Tanks for the memories . . .

[MosesPresley]

In my latest game, I am the zulus. I have about 70 infantry, 20 cavalry and about 20 tanks. I am fighting the French: 115 infantry, 0 cavalry and 0 tanks. The French would stand a good chance of stomping me if they built some tanks. Why is it the AI doesn't build any tanks until it is too late?

[edited] Regent Level.

The French marched about 80 of their infantry and riflemen right up next to one of my border cities that was protected by 8 infantry. I bombarded them with my 12 artillery and 6 bombers, which damaged a few of them. I circled behind them with my cavalry and took a French border town and I used my tanks to knock down a few more of their infantry. The next turn, the French retreated. Well this may be funny, we all know the WW2 jokes about the French, but it was stupid. If they had some tanks, I probably would have lost my border city and the town I had just conquered.

[end edit]


I can't be the only one who has this happen. The AI behaves like this in every game. It is a good strategy to have a lot of infantry to hold your cities, but you need assault forces to take someone elses and to repel enemy invaders. I would like to see in a future patch or in CIV III:PTW the AI build more assault troops, especially tanks.

Any thoughts?

[Carver]

I've noticed axactly the same thing. My mil advisor will tell that the AI civs have only a handful of tanks even though they have had the required everything for quite a while. Meanwhile the AIs love using infantry and mech infantry as attackers. My only guess is that the AI is programmed to roughly build X defenders per city, therefore these are the first priority and tanks are down the list somewhere. OTOH, the AIs seem to build calvalry rather often.

[zulu9812]

Building lots of cavalry is understandable: they'v built lots of horsemen & knights and just upgrade them. They already have the troops. Whereas tanks are completely new

[Kingof the Apes]

In my recent games, the AI rarely even goes for Military Tradition. They were in Industrial age, abou 4 of them, each around 6 techs ahead of me, but still none had it.(???)

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by zulu9812
Building lots of cavalry is understandable: they'v built lots of horsemen & knights and just upgrade them. They already have the troops. Whereas tanks are completely new

This is why in one of my edited games, I let Calvary/Cossak etc, upgrade to tanks/panzers.

[SpencerH]

The AI does build tanks and use them, but it does tend to retreat rather than press home an attack even when it has overwhelming forces (in some cases). I noticed this change in strategy with 1.21 but it could have come earlier.

[Vlado]

I guess that you have one of the later patches, 1.21f i guess. As I recall there's actually a reason for this strange behavior. Some one wrote that the mech inf as well as the regular inf are flagged as offensive AND defensive units. Normally when the AI builds units it build these first for defence and then no tanks since they don't think they need any offensive (they already think they have because of the mechs etc.). In the original game mech etc weren't flagged as offensive but because of people complaining that the AI didn't use them in a proper way, eg attacking your tanks when they got stuck outside of their town with one HP etc, the flagging got changed. So what you want to do is change the flags for these units to be defensive only and you'll see plenty of tanks. This will of course bring beck the old problem with them not attacking your one HP tanks but you can't have it all can you?

You might want to try to flag the tanks to defensive as well as offensive units, that might do the same thing.
I'm don't think I've read something about anyone flagging the tanks as defensive units though, so I can't say for sure.

/Vlado

[Papa Chubby]

Doesn´t the AI have any perception of the different strengths of these units. If they don´t, would it be to hard to implement that into the AI, recognising the strongest units in each field.