A picture is worth a thousand words so the attached picture should explain everything. Once the AI was able to recruit Prowlers, that's all they did. Their population and I assume their production in general has suffered because the only thing they are doing is producing more Prowlers. Just to be clear, I'm not pointing out the function of prowlers or how they show up in battle or anything like that--only the rate at which the AI recruits them. In fact, in the early part of the Industrial era these units are incredibly weak compared to everything else, so the AI is wasting population and production on 10 units that keep dying to only one of mine. The screenshot is only one of the many battles that look exactly like this. 

If the pic is a little hard to interpret, this is a city battle where I've scrolled down on their units list and it's nothing but Prowlers which were more than their normal army and their city defenses combined. 

It's also annoying that it OVERLY inflates the AI's military power when it comes to battles and sieges. Meaning you ALWAYS have to manually fight, because the auto-battle gives it to the AI if you dare try to do so that way.

The AI creates too many stealthy units, they practically crowd the map with them. The worst thing is that the only positive effect of this, is to make it impractical to move the envoys and collect value, because as diplomats they have no combat power, and there is no way to send them with an escort unlike spies. Spies can complete the squad with thieves and stay hidden without dealing with closed borders. However, envoys are obligatorily visible, which makes thieves unfeasible, while conventional units are also useless, because they cannot cross borders and cities. Bottom line, with AIs spawning thieves, envoys are useless.

Here's a follow-up on how ridiculous it can be. This battle was against almost nothing but Prowlers, and you can see the outcome. Notice that this is pretty far into the industrial era where my army is mostly made of Musketeers, so at this point I shouldn't have much of an advantage (aside from being a Human player against AI). 

As much as I enjoy the new diplomacy and stealth reworks, when battles are this much of a blowout simply because the AI makes only one type of unit it takes away much of the fun.

I second this - there needs to be some slight tweaking to the stealth units/ambush and especially, as you say, the NUMBER of UNITS they produce. Unnecessary and churlish.

Hello people,


We would like to take a look. If you have advanced saves to share with us where this happens, it would help us a lot !

I've noticed this to. Here's a save (autosave from the start of turn 216). The Zulu forces defending Byblos against my Soviet army include 14 prowlers.

This battle also includes another bit of bad AI tactics: There are only very few squares in Byblos and Adulis that my ships can hit (e.g. the square right by the harbor in Adulis) , but the AI keeps moving units into those squares to be ripped apart by my armada. It would be very easy for them to avoid those few squares and spare their units. Earlier in the game I saw a similar error where the AI kept embarking units within range of archers 

auto-save 993.ctr

I have seen one case where the AI put a prowler to brilliant use: they put the prowler in a valley my reinforcements had to traverse to get to a battle, and so when I tried to move my reinforcements, they were met with a blocking force (a prowler) and couldn't reach the main battle. Despite this single moment of brilliance, for the most part the AI overproduces prowlers and uses them badly (including them in large pitched battles where they serve no purpose)

Agreed, I wanted to make a post about this very issue myself. Both games I playes since TWR came out had this issue, which kills any desire to start a new game until it's fixed.

The amount of prowlers and spys the AI cranks outs is ridiculous, the fact that they can ambush (and be stealthy at all) AT SEA is double ridiculous.

Dayvit78 wrote:

Ich sekundiere das - es muss einige leichte Optimierungen an den Stealth-Einheiten / Hinterhalt geben und insbesondere, wie Sie sagen, der Anzahl der Einheiten, die sie produzieren. Unnötig und churlish.PL

Please !