Kingdoms: AI, and Grand Campaign portability

[DrJambo]

Couple of questions for those that either already have Kingdoms, or those in the know.

1. Has the campaign and battle AI been changed/tweaked in any way? For instance, with the changes to cavalry and general unit balance, will the AI now use them for flanking or attacking the rear of already engaged units, as opposed to the AI's old tactic of charging any unit frontally and long before their own infantry have engaged.

2. Are there any new battle AI parameters available for us to mod in the various Kingdoms xml files?

3. Big question - since the grand campaign has been officially consigned to the scrapheap in terms of fixes and improvements in the expansion, will it be possible to port the Grand Campaign over so that it uses the Kingdoms' exe?

[Antioch]

i can answer the first question. when i played Antioch:=) in the crusader campaign. I attacked a rebel town. The A.I was in Medium/Medium. The A.I saw that my crossbowmen had no spearmen infront of them and attacked with a cavalery charge right away. and flanked me with its heavy infantry. It did another flanking move with it`s horsarchers and attacked me from ther rear. BUT... i hade better units and knights so i had no problem destroying him. Yes. I think that the AI is better.

[Ultraman]

As far as the ai goes, my understanding is that we will see NO improvements beyond the 1.2 patch in the Kingdoms expansion.

[DrJambo]

As far as the ai goes, my understanding is that we will see NO improvements beyond the 1.2 patch in the Kingdoms expansion.

So, AI pike and western halberd units still won't work as intended, AI cavalry will still charge foolishly into spears, AI generals will still be first through gates (which incidentally now have boiling oil!) and there'll still be major pathfinding issues in sieges... just to name a few of course...

I was under the assumption that improvements/changes just weren't made to the vanilla Med II exe...

[Ultraman]

I'll give you what I know, and then you can decide for yourself what it all means. I'm pretty cynical about the whole thing, and have pretty much decided to stop pumping money into the TW franchise unless I hear anything major has changed in the way they make games.

In the Kingdoms Dev thread (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=95285), the ai question was asked and answered like this:

Will we see improved AI?
Yes, the upcoming patch will see a lot of big AI improvements, these will be carried over to Kingdoms.

This was before the 1.2 patch was released, so 1.2 was "the upcoming patch." I asked for clarification on page 3 of the same thread, and Caliban didn't answer my question, even though his next post directly followed mine a couple days later. When another guy asked the same question twice, the last with a bit more gusto ("err Caliban!!! Hello???"), he got this response from Caliban:

What am I, your whipping boy?

Just to clarify, Kingdoms is an expansion, there will be no changes to the main campaign. It has been built as a separate exe....

To answer your question Sheriff Lobo, there are significant improvements to the AI in Kingdoms. The AI factions now build balanced armies and there have been great improvements to the AI decision making process. The result is vastly better campaign AI overall. You may have heard Palamedes talking about it at some stage as he did a lot of work on it.

Was there a switcharound somewhere? Does this mean that the expansion was improved, or that it is simply so because the new patch will have been out and in effect?

This was all I could find from his reference to Palamedes talking about the AI (for the full post, go here- Link)

Palamedes said:
You see in Kingdoms we exposed some code that let us specify probabilities specific units would be built for each faction and we also translated this in terms of recruitment refresh rates and cost modifiers. This took a while to get right because often we would get some units being spammed or not the specific faction feel we were looking for. Poland in my opinion, was on last look one of the best set up factions.

The AI builds armies with lots of mounted xbows and nobles, a few foot archers and a significant number of dismounted nobles and spearmen. So as you can imagine the AI armies really hurt you especially in the open. They probably dont siege the best especially against factions like Teutonic Order but there has been plenty of times I have been caught in the open and been smashed by a Polish stack. Right now as Liuthuania on "Very Hard" Poland are the only faction that is hurting me when both sides have equal numbers.

All this convinces me of is that maybe they got the ai to make better stacks, which doesn't necessarily equate to better campaign or battle performance, imo.

Unsurprisingly, someone asked Caliban for more clarification:

Originally Posted by Player44
Wait... I need this clarified. So say if you launch kingdoms and do grand campaign, your saying there will be NO Reinforcement commands, NO new units, NO moats and oil, NO new AI, and basically be the exact same thing as the campaign now, with no new features? And also, do you install kingdoms before or after 1.2? are 1.2 features included into kingdoms?

Here is Caliban's reply (I highlighted what seemed most relevant in bold):

The Kingdoms campaigns has a separate executable, so you won't even see the grand campaign option. You launch each kingdoms campaign separately and only have the option to play that particular campaign. So if you want to play Crusades for example, you open the crusades icon. If you want to play Americas, you open the Americas icon. Each campaign looks like an entirely separate game.
If you want to play the grand campaign, you launch that from the M2 option which runs from patch 1.3 which is included in the kingdoms install. This patch is purely for compatibility, there are no new features in the grand campaign. Kingdoms is, 4 separate, unique campaigns from the original game. Hope this answers your question.

