Slitherine

While I enjoy not having to deal with huge amount of AI tanks, I also find AI minefield tactic to be completely atrocious. AI basically tries to wipe out minefields completely by driving it's tanks one after another into mines again and again. Even if their tanks have 2 strength! I didn't see that happening with 1 SP though. In this way if user has set lots of minefields by the time AI has to battle user with tanks, most of AI tanks will be halved in strength.

On the other hand every sane player will cut a few gaps in AI minefield and push every unit through the gaps. I don't understand why AI is programmed in this way...

Aha, its a brilliant trick, the tanks are trying to build cheap easy experience.

Then as the AI replacement prestige seems to be endless, the tanks are rebuilt to full strenght and then come crushing you. Pure genius!

antoniocapo wrote:Aha, its a brilliant trick, the tanks are trying to build cheap easy experience.

Then as the AI replacement prestige seems to be endless, the tanks are rebuilt to full strenght and then come crushing you. Pure genius!

I hope this is sarcastic comment Well yea, but AI almost always replaces with green replacements so basically it doesn't do anything in process. However since I'm playing the mod AI fails even to do replacements but rushes all his tanks into oblivion more or less (attacks with tanks of 2-3 SP). Well at least that makes my job doable, otherwise it would be almost impossible.

As a side note, I don't think AI has been optimized for attacking against large minefields. These fields never appear in any official campaigns or AK (rare patches here and there). So AI never has to breach them. But in LoV mod there is need for AI to do that, and it fails miserably.

Yes was trying to make fun of the AI fail . However i have used that tactic to build xp for my engineers .

I experienced the AI mindless attacks on mines behavior too. Tanks and whole air forces being wasted on out of the way minefields. It did save my weak flank though so i wasnt complaining at the time. I think this needs a patch fix to deprioritize minefields as a valid target if anything else is in range or if theres a clear path to a target (objective or unit).

Well every AI will be limited somehow. It's really not possible at the moment to create any AI really thinking so they are bound by a set of rules which works more or less. You could fine tune the AI for ages and still wouldn't be able to cover every possibility but consuming huge amounts of time. Considering there is only one developer for the game you see the problem. Additionally if you overburden the AI with rules it starts taking ages to process a move.

That's all aside minefields are a special case as the AI was implemented without them in mind. Mines got added later, in the Afrika Korps expansion if my memory serves me, and probably the AI didn't get changed to specially accommodate for them.

The AI considers the minefield as a unit. It considers the attack to be an advantage. Therefore it attacks until there is no advantage.

Therefore it will ignore any other unit of yours that is superior to a mine. It's just a poorly designed map with no testing.

@Tarrak.

I agree that AI has to be limited somehow. I also think the one developer (Kerensky I guess) did a tremendous job. I just think that AI shouldn't consider the mines a regular unit. I don't believe it is so hard to implement that. And when AK where developed that should have been thought off since it is one of the major new things in game mechanics. The problem obviously was that developers overlooked the possibility of AI attacking large human player's minefields, and instead only though that human players would attack Ai minefields (as they do). I think it would have been good enough just to treat mines as different kind of enemy (not a regular one) and try to avoid them completely (unless the unit is an engineer or mine clearing tank).

@Razz1,

I understand the mechanic but what I said to Tarrak also applies here. I don't understand how the scenario should have been designed differently to accommodate for this behavior. Btw. I'm not the scenario designer The only two things that come to my mind is to give AI bunch of engineers (or scorpion tanks) close to the minefields, and the other would be to avoid putting mines altogether. And the first option is almost equivalent to having no mines at all, so it seems that designers are better off putting no mines at all.

Made me think of the Cauldron mission in AC. The allies get a massive mine field protecting the 150th Brigade you need to reach, but then the AI now gets a endless stream of enginners to wipe it out?? Plus as was said, every German unit sees the mines are the most deadly thing in the world and goes all out to kill them.

Little off topic but is like many battles where you dont go first. You are given a handful of aux units to help defend and yet by the end of the AI first turn just about everyone of them is killed. Not sure why the designers put them in there in the first place, just to be canon fodder??