Trade Theatre Usage Analysis

[jsberry]

The part of the AI that deals with trade nodes is REALLY crappy... Whenever I fight a stack of AI's ships on the nodes I find out that most of the ships there are war ships not earning any revenue.

AI factions lose trade ships while auto-fighting pirates/other AI factions. On several occasions I've fought AI's 5-10 ship stacks near Europe/in the Mediterranean, which were composed entirely of Indiamen. For some reason, AI fails to send these to the trade theaters and rather uses Indiamen stacks as warships whereas real warships end up sitting on trade nodes. I guess, sloppy
AI logic (lack of it) is behind that absurdity.

It's beyond sloppy. Sloppy would be one set of over-generalized rules that does not work well in every case. That's not what we have.

What we have is an AI that specifically decides to make exceptions to the general rules, in the worst possible cases.

For example, trade spots are easy to attack, can be vulnerable, and are valuable things to take. It's the BEST place to attack an enemy, both because his merchant ships there will be weak, and because you cause immediate financial harm, and because you can take it for yourself. However, it is the ONE place the AI will NOT attack the human. (It is understandable why pirates don't attack there - they can't trade but can raid, so they'd rather be a parasite that does not kill the host - but why don't the other factions attack there?)

I had noticed the use of warships in trade spots, but had not noticed the paradox of usinig Indiamen to fight on the high seas. If this is the case, it is another intentional exception to make the game WORSE.

WHY???