AIs ganging up on you

[Kristoffer O]

I don't think tha AI gangs up intentionally. It attacks when it has few expansion possibilities. If you are strong you probably have more neighbors that might attack you. You will rarely be aware of AI vs AI battles. The AI prefers easy targets I believe, but that is probably on a short term basis. If a province seems weak it might attack. If another neighbor has weaker defences it will be targeted instead.

[Agrajag]

The AIs do not gang up on you.
Just try a SP game with many AIs and not too much space and you will soon see several AI nations disappearing even if you didnt attack them...

[Peter Ebbesen]

Kristoffer O said:
I don't think tha AI gangs up intentionally. It attacks when it has few expansion possibilities. If you are strong you probably have more neighbors that might attack you. You will rarely be aware of AI vs AI battles. The AI prefers easy targets I believe, but that is probably on a short term basis. If a province seems weak it might attack. If another neighbor has weaker defences it will be targeted instead.

It also declares war seemingly at random against players it ought not to have any knowledge of (sometimes several rounds before even the quickest scout could have reached a player's land) and targets spells like call of the winds with unheard of precision against territory that should be terra incognita.

Yeah, yeah, so it has complete knowledge of the province ownership in the world. A nice cheat and no big deal in general (a cheating AI is good so long as nobody really notices/its actions are such that they could conceivably have been made on the basis of the knowledge a human player would have had in the same position), but it is EXTREMELY silly for an AI that is located 8 provinces away - as determined later - to declare war on somebody it should not know of in round 4 and keep hammering his provinces with call of the winds on a monthly basis. A complete waste of gems on its part but it does force one to invest in more PD than is nice at such an early point in the game.

[The Panther]

The AI will attack you quite reliably if you have a lot of provinces and a small army. In fact, nearly all AIs will pile on once your army size begins to shrink. Once the ball starts rolling like that against you, it is very hard to recover. If you are on the top of the province graph and near the bottom of the army size graph, you will find yourself in a LOT of wars.

One way to avoid this is to put in 11 PD everywhere. The AI always knows your PD level in every province and will add that to your army size. Since there is no possibility of recruiting armies as fast as the AI does on the impossible level (and to a lesser extent, the hard level), use of PD can give you time to build up SCs, summons, artifacts, build forts, and do all the stuff that happens every game in MP but never in SP by the AI.

Once you get 11 PD everywhere, they will lose a few hawks or wolves to your PD and then quit attacking you. After some indeterminate number of turns with no attacks, they will be at peace with you but never annouce the fact.

[NTJedi]

The Panther is correct...

Even after an AI declares war it's possible for that AI to slip back into a peace status with you. Unfortunately there is no way to tell how peaceful or aggressive an AI opponent setting is towards you.

on a side note:
The biggest problem the AI has right now is starving units. The AI isn't aware of supplies within provinces... so it'll stack 200 light infantry in a province with 40 supplies. This results in starving and dieseased units which cause low morale and early death for new or veteran units. Hopefully Dominions_3 will have a disable starving option for AI.

[Arralen]

NTJedi said:
The biggest problem the AI has right now is starving units. The AI isn't aware of supplies within provinces... so it'll stack 200 light infantry in a province with 40 supplies. This results in starving and dieseased units which cause low morale and early death for new or veteran units. Hopefully Dominions_3 will have a disable starving option for AI.

Your're right, and not.
There's an easy fix for the problem:

#modname "Fix Starving AI Army Issue"
#description "Supplies x5"
#Version 0.1
#domVersion 2.06
-- icon
#supplymult 500

Works even on the problematic Aran,Cradle and Parganos Maps.

[Jarkko]

Peter Ebbesen said:A complete waste of gems on its part but it does force one to invest in more PD than is nice at such an early point in the game.

Staring at the stats I shake in horror... Just how well would you be doing in our game without the AI concentrating on you? But who am I to complain, I get much less attention from the AI so I can possibly recover a bit

[Peter Ebbesen]

Jarkko said:

Staring at the stats I shake in horror... Just how well would you be doing in our game without the AI concentrating on you? But who am I to complain, I get much less attention from the AI so I can possibly recover a bit

Now, now, I chose to play Niefelheim with a Son of Niefel W9 bless pretender rather than default Jotunheim with a skratti rainbow mage, so you should have no real problems getting the upper hand on me in the magical department, not even playing as Pangaea.

[Jarkko]

Peter Ebbesen said:you should have no real problems getting the upper hand on me in the magical department, not even playing as Pangaea.

You, sir, obviosly *even still* have no clue of what I am incapable of

[Schmoe]

Just for the record, in a SP game I was playing Last night, I was attacked by all three of my AI neighbors on turn 15. I had not attacked or been attacked by any of them prior, so obviously the AI demonstrates superior capability for collusion and coordination against humans! I feel oppressed. It's taken me 10 turns to retake the land that I lost under the combined assault.