Odd AI Behavior

[RERomine]

Originally Posted by Mobhack

1) No idea - never seen that one, since if the defender it will generally be stationary. If 2 below - then it might decide the quickest path is via the mines, if there are no nearby gaps, of course.

Seems like an reconnaissance probe. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In the case where they hit the minefield, the units were East of it before they started and there were no gaps.

2) The AI will sometimes do a mini counter attack even before you have taken any objectives. Usually with armour, but sometimes not. This should be quite rare - in 2 recent WW2 long campaigns the defenders have come at me maybe twice with a tank platoon before I was near the objectives. (Being near the objectives if spotted by the AI can sometimes trigger counter attacks too, though generally you need to flip one or more).

Except in my case, the AI didn't run to the sound of the guns. At the end of the battle, it had possession of my deployment zone, but I didn't have anything back there. My entire force was in AI deployment zone.

3) If you mean dropping arty ahead of your deployment zone, it will sometimes aim at the front of the deployment line and then there is the usual spread of fires which may take the aim point off and away into the neutral zone. But fires landing ahead of your deployment zone can drop on the next turn as well thus splatting your advancing troops from turn 1 if you decided to risk running into the shelled zone. And if heavy arty, then it can crater approach roads in front of your advance which also may slow your approach down.

Desert battle in this case, without roads. I've seen the AI hammer roads before so I don't deploy on them. The fire came in too far ahead of my deployment zone to be a risk to anything and I definitely wasn't going to go through the impact zone with artillery still coming in. If I'm receiving incoming mail, I get out of the impact zone and if I have to go where it is coming in, I wait. I suspect this is true for most people. The only exception to this would probably be the last turn or two of the battle and the impact zone is on victory hexes not controlled by the player.

4) Before that was introduced stugs, marders etc were simply dead meat if engaged from a flank as only turrets would turn to engage. It also solved problems with Char Bs and Lee/Grants which would almost never use the hull guns, simply engaging with the sub-turret unless a human player manually hull-turned them - which the AI rarely did.

Cheers
Andy

For fixed or sponson mounted guns, it makes sense. They are going to turn to fire. For other units, auto pivot's usefulness varies from tank to tank. Some it helps, some it doesn't.

Coding for each situation is not something that I'd want to tackle. You would have to run a numeric calculation for each unit to determine the optimum angle each time it ends it's turn or receives fire. Can't do it by unit name because names can be changed. Since armor values also can change, it would have to be a run-time calculation unless you calculated it in advance and maintained the values in a table. Then you have to consider multiple threats to the tank. With a 50mm L42 to the right 30 degrees off at 16 hexes and a 50mm L60 to the left at 20 degrees, 22 hexes off, which is the bigger threat? Has one of the guns been suppressed and really isn't a threat? Could it possibly recover and become a threat before the next turn starts? You see where all of that goes. Coding it would be a project in and of itself.

Auto pivot at worst puts the player and AI on the same playing field. If the player chooses to angle a unit before firing or at the end of their turn to optimize armor, that gives them a leg up on the AI. No reason to complain there. When I first brought it up, I saw the advantages to manually setting tank angles. As Don pointed out, it was based on my experience. When I get to Tigers and Panthers rather than various versions of the mark IIIs, I'll worry less about tank angles. Things are fine the way they are