Battle AI and Unit Size

[WarnerVH]

Now that I have been playing ETW for some time now I have started to notice a few things that make me suspicious that there are some major AI bugs in the battle AI on the battle maps.

I have noticed that when I play against the AI they are doing some lame brain things. I have come to term this particular trait of the AI as The Chicken Dance.

It always seems to happen at the beginning of the battle on the initial approach to my battle line. When the battle first begins (and I mean seconds after battle starts) all the units start to run around on the battlemap like a bunch of ants. Units on the left wing of the AI will run across their battleline to form on the right. Units on the right will run around and form on the left and so on and so on. Usually they will do this and then form up and start their charge across the battlefield to my line. It's as if the AI didn't not have time to deploy and is franticly racing to set up it's units.

With that said they will often march across the battlefield until the AI controlled infantry get into fire range. They will next cross the ground as if to charge your line only to all stop, turn around and walk back out of range of my fire. Once this happens they will again turn around and start their decent onto my line and attempt to engage into melee combat. Often this is done and there is absolutely NO unit cohesion with other units. And what takes the cake is that often an AI control army will take units left of their "battleline" and have them march across their rank to engage units right of their battleline. There is no feeling of real battle in any of the battles.

Its seems they will continue to dance back and forth until their units lose a good bit of men and they have also routed many of their units. After the AI seems to have less units in smaller size they tend to start to fight better and make better decisions concerning when to attack cold steel and when to trade volleys. But they never really use ANY of their units in conjunction with their other units. I often see them send ONE LONE CAVALRY UNIT down to attack my ENTIRE army. This doesn't make sense.

Is it just me or does it seem that the AI has a problem with big huge units (such as unit size ultra). Does the battle AI play smarter on small unit size? I've ran a few experiments and it seems that the AI plays better with smaller unit sizes. It must not be able to cope with moving such huge units. :LOL: I've already seen the AI artillery set up in front of another AI artillery unit and blow their arty away when the rear artillery unit attempts to fire THROUGH the front artillery unit.

Is this just bad AI scripting, a broken AI, or just the AI not being able to handle a unit with a huge amount of men, such as 120 + men in an infantry unit? I also have not played vanilla much. Could this be a bug with a modded version of the AI?

Take care all

[Johan217]

ETW patch 1.2 introduced some serious issues with the battle AI. This is most noticeable in Custom Battles.
I also have the feeling that ETW was optimized for its default "Normal" unit size. The ETW AI can barely handle its "huge" unit sizes, this is one reason why we choose not to increase unit sizes.

Watching those immense battles is only epic until you see your units getting stuck or milling around

[sage2]

Also note that CA confirmed that this issue will be fixed in 1.3. Note that we're highly unlikely to ever inrecase unit sizes (first and foremost because this is very easy for a user to do), unless there are very significant BAI improvements around pathfinding and such.

[WarnerVH]

I tried a few battles since posting this at both ultra and small unit sizes and found the same issues. I had not done this since the patch and before the patch small unit sizes were better at firing and pathfinding. Now that I've conducted a few test again I find that you are right. Unit size does not matter anymore. At any unit size (I've used both ultra and small), the AI either starts it's chicken dance or they will walk halfway to my battleline and simply set there and stand idle out of range of my small arms fire.

I hope they put this patch out soon as it seems impossible to play a battle. It's like back in the day when The Lordz modders made Napoleon Total War for MTW-1. They spent so much time working around the battlemap bugs that when Rome Total War came out they decided there were too many issues with the AI to make a mod for anyother format except multiplayer.

Most mods for ETW will begin to be working at fixing the bugs over making a better game experience by building on a complete game.