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About the artillery thing though, I used to think the same way he did, and it might has been true back in the day (SPWAW probably) but when you see a number of barrages hit where you have absolutely nothing, then you know the use of a borg arti is non-existent or largely curtailed.
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The "borg" artillery
was true for the original SSI code.
however as we have stated before on this forum and the old Yahoo! board, it was one of the
first things we removed on recieving the source code.
The original SSI AI arty code
did have advantages built-in to make it fall nearer to your troops (Whether located or not).
We removed this AI arty advantage, so new AI predictive code was required.
My AI artillery code has to use prediction to plot any fires that are "blind", just like a player. Therefore it is interested in areas around objectives, approach road hexes and so on just like a human opponent. Sometimes it just plots random fire into the whole box of the enemy deployment zone, since there likely will be troops in there, somewhere.
A year or 2 back I added the "AI Interest" routines to give the AI a "clue" about things that a
human opponent would see reported in the playback (such as rooster trails, fire weapons events and so on that are reported to the other player), details in the release history section of the game. (Otherwise it could only react to troops
visible in its turn or random plotting - now, if you do the "hill dance" where you bring up a sucession of vehicles to fire from a hill, and end up all hidden behind that hill, it will tend to start some arty falling on you - as the number of "fire events" from that location go up and up, despite your running behind the ridge for cover after the firing).
So occasionally the AI gets lucky and drops a shed-load of predicted arty onto one of your blocks of troops. Most players see this as the AI having a lucky guess this time (which is what it did do), but there still happen to be one or 2 players who when this happen, come bleating here about "borg AI artillery". Simply not true for the SPCamo code. I happen to know this, since I wrote it ..
Cheers
Andy