No! I don't want to build a galleon!

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Does the AI have a tall ships fetish, or what? I'm happily trying to build an interplanetary starship, and propping up offshore platforms here and there. The AI, however, keeps deciding it wants to recreate "Mutiny on the Bounty".

Is there any way of retiring obsolete units?

[War4ever]

just build another type of ship...the govenors are a joke in this game

[Zzyzx]

Or wait until later and the Governors want to build nothing but bombers... Kind of hard to win a game by bombardment only...

[Kolyana]

God, tell me about it. I just played a game in which I told the governors *not* to build any type of unit ... no air, no sea. I applied it to all cities.

Next turn? 3 fighter jets.

Hmm, I think. Odd.

I double checked governor settings, made sure they were not to build jets.

Next turn? 3 more jets and 3 bombers.

Next ... bombers, jets and Privateers (ARGH!) ...

Then more fighters, fighters, fighters ...

I had fighters up the gazoo ...

I actually came to the conclusion that in high resource cities, spare resources were used to build these smaller units. I could come up with no reason why this cack was being churned out.

[Evil_Eric_4]

The sad thing about it is you know the AI civs dont overrule THEIR governors.

Great here comes 10 more Frigates to bombard my Battlewagons.

[Archmage]

LOL! You guys have it easy. Try playing as the Persians. You'll be using some cities to build Stealth Bombers and others to build Modern Armor and the damned game will ALWAYS try and build Immortals. Don't get me wrong...they were a great unit...FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO!!! CivII eliminated the building of obsolete units and I wouldn't have a problem with that here either... Galleons...LOL!

[Venger]

Same thing for my Roman Empire. Let's not build any mechanized infantry or tanks, let's churn out legion after legion after legion after legion...

Yet ANOTHER example of why this game is more of a chore than a pleasure...

Venger

[Raleigh]

I am not sure but I think I read here that you can edit the rules so as to make galleys and immortals etc. obsolete with new units: ironclads and riflemen. But if you don't have the resources to build ironclads, etc. you will be screwed completley.

[Pyrodrew]

Originally posted by Evil_Eric_4
The sad thing about it is you know the AI civs dont overrule THEIR governors.
Great here comes 10 more Frigates to bombard my Battlewagons.

Agreed! This is by far the worst. Although it slows down the game, I can turn off my governors.

Yet, battlewise the AI becomes a joke when you have infantry & an AI Superpower declares war on you only to send... Jaguar Warriors! Then later I saw pikemen... I had to look at the date to make sure I wasn't confused. This makes it quite obvious that the AI has no capabilities to upgrade units. Why should I be allowed to upgrade units if they cannot? It also makes Leonardo's Workshop pretty useless to the AI. Poor AI.

Hopefully, the patch will address this.

[Easy Rhino]

Originally posted by Pyrodrew
It also makes Leonardo's Workshop pretty useless to the AI. Poor AI.

oooh, I didn't think of that.

It's pretty funny.

ER

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Archmage
LOL! You guys have it easy. Try playing as the Persians. You'll be using some cities to build Stealth Bombers and others to build Modern Armor and the damned game will ALWAYS try and build Immortals. Don't get me wrong...they were a great unit...FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO!!! CivII eliminated the building of obsolete units and I wouldn't have a problem with that here either... Galleons...LOL!

Yep, it kept trying to make freakin' Immortals in every single city, all the way until I discovered the Marines. Only THEN it started wanting to make marines instead in some cities.

But at least the Immortals are a half-decent unit until the late middle ages, depending on how backwards you kept your opponents. If you think the Persians were bad, try the Greeks. It kept trying to make longbowmen all the way to the late 20'th century.

[Ixander]

The game seems to make a unit obsolete after you have ditched all instances of that particular unit and an upgrade exists. IE, the galleon unit will be scrapped after you have disbanded or upgraded all galleons to transports. The governor(s) will catch up, prolly deciding that your fleet is desperately lacking 10000 submarines

I think scrapping does not work for Immortals because there's no upgrade to Immortals.

