The Dumb AI

[Snarkhunter]

well... I'm not saying that all units have DEFINITE and the ONLY attack/defense values, but lets get real.... if a massive army of archers charged (while firing) at a massive army of swordsmen (same size army) I'd say its pretty obvious who'd win.

As for the pike, yes, it was used for attacking, but that was also when most of the weapons were too expensive to build, and building pikes/spears was a real cheap and efficient weapon, and I'm not sure of anyone who was fully educated on the subject would say that the pike was more efficient when attacking than when in the proper defensive stance.

Yes, but that's not how archers were used, historically. Except for something like horse archers, which did attack swordsmen & handed them their fundiments, more often than not.

It was certainly cheaper to arm large numbers with pikes than with plate armor and broadswords, but that wasn't its main advantage. Instead, it gave infantry something it had lacked for nearly a thousand years: shock capability. Shock and firepower were the two main quantities in offensive warfare for thousands of years. (They still are, but are carried out differently today.) During the heyday of western knights, shock dominated massively & firepower was all but non-existent; this began to pass with longbows & even more with crossbows (& later gunpowder, of course), but pikes were even more effective for shock value, if used properly. And that took some training--you couldn't just hand a peasant a pike & expect him to do anything useful with it on the battlefield. Note finally that from the get-go, the Swiss pikes attacked cavalry on the battlefield; they didn't wait around to receive an attack.

As for "fully educated", well, the great commanders during say the 15th-17th century knew far more about it than everyone on this list put together. . . and they didn't have any problem finding a place for pikes--defensively and offensively--in their armies. As for de Saxe, he's one of the great military theorists--who also backed up his theories on the battlefield. With victories. Get ye to Amazon & score a copy of Reveries without delay if you've never read it!

Marsden, as for Agincourt, the longbows acted first as bombardment units. Then after a certain point, the archers thrw away their bows and became in effect warriors, armed with axes and daggers & took their melee value of "1" against a melee defense of "0"--4/4 longbow-->5/5 warrior . I don't really think one can speak of them attacking as archers.

To really capture all this, you'd need to rate units separately for firepower & shock--call it melee-- & still further perhaps for offensive and defensive melee, but that is too refined for Civ3

kk

 

[Bowsling]

oops, sorry GONdorman, you made that comment

 

[GONdorman]

Bah, never mind

 

[Bowsling]

I'd like elizabeth to explain to me why it takes 2 galleys to plop 2 spearmen from her besieged capital onto an unimproved grassland with a bunch of MI that she could clearly see from the galley.

 

[Aabraxan]

Yeah, billybones27, I know what you mean. I especially like it when an AI drops off a spear/settler pair right between two 4-unit cav armies.

 

[Sweetchuck]

The AI is awful at this kind of thing.

I had a game recently where the AI had a galley AND a caravel each drop off a single archer by one of my cities.

Had it dropped the max capacity of 5 units off, they could have taken that city since I had only two units defending it.

And, they'll march free slaves right past the gate of Mordor being guarded by a single spear without hesitation.

 

[Kumquat]

The AI always has tons of units in its capital even if it is in the heart of their territory and then when you get near it most of the cities defense force decide they will go pillage some resources Also the AI changes their government like crazy till you get to fascism, then they just go to war with anybody that looks at them the wrong way for the rest of the game.

 

[Elear]

The AI always has tons of units in its capital even if it is in the heart of their territory and then when you get near it most of the cities defense force decide they will go pillage some resources Also the AI changes their government like crazy till you get to fascism, then they just go to war with anybody that looks at them the wrong way for the rest of the game.

What's even better is when they attack with Infantry/TOW Infantry against your Mech Infantry while in Democracy. That doesn't last too long, but you can't blame them once you've built the Apollo Program.

 

[dexters]

I'm a big fan of the Civ3 AI, maybe because it's the one aspect I've seen constantly improved upon for nearly 3 years until support for patches was finally pulled in early 2004 and along the way, the AI got better in many ways, although a lot of heuristics of the AI, were understandably difficult if not impossible to fix.

It's worth noting that the AI was designed to function more or less on a Civ that is either superior to the human player, even or just slightly behind. Anything beyond that, say- a small OCC AI, Island-bound Civs, or a small 'beaten' AI clinging for survival and it breaks down and goes off the rails. It causes them to play the game as if they are more than they really are. And play gambits like they have more advanced units causing for the hilarious Galleon landing Archers next to MI scenarios.

The lack of scalability of the AI in understanding it has 5 cities compared to the average of 30 cities in the rest of the world is one of the issues I have with the game but otherwise, a lot of the 'dumb' AI are reasonable moves, when they have the units to back up those playbook maneuvers. I remember one of my earliest C3C games, I was playing Japan in an unwinnable game stuck on a large Island. The AI had became a runaway on the main continent and near the end of the game, as the number of civs got whittled down, I was having an impossible time negotiating with the same runaway AI for iron, which I did not have. At some point they finally landed a stack of cavalry next to one of my core cities. I did venture to play a few more turns after that. They declared war on me, and not even my Infantry could stop the sheer number of cavalary units they could muster. As this example shows, the same Archer vs. MI playbook can actually work as a masterful piece of intimidation if the AI have the units.


