CA: Some Recommendations for Siege AI

Hi,

On the whole the AI in the game is very impressive. Despite that, however, there are some obvious improvements that could be made. I always feel at a distinct advantage when attacking or defending cities, in particular when the AI tries to assault a city with stone walls...

1. Battering ram
Whilst it's great against wooden walls, the AI should never build these for stone wall assaults. They always seem to get destroyed before reaching the gate. Either that or boost the hp of battering rams so that they last a bit longer.

2. Men carrying siege equipment
When the equipment is destroyed the unit carrying the equipment should leave the wreckage and perform some other task. At the moment they just stand with the destroyed siege equipment until they themselves are destroyed by the wall defences.

3. Sapping point
The AI should on occasion use the sapping point. So far after 20+ sieges I've never seen the AI use this method, which is arguably the most effective when assaulting stone walls.

Just some thoughts.

Regards

J

Some nice pathfinding wouldn't go amiss either.

Another couple to add:

Sometimes the AI will position its troops within the range of the towers, etc, and after setup remain standing there getting pelted by missiles until they retreat..?!

I have noticed that AI reinforcements sometimes don't so anything during siege assaults. That is, they don't help or coordinate with the main attakcing AI army or attack in any way whatsoever once the main force has routed...

One has to manually exit the game (or wait for timer to run out) to end the battle.

Regards

With regards to siege pathfinding, I think some of the dodgy pathfinding in cities happens when you have units grouped, especially in their starting group which may be fairly well spread. I've been experimenting quite a bit with this and it seems that when you ungroup the units and then simply select a bunch of them (without shift + grouping them) they then have no problem moving around the streets.

Operating with grouped units is not a good idea for city battles. It sometimes also has problems in forested maps, particularly when siege equipment is involved as they're unable to move in the trees.

Try it and see.

Cheers

Quote:

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Operating with grouped units is not a good idea for city battles. It sometimes also has problems in forested maps, particularly when siege equipment is involved as they're unable to move in the trees.

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I agree. In fact I no longer use groups once the fighting starts. It seems the AI of grouped units overarching desire is retain the group formation. Shift clicking works much better. That said, groups are great for move armies around