AI targeting of cities/castle and frontline

[Lovec1990]

Guys while i agree with everything there is this:

Ai actions on map are unpredictable becouse your action can throw it off thats why some have snowballing and others do not, but i also noticed in my game that kingdoms took castles that are deep in enemy teritory plus not too mention declearing war with kingdom that is far away

 

[bulbous_fripp]

In the interest of being constructive, I'd like to propose a hopefully not hard to implement change : restrict the list of siege (but not raiding) targets to those that share a border with the sieging team's territory. FOR example (working off this map), when the Aserai and Southern Empire are at war at the game's beginning, the *only* valid targets for Aserai should be Danustica and Lavania castle. For the SE, the only valid targets should be Shibal Zumr, Tamnuh Castle, and Husn Fulq. This should make wars a little less stupid, at the expense of being predictable.

 

[aimlessgun]

I think making the target rules too rigid wouldn't be a great choice and also unrealistic. However I think distance from friendly territory should be a much bigger part of the targeting calculation. AI should be willing to take a more strong defended but nearer settlement.

I do appreciate the AI avoiding the player garrisoned settlements though. I mean, yes it's annoying, but it is intelligent and I want the AI to be intelligent. A good opponent should annoy and frustrate you, not just walk into your traps. However I agree that a mechanic to more easily join an ongoing siege defense is needed. In another thread there was a suggestion you could sneak in with your companions without losing a huge chunk of your army. Possibly Roguery could be used to determine how many additional troops you can sneak in.

 

[DocShotgun]

+1

My game has such horrible border-gore now due to the AI conquering random land that's super far away. I've noticed that with each faction in multiple concurrent wars, they tend to want to go for the settlements that were recently conquered by another faction due to the weaker garrisons, which I think explains why some of this is happening. Some war declarations also make no sense at all, like one time I was playing as aserai and we went to war with sturgia on the other side of the map...like why would you even want to take a fief that far away and try to defend it?

Also I've never fought a defensive siege in campaign before - because the AI won't siege a settlement that I'm sitting in and you can't join in-progress sieges - they'll just go somewhere else. Pretty much all of my settlement defense consists of bringing troops to a settlement under siege and either 1) Forcing the AI to abandon the siege and run away or 2) wiping their field army with my field army.

I've definitely also seen the armies starving out from walking around for too long to decide on a target.

 

[bulbous_fripp]

However I think distance from friendly territory should be a much bigger part of the targeting calculation.

This seems like a simple change, but I'm not sure that's the case. The "distance" we want to consider is the travel distance from a friendly base to the objective. However, there are some castles (Ortocorys w/r/t the Aserai, for example), that are geographically close to enemy bases but require a large travel distance (around a lake). Therefore, I think a simple graph approach might be preferable (not to mention easier in terms of performance).