ai usage of custom units

[aalibey]

I will appreciate some thoughts about custom units. Some of them really look nice and you want to have them in your game. But does AI use them as "intended"? eg. you have mech infantry A/D/M 12/18/2 cost shields 110. now you add humvee (nice unit must have) 10/16/3 with blitz, cost 100. Does AI now build only humvee?

Another question about default rules
Civilopedia says that F15 and Jet Fighter have radar ability, so that they see two squares. However if you check civ3mod.bic in 1.29f it is simply not checked. What does it mean? Do they have that ability or not?

 

[GIDustin]

The only thing i can help you with wasnt even asked. If you give a boat a transport cap of ONLY 1, the AI will not use it to build new cities as they always send a defensive unit along with their settlers.

I dont play civ 3 a whole lot. I spend most of my time in the editor, some graphics program, or Editpad looking at CGI files so I cannot answer the questions you asked.

GIDustin

 

[Dark Sheer]

AI will build almost any attack and defense unit. However, AI might not use a unit for terraforming if it is also a defense or attack unit.

AI also do not know how to use a land transport. Other than that AI do know how to use all custom units including those with hidden nationality and invisibility.

 

[Cyclonic]

This question has been bugging me too. I like adding extra units to vary the game, but ONLY if the AI will build them.

All I can deduce is that the AI has some sort of evaluation routine by which it rates the unit. Then for any particular strategy (eg Air Strategy: bombard) it will choose one it thinks 'best' from among those which are flagged for it. I found that if you have two different bomber types arrive with the same tech, the AI will only build one of them, because one of them must be 'best'. Mine had different purposes (one is a naval bomber, basable on Carriers and having LSB, the other land-based only with no LSB) but the AI did not seem to grasp that: they were apparently just assessed for bang-per-buck value. I would expect the same to happen if there were, say, two different tank types that came with Motorised Transportation.

Is anything known about how the evaluation of units is done? I haven't seen any Firaxs comments on this at all.