Compared to Bozo the Clown your military is Average!!

[cracker]

When the Sid Clone Military Advisor pops up and tells me this, I just want to shoot him with acid filled paintballs.

The CIV3 military assessment by raw body count is stupid beyond a normally forgivable game design issue because this one factor tends to drive extortion demands and stupid AI behavior that just should not be happening. If Psycho Chaka or Ballistic Bismarck thinks that our military is average this doubles our triples the chance that they will do something stupid to attack us.

The problem is that the CIV3 game designers applied an Ancient Age military assessment formula to every aspect of the game instead and included total unit body count in the military power formula. Based on test data, every unit is included in the formula. Workers, Settlers, Scouts, Explorers, Land Units, Air Units, Naval Units, Transports, and Bombardment Units are all counted equally in the military formula.

To test this process, I used the editor to artificially build treasury and population growth so I could build a force of 20 workers and one warrior to compare to the AI’s military force of 12 spearmen and archers and 2 workers. In this case, the AI doesn’t attack me and I get messages from the military advisory saying “Compared to these bozos our military is strong”. All other factors (cities, etc.) are equal. So what are my 20 workers going to do to defend the empire when those weak 12 military units come charging into the realm.

I tested the opposite case, and manipulated the units to have 12 Mech Infantry units and 2 workers in my military while the AI’s military contained 4 warriors and 18 workers. In this case, my wise and knowledgeable Sid Clone Military Advisor popped up saying “Compared to these bozos our military is weak”. The next turn when I asked two evil AI warriors to leave my territory, they declared war on me because they thought their military power gave them that right.

Everyone who really thinks this is a conscious and logical game design issue; hold up your hand now so we can identify you permanently as someone who has absolutely lost all contact with reality and may need to be fed with a spoon.

 

[cracker]

In several recent games, this became painfully obvious because I had crested a major technology lead over the 4 of the 5 AI’s that remained in a game, only to find the backward AIs would attack when I joined workers into cities to reduce to support cost of field workers after the entire continent had been railroaded. Since I was China and had the Industrious workers plus Democracy plus replaceable parts I was up to the point where two of our Chinese workers could clear pollution in one turn. I also had about 35 slave workers from early conquests of other civs. The slave workers did not appear in the military power count.

It’s just really not appropriate to have the military power ratio shift because I have Infantry while the other civs have spearmen and riflemen and just because I reduced the non combatant workforce that was no longer needed.

This cries out to be fixed in the next patch well before any further incorporation of this flawed logic gets passed on to multiplier of the XP version.

 

[cracker]

What is needed is a conversion to some sort of military power assessment that takes effect when the civs have progressed out of the Ancient Age. If there was hesitation to make this the default assessment for the military advisor, then it could be implemented by adding the calculation to the military advisor’s arsenal when an upgrade to each foreign embassy called the “Military Liaison” or “Military Attaché” was purchased.

Military Power assessment would use the ADM and BRF factors to calculate the offensive and defensive power contributions of any given unit.

I processed several test games for the military power calculations and produced examples from the May Tournament Game hosted on Poly by Bill Chin.

To determine the simple military power of a unit (simple being the case where unit experience is not considered as in conscript versus elite) I multiplied the A or D value of a unit time the number of that type of unit. Movement capacity was used to modify these strengths by multiplying each value by a factor that depended on the number of movement points in excess of the base value of 1. Movement was taken to have more of a positive impact on offensive power than it had on defensive power because in many cases defenders do not have the power of using their superior movement capacity to retreat or avoid contact with enemy.

I used a factor of 30% for the increase in offensive power that a unit with 2 movement points would have over a unit with 1 movement point but the same A and D values. An example of this comparison would be between an archer (2/1/1) and a horseman (2/1/2). For units with 3 or more movement points, I used a factor 60% for the increase in offensive power due to enhanced mobility.

Similar logic was applied to incorporating the impact of mobility into defensive power. The increase in defensive strength due to mobility is justified by considering the impacts of retreat and counterattack capabilities. I used factors of 20% and 35% for units with mobility of two and then three or more respectively.

