AI Warfare - Unable to Mobilize

[Askia Muhammad]

So I know there have been countless threads about the AI - So I apologize for making yet another but I was curious if we could try and guess why the AI behaves or is limited in some ways - I assume those active in modding probably have a better grasp than I do so perhaps this is aimed more at them.

Recently, I’ve been using Real Strategy and I’ve definitely noticed it does improve the AI overall but mod or not I find the AI seems totally incapable of mobilizing a large force.

I can see the rear of Gaul’s empire and see they have a HUGE number of units there but they never seem to send more than two to three units at once which frankly a city with walls and a single ranged unit can easily turn away by itself.

Why is this? You’d think in the context of a pseudo-world war being declared against me that one of the AI (who also lost a city against me) would be incentivized to deploy a large percentage of their military to retake the city - but this is not so.

Without real strategy I find the AI barely has an army mid to late game and if they do and they attack they will literally feed their army to me one unit at a time. Real Strategy seems to have improved this behavior by increase the quantity of units sent - but also I am seeing more corps and armies and the AI is attacking multiple corners of my empire at once.

This is an improvement but three separate attacks with three armies each isn’t going to do much damage against even ancient walls and a field cannon corps.

Why won’t the AI send 6-7 units ? I’d have a lot more trouble dealing with them - and they don’t often seem to even target my cities - which is another problem.

Any ideas on why the AI seems to have such a limited capacity or desire to mobilize?

 

[Askia Muhammad]

I think, in general, combat favors the defender a bit too much - I personally play with a mod that nerfs walls a bit

 

[Infixo]

On spot observation. I need to think about it more but I can say quickly that there are at least 3 places where the size of attacking forces is decided or considered. And frankly, since there is no documentstion, we don’t know which of these places is „the one”.
You have strength comparison.
There is team composition.
And there is operation definition.
And as usual, maybe there is some bug. Or maybe it is so complex that even devs don’t know how to parameterize it properly.
But I am glad that you notice an improvement with Real Strategy!

 

[Planktonic]

Why won’t the AI send 6-7 units ? I’d have a lot more trouble dealing with them - and they don’t often seem to even target my cities - which is another problem.

Any ideas on why the AI seems to have such a limited capacity or desire to mobilize?

When I first started playing and joined the forum a couple of years ago I also had questions about the way the AI worked. I remember someone (I think Insidious Mage) posted a video of a conference in which a Civ game developer discussed the difference between a "good AI" and a "fun AI".

Iirc, the main point is that it would be possible to make a very good AI that would perform strongly militarily and in other respects, but that level of challenge would no longer be fun for the majority of players. Most people, after all, want to win, and the vast majority of players are not CivFanatics. As I understand it, only a small percentage have won on Deity and even on this forum there are many experienced players who prefer to play at lower levels of difficulty because it's more fun for them. A strong AI might inhibit or discourage less experienced or casual players from taking up the game.

It would be nice if the level of difficulty included a component of better AI performance instead of just stacked bonuses at the beginning, but the latter does seem to be a crudely effective way of making the game more challenging, although it obviously still is lacking in the way you describe and others.