New player, like the game, dislike the AI

[socalkdg]

I've played SC and SC2 and decided to buy this after playing the demo. Like hexes and the extra spacing of this game thus I'm enjoying myself a lot. Play on the laptop and don't have the time to PBEM, thus need a decent AI.

After playing around with the game for a while, I modified starting tech giving Germans tech 2 across the board and Italians tech 1. Also gave the Axis a slight economic advantage. I'm playing as the Allies.

Axis did the following:

Poland - 4 turns which was good.
Holland and Belgium at the same time - Not the smartest, but with the increase in tech conquered quickly.
France - finished off end of June, so far so good for the AI
Denmark - Should take early, plus the AI moved 10 units here, but still took it.
Then moved to Russia line with about 6 units at Yugoslavia

So I'm pretty happy with the game right now. Extra tech is keeping England from building up its air force as the Axis keeps attacking England with 3 air. There are about 25 units on Russia border. Axis is in the game.

Currently we are early 1941 so things are looking pretty good.

Then the AI attacks Yugoslavia. That is ok, but then it does something crazy.

It moved all the units from the Russian line towards Yugoslavia
I didn’t reinforce the capitol because of this move as I didn't want them having the all the axis units there. After taking Yugoslavia, it declared war on Russia, but no longer having the huge force on the border.

Only two units are lost and the Russians can retreat the rest of their army.

So two questions. Can the developers of this game modify the AI so it doesn't do something really stupid like this. It should seem simple to limit the number of attackers based on the number of defenders. Or give it an attack order that would have sent them through Yugoslavia first, then built up the russian border.

Secondly, can I make a modification that keeps this from occuring?

I like the game, and with improved AI will most likely play this over SC2. I enjoy playing the Allies more and yes I notice that the AI does a better job defending with the Allies. But for something like this it would seem really basic to improve the AI with its attack order and number of units being used to attack.

Thoughts and help are welcome.

[BuddyGrant]

AI in PC war games is always going to be better on the defense, so for the best solo game you would need to play as the axis side in CEAW (or most any other WW2 Europe simulation). Also, the CEAW AI is particularly poor as the Axis, and to make an interesting solo game you almost need to re-write the 1939 scenario!

If you are set on playing as the Allies you could try the following ideas to make it a bit more interesting:
- Obviously you want to give the AI the highest advantage. If you do this then there is no need to adjust the AI's tech levels because that is part of the AI max advantage.
- Penalise your Allied PP intake by dramatically reducing the number and size of Allied convoys.
- House rule about Allied French coastal invasions: Don't allow them - ever. The AI will not defend against these invasions, nor will the AI move eastern units to protect Berlin from the west. To get around this issue you could maybe only allow European invasions from the Mediterranean.
- Set some of the minor nations as axis allies so that GE does not make poorly timed attacks on these countries. The Axis will also get an economic advantage from this. You would think this would also give the AI a unit advantage but the AI tends to keep all minor nation units within that nations borders - for defense I guess. Examples of nations you might want to assign to the axis: Yugoslavia, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and maybe Turkey and Spain.

That should give a good challenge to the Allied Russian player. For the USA/UK side it would be pretty boring though:).

[metolius]

Well, you've hit on a theme that lot's of people have brought up, and the short answers is: you've graduated beyond the AI.

You are absolutely right. The AI does some crazy stuff. Sometimes, it does some things that are actually pretty cool. Most of the time, it bumbles around.

You can give it some (or a lot) of advantage, but that can throw the game off in other ways.

So, the only solution (other than pestering the developers to improve the AI, and I think that's a long shot) is to switch to playing against a human. There are a lot of play-by-mail players here, so I'm sure you'll find some opposition very soon.

Best of luck!

[Clark]

I've played SC and SC2 and decided to buy this after playing the demo. Like hexes and the extra spacing of this game thus I'm enjoying myself a lot. Play on the laptop and don't have the time to PBEM, thus need a decent AI.

After playing around with the game for a while, I modified starting tech giving Germans tech 2 across the board and Italians tech 1. Also gave the Axis a slight economic advantage. I'm playing as the Allies.

Axis did the following:

Poland - 4 turns which was good.
Holland and Belgium at the same time - Not the smartest, but with the increase in tech conquered quickly.
France - finished off end of June, so far so good for the AI
Denmark - Should take early, plus the AI moved 10 units here, but still took it.
Then moved to Russia line with about 6 units at Yugoslavia

So I'm pretty happy with the game right now. Extra tech is keeping England from building up its air force as the Axis keeps attacking England with 3 air. There are about 25 units on Russia border. Axis is in the game.

Currently we are early 1941 so things are looking pretty good.

