Massive AI (as Allied) snafu?

[Cameroon]

Warning, there be spoilers here relating to the Chambois scenario.

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Ok, so I decided I'd play Chambois as the German side even though I figured I could be gamey and just race for the edge. The first time I didn't do so and due, I think, mostly to extreme in-attention I lost. Also none of my armor seemed to be able to hit anything and the allies hit everything they aimed at. Had I paid a bit more attention to where my armor was placed I could probably have managed a much better job. As it was, those Poles ended up with a minor victory.

Eh, ok whatever. So I loaded it up again determined just to participate in an all out slaughter of allied armor by being gamey and exploiting what I knew the AI would likely do. (I also rushed everything but armor off the exit edge).

So 25 turns later, what has happend? Nothing. I haven't seen even a sound contact. 25 turns, nada.... this seems highly unnatural.

So I look at the map and what greets my eyes? Literally ALL the allied forces are in a tiny little knot at that "middle" ridge near the patch of woods (basically forward of the middle starting area). I wish I had taken a screenshot of the mess. It looked like a major freeway at rush hour... with both lanes blocked by a major accident... and people running (well, not moving at all, just gawking) all over the place.

Has anyone ever anything even remotely like this happen to them? I mean, I've seen some ugly vehicle AI involving bridges (much to my gunners' delight) but this was insane.

[offtaskagain]

Was it as the bad as the CC "AFV dance of death"? If you aren't familiar with it, it's when an AFV gets in a town and just runs into an obstacle, reverses into another one, then goes forward and repeat. Kinda like Austin Powers in the little golf cart in Dr. Evil's base. Or they would reverse into combat, or spin in circles exposing their flank armor needlessly in open terrain. Your's sounds pretty bad but that's the first time I've heard of that bad of a SNAFU in CM. The dance of death occured practically every time you played CC.

[SlowMotion]

Because I haven't seen your screen shot, I can't tell whether my experience is exactly the same, but I saw something like that in one of my own scenarios. The AI had planned to move lots of vehicles to a bridge along a river bank. The river bank was normal terrain, next to it was scattered trees, both can be used by infantry and vehicles just fine. In my setup I had decided to close the river bank normal terrain using barbed wire. The scattered trees area was still usable. But the AI just didn't seem to understand it at all. All the vehicles just gathered to make a huge group next to that barbed wire obstacle. It looked really strange, I can send the screen shot if you're interested.

[Cameroon]

Let's put it this way, load up Chambois as the allies. Dismount any mounted infantry. Now, give vehicles and infantry move orders to put them all together. Not as a formation or anything, just all jumbled up with no more than 5 meters between you and anything else, and preferably less than 2 meters.

Now give a bunch of movement orders to all those units to make them mill around that area in a completely incoherent pattern. Remember though, they can't get more than 5 meters apart.

Basically if you can imagine that, you can imagine what I saw. I mean, not only were the AFVs all tangled up but the infantry was too. It was in the same area and facing in all random directions.

The Vickers sitting in the middle was pretty amusing though. There was this 5 meter in radius circle of calm centered on him. I should go into the editor and place the units similar to what I saw so I can give you a screen shot.

panzerwerfer, hopefully you can see that this was worse then the AFV dance of death. This was the AFV and Infantry Orgy of Inactivity. Speaking of reversing into combat... I've watched a number of AFVs do so in CM 1.12. Not only that, my first Chambois as the Germans, right at the end the Allies turned their tanks around (ie front facing where they came from) and started driving AWAY from the VLs. All their tanks, in unison, just turned around and drove away.

SlowMotion, sure, you can e-mail me the screen shot. My address is in my profile, I'll let you know if it's like what I saw.

[ 11-14-2001: Message edited by: Cameroon ]</p>

[CMplayer]

Yep, I've seen the AI do that when I was playtesting homemade scenarios, but I just figured I needed to tweak it, to give them a little more incentive to advance.

Seriously, creating a good AI for playing a game like Combat Mission is probably a great deal harder than writing a good chess program. So this sort of problem doesn't surprise me in the least.

[Soddball]

I have a screenshot of something similar - around 20 axis vehicles around a building, none of them firing. As a result one of my stuarts got half a dozen tank kills

[Massattack]

I have just finished playing this scenario against one of my Pbem partners, playing as Axis, and found what appeared to be a higher degree of misses by armour on both sides, even at engagement distances of 50-350m.