Some of my thoughts on miscellaneous topics-
On Loading ships:

I've also watched more than a few debug games. I can confirm the AI load their invasion transports in a buffet fashion. This is how I observed the AI subsystem works.

Transport enters city
-Signal is sent to offensive units (Ship at X City)
This will cause the stacks of doom the AI keeps in reserve to move towards that city, sometimes the stack would be quite a distance away.

Once ship is loaded, a second signal is sent
-Transport full. No empty spots.
At which point, the stacks of units moving towards the city to load into the transport will stop.

There's no concious selection that will indicate to me that they prefer outdated units over modern ones. The only reason we get a lot of accounts from players laughing at the AI for landing an archer next to an MI may have more to do with the situation of the game (badly outmatched AI) then any sort of bad AI coding. And the reason the outdated units got loaded in first is that most offensive units tend to be kept outside cities in SOD, even in peacetime, the SOD simply sit around inside the AI territory and are often not upgraded until they enter a city.

 

[Spoonwood]

Whether on pangea or archipelago, I often find the AI really doesn't bring enough force to the table. And it builds far too many defensive units to really mount an offensive campaign... more like they designed it as fun to kill the AI, then to present a strategic challenge. The AI also has absolutely no clue what it does and you can exploit this. It goes after the weakest target around. So, if you have a stack of 8 swordsman about to march your capital in the south, and you have a wounded horseman in the north or maybe an undefended city there, the sword stack will turn around and head for that horseman. Sirian wrote in an interesting study

There are three primary strategic imperatives to the Civ3 AI that plunge it into a tactical quagmire.

1. The offensive force picks one city at a time to target. The selection is made on the basis of the current strength of the best defender, without regard to distance between the attacking force and the target. Therefore, the human can make the AI dance to any tune he likes by shuffling his defenders. Move a strong defender into a threatened town and move all strong defenders out of a town somewhere else and the AI's ENTIRE STACK will abandon its attack on the town with the stronger defender and shift its target to the one that is now guarded by weaker units. In theory, a player could keep an entire AI army locked in a frozen dance forever by setting up oscillating targets, just by moving defenders in and out of towns.

2. When one of the AI's cities is threatened by enemy forces moving in to attack position, the offensive force "turns around" from whatever it may have been doing and the whole thing tries to go rescue the threatened city. The human can pull these puppet strings by parking a few otherwise nonthreatening units near an AI's city, and moving them in and out of attack range.

3. The AI prefers in general to attack targets with the weakest defense strength. The human can exploit this by baiting the AI with soft targets, to various ends.

here: http://www.warpcore.org/~sirian/civ3/epic47c.html

 

[dexters]

Whether on pangea or archipelago, I often find the AI really doesn't bring enough force to the table. And it builds far too many defensive units to really mount an offensive campaign... more like they designed it as fun to kill the AI, then to present a strategic challenge. The AI also has absolutely no clue what it does and you can exploit this. It goes after the weakest target around. So, if you have a stack of 8 swordsman about to march your capital in the south, and you have a wounded horseman in the north or maybe an undefended city there, the sword stack will turn around and head for that horseman. Sirian wrote in an interesting study

here: http://www.warpcore.org/~sirian/civ3/epic47c.html

That's more of an exploit than dumb AI move however.

 

[Bowsling]

Once ship is loaded, a second signal is sent
-Transport full. No empty spots.
At which point, the stacks of units moving towards the city to load into the transport will stop.

If that's the case, how do we get those hilarious situations of sending 2 galleys to drop of 2 units, one in each ship.

 

[dexters]

If that's the case, how do we get those hilarious situations of sending 2 galleys to drop of 2 units, one in each ship.

I can't speak for that. I can only talk about what I've observed and AI can load up transports no problem and they do move all their SoD stacks towards the city with transports.

Once full, SoD stops moving and ship leaves.

 

[Bowsling]

I can't speak for that. I can only talk about what I've observed and AI can load up transports no problem and they do move all their SoD stacks towards the city with transports.

Once full, SoD stops moving and ship leaves.

duh! what was I thinking? the second galley was an escort. kinda too bad there's still that loophole, as the galleys had the capability to drop of their units then get back to the city.

 

[Argetnyx]

duh! what was I thinking? the second galley was an escort. kinda too bad there's still that loophole, as the galleys had the capability to drop of their units then get back to the city.

I just made a mod (for myself) that had the Trireme as the ancient military unit, and the AIs use them as escorts usually for one galley, which has only one unit in it.