No AI siege weapons

[RobO]

The AI doesn't seem to build siege weapons. It severely cripples their attack, and is probably caused by having the siege workshop (and other buildings later) as a prerequisite (I haven't checked if they build it).

I'm currently in a war with Hannibal (annoyingly, he has plenty of space to expand in the other direction). He's kicking ass, except for the fact that he's burning a fairly large army on attacking a city with 130% defense.

Do others have the same observation? I'm using 2.8 with a bare minimum of Aforess' stuff (e.g. none of the buildings).

One solution would be to increase the build cost of the siege weapons, allow them to be build without prerequisites other than tech, and let the siege workshop, cannon forge etc. decrease the build cost of siege weapons, perhaps give an experience point as well. How do you like that?

 

[TechXLtd]

The AI doesn't seem to build siege weapons. It severely cripples their attack, and is probably caused by having the siege workshop (and other buildings later) as a prerequisite (I haven't checked if they build it).

I'm currently in a war with Hannibal (annoyingly, he has plenty of space to expand in the other direction). He's kicking ass, except for the fact that he's burning a fairly large army on attacking a city with 130% defense.

Do others have the same observation? I'm using 2.8 with a bare minimum of Aforess' stuff (e.g. none of the buildings).

One solution would be to increase the build cost of the siege weapons, allow them to be build without prerequisites other than tech, and let the siege workshop, cannon forge etc. decrease the build cost of siege weapons, perhaps give an experience point as well. How do you like that?

That sounds like a capital idea. I like the thought of having them train faster with the building and perhaps a small (perhaps +1-2) experience points added to them. I tend not to want to build the darn things until I get artillery instead. It just seems like a bit of a hassle to need them to be built. I think that you could also have them be sped up by certain resources as well like with steel and sulfur or maybe for the earlier siege weapons things like hemp (hemp rope) or iron, or maybe even stone (catapult ammo?).

 

[RobO]

Which file(s) do I look in of I was to try this out myself? I've looked, but didn't find anything that looked right.

 

[zappara]

The AI doesn't seem to build siege weapons. It severely cripples their attack, and is probably caused by having the siege workshop (and other buildings later) as a prerequisite (I haven't checked if they build it).

They do build the required buildings. I think the reason why they don't build the units is because of the new iPower values I made for all units. I'll need to re-evaluate siege weapon iPower values (since they do collateral damage). For example catapult has iPower value of 10 and Swordsman which comes from the next tech after Siege Warfare has iPower value of 20 so because of this the AI player prefers to build Swordsman units since it seems to be twice as good as catapult.

 

[RobO]

OK,. I found the values in CIV4UnitInfos.xml
It seems I can find them all by searching for UNITCOMBAT_SIEGE

Does someone know which siege weapons there are problems with?

 

[Adde]

The AI is still building siege weapons in all my games. I have noticed that they don't build them to quite the same extent as before, so now they usually seem to have around 4-6 in their attacking stack.

 

[os79]

Based on Zappara's comments:

Go to UnitInfos and search for Catapults and its UU counterparts and find <iPower> line and change the number to higher number, then experiment. With Affforess' new performance improved modmod, you should be able to playtest your new values faster in your games.

After you figure out the better stats for iPower, report here. Zappara may take these tests into considerations as well, since that is basically what 2.9 and maybe 2.81 is all about anyway.

 

[dexter_inside]

The AI is still building siege weapons in all my games. I have noticed that they don't build them to quite the same extent as before, so now they usually seem to have around 4-6 in their attacking stack.

Same here. Try higher difficulty if you still don't see siege units

 

[Bezhukov]

Same here. Try higher difficulty if you still don't see siege units

They're not building many on Deity. They do like to build prereq buildings, but like other mil buildings, they spam them, even in cities that lack basic infra and even when theyr'e looking at 30-40 turn builds, setting them way back relative to human players or the 1/2 AI players with the river/flood start.

 

[Adde]

The AI doesn't seem to build siege weapons. It severely cripples their attack, and is probably caused by having the siege workshop (and other buildings later) as a prerequisite (I haven't checked if they build it).

I'm currently in a war with Hannibal (annoyingly, he has plenty of space to expand in the other direction).....

I'm not trying to derail the thread, I'm just curious if anyone knows if the AI is actually programmed to do this because in pretty much every game I play the AI seems to try and build towards me even though there is plenty of space in other directions.

 

[zappara]

I'm not trying to derail the thread, I'm just curious if anyone knows if the AI is actually programmed to do this because in pretty much every game I play the AI seems to try and build towards me even though there is plenty of space in other directions.

That's common strategy - fill the space towards your future enemies as soon as possible and when that area is filled, send settlers to the other direction where enemy doesn't have access.

 

[Adde]

That's common strategy - fill the space towards your future enemies as soon as possible and when that area is filled, send settlers to the other direction where enemy doesn't have access.

I always try and do that myself, I just didn't know if the AI was programmed to do the same or not.

 

[os79]

For reference's sake:
Here is the modiki page on unitinfos.xml.

It describes what the XML tags do.

NOTICE:
It doesn't include any added XML tags of not-vanilla BtS tags.

 

[Adde]

Here is an example from my current game of an AI attack stack.

 

[os79]

Here is an example from my current game of an AI attack stack.

View attachment 235132

Ouch.

Lucky AI doesn't know to use entire stack of siege weapons to bombard before attacking with the rest. Otherwise, I would be really, really struggling .

 

[Afforess]

Ouch.

Lucky AI doesn't know to use entire stack of siege weapons to bombard before attacking with the rest. Otherwise, I would be really, really struggling .

Better AI .82j Added that, I thought.

 

[os79]

Better AI .82j Added that, I thought.

I guess I'm lucking out .

 

[szemek77]

Not much experience yet, but it really seems that AI is bringing much less siege weapons with their army. The necessity of SWW - makes the difference, I guess.

 

[Adde]

Ouch.

Lucky AI doesn't know to use entire stack of siege weapons to bombard before attacking with the rest. Otherwise, I would be really, really struggling .

The AI just declared war on me and started the attack by bombarding me with 13 catapults in a row.

 

[Afforess]

Os79

- I told you so