically any way I chose, but near the end the American's launched a cool sea invasion against me, around 7-8 infantry with a couple of destroyers leading them. The cool thing was that they came a very long way around the continent - around the side that I had no vision of. That was even though we had a single water tile seperating both continents at a different point.

 

[Gucumatz]

That looks pretty good in theory, though obviously it would be pretty easy to pick apart. At least they're trying to group a force up and bring some escorts.

The very high ratio of movement to visibility that naval units have has long been a problem in Civ and AI ineptitude at protecting their fleets seems to just be the manifestation this time around. Really though, I think the problem is just that it takes so many ships to defend a modest transport fleet against a somewhat competent attack. Human players probably aren't doing a much better job, the AI is just so much worse at exploiting the weaknesses in our convoys so we don't notice. I would be surprised if MP CiV games saw very many attempts at moving large transport fleets across the map relying on a local escort, they're almost indefensible.

It's interesting to contrast it with civ4 where the same fundamental characteristic (fast ships with low visibility) created almost the complete opposite effect because of unit stacking, no ZoC and the ability of a healthy transport to defeat a damaged warship. In that game it was hardly ever worth maintaining a sea dominance type navy since controlling the seas in a meaningful way was nearly impossible. Since you could only see them coming a couple turns away from landing and you had to have your ships spread around to see even that much you would at best only be able to bring a few warships to bear on their invasion for a couple turns. Go 50/50 with a few escorts and you might easily fail to stop a single transport from reaching the shore even with a good net of warships watching your coast.

I'd be pretty happy just to see them stop embarking units randomly when I have warships nearby. I think dramatically increasing the oversea visibility of later game naval units would be a necessary first step to fixing the problems with convoys though.

In Multi from competent sea players they rely on fleets much more than units. The thinking goes bombarb a city to kingdom come, eliminate the opponent's fleet, keep 1-2 units near your fleet to take a city at 1 hp and only THEN send units that may already be in the water but are far away from action to the continent you are invading for backup.

Its much more important to do this because people will run over units if they are desperate. I like to play as England/Denmark in my multiplayer games and my ships are great scouts in the Open Ocean, but I have to manually check if any units are moving (wish it would alert us if it simply saw units moving) and will then proceed to crush navies/units if I do see a huge fleet in the water.

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I haven't played a competent Songhai player on the seas yet though, so I will put some judgement off on that.

 

[tetley]

I'd like to see the AI use Paratroopers. That's how I commonly deal with island maps: island hop. For that matter, I'd like to see it legal to put a paratrooper on an aircraft carrier. Maybe that didn't happen in history, but...someone has to be first....