There’s really no excuse to lose a naval engagement aside from getting landed on. The AI just simply can’t micromanage putting destroyers in front and back of carriers/battleships to protect against subs, putting one carrier on intercept and one on air sweeps, shore bombardment with battleships blocked by destroyers, or subs a few tiles out of the fleet formation.
There are essentially 3 or 4 ‘formations’ in the code. One of them is “amphib-landing” where the AI throws a few marines + aa guns next to a “task_force” or “carrier group” (task force is destroyers + battleships only / carrier group is carriers + battleships only). This is why we tend to see so much destroyer spam, because they’re coded to free roam and not serve as point-interceptors (even in Naval Expansion
My point is, unless you let the AI strike first, they can’t retaliate to naval combat. If you sink their lead battleship/destroyer with subs, they will fall apart as opposed to sending out 1-2 destroyers to hunt them down. You can easily disrupt formations but simply hitting them while they’re formed up, and then the AI’s code goes crazy trying to determine whether to continue onto target or abandon entirely to chase some naval units. It’s the main reason I play majority-land based maps, because you can take every coastal city from the AI even if they have a land-based army garrisoning nearby. The AI also sucks at prioritizing naval kills from land - your whole fleet can be providing shore bombardment at a damage ratio of 4:1 compared to your landed troops (from an amphibious assault), and the most logical thing to do is take out the carriers offshore providing air cover.
BUT THE AI IS INCAPABLE OF AIRSWEEPING UNKNOWN TILES - unless AI has sight of a unit to air sweep, if your fleet is out of view from their controlled territory, they will never be able to locate it with air assets. I can’t tell you the amount of times I send in marines and keep my fleet 2 tiles away from AI border, with destroyers screening for subs 2 tiles away from my main fleet. By keeping battleships and carriers in dark tiles to AI -
This is one of the reasons the AI sucks at nuking. Aside from their spies revealing cities, their value calculated for choosing a nuke target is based off the cities they’ve seen and explored. If you had one city that was your industrial hub a few dozen/hundred turns ago, and the AI happened to have a spy there then, they typically lean towards nuking that (or your capital factoring in war score and leader aggression values). You can move industry around every 20-30 turns or so, and if the AI doesn’t move a spy around at the same rate (constantly updating your cities for their info), their nuke targets become outdated essentially.
I’m only discussing nukes because the AI is poor at using nuclear submarines too. In the event they actually place a missile on a sub 1) they send the sub unescorted (not in a Wolfpack or formation) very close to your territory (where you then see it and kill it with the missile inside still), or 2) they just never put a missile on a sub. The 3rd scenario is very rare and I seldom see it - where AI moves air units in response to city siege/under attack, and moves a missile to a sub, then strikes your closest frontier city to your advancing army (thus taking a few units out as well). Overall I love VP, but stick to land-based warfare as the formations and tactics of the AI are of course way better than their navals. Civ historically sucks at naval warfare I know and VP is MUCH better than any other version of civ.
There are essentially 3 or 4 ‘formations’ in the code. One of them is “amphib-landing” where the AI throws a few marines + aa guns next to a “task_force” or “carrier group” (task force is destroyers + battleships only / carrier group is carriers + battleships only). This is why we tend to see so much destroyer spam, because they’re coded to free roam and not serve as point-interceptors (even in Naval Expansion
My point is, unless you let the AI strike first, they can’t retaliate to naval combat. If you sink their lead battleship/destroyer with subs, they will fall apart as opposed to sending out 1-2 destroyers to hunt them down. You can easily disrupt formations but simply hitting them while they’re formed up, and then the AI’s code goes crazy trying to determine whether to continue onto target or abandon entirely to chase some naval units. It’s the main reason I play majority-land based maps, because you can take every coastal city from the AI even if they have a land-based army garrisoning nearby. The AI also sucks at prioritizing naval kills from land - your whole fleet can be providing shore bombardment at a damage ratio of 4:1 compared to your landed troops (from an amphibious assault), and the most logical thing to do is take out the carriers offshore providing air cover.
BUT THE AI IS INCAPABLE OF AIRSWEEPING UNKNOWN TILES - unless AI has sight of a unit to air sweep, if your fleet is out of view from their controlled territory, they will never be able to locate it with air assets. I can’t tell you the amount of times I send in marines and keep my fleet 2 tiles away from AI border, with destroyers screening for subs 2 tiles away from my main fleet. By keeping battleships and carriers in dark tiles to AI -
- the AI simply cannot send a fighter to uncover that tile, then 2) use its remaining air assets to attack that “newly discovered” tile with a unit on or adjacent. This is a massive exploit, because all experienced human players know fighters are critical to scanning troops movements/locations.
This is one of the reasons the AI sucks at nuking. Aside from their spies revealing cities, their value calculated for choosing a nuke target is based off the cities they’ve seen and explored. If you had one city that was your industrial hub a few dozen/hundred turns ago, and the AI happened to have a spy there then, they typically lean towards nuking that (or your capital factoring in war score and leader aggression values). You can move industry around every 20-30 turns or so, and if the AI doesn’t move a spy around at the same rate (constantly updating your cities for their info), their nuke targets become outdated essentially.
I’m only discussing nukes because the AI is poor at using nuclear submarines too. In the event they actually place a missile on a sub 1) they send the sub unescorted (not in a Wolfpack or formation) very close to your territory (where you then see it and kill it with the missile inside still), or 2) they just never put a missile on a sub. The 3rd scenario is very rare and I seldom see it - where AI moves air units in response to city siege/under attack, and moves a missile to a sub, then strikes your closest frontier city to your advancing army (thus taking a few units out as well). Overall I love VP, but stick to land-based warfare as the formations and tactics of the AI are of course way better than their navals. Civ historically sucks at naval warfare I know and VP is MUCH better than any other version of civ.