AI Perks

[Tazak]

I’m a single player type of guy and I do like how aggressive and intelligent the AI is, however there are times where I see/feel like the AI is ‘exploiting’ a little too much to the point where it dumbs down the AI.
We’ve likely all seen situations where a lone tank carries on happily down a road several kilometres beyond where the rest of his buddies were KO’d, this strikes me as somewhat unrealistic. Looking deeper into this type of effect it appears that the AI is allowed to ignore moral/readiness.

Effects of ignoring moral/readiness:
Suppressive fire description is to reduce the enemy’s readiness thus reducing their combat effectiveness and should after a lot of it cause them to stop to regain readiness. In the current form suppressive fire is pointless against the AI.
Soviet style attacks in echelon were designed to overwhelm NATO forces in that once the forward echelon were ‘combat ineffective’ the 2nd echelon were drive past to carry on the attack and keep up the pressure on NATO troops. At present the only way of make the 1st echelon combat ineffective is to destroy them, during which time the AI relentlessly carries on driving down roads with lone tanks.
This effect is more pronounced playing as the soviets and watching a NATO AI restlessly driving down a road although it’s seen less often as NATO counters are platoons rather than companies and are ‘easier’ to destroy completely. You can test this by creating a M1/Leopard2/Challenger tank company unit, giving it to the AI and pound it with arty and direct fire.
It forces players to adopt a forward defence approach with little to no option for using delaying tactics, i.e. most NATO forces trained for situations where a small force forward of the MLR would halt the enemy advance for a short period of time giving the defender time to finalise preparations or redeploy according to the enemies axis of advance.
If the AI is defending players cannot push the AI out of positions and has to completely destroy the defending units.
When planning a scenario I have to take into account a reckless rate of advance and space out the arrival of AI forces rather than keeping to expected timings as per various doctrines as scenarios are often over sooner rather than later i.e. sudden death at 30%, yes battles would be short and bloody but we’re looking at a few hours rather than days.
The AI after securing an objective will press home its advantage with every unit regardless of its moral/readiness status, where standard practice would have been to resupply/rest heavily depleted units while the next echelon takes over the attack

Possible option:
Making the AI notice the effects of readiness/moral by pulling units back 2-4 hexes from the nearest enemy unit and resupply at an increased recovery rate (x2 or x3 over standard) when both moral and readiness drop into ‘red’ (i.e. less than 30%) before that unit can continue its advance, allow the AI to ignore 1 in red but not both.

What effects would this have?
Firstly it would greatly reduce the lone tank situations, secondly it would increase pressure on defenders when the 2nd echelon is joined by the remains of the 1st echelon after they have recovered some moral/readiness simulating additional forces being throw at the player.
In defensive situations it would allow the player to ‘push’ AI units out of their position with overwhelming fire before taking the objective and deciding if they should press home their advantage or to resupply themselves.
It would make suppressive fire useful against AI forces. It would also give players the option of focusing arty fire on the 2nd echelon troops (if they were spotted) delaying them from entering the battle.
It would make for a more realistic NATO AI
Scenario creation would be a lot more flexible and allow for very small NATO forces to hold up/delay much larger soviet formations for short durations (i.e. 4-6 hour scenarios) while also allowing for larger battles (8-12 hours)

I believe it would add to the realism of the AI rather than the Stalingrad approach of “advance into the hail of German bullets or retreat into a hail of soviet bullets”, I truly believe in the 1980’s that the soviets were past that point of suicidal desperation.

[Tazak]

For an example look at the 3/1/284th MRR unit selected here, this was taken a few minutes (no more than 4-5 minutes) into the soviet command cycle, it has lost all but 1 of its BMPs along with a couple of rifle sections leaving its moral at 23% and readiness at 28%.

Yet it is still following assault orders (you can see the waypoints using a scroll in/out bug), over the next 6 minutes it losses its last BMP and 1 more rifle section dropping its moral to 19% and readiness at 25% (both red at this stage) yet it continues to relentlessly assault forward despite the remaining battalion units most of whom are in decent shape being right behind it. If it were to pull back into the town and resupply at +36/hr (x3 rather than the low +12/hr shown) it would be at 57% moral and 64% readiness in an hour.

realistically I think the soviet commander at this stage would have pulled 3/1/284th back allowing the next unit to move forward as point unit and cycle his forces to maintain forward movement but not at the cost of complete destruction of his battalion.

[CapnDarwin]

Tazak, great write up. I will have to grab this and add it to our design notes. 2.1 will give us a chance to adjust a number of AI behaviors and work to correct what you see here.