AIs ganging up on you

ioticus · #1 November 15th, 2004, 01:47 AM

Is it just me or do the AIs always seem to gang up on you? As a result, I usually get dog piled

PDF · #2 November 15th, 2004, 07:51 AM

It's the latter - the AIs gang up

Jarkko · #3 November 15th, 2004, 07:58 AM

Yesterday evening I learned in a 2-player MP the AI's cheat with having map-knowledge. As usual I was doing crappy, but my co-player/opponent is doing in his usual splendid way. As he is leading according to the statistics, he has got some nasty interest from his AI neighbours and not-quite neighbours.

So I assume the AI gangs up against anybody leading the game. Which in solo-play is usually the human, I believe

Endoperez · #4 November 15th, 2004, 09:44 AM

I think that AI attacks those that seem to present great(est) thread, and those that seem to be the weakest. If you have strong armies, or even strong province defense, on all/most of your border provinces your AI enemies will not attack you until they have no other choice left. If you happen to lead in the income/gems etc., all AIs consider ifit is worth attacking you. However, AIs will not attack humans any more than they would attack each other if the situation is similar.

About "cheating AI": AI's of harder difficulties get more gold, resources, gems and resesarch than humans, and all difficulties also get to know who owns what province. They need scouts to see magic sites/armies/lone rainbow-pretenders, and I don't think it's as bad as it seems. Any human player who would consider attacking you would have many scouts in your direction, and he would have traded for lots more information about you than mere provinces!

Jarkko · #5 November 15th, 2004, 10:02 AM

Oh, I don't mean the AI shouldn't be able to cheat, on the contrary. I just didn't know it has a knowledge of who owns which province, but that is surely not the Last thing I didn't yet know of this game

Kristoffer O · #6 November 15th, 2004, 12:58 PM

I don't think tha AI gangs up intentionally. It attacks when it has few expansion possibilities. If you are strong you probably have more neighbors that might attack you. You will rarely be aware of AI vs AI battles. The AI prefers easy targets I believe, but that is probably on a short term basis. If a province seems weak it might attack. If another neighbor has weaker defences it will be targeted instead.

Agrajag · #7 November 15th, 2004, 03:01 PM

The AIs do not gang up on you.
Just try a SP game with many AIs and not too much space and you will soon see several AI nations disappearing even if you didnt attack them...

Peter Ebbesen · #8 November 15th, 2004, 09:31 PM

Quote:

Kristoffer O said:
I don't think tha AI gangs up intentionally. It attacks when it has few expansion possibilities. If you are strong you probably have more neighbors that might attack you. You will rarely be aware of AI vs AI battles. The AI prefers easy targets I believe, but that is probably on a short term basis. If a province seems weak it might attack. If another neighbor has weaker defences it will be targeted instead.

It also declares war seemingly at random against players it ought not to have any knowledge of (sometimes several rounds before even the quickest scout could have reached a player's land) and targets spells like call of the winds with unheard of precision against territory that should be terra incognita.

Yeah, yeah, so it has complete knowledge of the province ownership in the world. A nice cheat and no big deal in general (a cheating AI is good so long as nobody really notices/its actions are such that they could conceivably have been made on the basis of the knowledge a human player would have had in the same position), but it is EXTREMELY silly for an AI that is located 8 provinces away - as determined later - to declare war on somebody it should not know of in round 4 and keep hammering his provinces with call of the winds on a monthly basis. A complete waste of gems on its part but it does force one to invest in more PD than is nice at such an early point in the game.

The Panther · #9 November 15th, 2004, 09:55 PM

The AI will attack you quite reliably if you have a lot of provinces and a small army. In fact, nearly all AIs will pile on once your army size begins to shrink. Once the ball starts rolling like that against you, it is very hard to recover. If you are on the top of the province graph and near the bottom of the army size graph, you will find yourself in a LOT of wars.

One way to avoid this is to put in 11 PD everywhere. The AI always knows your PD level in every province and will add that to your army size. Since there is no possibility of recruiting armies as fast as the AI does on the impossible level (and to a lesser extent, the hard level), use of PD can give you time to build up SCs, summons, artifacts, build forts, and do all the stuff that happens every game in MP but never in SP by the AI.

Once you get 11 PD everywhere, they will lose a few hawks or wolves to your PD and then quit attacking you. After some indeterminate number of turns with no attacks, they will be at peace with you but never annouce the fact.

NTJedi · #10 November 15th, 2004, 11:01 PM

The Panther is correct...

Even after an AI declares war it's possible for that AI to slip back into a peace status with you. Unfortunately there is no way to tell how peaceful or aggressive an AI opponent setting is towards you.

on a side note:
The biggest problem the AI has right now is starving units. The AI isn't aware of supplies within provinces... so it'll stack 200 light infantry in a province with 40 supplies. This results in starving and dieseased units which cause low morale and early death for new or veteran units. Hopefully Dominions_3 will have a disable starving option for AI.