[larchy]

Tactical Nuke production is followed by..... Warriors!
GFG!"££$!"£$!"@$!:@$£"!$"£@
Think I'm gonna stand outside Infogrammes HQ and burn meh bra.

[Elowan]

All of which points to a glaring game mechanism defect -- only hit points/defense points/mobility points count in Cv3 warfare not unit type. Gadzooks!

Incidently - some of the NA Afghan soldiers attack(ed) on horseback. An AK can make mincemeat of a horse even if the horse has more hit points than a man.

Obsolete units need to be removed from the game.

However - the resource engine makes that likelihood - unlikely - since some modern units cannot be made without certain resources.

I'm sure that there is a solution to that problem just as I'm sure that the game was taken away from the programmers too damned soon! We can blame ourselves for that.

[Moraelin]

Actually, Elowan, THAT would at least make sense. However, the screw-up in the Civ 3 engine is that it makes no sense at all.

E.g., I already have Infantry, but the AI governors desperately want to make Immortals for the Persians or Longbowmen for the Greeks. Ahem. Why? Check the stats on Infantry. It has more offense AND defense than either the Immortals or the Longbowmen, the same HP, and the same movement. If I want to attack someone, the Infantry can not only hit the enemy's cities harder than Longbowmen, it also doesn't need any escort like those 1 def Longbowmen do.

From where I stand, it looks like the only kind of logic it applies is: you need this many defensive units, this many offensive units, this many artillery units, etc. So since my Infantry is horde of "defensive" units, it tries to make some "offensive" ones too... Which brings us to Immortals and Longbowmen.

But again, it doesn't check that the defensive units I already have are far more suited for offense, too, than what it's trying to create.

[Blisterz]

I try and keep a few swordsmen in my capital. So every few turns I can pretend I am having a changing of the guards

[Kc7mxo]

Hah. Hah hah. ho ho. hee hee.

read my sig. har har har. i hate that damn govenor.

[Zanzin]

And this is why I don't use the govenors!!

[War4ever]

i dont' know of any game that has good governors....nothing can give you "intelligent" decisions.....as it is all on a individual basis...

they suck!

[Skanky Burns]

The biggest problem is that the enemy AI is using the same governors to control its production. When they keep sending in hordes of majorly obsolete units to the front, despite the fact that they have the technology, resources, and production capacity to build modern units, you've just got to wonder about that AI.

In all honesty, though, the AI is much better than any other civ-style game.

[dexters]

Actually, Soren has answered this question before.

I was complaining about the dumb Governor not being able to recognize I want to build riflemen, not archers.

Here's an excerpt from his response

The AI defines "offensive" units as

Warriors
Archers
Swordsmen
Longbowmen
Chariots
Horsemen
Knights
Cavalry
Marines
Paratroopers
Tanks
Modern Armor

Thus, if you allow the AI to suggest offensive units, it will always try to find the best unit from the above group to build whenever it determines that you need more offense. And if you don't have the right assortment of resources, this might mean that it suggest build Longbowmen because that is the "best" offensive unit, even if Riflemen are available.

So his point was basically that the AI governors appear to be stupid because of the way they organize things. If you look at the above example, and assuming I don't have a horse as a resource (which is what happened in my game), the AI governors will continue to build Longbowmen as my offensive unit until I get Marines. Even if I have units like Riflemen or Infantry with far better attack power. Why? This is Because Riflemen is classified as a defensive unit, it won't build it.

The AI governors need to be fed input from time to time. I think the people here have a point. We weren't told which is offensive and which is defensive, so we sort of have to guess, and sometimes, what you think is an obvious thing (like changing production from Longbowmen to infantry) wont happen because, well... the AI works from a list of offensive/defensive units we weren't given. We have to find it out ourselves.

[Moraelin]

And my question is, from a programming point of view, why DOES the AI even need a list of offensive and defensive units. I mean, really, there are only 3 stats for a unit, not some really detailed model that would bog down the CPU in complex maths. It can just take the raw list of units it can build, and see which unit has the highest offense or defense value, depending on which role it has in mind.

