Units attack farms instead of capturing/ignoring them

[Stan]

I played with three Petra AIs in Very Hard difficulty on Thessalonians plains, and instead of capturing farms, they started destroying them.

I think behaviour should be

• Neutral Farm → Capture
• Enemy Farm if enemy around, ignore, else capture.

[Stan]

Related commands

[mimo]

Do you mean farmstead ? or fields ? I guess fields as the AI do capture farmsteads. But then, this proposition is invalid as fields are not capturables presently. That feature can be changed, but that's more a design choice rather than an AI defect.

[Stan]

I meant fields. Oh I thought you could, It made sense to me. Anyway, for the time being i don't think they should attack fields.

[mimo]

Well, it depends if you are raiding and want to destroy the enemy economy. Otherwise, most of the time, the units attacking a field are idle units nearby an enemy field which are automatically made attacking the field by UnitAI.

But I also did not liked this behaviour and had some thought about it, but never came to something really finalized:

• a simple solution would be to change the owner of the fields when constructed and make them gaia. UnitAI would then no more attack them automatically, and that would reflect more the fact that all players can gather on it.
• another possibility would be to change radically the way fields are used. We could make them non-attackable, but any fields without gatherers would health-decay while fields with gatherers would slowly regain health (that would represent the fact that fields not worked on become uncultivated land). So when raiding, killing or making flee the gatherers would make the field decay. And to make these raids more useful, the gathering rate would be scaled by the health ratio of the field, so that after a raid the field will take some time to be fully efficient again.

[Stan]

I like 2)

AI attacks gaia fields too though.

[elexis]

One more vote for 2).

It would make the game more interesting, as unused fields are penalized, more efficient build orders promoted and raids becoming more viable.

[Lionkanzen]

Vote for 2

[mimo]

In 17015:

petra: be more restrictive to attack a field, refs #3406

[elexis]

Doesn't work for mirages and we should implement an attackable attribute for structures.

[elexis]

After capturing a CC, the first thing the units do is attacking the fields, no matter if they are attacked by 6 towers and a fortress (aggressive stance, which is the default).

[elexis]

Simple testcase as seen in the gif.