AI ship retreat logic

[Refar]

I noticed a possible issue with the AI logic to retreat ships (damaged i.e.) from cities in danger to be lost.

What happened is - i was besieging a city, the AI had 2 damaged galleys there. The siege took a few turns (it's hard to bring enought siege in a Galley Driven Naval invasion )...

So those 2 enemy galleys retreated form the city as i landed my troops. The next turn the AI apparently changed its mind, and they returned. And then retreated again, and returned.
3 times in toal untill i took the city.

Apparently once the ship is out of harbor the AI will re-evaluate its orders - like "Oh, those are damaged, they need to heal" - and send them to the nearest harbour - which in this case was still the besieged city.

This was i.e. as the ships were damaged - if they stayed in the besieged city to heal, they would have been ready in time to try to sink another 2 of my reinforcement galleys.

 

[Solver]

Very interesting note. Thanks.

 

[Woody1]

I've noticed similar AI behaviour on undamaged stacks of ships. Usually, from/to a city I am blockading or something. Although, it may be widespread behaviour that I'm just not seeing elsewhere because I don't have visibility.

The AI will move a large stack of ships out of a city, then move them all back the next turn. Repeat.

As a side note, the AI is pretty stupid about attacking other ships. It will happily attack a single ship (like a privateer), but if I stack two privs together the AI usually won't dare attack. I think that's a weakness in the AI. Not sure what the fix is, though, as you don't want to make them suicidal.

 

[TheDS]

It also depends on what the AI has available to attack with.

I've seen it afraid to use a handful of Caravels to attack single Privateers, for instance. (I doubt that it realized I had devoted so much production to new Privateers and would have just moved a fleet of them in if I had to, like I did to a different AI player earlier in that game.)

I also saw them stack a pair (or trio) of Frigates or SOLs and go after an equal or larger stack of Privateers.

Sending a single Frigate after a pair of Privateers happens, but not often, because usually the Frigate will be killed by the second Privateer, but I've seen it. (Especially when that Frigate can duck back into a city!)

That said, it's highly unusual to have a stack of ships get attacked, but I think that's more due to my tendency to have overwhelming naval superiority past the gunpowder age, and before then, I tend to not get in wars requiring naval support.