Suggestions for CA to help improve the AI

[Van Diemen]

Ok, this thread is not for complaining about the game, but to provide constructive suggestions to help CA improve the AI by listing the AI problems and preferably also suggesting how to solve the issue.


AI Problem 1: Too small and numerous armies
One of the things I noticed is that countries have too many and too small armies to effectively fight in war, especially when they are relatively weak. I would suggest to have an additional imperium level for 1-2 region states in which you can only have 1 fleet and 2 armies in total. When a country grows further to 3 regions it will have armies capped at 3 and fleets at 2, as it is now for all nations between 1-6 regions. This way the AI will be forced to spend more money on a few armies/fleets early on instead of spreading out its economical income on more armies than it can handle. Also I think that a new mechanic should be introduced so that countries can also lose imperium levels when they lose territory. I have a game currently in which Rome has been reduced to having only Sardinia, and it still has 6 armies and 3 fleets, with each having something between 1-5 units. Hopefully by forcing the AI to cut down to size it will be in a better position to recover and recapture with more consolidated and larger forces after having lost significant amounts of territory.

[Furber]

I think the Balance of Power for Auto Resolve over estimates the strength of units like levy spearmen and slingers. So the CAI builds huge armies composed of these 2 unit types, which in turn makes the battles lame. I also think factions like the Gaetuli of North Africa are able to wipe out Carthage, and Egypt gets killed off too, because this very basic army building is strengthened by the buggy Auto Resolve. I'm not saying the underdogs of North Africa should never win, but they certainly shouldn't always win (they have in my 3 campaigns). Fix auto resolve's balance of power issue and maybe we'll see more diversity in enemy armies which will lead to more fun battles (BAI isn't that bad, it's just made worse by the composition of the enemy armies).