"Your warrior has been destroyed by a savage mistform" - turn 40.

[xienwolf]

AI units don't consider being able to actually see the tile a unit is on, just being able to see the unit itself if it is invisible in some manner. They just see an area around themselves at each step in their consideration of what to do next, starting with what they can reach in one turn, then expanding out to what they can reach quickly, and finally ranging out to a longer term objective.

I suppose I could fix it up so that they have to be able to actually see you, but then it would be nearly impossible to ever have a barbarian chase you down (maybe they never should though?)

 

[WarKirby]

AI units don't consider being able to actually see the tile a unit is on, just being able to see the unit itself if it is invisible in some manner. They just see an area around themselves at each step in their consideration of what to do next, starting with what they can reach in one turn, then expanding out to what they can reach quickly, and finally ranging out to a longer term objective.

I suppose I could fix it up so that they have to be able to actually see you, but then it would be nearly impossible to ever have a barbarian chase you down (maybe they never should though?)

I'd say, if you're in the line of sight of a unit, and you move into somewhere it wouldn't be able to see (like behind a mountain) it shouldn't just forget you, but it shouldn't home in on you like a heat seeking missile either.

How about, making it so that if you move out of a unit's line of sight, it treats the your last known location as where it thinks you are, and if intending to chase you, will move there. If it can't see you when or before it reaches that tile, then it should give up the chase


Also, it'd be nice if barbarians would have some sort of limit on how far from "home" they'd stray to chase you down. It does make sense that the guardians of Prstinus Pass would go after whoever disturbed them, but it seems a little silly when they'll chase a lowly scout to the ends of the earth because they can't catch him. Until his nation becomes powerful enough to kill the gargoyles.


For barbarians spawned from dungeons/villages, they should consider that tile as "home", and not wander more than 10 tiles or so from there. Giving up the chase if their quarry moves outside that range. Likewise, the aforementioned gargoyles should treat pristinus pass as home.

As for randomly spawned wandering barbs, I'd say they should not bother ever chasing down units, except as targets of opportunity. Thy should focus on lemming rushing any cities they can find, and maybe pillaging stuff.

 

[xienwolf]

Granting units MEMORY would require an insane jump in processing time or memory footprint of the game as a whole, for almost no worthwhile end result.

 

[Sarisin]

This appears to be the behavior of most (if not all) barbarian units. If they see a unit that they have a good chance of killing they will move towards it to try and kill it. Sometimes I'll have a heavily wounded warrior out in the woods and a stack of orcs will move next to him. Realizing he'll die, even on a hilled forest, if he tries to defend I have him move away out of sight of the stack. They seem to know exactly which square I moved to and will move to intercept. They will continue to chase my wounded warrior until a better target presents itself or they lose sight of their target. Since my warrior doesn't move faster than the orcs, they'll never lose sight of me. If I had a scout I could break clear of the woods and move out of sight range. They then will revert to their more random behavior.

Gargoyles always do this, since they are almost always going to heavily outmatch their opponent. You've probably seen this behavior a lot with bears too.

I posted a thread here some time ago about this being one of the ways the AI cheats. They can clearly see the map, while you cannot. This is how they follow you allover the map.

I had several units lead a couple of Gargoyles on a wild goose chase allover a huge map. There was no way they could follow units with 2 movement pts. unless they saw where they moved. Still, they managed to keep up for about 100 turns until I lost them passing through other civ's territory.

With units with only 1 movement pt., someone mentioned that the chasing unit just keeps moving to the tile vacated by the unit being chased. That might be, but didn't explain how they kept up with units with 2 movement pts.

It also helps you understand how the AI is able to go straight for goody huts, lairs, etc. (although sometimes they do seem to wander off in the wrong direction).

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Granting units MEMORY would require an insane jump in processing time or memory footprint of the game as a whole, for almost no worthwhile end result.

I for one think that it would be completely worth the cost.

 

[WarKirby]

I kind of assumed that units already have memory. Given that if you tell a unit to go somewhere, it will remember where you told it, and keep moving there every turn until it arrives.

Am I missing something?

 

[xienwolf]

That is remembering just one thing. For a unit to say "5 turns ago, every unit in the world that my owner could see were in these locations..." means MASSIVE memory required, as each unit's location must be tracked over multiple turns and recorded, along with information about what each player could see. Then you have to loop over all of this extra data and decide how to utilize it with each unit each turn.

