Military Advisor

[dubwai]

OK I've been defending Civ III lately and I want to put in a complaint, well not so much a complaint but a pet-peeve.

The military advisor doesn't really help me much. Whenever I go to see how my military matches up I get the normal "We have an average military comparecd to these guys" or whatever. The thing is I could have 100 tank units and my enemy has 100 warrior units and somehow the military advisor sees this as being pretty much equal.

For example in may last game I was playing as the Indians and I was in second place. It was nearing the end of the game. I was pretty far behind (couple hundred points) so I was going to have to wipe-out the Greeks in order to win. So I start building tanks and infantry like a madman until I had two columns of ~12 tanks and ~14 infantry that were not needed for defense. I check my Military advisor and I get the 'average' message.

So I start attacking and all the Greeks had were calvary. I took out about 25 units losing maybe one or two infantry and a tank. I had captured about 10 cities before the Greeks started coming at me with their own tanks. They even had riflemen defending a lot of their cities.

So anyway clearly the game uses a very weak comparison of military strength. A simple sum of attack and defense points would be better.

Anyone else experience this?

[Arrian]

Yes, the military advisor is a blithering idiot, much like the others (with the noteable exception of the omniscient foreign advisor). Ignore him.

Luckily, Soren Johnson said that the AI doesn't use the same strength calculation. It apparently does take attack/defense values into account as well (though I have still seen some pretty stupid AI decisions).

-Arrian

[Ghengis Brom]

The advisor is probably weighting the analysis because he knows that rifleman has a good chance of beating your tank.