Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Hey guys, quick couple Qs about preparing to attack a neighbour civ:

1) When I switch civics to get extra XP on units or whatever, do the AI civs respond strategically to that? ie; if they know I'm switching to a war-favouring civic, does this trigger their beefing up security on border cities?

2) I've noticed placing military units near the border tends to scare them into sending reinforcements to the nearest city; is this purely a tile-distance thing? ie Is there a set number of tiles away I have to be before they'll ignore my military movements?

Cheers

 

Good questions. I don't think neighboring civs realize you're preparing for war depending your civics. If your neighbors share your militaristic new civics they'll treat war as *less* likely because your relations will improve.

I hope someone has an answer for your second question.

 

I can see two tiles beyond my borders in every direction - including inside cities - plus of course the visibility range of any units beyond that. I continue to assume until informed otherwise that the AIs have the exact same limitation. In addition to this, they may have the ability to see inside your cities if they have enough espionage points.

In some mods, the visibility range of units is reduced by forests and/or increased by coast.

 

Rep:

1)From what I see up to now in the code, I haven't found much "awareness" in the AI in terms of "potentiality". I mean, what happens ahead, they don't think about it. They think short term, moment being. So basically when you dow them. Civics fall in the potentiality category.

2)Outside BFC plus corners.Or three tiles away, the AI doesn't take it as danger for a particular city. It's coded like that. Something called AI_isDanger() in the code.

EDIT: There is one "awareness" I ever found and that was from experiencing it. First, it's only in Civ4 Vanilla. It seems the devs coded the AI to be paranoid in presence of human players. In low levels where the AI starts with few warriors, if the AI meets a human (and only a human; doesn't care about other AI's) it stops its progress for a worker and train a second warrior. Just the act of meeting triggers this and that is what I call "better than sorry" preventive action from an AI against potentiality [of a zerg rush].

 

No. The AI simply and randomly rolls war odd each turn according to their stance towards you. They don't react further. AI is stoopid. That's it.

 

For unmodded BTS, indeed, the AI has a innate radar compared to the human. When it comes to sighting, it's the same. For instance, an AI unit will have as much spawnbuster ability as a human unit. But when it comes to evaluate surroundings, it was implemented some sort of radar larger than sight. It affects AI behaviour and helps them in a concept limited to humans here: memory. The AI cannot (or it takes too much memory allocation and bugs the game) recall what happened. That radar mends that disability.

 

Thanks for the detailed answers all!

 

Yeah, but it also let's it see/remember things it has never seen, especially in the destroyer age...

 

This is not the case. If you switch to someone's favoured civic (which they are running) they will like you more, and if your switch implicitly causes a change in/out of a state religion that will alter diplomatic relations, but the mere fact of sharing civics has no effect.

 

Do you know how far this "radar" extends?

 

^
For naval units, it's as far as their movement points allow.
For land units, it depends of their base movement point:
'twas 4 tiles away for 1 units.
And 6 tiles away for 2 units.

As you might notice, it goes along the max movement of a 2 unit on a road when engineering is discovered.
When railroads enter the scene, the max movements for all units is 10 tiles and it goes beyond their radar.

 

On this aspect, I prefer a cheating AI than a completely lost one.

 

Q: I paid a "Friendly AI" to DoW an "unFriendly AI"; they took my money and didn't declare; What went wrong?

 

Can you post a screenshot of your event log?

 

I asked this in a different thread, but it's more apt here.

What exactly do you mean by choking? DoW, steal a worker (if you can), and park an axeman near their border so they don't dare send out a settler, something like that? Have never tried it.

 

That's pretty much it. Pillage him into the Stone Age too.

 

This is a current game and I do not wish to expose info.
The only apposite info was a line reporting they had money available for trade (total I paid - 100).

I reloaded the previous 10 autosaves and checked the trade screens.
This looks like a glitch, as none of those saves had DoW/StopTrading selectable.

Very inconvenient, money gone and his stack is on its way.

 

Cheers. Maybe I should try it at some point. Guess I feel it is a bit too "gamey". I tend to either build up an empire peacefully (with aggressive intents), or go all out to crush my enemies.

 

Check it out on some of AZ's videos. It really is a powerful tactic. Extremely hard to defend against too. MP people can attest to that.

 

I have an extremely low tolerance for exploits, but I have no problem with this. Sometimes you don't have the troops to take on the city or the SoD, but you do have the troops to 'indicate your disapproval' of this particular neighbour (and of course you are 'tenderizing' him for when you do invade). Also, I would like to be able to take territory by military means without taking cities. You can't, but this is the next best thing.