Automation

[STarLoVe21]

Greetings,
Recently got the game Civ III complete on steam for free.

I used to play it maybe a decade ago, so much fun, but it has changed a bit with the addition of conquests and PTW.

One new feature is the automate bombard for artillery, some warships and airplanes.

However there is something disrupting that I wish I can bypass.
Having blockaded the continent of my enemy with countless warships and carriers, most units are set to automatically bombard his cities and resources.
However after we had agreed to peace, the automatic bombardment command for hundreds of my invading units didn't go way, instead I was presented with my adviser pop-up message stating ["are you sure? This will cause a war with xxx"], and I had to click the No button a zillion times, once for each unit that had an automatic bombard command. Is there a way around this problem?

Another issue with automation that I faced is that, sometimes, when creating new maps and new rules, I like to add the "automate" feature for my warships, airplanes and artillery, so they can deal with bombardment and moving and protecting my ships on their own; I know it's a bit lazy, but that's how I used to do it without issue years ago, however with the new game edition, I am faced with the ["are you sure? This will cause a war with xxx"] pop-up for every unit, even though I had no enemies to begin with and no automatic bombardment command were given, only automate units; sometimes the pop-up is given when I automate my ironclad while it's still at base, dozens of tiles away from the closest friendly tile; what on earth are these automated units doing to cause this pop-up, they aren't simply trying to attack my friends, but also causing something at long range...

Any help to fix this is greatly appreciated.

 

[tjs282]

However after we had agreed to peace, the automatic bombardment command for hundreds of my invading units didn't go way, instead I was presented with my adviser pop-up message stating ["are you sure? This will cause a war with xxx"], and I had to click the No button a zillion times, once for each unit that had an automatic bombard command. Is there a way around this problem?

There are several possible, but none are ideal:

(1) If you've set auto-bombardment, and your units are stacked, then once you've signed peace, right-click on a bombard-stack and "Wake all". You'll get multiple superscript texts notifying you that 'This unit has already moved', but waking an inactive unit(s) should cancel their auto-moves. This is of course not so helpful if your units aren't stacked, because then you have to wake each one individually, which is just as much of a click-fest as clicking 'No' a zillion times, so...

(2) If you've set auto-bombardment, and your units are widely dispersed, then once you've signed peace, go into your preferences menu (Ctrl-P), and select the option "Cancel Orders for Friendly [combat] Unit". This should switch off the auto-bombardment for any of your units which are (now) adjacent to an AI-unit; it may however cause some/all of your Workers near your land-borders to stop whatever they're doing as well, wasting whatever Worker-turns they've already put into their current job, so...

(3) At risk of stating the obvious... Pretty much all the unit-automation in Civ3 is poor to awful (just look at how incompetently the AI-Civs distribute and assign their Workers), and thus letting the AI do your 'thinking' for you, is generally a Bad Idea. So I would strongly recommend not using the auto-bombard command in the first place — or at least, not for semi-random AI-harassment.

(Auto)bombardment alone will not bring an AI-Leader to the negotiating-table quickly, or force favourable peace terms once he's there; the only thing which will is the infliction of substantial losses of units and/or towns — which cannot be accomplished via nuisance-level bombardment. And while bombardment can increase a Democratic or Republican AI-Civ's war-weariness level to the point where they revolt to a government without WW, both Communism and Fascism also allow high levels of conscription and/or whipping, making conquest of their territory that much more difficult.

I therefore only ever use auto-bombard during all-out wars of conquest, against resource-tiles that I don't want the AI-Civ to have a chance to re-hook, before I kill them forever, or against cities that I intend to capture at some point in the very near future (once the town is mine, my units stop their auto-bombardment) — and even then, only if I'm concerned that my (bombard-)stack isn't quite large enough to guarantee redlining/killing everything on a single turn (if it is, then I'll use ordinary bombardment instead).

["are you sure? This will cause a war with xxx"] pop-up for every unit, even though I had no enemies to begin with and no automatic bombardment command were given, only automate units; sometimes the pop-up is given when I automate my ironclad while it's still at base, dozens of tiles away from the closest friendly tile; what on earth are these automated units doing to cause this pop-up, they aren't simply trying to attack my friends, but also causing something at long range

I would guess that this might have something to do with the 'sub bug', which first appeared in Vanilla/PlayTheWorld, and was fixed in a later patch; but then re-appeared in Conquests — and wasn't.

Basically, if a ship which doesn't have the 'Detect invisible' flag, accidentally-or-on-purpose runs over a submarine belonging to another nation, then (regardless of who sinks) that is regarded as an act of war. Even when a sub is invisible to a ship, a human player who is manually controlling his ship(s) will still get the 'This will cause war!' pop-up when he tries to move the 'sub-blind' ship onto a sub-occupied tile — and thus has the opportunity to change course. Conversely, the AI (which is by definition running the 'automate unit' algorithms) will plough on regardless, and start a war.

So if you also insist on automating your ships, the pop-up may not necessarily be an indication that your automated ship will start a war immediately on that turn, but that it may start one in the (near) future. To avoid this, you may therefore also need to give all ship-types (from Curraghs onwards) the ability to detect (AI-)subs, so they will be able to navigate around the subs without your intervention. Though that means sacrificing 'realism' for 'ease of play', that's your choice to make.