1) The AI knows about victory hexes, and so if it has spare arty it will often dump this on or around enemy or neutral victory hexes. Because v-hexes are likely spaces for the enemy to have troops..
Just like a human player, the AI knows about v-hexes flipping to the other sides control, and it treats that as a high priority artillery tasking.
The end users that go on about being plastered by enemy arty fire often have
camped out on or around victory hexes they have now captured. The cure for that is to try to set up any defence some way away from the objective area (10 hexes or so on the enemy side say). And try
not to hang around objectives you have just taken
!
2) The AI artillery is subject to delay, just like yours. "Magical" AI artillery arriving "out of the blue" on your troops is often caused by showing him something that he plots on, and then moving into that area a few turns later, jut in time to receive the incoming mail.
e.g.
- scouts pass on top of a hill. AI sees scout vehicles and plots on them. Human user then moves troops to occupy it a little later. Bang!. Human player attributes that to "AI advantage" as its "instant".
It wasn't.
- Human troops fire from some cover. AI notes it is being fired on from the area and plots. Human moves the firing troops away, but a couple of turns later debuses a mech company in the same cover, just in time for presents to be received.
- Human player plays the "hill dance" where he pops up onto a ridge, or the front of a wood and fires out but withdraws at end turn so the "AI wont notice him". That was cured a long time ago - AI plots fire on hexes its interested in, which includes firing hexes - to include hexes the human Z-fires from. So your tanks may all be lined up behind the hill after doing the dance and out of direct LOS - but the AI knows that trick since long ago. The arriving fire is not "Magical". The higer the density of fire from an area, the more likely some gifts will be delivered there. Bang again.
See the section on the AI interest in the release notes, its buried in there several releases back.
3) the AI knows about the puffs of smoke that artillery leaves on the map when firing indirectly, so it will counter-battery your on-map arty,
just like you do to it. Solution - shift the guns. SP arty is much better for that.
4) Plotted fires (by you or the AI) are subject to
scatter. The stonk that killed your truck convoy may have been aimed at something completely different but just drifted 12 hexes left and up from say, the V-hex that you tripped 4 turns before. Unobserved fires are subject to much more scatter, and AI map fire plots tend to be without a spotter in LOS.
5) Strike planes can see from up there in the sky. They
search for targets as they fly in. They look at about a kilometre around the plotted target hex and decide what's juicy (which may result in a blue-on-blue as crab air is not that good at identifying stuff).
6) Sometimes the AI just chooses a random likely spot in the enemy zone to biff up, if a battery is idle. It quite likes road hexes. Were your loaded trucks parked up on a road in the rear? - oh, bless
!
7) Now we have programmed fires the attacking AI often plots a programme of fires, including a creeping barrage or searching fires around an objective on its intended axis of advance. It's no longer the single pre-game fire-blow any more.
8) The AI may just have your troops in LOS from a unit you haven't spotted yet, such as a stray inf-AT left behind. Or a unit up on a hill waay over there actually may have a LOS to you. Sweep up around a taken area and find all the hideouts.
AI artillery fires are received as a result of something you did that attracted its attention, or by it plotting onto likely spots or a programmed barrage. It has no inbuilt advantage - the original SSI Steel Panthers code
did have such,
but we removed the AI arty cheats as one of the first things we did with the old DOS code.
Game engine question (sorta)
Linear Mode
