Dear AI : "Pillage" is not a toy :(

[Chetlen]

Actually I think pillaging is a great addition to wartime strategy. In one of my first games I was the Mongols and wanted to take out the Chinese (fitting...), but I just didn't have the units to do it. But I DID have those wonderful Keshiks (whatever) who make great pillagers...after sending in a half dozen or so I brought his economy to its knees (he was not prepared to defend). Then I was able to take his cities, as he could no longer afford to build new defensive units.

Later in the same game I was in the mid-industrial era when Saladin (on a different continent) surprised me by building the Apollo program and starting his spaceship. I was going to lose if I didn't slow him down, so I made an open-borders agreement with his neighbor (Catherine), shipped over about fifteen cavalry, then declared war and let them loose on his land. Despite his tech advantage he didn't have enough units to counter me quickly, and I destroyed most of his tiles before he rallied to push me back. By this time his cities had starved down to half their previous size, he wasn't building spaceship parts, and I had caught up technologically. So I accomplished my goal without capturing a single city.

So I guess the point is that in this game there can be a lot more purpose in war besides just taking cities. In fact in many cases you are going to want to stop your opponent but are NOT going to want his cities...with the increased upkeep, unrest, etc sometimes they are more trouble than they are worth. In one game I took an opponents city but then it immediately started starving and rioting...I only had a couple of decent squares in the city radius, the rest now belonged to another neighbor. I had no way of even building up the culture (unless I wanted to waste a culture bomb) in order to increase the radius, so I just gifted the city to my neighbor civ, gaining a friend and ridding myself of a problem at the same time.

Anyway, this is a big change from prior Civ wars, when once a war started I usually tried to continue until I had wiped out my opponent and taken all his cities. There's just much less reason to do that in Civ4.

[Blake]

The pillaging done by the AI is not at all strategic, maybe it's strategic in a "The AI collective versus the player" sense, but it's not in the best interest of the individual AI's that engage in mass pillaging.

My beef is the AI ALWAYS pillages, it's like a fallback strategy it always ends up defaulting to. If pillaging is the only thing it can do, it shouldn't even be in the war.

There is such thing as strategic pillaging, but the AI very often loses 2 or more units for every tile pillaged. It also pillages tiles outside of any city's radius which is an extremely self-defeating thing to do, as it provides plenty of time to mobilize a defense before it gets around to pillaging inland.

The only reason AI pillaging "Works" is that there are 5 more AI's out there that aren't pillaging, essentially the pillager sacrifices himself for his comrade AI's.

The only reason human pillaging "Works" is the AI is too dumb to attack the pillaging units.

Note: I may be biased since I never engage in mass pillaging, thus maybe I can't see the personal benefits of untatical pillaging at the expense of losing units.

[Fidel]

Originally posted by LordShiva


Yes! I hate this! This is why I don't like war in Civ4!

I want big bloody battles in the open fields! I want to see the sun shining off the armour of the fallen, and the fields to turn red with spilled blood! I don't want pansy AIs to hoard all their units in their cities with +2 million % defensive bonus!

first game i played was continets, 8 players, warlord. no wars. i had to pay them at the end to attack vile louis, and he still won space race by one goddamn turn.
still, i decided to up it and go to noble. this time pangea, 12 civs. random climate gave me a very harsh world, and russians succumbed to two-pronged attack by greeks and ceasar. wars were raging all over the place, but cities were sparringly exchanged.
third game, again pangea 12, noble. wars ALL THE TIME, to the point that we had to skip some wonders. english - eliminated. monty - eliminated. tokugawa - lost 3/4 of his empire. big BLOODY AI BATTLES. AI kicking the living daylights out of each other and attacking me fiercely.

i guess it depends on the map, on the game, etc. this was all without ai agressive setting. but i guess that it shows that no two games would play in the same way...and that is good.