The offensive military power of bombardment capable units was calculated by multiplying the bombardment strength times the rate of fire (number of potential hits) and then modifying this power up by 50% when the range was greater than 1 as well as modifying the bombardment power up by 20% whenever the unit had mobility of greater than 1 move per turn as in the case of most naval units.

The defensive military power of bombardment units was very restricted because defending bombard units only got one shot per attacker and had no defensive capability on their own. Basically this calculation was just the bombardment strength of the unit times the number of units of that type.

Once these military factors where calculated they could be combined to provide an overall military power assessment of the units that were in the military force for a civilization. The offensive bombard powers were combined with the attack strengths to give an overall assessment of the offensive power of the military. Bombardment power was combined into the total power calculation by multiplying the bombardment power by 25% to account for the fact that bombardment power must be combined with offensive and defensive units in order to achieve effective military strength.

The total military power of a civilization was taken to be the simple average of the offensive and defensive military powers even though we should acknowledge that it would truly be mire accurate to compare the offensive military power of one civilization to the defensive military power of other rival civilizations in order to derive a more effective basis for decision making.

The results of these test calculations yielded an effective assessment system that can be simply implemented to eliminate the current discrepancies where the CIV3 AI’s are programmed to consider 2 warriors to be a superior military force to just one infantry or rifleman.

 

[cracker]

Compared to Bozo your military is Average!!

Here are two tables developed using the Military Power assessment calculations. The data is taken from an actual example in the May tournament game on Poly that is being hosted by Bill Chin. In these example tables we are comparing the military strengths of China and India after our really knowledgeable Military Advisor has told us that “Compared to these India the Chinese military is average.”

I will try to post the tables later in HTML Table format so they will be directly viewable.

 

[CrazyDuck]

yes the civ3 ai what works out military power is stupid but that often works to humans advantage when weak civs declare war on us

 

[cracker]

Here is an example of a Military Power assessment for China being played by the Human Player:

 

[cracker]

Here is Military power assessment for the military of India being played by the AI in the same game at the same time:

 

[cracker]

And here is the comparison mathematical comparison of the two military forces.

Bear in mind that the ever thoughful Firaxis assessment of these two military forces is that they are average or just about the same.

 

[Zouave]

Originally posted by CrazyDuck
yes the civ3 ai what works out military power is stupid but that often works to humans advantage when weak civs declare war on us

That's not the point!! No one wants stupidity. AI assessment of military strength is asinine.

The stupid bean-counting AI does too many idiotic illogical things that no one other than a braindead computer would do.

I once had a Roman city of '12', that had been part of Rome for 5,000 years, flip to me (Iroquois). Was I happy? Hell no; it was ridiculous.

Speaking of stupid, I once saw an AI civ with 18 spearmen - and 24 mechanized infantry. Just absurd.

 

[Dinorius R.]

Cracker,

It's no good coming to us with all this numerical mumbo-jumbo. What really counts is conjecture, speculation, flaming, prejudice, anecdote, rhetoric and hyperbole. It's what this Forum thrives on. Only then will anyone read your posts. Now put down your spreadsheet and pick up a thesaurus..

 

[Galitus]

I think a simpile and easily programmable solution to this problem would be instead of military strength being determined by amount of bodies, the AI should add up the amount of attack/defend values off the units in the game to make the comparison. For example...

Bozo has four spearmen with 1 attack and 2 defend traits. This adds up to 12 points. This being because if each spearmen is worth 3 points ( 1 point for attack, two for defense) then obviosly four of these spearmen together would be 12 (3 points multiplied by 4 spearmen).

Likewise, if cool human player has three knights with 3 attack and 2 defense... equaling 15 then that human player would be stronger (he has 15 points while the AI has 12). This way even if you have a smaller military as long as you are more advanced then the AI you would be considered stronger.

Now, if Firaxis wants to be really cool they could do seperate equations for the defense and offense parts of each unit. Thus determing whether you have a strong offensive or stronger defensive army compared to the other AIs. Maybe even making AIs like you more if you have a mainly defensive army instead of offensive.

Edit: I just read Cracker's post and realized this idea is a less complex version of Cracker's. I'll just shut up now

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

@ cracker:

Yep! Exactly! Now how do we get Firaxis to fix this.......

