Here is a mock coast that resembles Libya and Tunisia:
The two circles are bases or cities with B, barracks, P, port, and AF, air field. I drew a lime green line kind of going around the Libyan base. This is representative of the AI manager's zone of control for that barracks. It will prioritize protecting anything important in that zone, like resources, population centers, or most importantly, potential conflict zones. Notice the border of fake Libya and Tunisia. The Barracks sees that it overlaps a border, more importantly, it can potentially overlap a rival barracks zone of influence. The AI unit manager should take into account what the enemy nation has in its inventory, like a CIA blue book of units. Divide those counts by the amount of barracks the enemy has, and you potentially have a unit requirement to station in the barracks as reserve in the event war breaks out.
The similar concept applies to ports. We can see that fake Libya and fake Tunisia has a zone overlap. Both nations' unit managers should prioritize making sure it has enough units to rush into the conflict zone in the event of war. If Fake Tunisia only has one port, a small economy and cannot raise a large enough navy through equipment purchases, then it should attempt to increase the air force, acquire anti-naval missiles, or artillery. An attempt should be made to increase the overall military naval fighting ability and keep those units stationed near the conflict zones. In our example, the air base will likely be able to overlap not only the naval conflict zone, but the land conflict zone, and perhaps even the Fake Libyan city. Thus, the AI unit manager would need to prioritize which zones are a bigger threat and acquire air platforms in order of priority. Air should always take priority, and AA and fighters should always be desirable in order to take over the skies. However, in the event fake Libya has a massive tank force, the AI should make sure it acquires or upgrades units with more AT capability.
Fake Tunisia should also invest money by building defense bases on the border with fake Libya where key supply points exist. Defense bases and garrisons have always been a cheap alternative to fielding large land armies. To date, the AI has no real mechanism of sensing where it should invest in defensive locations. As you can see, by drawing force projection radius around a base, we can find where there are overlaps and create an order of operations for the AI unit managers to make investments and send units to keep in reserve.
Key take aways:
- Draw force project radius around bases
- Identify overlaps, like borders, enemy force projection zones, and enemy cities / bases
- Each base should at a minimum, project the nation's unit count divided by base type count. This is a good starting point for the AI unit manager to set deployment priorities against rivals
- Weak AI should invest in defensive structures on borders with meaner rivals, primarily in supply zones inside of the rival force projection zone
- When conflict breaks out, the AI should deploy the reserve units from those nearby bases and send to conflict zones, points of interest, and of course, counter appropriate targets, AT vs tanks, for example
- barracks, supply depots, ports, and air bases, should all be key instruments for the AI unit manager to project force.
- AI should no longer care about stealing border tiles. End the current border system, it is not good.
- AI should not manage units individually, but manage from bases in the base army group
- Orders should be given to units from the base's perspective. Base has a priority list, and mostly aims to neutralize all enemy bases / nodes, in it's zone of influence. This creates a domino effect. Take all bases, you win.
- If unit manager detects that a base has no threats, but other bases do have threats, non threatened bases should order unit transfer to bases that need units. This is good for conquest, as the front will move naturally as the AI takes over enemy bases.
- At war threats should be higher priority over potential at peace threats. However, there should be a setting to override danger levels of a target nation to ensure that some borders keep units. In general, the AI should not be concerned with friendly nations, but focus deployements on nations with high anger and casus beli.
- Spies. You guys want to overhaul spies. Allow AI spy missions to reveal unit counts and potential AI unit manager plans for a region. AI unit managers should benefit by getting specific unit counts and diplomatic plans, keeping precise quantities of counter forces and building up defenses on the border. An expectation for a base should be that it contains no more than the nation's unit count divided by base count. However, if the base is far beyond this, then the observing AI should be able to run a check list that is best suited for defending an invasion from those conflict zones.