Then the AI attacks Yugoslavia. That is ok, but then it does something crazy.

It moved all the units from the Russian line towards Yugoslavia
I didn’t reinforce the capitol because of this move as I didn't want them having the all the axis units there. After taking Yugoslavia, it declared war on Russia, but no longer having the huge force on the border.

Only two units are lost and the Russians can retreat the rest of their army.

So two questions. Can the developers of this game modify the AI so it doesn't do something really stupid like this. It should seem simple to limit the number of attackers based on the number of defenders. Or give it an attack order that would have sent them through Yugoslavia first, then built up the russian border.

Secondly, can I make a modification that keeps this from occuring?

I like the game, and with improved AI will most likely play this over SC2. I enjoy playing the Allies more and yes I notice that the AI does a better job defending with the Allies. But for something like this it would seem really basic to improve the AI with its attack order and number of units being used to attack.

Thoughts and help are welcome.

I don't think PBEM takes a long time per turn, but it certainly takes a lot longer to finish a game. I usually play anywhere from 3 to 6 turns a day between my various games, depending on how busy I am and how good my opponents are about sending their response.

The enthusiasts who worked on GS have stated that improving the AI is not something they are interested in. As Buddy stated, if you want more of a challenge against the AI, you can impose certain house rules on yourself. In vanilla, before I started playing PBEM, I played around with all sorts of scenarios, like trying to defeat Russia before dealing with the West, or skipping France and instead attacking the UK first, or even skipping those two and heading for North America.

[socalkdg]

Thanks for the response from everyone. Still going to look at playing the AI as some days I can't play at all while other days I can play for 3-4 hours.

- House rule about Allied French coastal invasions: Don't allow them - ever. The AI will not defend against these invasions, nor will the AI move eastern units to protect Berlin from the west. To get around this issue you could maybe only allow European invasions from the Mediterranean.

I was going to play around with the AI commands CAPITAL_DEFENCE as well as RECONQUEST_MAJOR and see if the AI would do better with a France invasion.

- Set some of the minor nations as axis allies so that GE does not make poorly timed attacks on these countries. The Axis will also get an economic advantage from this. You would think this would also give the AI a unit advantage but the AI tends to keep all minor nation units within that nations borders - for defense I guess. Examples of nations you might want to assign to the axis: Yugoslavia, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and maybe Turkey and Spain.

I like this idea. Do you use the editor and just click the button Pro Axis for each country that you want to be Axis? Can you control what year this occurs so you could stagger when they become pro axis?

[firepowerjohan]

Just to check, this is with the original 1.12 version not with the GS expansion ?

[socalkdg]

Just to check, this is with the original 1.12 version not with the GS expansion ?

Correct. I had heard that there was no change to the AI in the expansion.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Just to check, this is with the original 1.12 version not with the GS expansion ?

Correct. I had heard that there was no change to the AI in the expansion.

That is true. GS is made for PBEM and not vs the AI. We didn't change how the AI behaves. All we did was to solve some hang issues reported in AI games due to functionality introduced in GS. The behavior is still the same.

I think it's almost impossible to make an AI that can fight a good human player in complex games like CEAW. The game is easy for a human, but complex for a computer. Humans learn how to attack efficiently, but that's hard for the AI. I see that the AI turn after turn shuffle their Axis units against the French units in 1940 and attack a little here and there. If you only attack from 2 sides you rarely make a kill. So the AI just fights a stone wall. France usually falls because Italy can attack from the south (June 1940). So the AI struggles to find an efficient way to take out France. The same about an attack upon Russia.

But I can't see how you can make a good code that will analyze the situation and determine which hexes to attack. You have to look ahead and plan what will happen many months into the future. It's not easy for the AI to make independent plans. You can make some scripts, but when you play awhile then the AI behavior will become predictable.

So it's probably best to use the AI to learn the game mechanisms. Once you feel you understand how the game works then you can try to play against human opponents.

[BuddyGrant]

I want to mention here in defense of the CEAW AI that in spite of the AI issues there is more depth there than I originally assumed. There are many rules that the AI seems to follow that can trigger unusual AI moves, including some very interesting AI moves in North Africa as both the axis and allied sides. Unfortunately I only see these AI moves when I heavily edit the 1939 scenario.

Example: If the USA or UK AI feels that it has enough units for defense of it's capital (or some logic like that) then it will sometimes send large groups of units to North Africa by boat, giving the solo human player a nasty shock down there. I'm not saying that is always a smart move, but it's a move I never see the AI do unless the AI side is given many additional units to start the scenario. That seems to indicate that part of the AI's logic is based on units that it feels it can spare.

Again, playing as the Axis side can get you a seriously tough game against the AI. Playing as the Allies is pretty hopeless though:).