[dexters]

Originally posted by Moraelin
And my question is, from a programming point of view, why DOES the AI even need a list of offensive and defensive units. I mean, really, there are only 3 stats for a unit, not some really detailed model that would bog down the CPU in complex maths. It can just take the raw list of units it can build, and see which unit has the highest offense or defense value, depending on which role it has in mind.

That is what I had assumed. I was surprised the model used was far less complex, with the use of a predefined list instead of a routine to determine units with the highest attack power / defense power.

[PGM]

Originally posted by dexters
Actually, Soren has answered this question before.
I was complaining about the dumb Governor not being able to recognize I want to build riflemen, not archers.
Here's an excerpt from his response
(...)

I can understand this, but the other day I was building M.Armors and S.Bombers, and the Governors were always suggesting Immortals. I had already used my Golden Age, why build Immortals? And I was at war with the whole world, why build Privateers instead of Battleships???
Govs:

[Auren]

I guess I have had little better luck tunign governors than others.

My only real problem is coast cities which want to build privateers all the time.

Land cities work ok, altough they want to make bombers occasionally. Luckily I like to have few bombers so it doesn't matter if I miss some of them. Altough ti really makes me wonder how governors make any kind of ounits when I have denied them to make any....

[Kolyana]

Dexters: That's an interesting list, but the following posts after it were all valid.

We're talking about a programming environment here ... it shouldn't be hardcoded, it should be part of a decision making algorithm.

Not blowing my own horn or anything, but I'm the head of a small software company and the first thing we tell new recruits is to *NOT* hardcode this sort of stuff. Very sloppy work.

More importantly, if they have to hardcode it - why can't we edit it? All could be forgiven if I could create my own Offensive, Defensive lists.

[rid102]

More importantly, if they have to hardcode it - why can't we edit it? All could be forgiven if I could create my own Offensive, Defensive lists.

Yeah but that'd be simple and easy and would work.

What you don't understand is that Firaxis know much better than anyone here and that their really annoying "learning AI" governers are far superior than allowing the user to actually do what they want!

[Moraelin]

Originally posted by Kolyana More importantly, if they have to hardcode it - why can't we edit it? All could be forgiven if I could create my own Offensive, Defensive lists.

Because if it can be edited it's not really hardcoded?

I mean, really, if someone could be bothered to read that list from a resource instead of hardcoding it... they might as well have done the Right Thing (TM) instead. I.e., could have used the horribly advanced programming technique known as a for loop, and got all the needed info directly from the units' defensive and offensive values.

Or for extra brownie points they could have kept two sorted lists of all units one can build, one by offense and one by defense, with cost as a second key, so they can quickly locate the hardest hitting or defending unit AND which is the cheapest for that offense/defense value. And since you only need to update that list when a new unit becomes available, even bubble sort would do.

Both of which would have had the advantage of automatically addapting to whatever modding is done to the game's units.

[Akka]

Originally posted by Kolyana
Dexters: That's an interesting list, but the following posts after it were all valid.

We're talking about a programming environment here ... it shouldn't be hardcoded, it should be part of a decision making algorithm.

Not blowing my own horn or anything, but I'm the head of a small software company and the first thing we tell new recruits is to *NOT* hardcode this sort of stuff. Very sloppy work.

More importantly, if they have to hardcode it - why can't we edit it? All could be forgiven if I could create my own Offensive, Defensive lists.

Am I the only one here that look at the game editor ? I know it does not allow to do any scenario, but you CAN choose for EACH UNIT if it will be a "defense" or an "offense" unit. Just open the editor, go for the "unit" panel, and look at the little boxes...

Now, it's true that except for expansion, the AI sucks. It looks good only because of the multiple restraints that are put on each civ to give to the weaker more chances to take back their late, and to the more powerful more caps to make sure that they won't go too far.
Cheesy.

[rid102]

Am I the only one here that look at the game editor ? I know it does not allow to do any scenario, but you CAN choose for EACH UNIT if it will be a "defense" or an "offense" unit. Just open the editor, go for the "unit" panel, and look at the little boxes...

I'm still looking for the "Don't be ****" checkbox in the editor - anyone found it yet?