AIs and the Art of War

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I added save earlier before I changed Emancipation Proclamation too.

Another save.
3 AIs - Industrial/Modern era on 300th turn.
Tiny/Blitz/Nightmare.

They build planes, they can build tanks if they want.

I guess on bigger maps there would be more chances to use these.
AI now should function well enough in Industrial and later eras.
 

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With SM: Willem is in Modern, his size 50+ city is defended by 1 50-str Infantry and 2 cavalry. I have 65-str Musketmen despite being two eras behind. So I captured that city relatively cheaply (it was much better 'defended' by partisans after I captured it...:rolleyes:)

It was on an island, so maybe the AI for reinforcing it is impossibly complicated by that, but it just seems like they do not leverage their tech advantages. He should be able to beat my power easily, but I got the power lead back at Musketmen, and it's been uncontested since then.
 
With SM: Willem is in Modern, his size 50+ city is defended by 1 50-str Infantry and 2 cavalry. I have 65-str Musketmen despite being two eras behind. So I captured that city relatively cheaply (it was much better 'defended' by partisans after I captured it...:rolleyes:)

It was on an island, so maybe the AI for reinforcing it is impossibly complicated by that, but it just seems like they do not leverage their tech advantages. He should be able to beat my power easily, but I got the power lead back at Musketmen, and it's been uncontested since then.
So it sounds like you are fighting about 300 Infantry with about 1500 Musketmen. It's a matter of manpower. The cavalry are also probably numbering around 50 each. Remember the Alamo! lol.

As for being on an island, yeah that's definitely going to limit how fast they can get defenders there as you approach.
 
Ragnar has a 230+ strength Rifleman, 2 move, a dozen or so promos. My strongest unit is around 87. He could split that and they could defend his three cities forever with their eyes closed.

But he didn't - in fact he went on the offensive with that one unsplit unit, and managed to lose all 3 cities.
 
Ragnar has a 230+ strength Rifleman, 2 move, a dozen or so promos. My strongest unit is around 87. He could split that and they could defend his three cities forever with their eyes closed.

But he didn't - in fact he went on the offensive with that one unsplit unit, and managed to lose all 3 cities.
Units are controlled by the AI type they are made to be. The kind of advanced consideration to divide and send units to other roles is the exact kind of thing that is currently confusing the hell out of the AI on a lot of strategic levels. For example, you would NOT want to promote a city defense unit with the same promos you would give city attackers, so if it was to take attackers and shift them to defense, it should at least realize it's doing so as an emergency measure and eventually want to pull those units back into an offensive role because that's what they were trained for. This kind of advanced thinking is far from implementation in Size Matters, where units ONLY ever merge in the AI and never have any protocols to split because it proved to create major problems. Obviously with years of work directly on AI, such segments could be written into the AI decisionmaking flowcharts, but there's already a lot to clean up because of AIs switching AItypes for reasons similar to this that have caused big problems in being able to assume why a unit is doing a given thing as it is now.

AKA, we gotta clean up what we have now before we can even think of adding something that advanced.

Curious... he went on the offense with that unit - what stopped it from stomping YOU given the strength it had?
 
Curious... he went on the offense with that unit - what stopped it from stomping YOU given the strength it had?
Well, time. It was just one unit, and within two or three turns of it coming out of its shell, I had two cities and was ready to make peace. Then I noticed he had left just one Game Hunter defending the third city, and it had for some reason insufficient culture etc. defence to stop me attacking it. So I sent 1 dragoon, et voila, all three cities. He's still got the unit (Require Complete Kills), but it's no threat in peacetime.
 
Well, time. It was just one unit, and within two or three turns of it coming out of its shell, I had two cities and was ready to make peace. Then I noticed he had left just one Game Hunter defending the third city, and it had for some reason insufficient culture etc. defence to stop me attacking it. So I sent 1 dragoon, et voila, all three cities. He's still got the unit (Require Complete Kills), but it's no threat in peacetime.
There are certainly some things I would like to do to boost the AI's defensive capabilities. Thanks for the feedback.
 
well seems like AI has improved since my last game... they are expanding and expanding fast :)
 
Not exactly war, but:
AIs send crims to pillage, but don't leave them any movement afterwards, so that although you still can't see them, you know exactly where they are. Sometimes they are adjacent to relative safety in one of your cities, so that any fraction of a move left over would save them.
 
My wars are... boring. Probably because I haven't noticed true "rock-paper-scissors" units. When attacking first unit in a stack I have about 3% chance to win. Maybe because of that AI do no attack... at all. During wars they just sit down, doing almost nothing. They send one or two units to pillage while the rest just stand in the forests and on hills. During entire current and previous war they attacked my units 2 or 3 times. I've never seen such passive AI in Civ IV and it's really starting to bother me.
 
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My wars are... boring. Probably because I haven't noticed true "rock-paper-scissors" units. When attacking first unit in a stack I have about 3% chance to win. Maybe because of that AI do no attack... at all. During wars they just sit down, doing almost nothing. They send one or two units to pillage while the rest just stand in the forests and on hills. During entire current and previous war they attacked my units 2 or 3 times. I've never seen such passive AI in Civ IV and it's really starting to bother me.
Yeah ai needs improvement for sure
 
I put a fix in SVN-11065 that may fix some issues. Certainly in my test I gave the enemy enough units to attack my city and they did it immediately (they lost though).
 
On what handicap/map size/speed are you playing?
And what version? Also Normal Traits or the New set? SM or Not. Revolutions? etc.

Blanket statements like the one Aquila SPQR just gave today are basically useless to work from. Details and more Details Please!

Now I will make a blanket statement, in all my lastest games the Ai is aggressive. Question who is right? Aquila SPQR or me, or both?
 
v.40.0.608-alpha. I downloaded it not so long ago so I assume I downloaded the latest available. No revolutions. I don't remember what I chose when it comes to traits and I have no idea what a "SM" is. I'm absolutely new to C2C, it's my first playthrough ever.

Question who is right? Aquila SPQR or me, or both?

Both. What I described is true, and I trust that what you described is true.
I agree however that what I wrote was useless when it comes to fixing the problem.
 
in all my lastest games the Ai is aggressive
Your statement is true but we are talking about something else. From my experience it doesnt matter what options I played.
Its about AI stategy and tactics. When AI declare war there is no real threat, no real army and real attacking doom stack. Just blanket declaration of war. I have seen it too many times and I know this problem might be very complex to solve but must be done eventually or mod become boring.
PS: From all my games only greece civ attacked others civs and really conquered them. Never seen any other civs do it in long time. Maybe there is something special in their traits or leader.
 
v.40.0.608-alpha. I downloaded it not so long ago so I assume I downloaded the latest available.
It is the latest stable release, we do have an alpha build available which you can access using these instructions. Usual caveats of an alpha build apply: stability not guaranteed up to and including crashing, corruption of your save (that didn't happen yet).
 
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