Hiding from the AI

[Argetnyx]

I have recently had a game where i was attacked by an AI, but the AI only targeted one city, nothing else. i sent a huge stack of knights through their territory and started capturing their cities in the center of the empire. the knights were completely ignored, nothing attacked them unless they were in one of the captured cities. why arent they noticed?

 

[Sweetchuck]

I've grown to realize that the AI design when it comes to warfare is completely pathetic.

The AI will target that one city that is least defended, so if it's by number of units or quality of units - the lowest grade is the city they will go after. Yes, the AI knows where this under-defended city is.

March your stack right up to AI cities, and if the AI thinks that stack is too much to deal with, they'll ignore it - so much to the point when you're on their capitals doorstep with that stack of doom - they'll send units out of the capital to go after that lone worker irrigating a tile 3 turns away.

Once you capture a city, there must be something in the AI's programming that makes it want to take "revenge", and they'll finally attack you - unless you're well fortified, but still I think they'll send some token resistance.

Plus, the AI loves to send a caravel with a lone archer on it and drop it off next to this underdefended city, even though you may have 3 or 4 higher quality units on it. And, you can tell the rate of turns it takes to build archers with the AI, because they'll send them individually toward your bordering cities one at a time.

 

[capnvonbaron]

The AI doesn't often have a "kill the stack" mentality unless it has many, many offensive units to do so. Also, it seems to prioritize vulnerable targets or its own former posessions. What kind of units did the AI have? Anything short of longbows and they hesitate to touch any full-health knights, and its own fast movers may not have been able to keep up or just too scattered to take on your stack. Also, what difficulty level are we talking? Anything below Regent and the AI is pretty much completely incapable of warfare. Heck, I even had a monarchy game where the AI's idea of a first-move offensive strike was three spearmen wandering across my territory to nab some workers. Their four cities were all mine a few turns later. I guess to summarize, what the AI does in warfare has many, many variables, and they often don't make any sense based on your knowledge of handling a conflict.

 

[vmxa]

The AI will attack the units, as long as it thinks it has a shot at winning. If you send knights and the best they have is archers, they do not attack. I would expect them to attack with MDI.

This is why armies are not attacked, unless they are damaged or very obsolete. Now if you move the units or armies into a town you captured, they will attack, even when they are unlikely to win that battle.

IOW if you had say a sword army in the the late AA or early MA, it would be able to go anywhere and even stacks of 6-8 MDI will leave it alone, unless it is damaged.

Move that army into a town and they will attack with horses or jags or even warriors. I have had them attack mech armies in a town or on an airfield, when they would not attack a cav army in the open. In fact they were not attacking knight armies.

The one big exception is if you have the Patrol flag on, then they sometimes blunder into an army.

 

[Argetnyx]

The AI will attack the units, as long as it thinks it has a shot at winning. If you send knights and the best they have is archers, they do not attack. I would expect them to attack with MDI.

This is why armies are not attacked, unless they are damaged or very obsolete. Now if you move the units or armies into a town you captured, they will attack, even when they are unlikely to win that battle.

IOW if you had say a sword army in the the late AA or early MA, it would be able to go anywhere and even stacks of 6-8 MDI will leave it alone, unless it is damaged.

Move that army into a town and they will attack with horses or jags or even warriors. I have had them attack mech armies in a town or on an airfield, when they would not attack a cav army in the open. In fact they were not attacking knight armies.

The one big exception is if you have the Patrol flag on, then they sometimes blunder into an army.

The worst enemy to armies is bombers, the AI uses them to devastate your army until it is weak enough for them to attack it with regular units.

i think that the game was regent for difficulty, im not sure

 

[Motorhead]

Regarding Armies:
I'm on my 2nd emperor lvl game and the AI has attacked my 4 stack Mech Inf Army with bombers and arty. I was actually quite happy it put up a fight. Unfortunately, once my mobile SAMs downed 4 or 5 of their bombers (and the other 6 or 7 elsewhere), the AI went pure defense and stopped building bombers completely. Now just the occasional arty round will fly at my MI army.

Earlier in that same war, AI devastated two 4-stack cav armies with bombers then tank/inf to mop up, even though armies were fortified on mountains. If any army goes near a critical strategic resource (my armies were near their only rubber) they seem to get much more aggressive.


Back to original point of thread:
I've noticed the same thing. The AI will too often avoid what I see as the more critical fight (say for their rich capital city) and send off stray units to attack my more vulnerable cities.



[ first post, my de-lurking ]

 

[NickyH]

The AI will too often avoid what I see as the more critical fight (say for their rich capital city) and send off stray units to attack my more vulnerable cities.

This is often very easy to exploit, as you can garrison some units in your towns closest to the border where the AI attacks you, and then leave completely undefended towns behind those border towns. They will go for the towns deeper into your territory, and you'll have lots of opportunities to kill them with your offensive units on their way there.

If there are mountains in the area, the AI is quite good at using them to their advantage by moving their troops on top of the mountains where they are harder to kill. You can turn that into your own advantage by fortifying good defenders on the mountains, since the defensive bonus makes the AI avoid them. I believe the defensive bonus is 100% for mountains, which should give a Spearman a defensive value of 4, same as a musket. IIRC you get an extra 25% bonus if the unit is fortified, so the AI would probably avoid attacking the spear with a Knight. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will soon correct me.)

 

[Argetnyx]

the AI doesn't care what the defensive values are, they attack any nearby or weak units/cities with any stray units they can dig up (usually A LOT).