AI aggresion

[Kataphraktoi]

Im not referring to declaring war, but instead the AIs use of troops. Again and again i see the AI squander opportunity by building and garrisoning huge amounts of troops.

In this shot, the barbarians have held Lyons for centuries, and a french force sufficent to retake the city is stationed in paris. But they just sit there, as they often do in all my games(betterAI+aggressive even does this).




Is there some miracle fix, a file i can edit quick and simple to allow the AI to take risks and use its troops? As it is its just hopeless, even BTS\aggressive couldnt play the conqueror if its life depended on it. My dream scenario would be an AI conquering a whole continent and running away with the game. Higher difficulty levels create an illusion of this happening, but in reality its just the AI having so many troops and earlier it can use them while maintaining its excessive garrisons.

[Darsnan]

Re: AI aggresion

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
Im not referring to declaring war, but instead the AIs use of troops. Again and again i see the AI squander opportunity by building and garrisoning huge amounts of troops.

Heah Kataphraktoi,

read your post when it first came out and have kept it in mind while I've been playing around with BtS. Essentially in a nutshell my opinion is that this AI behavior is an update in response to the old Civ AI approach of continually dribbling units out 1 -2 at a time (a la SMACX). These units were then easily killed off by human players and more developed AIs. The new coding seems to take the form of "if I have developed a superior force in my city versus those in the general neighborhood surrounding it, then I will commmit it to battle, else hold in garrison." Thus from my playtesting I believe you can get aberrantly huge garrisons (like what you have presented in your screen pic), or if the scale tips in favor of aggression, then you can get stacks of doom coming at you. What exactly the defining criteria are that tips the scale from the AI playing defense to sending out stacks of units I have not determined yet, but I do believemy synopsis is a correct general overview of how the AI behaves in-game.
Currently I'm playtesting a variant of this using paratroopers (see screenshot). Essentially I've purposely left a city undefended, and which can easily be parachuted into by a neighboring hostile AI. I started out by garrisoning the enemy city with one lone paratrooper. The AI steadfastly refused to drop the unit onto the undefended city. Two paratroopers did no better, nor did 3. Four paratroopers seemed to "tip the balance " as it were, and they deployed, although after landing they didn't move to occupy the empty city on that turn.

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
In this shot, the barbarians have held Lyons for centuries, and a french force sufficent to retake the city is stationed in paris. But they just sit there, as they often do in all my games(betterAI+aggressive even does this).

I've playtested with similar results. This, IMO, is a drawback of this new coding. A variant might be to add some units to the tech tree which are categorized as "scouts" which the AIs would then send out to "explore" the surrounding terrain, and have the "opportunity" to coallesce into a stack and capture enemy cities.

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi
Is there some miracle fix, a file i can edit quick and simple to allow the AI to take risks and use its troops?

As far as I know there is no file you can edit "quick and simple" to fix this. This is how things are in Civ4 BtS.

D