AI and unit fatigue?

[shevegen]

With AI I mean the computer playing the enemy. The AI is not bad, but it is not that great either. But this is not the topic here, I actually refer to "fatigue" in regards to AI.

Now with that I mean that the opponent appears to become "dumber" the fewer unit it has available.

I may be wrong here, but let me explain what I mean with a specific example.

I am playing some scenario right now where I control some lizardmen and also naga.

I just killed the enemy naga guy or was it some mermaid hippie. Either way, now I have to fight
against some arrogant elves in the north.

I just had two or three rounds of decisive battle where the elven units kind of suicide rushed into
my battle-hardened scaly warriors and scaly priests. And now the rest of the scenario is a cake
walk. So I have about 20 units, the enemy has only about 5 units left. These are also dispersed
over the map and moving about without a plan.

This is what I mean with fatigue. It appears as if dispersed units don't try any cohesion or something
like that. They seem to just move individually. Granted, they stand no chance anyway as I already
won by having more units now and being able to soak up enough damage, but if these individual
units would "coordinate" more, they could still do a bit of damage or delay the advance of my units.
This seems to be missing right now in the AI.

With "fatigue" I kind of mean that they appear to have given up. I am aware this is not the case, the
AI can not "fatigue" as such, but it appears to me as IF the AI were fatigued. Almost as if it would have
given up on wanting to win.

I have no good solution for this; perhaps we can apply multiple different AI. In this case here, perhaps
via conditional checks such as "if only few units left" and "if highly dispersed", try to favour regrouping,
where regrouping is defined as moving towards the nearest (or any) allied camp and put yourself into
a position to maximize delay or so. Or a variation of this. Because right now, the few units left seem to
just wait for their death or move in ways that makes little sense to me. They move about individually
so I can now just cherry-pick them off one by one (or just ignore them and head to the enemy leader
and finish him off anyway). In this event it may be easier for them to then regroup and go closer to
their leader and protect him. Or anything like that. (And, prior to that, perhaps not go all-in but
position the units like a human player would, e. g. counter-offensive rather than the suicide-rush
strategy.)

I have absolutely no insight into the AI part of wesnoth, but perhaps we could have "pre-defined" AI-like
behaviour. Or profile. This could perhaps also be modeled into WML, where working AI strategies could
be chosen by the map creator, and/or automatically picked. The latter would be more elegant, but for
some scenarios a manual overrule may work. For instance, the scenario I play right now, I first did not
succeed because I was fighting the elves, whereas the mermaid leader kept on spawning new units.
So I decided now to kill him early on with all my units; when I semi-accidentally placed one lizard on
the coast, the enemy leader rushed in and wanted to snipe him but failed, and in two turns was then
killed by my units - and also could not recruit new units as he was not in his stronghold. Those suicide
rushes should also be tweaked on the AI level IMO, or perhaps be added as a "trait-like" attribute onto
WML.