Cruise Missiles Hanging in Mid-Air!

[Gatekeeper]

quote: Originally posted by Smash on 10-16-2000 02:21 AM You can do it also if you have MGE.Press w one move before last,then command+n when you are finished.Works for all air or missile units.Keeps triremes from sinking also.Just move 2 squres though.

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Smash:

Thanks for the tip. I don't want to make a fairly easy job (most of the time) any easier, though .

CYBERAmazon

[Bohlen]

CYBERAmazon:

I'm glad you got to clear things up for The Capo. He sounds a little paranoid.

Wow! It's amazing to me how lowering the cost of cruise missiles by 10 shields will produce drastically different results. I would have thought that no matter how cheap missiles are, that the AI is programmed to attack only naval units with them, since that's all it does under normal cost. I guess that only goes to show what can happen when you make a small change to rules.txt. If the AI would use cruise missiles as regularly on cities as it does nukes, the AI could be pretty dangerous at times in modern era warfare.

[Gatekeeper]

Simpson II:

I apologize for not seeing your question earlier. Regarding it, the city was defended by my conquering howitzer divisions (two, I think).

CYBERAmazon

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Bohlen:

I haven't been able to detect a pattern on missile vs. city usage yet, other than the fact that it seems to hit cities with ships and/or armor harbored in them more frequently than other targets.

Once or twice, it has struck my cities that are defended by SAM missile batteries and SDI Defenses. Suffice to say, the AI actually seems to avoid those cities w/missiles after discovering their defense networks. A bit of intelligence, perhaps?

CYBERAmazon

[Bohlen]

quote: Originally posted by CYBERAmazon on 10-17-2000 02:33 PM Once or twice, it has struck my cities that are defended by SAM missile batteries and SDI Defenses. Suffice to say, the AI actually seems to avoid those cities w/missiles after discovering their defense networks. A bit of intelligence, perhaps? CYBERAmazon

The same can be said when the AI uses nukes...well, sort of. The AI will not drop a nuke on a city that has an SDI defense, but will continually try to nuke a city that does not have its own SDI, but is still protected by an SDI located in a city that is up to 3 squares away. Here, the AI knows which cities have SDIs and which do not. It sounds like in your situation, the AI has to "give it a try" with the missiles first in order to learn about which cities have SAMs and SDIs.

I'll have to give this a try in one of my upcoming games and see if my results match yours.

Keep up the good work! Very interesting stuff.

[debeest]

Two things:

1) civilopedia notwithstanding, cruise missiles normally cost 60 shields, not 50, right? and

2) CYBERAmazon, I assure you that if you build a battleship and hover a bomber over it, you will often find the stack surrounded by a cloud of eager, panting, enemy cruise missiles, wondering why they couldn't bite it and how they're gonna get home. I've assumed that it was a glitch, but it occurs to me that maybe the AI knows about the "wait" trick and actually CHEATS INTELLIGENTLY the way the human player can!

[Gatekeeper]

quote: Originally posted by debeest on 10-17-2000 11:00 PM Two things: 1) civilopedia notwithstanding, cruise missiles normally cost 60 shields, not 50, right? and 2) CYBERAmazon, I assure you that if you build a battleship and hover a bomber over it, you will often find the stack surrounded by a cloud of eager, panting, enemy cruise missiles, wondering why they couldn't bite it and how they're gonna get home. I've assumed that it was a glitch, but it occurs to me that maybe the AI knows about the "wait" trick and actually CHEATS INTELLIGENTLY the way the human player can!

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debeest:

Regarding part one of your question, nope. In my version of Civ II (Macintosh release), the cruise missiles usually cost 50 shields. I lowered it to 40 after reading about something similar Smash (least I think it was him) did with identical results. If anything, he deserves most of the credit for this trick, as he was the one who enlightened me to its existence. Since then, we've both been lab rats .

As for the second half of your question, I've *never* observed what you've seen. Perhaps it's something they fixed when porting it to the Macintosh. The most I've ever found is usually an AI sub carrying a single cruise missile. That, I think, acts as a mobile base for the AI, and the single cruise missile is some sort of loci point where the AI can bring in however many others it thinks it needs to do a given job (like making my life hell with 36-missile en masse strikes).

CYBERAmazon