Telling a unit "Go to these 2 numbers" is pretty simple, you store those two numbers for that one unit, and each turn you check if he is there, and then attempt to get there. The difference is quite massive.


The way it works now, AI gets a LOCAL advantage, it doesn't worry about fog of war too much within a 3 tile radius. But they get a GLOBAL disadvantage, each unit is completely ignorant of anything outside of the range it attempts to follow orders in (meaning that Valin on the western front has no clue that lines were broken on the eastern front and cities are being taken every turn. He just knows that there are 3 Goblin Archers on this hill and he is waiting for more support so he can take them down)

 

[PPQ_Purple]

That sounds both extremely realistic lore vise, considering the era and all. But extremely bad as a mechanic... I am playing a game where the AI is using huge SODs to exterminate my war ally. He has almost no defenses BTW. And I am rushing his capital with my SODs and the AI does not withdraw any troops to atack me... is this what causes the efect?

Also, can anyone tell me how to force activate that guardian thing?

 

[WarKirby]

That is remembering just one thing. For a unit to say "5 turns ago, every unit in the world that my owner could see were in these locations..." means MASSIVE memory required, as each unit's location must be tracked over multiple turns and recorded, along with information about what each player could see. Then you have to loop over all of this extra data and decide how to utilize it with each unit each turn.

Telling a unit "Go to these 2 numbers" is pretty simple, you store those two numbers for that one unit, and each turn you check if he is there, and then attempt to get there. The difference is quite massive.

This is what I meant. I didn't mean remembering every unit. Just remembering the location of the "target". The unit that it's actively following.

 

[thadian]

Also, someone else mentioned deleting Orthus to protect AI civs on Monarch... Is the Monarch AI that bad? I've never seen a civ have trouble with Orthus; whoever he spawns next to usually has an insane early game with the Axe for early conquest.

Yes, it is.

i would love to be up there with you immortal/diety players but i can't outmath the AI cheats. i don't know how you all do it, but i refer to: tech whoring - seeing the entire map - artificial handicaps that greatly work in their favor. for example, i turn off goody huts because they never really help me anyway but one too many times on turn 60 i see an AI with 250 points from tech popping. i want a SMART AI - not bigger handicaps.

but on monarch the AI is really really stupid. it often fails to estimate the barbs and when savages come near them they turtle their workers in their cities even long after they need to. turn 260 in my matazl game for example, only 2 civ's had developed tile improvements in any of their cities and the rest of their cities were just hopeless messes of no improvements of any kind and about 20 workers turtled in their cities.

 

[Sarisin]

Yes, it is.

i would love to be up there with you immortal/diety players but i can't outmath the AI cheats. i don't know how you all do it, but i refer to: tech whoring - seeing the entire map - artificial handicaps that greatly work in their favor. for example, i turn off goody huts because they never really help me anyway but one too many times on turn 60 i see an AI with 250 points from tech popping. i want a SMART AI - not bigger handicaps.

but on monarch the AI is really really stupid. it often fails to estimate the barbs and when savages come near them they turtle their workers in their cities even long after they need to. turn 260 in my matazl game for example, only 2 civ's had developed tile improvements in any of their cities and the rest of their cities were just hopeless messes of no improvements of any kind and about 20 workers turtled in their cities.

I've noticed that the AI does build improvements - although not as intelligently as the human player. For example, you often see a cottage built on a Reagents tile, or a Farm built on Cows.

However, one thing they for some reason do NOT do like the human player is DEFEND improvements. That might be why you come across civs with so much unimproved land. I find they go out and build the farm. Along comes a group of barb Warriors and poof the farm is gone. Other improvements follow. Rather than bring out the load of defenders in the city to take on the orcs, they stay inside and wait for them to destroy all the improvements, then defend when they finally attack the city. Then, out come the Workers again and re-build improvements.

I find one of the biggest challenges (and I play only at Prince-Monarch) is defending my improvements from barbs. No problem defending cities, but when the AI constantly spawns five Frostling Riders or Wolf Riders all around your borders and a few tiles away from improvements, it can be fun trying to prevent that resource improvement from getting pillaged. I do find the group of barbs is more apt to attack a unit than pillage an improvement and that helps.

But, if you pull all your units into your cities and ignore the barbs, they will merrily pillage all improvements before finally dying when attacking your cities.