Ai defending town center 1.2 change- new human stategy?

**Razor1952** · 02-21-2005, 00:37

In 1.2 the ai will now not sit and occupy the town center and attack archers etc which are attacking it.

Well this now leaves the ai exposed to a different human strat.

eg. I'm seiging Rome SPQR(the last bastion to victory) , they have Praetorian full upgraded exp9 units and I only have foresters/chosen swordsmen, and little hope really of direct 1:1 victory.
I assault from all sides take and loose gates etc, the Praetorians sweep all before them. They chase my routing units outside the city , I am finally left with one Cohort in the city center to defeat and no hope really . I send my foresters remaining into direct combat, the Cohort chases them to the city walls and beyond. Meanwhile my remaining General sneaks into the city square and the countdown begins. All the cohorts are off chasing my remnants, whilst my General wins a close victory and Rome falls!. Lost 1500 troops to 100 but still won!.

A bit cheesy perhaps or valid tactics?

On the 1.2 change in ai tactics I guess on balance its still a good thing over 1.1 though perhaps the main defending unit should return immediately if the countdown starts

**hung41584** · 02-21-2005, 01:15

The ai doesn't do a good job of defending the center, thats all i can say. Also when you fight with 1:1 odds with armies of about 5 units, it makes a big difference if the ai didn't have that one unit guarding the center. Still, thats what happens.

**LegolasII** · 02-21-2005, 05:16

it was kinda sad b4 the patch tho how they sat there while getting pierced with arrows.

**Oaty** · 02-21-2005, 07:30

Watch what wardogs do since they are consided missile units.

Just be prepared for the unexpected because they will go hunt down the handlers.

**HarunTaiwan** · 02-21-2005, 08:41

Not so cheesy. Becuase this could really happen in life where one army moves too far away and a smaller force takes the city while they are busy.

**Sinner** · 02-21-2005, 12:50

Personally I feel that in fixing the old behavior of standing around watching each other getting killed by arrows CA have gone too far the other way, making the AI blindly over-aggresive.

I've also been using missile troops to lure defenders away from the central plaza, although instead of using that to sneak in and capture the city by default, I've been leading the defenders into ambushes. The enemy troops get totally target fixated and happily ignore the troops charging in on their flanks, just as they used to ignore the hail of arrows.

**Ellesthyan** · 02-21-2005, 14:08

Hmm, strange. I had the AI make an attack from the town square, route my troops, and return. Attack again, and return. Seems like a good tactic.

**Kraxis** · 02-21-2005, 21:50

It is much better now... That is for sure. All 'square' people rejoice.

Butthe AI reacts much like I predicted it would (I even argued that this was most likely why the AI was scriped to not do a thing in vanilla).

But unlike before it can cause problems.

As Seleucids I attacked Susa where only a single familymember of Parthia was present (no other units). I split up my troops main army with all the missiles under the general in one gate and another part of a single Eastern Merc along with another general (junior). The small army gotthere first and the Parthians attacked. They ripped my poor mercs a new one along with my general. Tried to get away but at some point I had to face them.
They even managed to get back to the square in time (50 secs left). Naturally I wiped them out then, but I would never have had such problems before. Lost 150 to 39. Only two parthians fell to the smaller group.

**Simetrical** · 02-21-2005, 21:56

The problem with the AI in Razor1952 was that it should have gone into testudo. Does the AI ever use testudo?

-Simetrical

**Kraxis** · 02-21-2005, 23:46

Originally Posted by Simetrical

The problem with the AI in Razor1952 was that it should have gone into testudo. Does the AI ever use testudo?

-Simetrical

It made the right call... In Testudo it would have been whittled down to nothing as well. The Testudo is good, but it is far from perfect and two units of Foresters could 'easily' have killed them off.

**Quietus** · 02-22-2005, 02:38

The all the AI actually moves out of the city when they are more numerous than you (particulary in wooden walls).

Just break some openings and harrass them with missile. They will become impatient and attack.

It is sort of a catch-22. As a player you want to minimize your casualty and but at the same time, the AI switches into an atttack mode so your tactic actually becomes "cheap".

**BeeSting** · 02-22-2005, 20:11

The problem I find is not the AI defending a town, I think it has improved much now, but assaulting it. And here's why:

1. Its own spies opening up the gates will lead to its own demise in that they will all rush the nearest gate and become vulnerable to forces that will sally forth and attack them from both ends. I had many great slaughters at the gate because the testers failed to see this and program the AI to use multiple entrances to enter a city.

2. The AI neglects the missiles from towers and does not seem to avoid it as it would from missile units. They consistently omit taking over the towers along the path of their entry to the town center, needlessly being shot to pieces and loss of great morale before seeing any action.

You could easily take advantage of this by having a minimal force to not defend the walls at all where heavy casualties are sure to be suffered. Instead, I've come to realize that it would be better for you to abandon the walls altogether and defend the town center only, where your units will fight to the last of their men. You need only to stretch a unit far enough where a portion of it crosses the town center borders, thus being able to defend the narrow street entrances to it. This maybe useful at first stages of the game, but will get old really soon. I once had a hoplite unit hold off a full-stack army in a wall less town, where the AI has a habit of not making the use of multiple entries to the center. The hoplites were eventually killed off, but the invading force lost half of its men trying to kill a unit of hoplites.

At this point, the walls seemed to have lost their historical importance due to incompetence of the AI general. Whoever did the testing was no less fool.

**Kraxis** · 02-22-2005, 21:52

BeeSting you can put the blame on the testers. We do not know if they found this problem and mentioned that it was perhaps good to check up on it. The same holds true for many of the other older bugs. It ultimately comes down to the Q&A team, who is often composed of management people. Guess how much they want to let go of money to fix such things.

**Zorn** · 02-23-2005, 01:02

I think you contradict yourself a little here. I totally agree that assaulting AI is very poor - mainly becaus the mentioned ignorance towards tower-misslefire.
But that means that holding the walls is priceless. Let one or two units crawl up your wall and engage them in a long melee. All that time the whole rest of the assaulting army just stands there being shot to pieces by towers and your missle units.
I`ve had armies of thousands killed only with defensive misslefire. You can even choose if you want to inflict a lot of casualities, and let the AI get on the walls, or if you want to suffer very little own losses by inhibiting such efforts.
If you have stone walls, use them. It`s much better than defending streets/center, even if you have phalanx.