Enemy units vanishing

[morchuflex]

Hello.

At first I thought I was hallucinating, but after careful checking, I'm sure I've seen enemy units simply vanish between turns.
Turn n: the English decide they are going to conquer me, declare war and unload a powerful invasion force composed of one spearman and one warrior onto my shore.
Turn n+1: I attack their "stack of death" and, surprise! the warrior has disappeared.
A few turns later, the same thing happens again with exactly the same units involved.
Not that I complain about that... But I keep wondering:
Is it likely that they are so badly bankrupt they have to disband units? The English are isolated from everyone except me, so they cannot have any gpt deal running. Their island is a very decent one and they should be reasonably prosperous, especially on Emperor level, where they get some additional free support (IIRC).
Any insight?

 

[Randy]

I've had this happen to AIs with one or two cities. If the AI is a republic they may not have the money.

 

[alamo]

They auto-disband as they run out of gold - stupid AI!

One time it kept building workers only to disband them a few turns later.

 

[Volstag]

I've seen it happen as well. Generally, it will be one, or two, units within my territory. The next turn comes around, and *poof* they're gone. I assume that the AI disbands them, for whatever reason.

-V

 

[Zelda's Man]

I have never seen them disbanded during war, but often they will disband them directly after war. I have used this ploy a couple of times to get them to decrease their number of units. They seemed to start by getting rid of their planes first, then ships which made bombarding easy when I redeclared war.

 

[Randy]

I've seen it during war. I've even seen them disdand a settler.

 

[vmxa]

They do not have enough cash to pay the maint, so they are disbanded. You see this a lot at Deity and Sid.

If you investigate a city it will be stuffed with units, especially if they are on an island. They run out structures and just default to troops until they are broke. This slows down their research as well.

The more backward the civ is the more you see they never have any cash on hand. This is also why you can run into scores of back leveled units, they have no money to upgrade.

 

[Kalach]

I used to think it was good until they stole and disbanded a worker of mine (I think it was theirs first anyway )