@ dino: I see you`re being a gameswill again even though you don`t admit it anymore

 

[cracker]

One of the big problems in these areas is that Soren has been quoted as saying that the AI's already do not count workers and already use some form of the military power calculations.

Since Soren thinks its working as of two of three versions ago and yet we can prove right now that V1.21 is not working, how do we resolve these conflicts.

Who do we believe?? Has Soren been so far removed from the loop that the minions can tell him something works in CIV3 and in fact it does not work and the internal testing process are not strong enough to detect when something that the big boss has promised does not work at all.

I just reverified this AM that all you have to do to stimulate the idiot AI to attack you is carry a large worker force to build roads etc. and then just join 20 or 30 workers into the populations of your cities in a single turn. This will usually drop your military strength just enough to send the psychos like Chaka, Bismarck, and Jerkses right off the deep end even though you have a whole slew of Infantry and artillery waiting to grind them into a pulp.

For the record, I started with 44 Chinese workers and was "Strong" militarily, and this shifted down to "Average" when I had joined workers down to 38. Since this was the only change in unit count, it was fairly clear that the AI's where using just the total unit count in their decision making process.

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

Ouch, i didn`t know it was supposedly fixed! I thought there was a factor for 'state of the art' units, but I guess it`s zero

This plus the possible Leader generation bug found by sumthinelse tell a lot about the internal workings of Firaxis - and it ain`t good!

 

[Richard III]

Well, too true, and if it's fixed, great.

But it's not an insurmountable flaw or anything; I always rely on whatever "ground level" intelligence I can get anyway (spot checks of target cities, patrols, brief incursions, explorers...), and I always assume the worst and build up accordingly before attacking.

Don't you?

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

Originally posted by Richard III


Don't you?

I do, but still it is ridiculous that others break trades with you because they have more Warriors than you Tanks!
Just because you can adapt it doesn`t mean it`s right!

 

[TrailblazingScot]

Speaking of stupid, I once saw an AI civ with 18 spearmen - and 24 mechanized infantry. Just absurd.

What the hell was he using mechanized infantry for when he had spearmen?

Go spearman go!

Comment: no worthwhile posts by kitten today...

PH76 says: the kitten does worthwhile posts?

 

[sumthinelse]

Originally posted by cracker
What is needed is a conversion to some sort of military power assessment that takes effect when the civs have progressed out of the Ancient Age. If there was hesitation to make this the default assessment for the military advisor, then it could be implemented by adding the calculation to the military advisor’s arsenal when an upgrade to each foreign embassy called the “Military Liaison” or “Military Attaché” was purchased.

Military Power assessment would use the ADM and BRF factors to calculate the offensive and defensive power contributions of any given unit.

I think your idea is a step in the right direction.... but ..... even if they improved the evaluation function by calculating real military strength instead of # of units, I think we would still be disappointed by the AI's tactics. They would send in an invasion force into my totally railroaded territory and get slaughtered. The AI would still find ways to lose wars without making you sweat. Let's face it, we need a lot of changes for the AI to be challenging.

I can just imagine us eagerly awaiting the "new, tougher" AI patch.... we would install it, and, "Oh, s***!!!"

Let's make improvements, and I think they should do as you suggest, but don't expect too much.

 

[TheDS]

Let's keep it simple, though. Sum the ADM values of all land units with non-zero values (this means we wouldn't count scouts, for instance) and sum up all the units, and that's how we figure out our relative military strength. Not perfect, but it's quick to do, so we're not waiting so long for the computer to make up its minds.

If you really wanna whine cuz you tend to build more artillery and boats and planes than troops, then we can count them by their bombardment capabilities: strength and number of attacks.

The other idea of knowing your A to D ratio is a good one too. If I'm all about defending my turf, then I shouldn't have as many cranky neighbors, but if I'm heavy on offense, then others may wonder what's up. Likewise, I'll want my advisor to alert me to apparent hostile intentions of neighbors.

 

[kring]

One other thing to factor in, although at probably a much lesser rate would be number of units ratios between the 2 groups. If you have X Infantry and I have Y Riflemen, your total A/D/M score could be higher than mine, even though I have a moderately larger number of Riflemen. I have to go so I will finish more on this later if I didn't make myself clear enough.