Hannibal's Destroyers

[ston]

The pitboss game I'm currently playing with a work colleague is nearing an end.

Until q. recently in the game, Hannibal (AI) was the tech leader due to his monster of a capital (it has 6x good food resources + other strong tiles). He was clearly going for a Culture victory, but following a recent Golden Age, his power rating suddenly shot up exponentially.

It turned out that he had been building destroyers. The map type is Pangea, Prince level.

My plan of attack was a ground assault using tanks and tac nukes with a few ICBMs thrown in for additional seasoning. Infantry and artillery would sweep in behind the tanks.

So, I DOW on Hannibal and start ripping through his cities. I fully expected all my fishing boats to get trashed (which they duly did), but what I didn't expect was no resistance on the ground whatsoever and over 40 maurauding destroyers trashing my sea resources and bombarding my cities.

I knew that he had so many that it wasn't really worth my effort trying to prepare a defence against them, but over 40?! He didn't field a single transport or try to land troops anywhere, he just ran amok with destroyers. By the way, hardly any were in port at the start of the war, so it wasn't really worth trying to sink them.

Is this normal AI behaviour, or normal for Hannibal in particular? I've never seen anything like it and was wondering if there's a logical explanation?

Anyway, suffice to say that his Culture attempt is not going quite as well as it was now He still rules the waves though

 

[nfw]

I've seen something like this happen with that Incan guy, all he build was caravels, which later got upgraded to frigate and destroyers. I posted a screenshot in the funny screenshot thread.

 

[ston]

Funny you should say that, Saladin was in the game earlier on (his land was in between my friend's and mine so he got sandwiched).

He got the Magellan achievement and had at least a dozen caravels that I could see bimbling about in a small inlet. Very possibly lots of others elsewhere. They didn't help him very much when it came down to it

Perhaps the AI goes a bit fleet-happy on Pangea maps for some reason?

 

[Coffee Mug]

On a possibly related note, the AI often spams ridiculous numbers of caravels if they're being blockaded with privateers and aren't able to build frigates. So much so that causing a potential rival to redirect almost all of their hammers into virtually useless ships is one of the biggest advantages of using privateers.