What to do?

[MarkShot]

When you have the perfect position to break the enemy, and they won't attack it? (got a win any way, but it was a waste)

Battle #1 of the Alex What If Campaign.

2019-09-24 20-22-13.jpg (430.66 KiB) Viewed 1044 times

[MVP7]

Historically battles like that were generally not fought. Neither side would offer battle that would give the other a massive advantage. Sometimes mutually agreeable battlefields were even agreed on by the adversaries to avoid endless impasses.

What you have there is not a perfect position to break the enemy. It's a perfect position to defend but no-one would be stupid enough to willingly attack it with a force of roughly equal size and/or capability. Positions like that are mainly good for locking and protecting the flanks of your formation.

[MarkShot]

I didn't necessarily plan for the OPFOR (AI) to immediately make a dash for it.

I had intended to fight the AI elsewhere with less strength, but attempt to out maneuver it.

My plan was to weaken it greatly ... as every moment it became weaker, the position you see becomes stronger.

As the name of the game is to drive the opponent from the field, it was to be our strong point on the field which would not yield and could not be broken. If the clock had not run down and the enemy had not been broken by disorganization and flanking by cavalry and one elephant unit, they would have impaled themselves there. As could be vaguely seen, they were in the process of massing their forces for an attack after my left flank had collapsed. My left flank was a swarm of light troops. It was never intended to be decisive; only to allow time to grab the strong point.

---

Independent of your response ... I was pondering this morning the question of "stupidity" in AI development.

We often lament the stupidity of the AI, and yet in the course human events no trait is on display more frequently than stupidity.

So, the question is how does one make AI stupidity to be "human like".

A classic case of non-human like AI stupidity were the early chess engines. When playing at a low ELO (rating), they would simply hang X points of pieces. Then when the point score matched your desired difficulty, the engine would flip to 2500 ELO full analysis mode and trounce you good.

Today's computer science work in both AI systems (emotive) and Robotics (emotive) has great importance to games where we like to think that the adversary is actually sentient with psychological states.

[SnuggleBunnies]

It would be hard to program the AI to act like a human player here... but as MP7 says, no human would assault that position. They would wait for your army to come down and fight, maybe nibble at the edges a bit with skirmishers. Terrain features like that are mostly useful to dump some cheaper and weaker troops on to secure the flank; say, a couple units of Massed Archers and a unit of Irregular Foot. That's 102 points to secure a lot of ground, and threaten any cavalry movement with Disruption. That way you can pour more points/troops into a part of the battlefield you actually want to fight on, without the fear of a rear attack.

So it's not really a perfect position to break the enemy. It's a perfect position to force a draw. To be fair, that can be useful - in a matchup where your army would be incapable of fighting in the open, or a tournament situation where all you have to do is not lose to secure the overall top spot, this sort of deployment could make sense.

[MarkShot]

Ha ha ha ... "not losing" always sounds like the basis for a decent plan.