Elemental Forums
I'm walking through AI cities on Ridiculous because none of them are defended and they're all making pioneers! Umber is the only one I've seen make a defender. Resoln dead. Tarth dead. Yithril dead. And Tarth and Yithril are supposed to be military factions.
Odd. I play hard and the exact opposite occurs. Factions usually don't even expand beyond a single city until 100 turns in.
I've got this happening now in my current game as well. Pioneers and small unprotected cities everywhere.
The AI isn't building "armies" of pioneers, so technically the patch addressed that. However, the AI is still sending out streams of pioneers that promptly walk to the edge of your realm and then stand there.
Add to that, I've noticed a couple AI heroes and armies that literally have not moved for 40 years.
I'm seeing about the same (hard difficulty). Magnar had a single city (lvl 4) surrounded by mountains with only a narrow entry (dunno if he created that or not -- if he did, very cool use of Raise Mountain spell!). He sent out a stack of ~half a dozen fairly tough spearmen from his mountain fortress area just before I declared. I assumed his stack would turn around to attack my attacking stack, but it never did even though it could have engaged me before I reached his capital. He had a half-dozen pioneers (not stacked, but most in one square) just sitting there immediately outside his city, and only 2 troops plus his Sov in the city (and Sov was at half health).
Enemy AI needs still needs to:
-produce fewer pioneers (need to cap the number in existence at the same time (this would allow building more as they're used up in creating cities, but not waste resources building more than can be reasonably used). Two or three max, one mimimum, would be a reasonable number.
-Whatever script that wandering off stack of spearmen was following ('explore' or 'monster bas'h or 'garrison new city site', etc.) should have been stopped and a new script chosen (with emphasis on ones like 'defend capital', 'attack nearby enemy stack', etc.) when I declared on him. AI needs to revise its scripts to better address changing situations.
-don't send off a relatively big stack of troops, leaving a much smaller number to garrison a city --especially a capital. Build a 'necessary' strength stack (both in numbers and equipment appropriate for that stage of the game) and keep it for garrison duty, then any 'extra' troops would be sent out for other purposes. An AI civ that's prone to risk-taking and aggressive strategies would tend to send off more troops, keeping a smaller garrison, while AI civs that are conservative would keep larger garrisons. Still, no AI civ should leave its only city so poorly garrisoned that its survival is endangered, without at least a very good reason to do so.
General impressions from someone who started when pre-release beta began and stopped around 1.06, and just started again with 1.09r -- game is very much improved, and is fast becoming the game I originally envisioned when I first started following things a few years ago.
All the hard work the SD crew has done since release shows.
Nicely done, one and all!
Take sufficient time off for the Holidays, you've earned it.
I'm pretty sure the AI is still in a death spiral somewhere. I regularly entice the AIs to fight each other so I'm sure they're still MOVING at least. It seems like one thing affecting their behavior is resource availability. I.e, if they have enough resources, they're pretty much content to do NOTHING. If they need a resource, or they're forced to act against another AI by war or something, then they'll act. But rather than saying "I have enough, where can I make trouble?" most AIs seem content to do nothing and just spam the player with requests to fuck with their closet rival.
I always stand my army outside the AI city i am about to attack fora few turns and the AI troops flock to the city after i have been there for a turn. It seems that the AI can not predict it will need to defend itself unless the army is right on top of the target. It dosen't matter since i don't think i have ever lost a battle to the AI, ever, but at least they have a few city gaurds instead of a block of pioneers.
I am getting a moderate problem with this. One empire did this and was so far away from me, took me 3000+ turns to see it, that this bad strategy paid off and I am in the fight of my life.
I'll say that you could just post some of your AI plans during christmas break and I'd forget all about it. 
I'm having a pioneer problem too with at least one of the AI's. Their cities were undefended, and they had huge stacks of pioneers. 
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