Quirky AI behavior

As someone who plays mainly against the AI, I’ve seen my fair share of quirky AI behavior. I’ve recently uploaded a few videos showcasing some of the ways the AI can act weirdly.

First, here are some Villagers and military units getting stuck trying to pass through chopped trees.

When you’re attacked by a wild animal, you usually have your units fight back. Yellow AI in this video, however, decides to garrison everyone instead.

(Not sure if it was a factor, but Yellow in the above video already had 3 of their previous TCs destroyed. Usually, the AI has no problem fighting back against wild animals)

And finally, resource cheats. For most of us, suddenly receiving 10,000 Wood via the Lumberjack cheat would be a godsend. If you’re an AI, though, it means building 69 Lumber Camps at the expense of training Villagers.

(If the AI were to receive 10,000 Wood later in the game, say at 20 minutes, then the AI will behave more normally i.e. selling excess Wood and building useful buildings)

What other quirky AI behavior have you guys found? Also, can anyone give more insight into why the AI behaved the way they did in the videos?

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Wow that snow leopard can raid better than me :rofl:

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Curious. i just played an arena game and a guy call “Catapols” displayed the EXACT same behaviour as the AI lumber camps you describe.

The quirkiest AI behavior I have encountered is the following:

On a custom scenario, I made the (Extreme) AI start on a small island, with shallows connected to the mainland. The AI would make a couple of Fishing Ships and then farm around its Town Center. As soon as it ran out of space for Farms around its Town Center, it started to construct Farms on the mainland. As soon as they were built, though, the AI promptly deleted them and started rebuilding them again. Over and over. It wasted thousands of wood in this process. Eventually it stopped, probably because more trees were cutted on the small island, giving more room for Farms there.

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Redditor found this AI masterpiece:

Meat shield? What meat shield?

In the video above, I pitted a Halberdier & Heavy Scorpion army (Blue/Green) against an Arbalest & Paladin army (Red). From Red’s point of view, having the Paladins focus on attacking the Scorpions is fine, given that Paladins counter siege weapons. From Green’s (i.e. the AI player) point of view, though, Arbalesters have an attack bonus against Halberdiers. In turn, having Green’s Halberdiers ignore the Paladins on their way to the Arbalesters is absolutely disastrous on Green’s parts, as there is now no meat shield to protect the siege weapons. Some Halbediers may eventually start engaging the Paladins, but by then, it’s usually too late to save the Scorpions.

I used an immobile AI script for the AI in the video, but I’ve also seen this happen when I use the default Promi AI. I thought adding (set-strategic-number sn-local-targeting-mode 1) to the script would make the Halberdiers prioritize the Paladins, but that didn’t work.

When the Halberdiers are controlled by humans, the Halberdiers will properly focus on attacking the closest units first, thus creating that meat shield for the Scorpions. Therefore, if you’re testing army compositions against each other and each side has a mix of ranged and melee units, make sure that one of the side is controlled by a human player.