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Ben Williams
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Ithaca, NY
Apr 2002
time: 00:19
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Let me set the stage, medium map, four civs (including myself) left. Post industrial age, infantry defense units, artillery and bombers. My empire is rather small, about twenty cities, and the continant I'm on I share with the Russians and English, I am, however, the most advanced civ in the game (playing monarch by the way).
It's pretty peaceful, or at least for me it is. The English declare war on the Russians, or the other way around, and they begin to fight. After about five turns the Russians come to me and demand some resource, I refuse, they declare war. Now there are three cities on the border between the Russians and myself, so I start building tanks (just got'em) in my higher producing cities and a few extra infantry to toughen the local defenses. Then, over the mountain about twenty-five units appear, most of which are Russian infantry. Another turn passes, my first round of tanks roll out and I bring them to central border city-which by this time has most of the Russian units around it-and do a pre-emptive strike on the "attack" force (I've never thought of infantry as attack units before, the only offensive men they had were a few cossacks and *gasp* some longbowmen).
My tanks destroy about five of the infantry units, and I now have half a dozen infantry fortified in my city (Phionex). Next turn: the attack begins. The Russians, in a feat of millitary planning the rivals The Great Escape, decide to dedicate their significant air power to wipeing out my supply of horses and saltpeter. The their credit, the Russians do manage to reduce them from rails to roads, coming very close to being a third of the way from depriving me of my precious horses, without which my tanks, would surely break down. The Russians then proceed to attack en mass with infantry. I don't have the exact numbers, but the final death rate between our two forces was something like the real-life Russian war with Germany, about 20-1. Now I would have been happy to have peace, but the Russians wouldn't talk to me, so I took my fat ass army of tanks and rolled into their nearest city, capturing it. Upon entering I found about ten artillery just sitting there, they didn't even bombard me as I approched the city.
Anyway, I took one more Russian town and they signed a treaty. I would have done more damage but I was dying from laughter after they tried attacking me with a warrior. The point of the story is this, between the wasted production of making artillery they don't use, and the wasted damage from planes bombing the desert (costing me literally nothing in terms of repair and lost production and food), and the fact that ninety percent of the Russian attack went into defensive units, it was almost as though the computer wanted to lose. If it had used its planes and artillery wisely and made offensive units, they would have been a real threat. Instead they went for the irritation angle, doing only the most superficial damage. AI is odviously is not as advanced as the techno-geeks would have us believe. Dispite the computers ability to out-produce me, it took only the slightest application of human thinking to defeat the machine.
I should add, also, that only an idiot fights a war on two fronts, and because I had a protection pact with the Zulus, the Russians were fighting a war on three.
Ben
"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
-Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, upon witnessing the first Trinity atomic bomb explosion, quoteing from the Hindu text Bhagavad-Gita.
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23-05-2002 00:45
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