Uhg, hopefully an easy fix. The AI should some kind of calculation to determine if it’s in an assault or defense state, and sending one unit forward should not trigger such a dramatic change. It seems currently it just asks, is there any unit I can kill. If not, because you are playing the terrain well, it does happily sit back and wait, but it will be unfortunate if the strategy becomes to stockpile bad units to use as bait. At least when all units are the same, and you are reasonably outnumbered, sacrificing units might become too costly to abuse this. Otherwise I’ll just have to make a rule for myself that no one deserved to be bait.
Hopefully. But I'm not holding my breath in that regard. I would think it's mostly a matter of terrain usage, the AI doesn't really do it properly. So you are sort of baiting him out and easy kills are like catnip to him. I mostly found this out during a siege, first you get that handful of free units (the citizens that takes up arms, if they die I have not noted any drawbacks to it). So my city was on a hill, behind a river, behind the city-center-hill was cliffs (or higher hills, whatever they are called). So one unit defends the center. The cliffs are filled with archers (or javelin units I think it was at the time). Send one citizen outside just below the cliffs. Instant attack from the AI with all it got and they get demolished by the cliff archers and then if they don't die you just mop them up with the next armed citizen. Perhaps there ought to be a drawback to just sending the citizens out there to die, there might be one but I didn't notice it. But I don't think there was anything bad with it on an in-game level.
If I didn't send out any citizens there is an initial attack wave, where it has usually built a siege engine etc. They will attack normally and pretty much die, if they don't die they retreat and you won't see them again. If I after that don't send bait, they don't attack. So it's not like they are just throwing themselves at the walls for nothing like lemmings. But they just sit a few tiles away and wait. So you wait since you are the defender. Turns pass and after 3 "fight turns" it ends and you progress to an actual turn which launches 3 more "fight turns" and so it goes until the AI gives up and goes home eventually.
I wanted to try this again later with Longbows (and english) for maximum range and see if I could just sit there and drop him at max range (4 or something) but he never came back after the first war and double sieges.
They do send reinforcements from outside, so can you. You walk up to the area, next turn you step into the area and then you can spawn in from a reinforcement point (+). So sieges could more or less just last forever as some kind of waiting game.
Overall the first siege lasted a total of a couple of game turns and then it realized this wasn't working. So he withdrew. I rushed a palisade and reinforced from the north with more archers and spearmen. He came back and we did it again. Same deal. Eventually I had killed so many of his units he peaced out.
But as long as the AI is willing to trade his units lives to just get kills then I don't hold much hope for it. The bait tactic works outside of sieges to. Just send something that you don't mind losing out to die, or something that you think or know will be able to survive for one turn and then retreat (so the AI can't have that attack that stuns unit in place for a turn, was some chariots that had that). If you can retreat and then hope the battle ends before you run out of troops (since there is no in-combat healing). Heal afterwards. If you survive with 1 hp you survived and it's not really a loss.
