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Anyone know what this indicates?
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You've got a static but moveable unit, like unlocked coastal artillery, in the stack. Something in there can't be moved very efficiently except by boat or rail.

Well, the AI does...
I wonder what she's doing?
Must be some of the fort's cannon.

Athena likes to do that with forces she isn't moving.

Yea, I noticed. After I won, I used ChangedFaction to take a look at what Athena had the Union doing, and sure enough she had the fort cannon in her stacks.

That's not a very good idea, tactically. Athena's troops can then be caught in the city and obliterated, rather than being able to escape and fight the next turn.

If you were to engage that stack and win, she'd have a ridiculously long retreat time. I doubt it would be forced into the structure as the attack would unlock the battery.

What is actually odd is that you can see the brown slash on the stack at all when you have the Confederates side loaded.

That's from the Union side, probably after he won. You can see the horizontal line to the left indicating the multiple stacks box which wouldn't show up at all from the Confederate side.

No, it's from the confederate side.
I'm fairly certain that it caused the Union to lose a bunch of units (as in they were obliterated) in Baltimore, where Athena ended up doing the same thing. I'd have to dig through that log now, though... which I don't really feel like doing. And, damn, it's been deleted because I loaded the game back up (I was going to post it here).

Yeah, that was my mistake. For some reason I thought you could only see the stack numbers from your own side when that's obviously not the case. I suspect Athena does it because it increases her firepower (which it does by a large margin) and she's just not equipped to deal with the greater concerns of retreat and attack beyond that turn.

AIs are tough things to program. Essentially you can go one of two ways: scripted or dynamic. A scripted AI will do the exact same thing every time, and once players figure it out there isn't much of a challenge left without giving a major bonus to AI resources. A dynamic AI, which we have, will react to the player to the limit of its programming, and will often come up short in situations where a human can improvise. Honestly, we have a great AI compared to the competition games, and it's designed by three people, so I'm rather lenient. If you really need that challenge, go PBEM; I know I needed to and the rewards are great as well as this being a community which is forgiving of serious omissions and imperfect understanding of the engine.

Athena never did that in AACW though; at least, not when I played it (which, admittedly, was with later patches). You still get the firepower without the unit(s) being in the stack too, as long as combat actually takes place in the region.

Anyway, yea... I have a lot of experience with AI, actually. But, you're correct, PBEM is probably the way to go. I don't ever seem to have the time though, unfortunately. I really worry about having to leave people stranded in the middle of a game, or something similar.

I can't remember exactly if Athena schlepped around Fort Batteries with her army, but I've seen in both games that she drags around captured Coastal Artillery with a land-locked force as if they were some super-laser-cannons .

Somehow when mixed with a large force the game seems to make the stack's actual movement an average of all the elements in the stack and thus dividing the hindrance of the CA up throughout the stack.

It always bugs me that she doesn't ship them off to some useful location instead of letting them weigh herself down and lose them again because she's not going to get away with them anyway .

Captain_Orso wrote:It always bugs me that she doesn't ship them off to some useful location instead of letting them weigh herself down and lose them again because she's not going to get away with them anyway .

Same. There's gotta be a command (or series of commands, I'm sure) that will help this...

I think it's an issue that has to do with the game engine understanding that units like Coastal Artillery, Fort Batteries and Siege Artillery are special units to be handled differently than other artillery units. I don't know of anything like a "stop acting dumb with special-artillery" command.

Captain_Orso wrote:I think it's an issue that has to do with the game engine understanding that units like Coastal Artillery, Fort Batteries and Siege Artillery are special units to be handled differently than other artillery units. I don't know of anything like a "stop acting dumb with special-artillery" command.

For a while in PoN this was solved by making these units immobile. Problem was that meant you couldn't move them from where they were built (say you built in your home nation but to defend a colonial fort) so a patch removed the constraint. It is certainly something embedded in the game code as I've seen Athena doing this in most of the games.

How does Athena decide which units to put inside a structure? Might there be a way to increase her affinity for choosing fort batteries and coastal artillery to man them?

Captain_Orso wrote:What is actually odd is that you can see the brown slash on the stack at all when you have the Confederates side loaded.

I've seen the same thing on at least one confederate stack besieged near Ft. Henry. Comes and goes on the Confederate stack while I am playing Union.