Improved AI war over oceans

[Dwarven Zerker]

Give AI better capability in creating navies with increasing priority as the water content of the world increases. Minimal or no emphasis for pangaea maps, moderate emphasis for continents and high emphasis for archepelagoes.

The composition of the navy should be at least 50% transport and the remainder on protection. Ideally, the AI would be able to group transports and protecting ships into "battle groups" to launch and execute more effective cross ocean wars.

This is perhaps the weakest ability of the AI that needs to be strengthened to provide a better challenge on continents and especially archapelago maps. It can be said that the archapelago map is an exploit as the AI can't invade beyond it's starting island effectively at all.

 

[Chauliodus]

I think just having Ai transports farry a full load instead of 1 or 2 units will make them 100X more dangerous.

For invasion forces like what your mentioning, I think having the AI muster units better on land and sea would be great, I hate how in Civ3, once their main force is smashed they just have a trickle of units invade your territory. I would rock if they would hold them back for when they have a large enough force to launch a sucessful second attack.

 

[t3h_m013]

it would make it much harder but in a good way. to be honest, in your core cities you dont need defenders at all on levels up to monarch at the moment

 

[Colonel]

u bring up a good point with this as i can remember numerous times where one soilder would get off a transport to attack me and it had come from very far a way sad part it was a warrior in modern most of the time

 

[Pariah]

Yes, I agree.

AIs can already rule the seas by having lots of naval units, and make it very dangerous for your transports to carry large battlegroups. Perhaps that's why they seldom send out full shiploads of invaders - the potential enormous loss if the transport is sunk? I reckon that transports or troopships should be tougher, as well as habitually grouped with other naval vessels for defence.

Transoceanic warfare should be pursued just as rigorously as settling new cities, or developing new weapons technologies. Maybe, on worlds with relatively little ocean &/or only one giant landmass, the AIs should give a low priority to development of naval advances? Their research effort can surely be directed towards the most immediately usefull goals, depending on circumstances.