In the last three weeks of playing my first CoW game after an absence of 18 months, I have observed a number of AI actions that I believe are new and probably represent a not-insignificant upgrade of the AI's programmed behaviors. Is this true?

Below is a screenshot of a damaged L1 rocket (i.e., a V1 buzzbomb), which was damaged and its L1 airfield damaged, by a single tactical bomber on direct attack. The launching L1 airbase was in Cleveland on the 22-player map. As you can see below, the aircraft truck convoy carrying the wounded L1 rocket is attempting to escape across Lake Erie!



Things that make you go "hmmm."

Well, that explains a few things I have witnessed. Thanks, Restrisiko.

I've played games with the "elite" AI previously. More of a trap for rookies and single-strategy players who love doom stacks. This new-ish standard AI (elite AI for everyone!) can still be picked apart by a good and knowledgeable player, but there are obvious penalties for players who set their doom stacks on 48-hours pre-programmed missions, intentionally start 3, 4, 5 or 6 simultaneous wars, and refuse to adapt their usual strategy and tactics to the particular unit mix of AI (and human) opponents.

C'est la guerre. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

You as well, Sir.

(Or your new alter ego.)

Because it's an appropriate cliche, and it sounds so very much more elegant in French.

If you don't know it, Ryan, you should google it. It's one of those things a literate adult should recognize, even if some of us are unable to pronounce it correctly in our Southern-accented high school French.

Well, then you should understand my self-consciousness about my non-standard French accent.

I grew up in Florida, where the only French one was likely to encounter (outside of school) was on the local restaurants' wine lists. My high school French teacher was an Alabama native who graduated from Florida State. Apparently, more than a little of her Alabama drawl was imparted to my own butchering of your mother tongue. Every time I have been in France, and I have attempted to politely engage the natives in their own language (which I am told they do appreciate), I have gotten a big smile and an inquiry as to where in the "South" I'm from.

And no one says Chateauneuf-du-Pape quite like me!

@WascallywabbitCDN, I may not share Old Boney's love of the frontal assault, but I am a huge proponent of well-managed and skillfully targeted artillery, of which Bonaparte was the 19th Century master.

Thunderbolts of the gods, indeed.

@Islandboy, I understood exactly what you're saying. I have played 26 COW games, 25 of them to completion, either as the winner, runner-up or a survivor still on the board when the game ended. I've seen plenty of programming glitches and server overload problems, but I have never seen spontaneously generated units involving an AI opponent. In my fairly extensive COW game-playing experience, usually such problems arise from misperceptions of old intelligence or from incomplete intelligence where units are on the extreme edge of your unit's view range. Enemy and neutral units appear generically as "infantry regiment no. __" when they first appear on the extreme edge of your unit's view range, and then their full unit (or unit stack) details are revealed as they draw closer.

In my personal experience, I have certainly never seen light tank brigades converted into tank destroyer brigades, or for that matter, any other type of unit converted from one type to another. That should never happen; in fact, it should be impossible. Human players can accelerate building construction, unit production (i.e., "unit spamming"), and research cycles with gold spending. But LTs and TDs don't even share the same research tree, so it should be programmatically impossible to convert one unit type to the other. If what happened in your game actually happened as you described it, someone owes you an explanation.

If I were you, I would politely ask the kindly and very knowledgeable @VorlonFCW, the senior English language forum and game administrator, to take a look at your game's history and see if he can reconcile what you have described with the way the game is supposed to operate.