Caliban

If all this doesn't answer your question about ai, I'm not surprised. Ever since MTWII was announced, I've never seen anything really directly addressed about improved ai, other than to hear them say, "yeah it's better." Beyond that all they talked about was graphics.

Some will say that 1.2 was a significant improvement to the ai, but I'm not all that impressed/convinced. Perhaps a few small improvements, but mostly a placebo effect, in my opinion. Now, the modders out there are doing great things (stainless steel, ultimate ai, etc.) with what they can change, but I don't think we'll see any big changes in hardcoded ai until the next TW installment.

Whew. I'm done with my research paper Hope that helps!

[Juggernaut]

I'll give you what I know, and then you can decide for yourself what it all means. I'm pretty cynical about the whole thing, and have pretty much decided to stop pumping money into the TW franchise unless I hear anything major has changed in the way they make games.

In the Kingdoms Dev thread (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=95285), the ai question was asked and answered like this:



This was before the 1.2 patch was released, so 1.2 was "the upcoming patch." I asked for clarification on page 3 of the same thread, and Caliban didn't answer my question, even though his next post directly followed mine a couple days later. When another guy asked the same question twice, the last with a bit more gusto ("err Caliban!!! Hello???"), he got this response from Caliban:



Was there a switcharound somewhere? Does this mean that the expansion was improved, or that it is simply so because the new patch will have been out and in effect?

This was all I could find from his reference to Palamedes talking about the AI (for the full post, go here- Link)



All this convinces me of is that maybe they got the ai to make better stacks, which doesn't necessarily equate to better campaign or battle performance, imo.

Unsurprisingly, someone asked Caliban for more clarification:


Here is Caliban's reply (I highlighted what seemed most relevant in bold):



If all this doesn't answer your question about ai, I'm not surprised. Ever since MTWII was announced, I've never seen anything really directly addressed about improved ai, other than to hear them say, "yeah it's better." Beyond that all they talked about was graphics.

Some will say that 1.2 was a significant improvement to the ai, but I'm not all that impressed/convinced. Perhaps a few small improvements, but mostly a placebo effect, in my opinion. Now, the modders out there are doing great things (stainless steel, ultimate ai, etc.) with what they can change, but I don't think we'll see any big changes in hardcoded ai until the next TW installment.

Whew. I'm done with my research paper Hope that helps!

Looks quite obvious to me that they are saying "There will be AI improvements in Kingdoms, but not in Grand Campaign".

[DrJambo]

Thanks for all the hard word posting that stuff Ultraman. I've just about resigned myself to the fact that the original Grand Campaign is all but dead.

What I'm hoping for is at least some AI improvement in the Kingdom campaigns. Such as the AI being able to use pikes and other slow moving infantry effectively and without leaving them miles behind the rest of their front line. That and the AI cav actually performing flanking manoeuvres after the accompanying infantry lines have engaged (not before like in vanilla), particularly now that cav units have been specifically 'balanced' with that in mind.

Also I'd like to think the vanilla GC will be somehow portable into using the Kingdoms exe if that's where any improvements lie. It would be nice to think that an adept modder could achieve this since CA have decided against it ...

[NagatsukaShumi]

Do you own the expansion pack Ultraman? I don't want to sound like a knob but, its perhaps wise to stops picking out CA quotes until you've played it or somebody who has can clarify that the the AI is no better.

[Ultraman]

Do you own the expansion pack Ultraman? I don't want to sound like a knob but, its perhaps wise to stops picking out CA quotes until you've played it or somebody who has can clarify that the the AI is no better.

No I don't own it. And I don't think you're a knob, but I do think I"m entitled to express my opinion without owning the thing based on the information (or lack thereof) given prior to its release. I've stated my reasons for why I'm skeptical, and for why I am no longer buying tw games. I have owned every game/exansion up til now and have, except for a few exceptional mods, been disappointed.

Do you think I'm cherry picking quotes to support my own cynical view? I'm not sure if you meant that exactly, but I decided to share what I could find. I've wanted the game to be better, as everyone has. I've bought and played it to death, and quickly become bored with it. The info I found that said the ai was going to be improved wasn't very specific, except for the part about more logical stacking. So I gathered these quotes because they came from what seemed to me the most relevant people and, due to what i believe was a pattern of talking it up (the ai) without really talking about it (from RTW to our current incarnation). I've come away thinking that the only "ai" improvements in the coming/now released expansion are as specifically stated... better stacks.

No doubt, others will/are buy/buying it and will share their thoughts. Great. I'm not telling anyone not to, but I am sharing my thoughts and conclusions on the run up to its release based on the available information that I could find.

So let it be known all, I don't own the expansion. Decide for yourselves to buy it or not and see if it's improved. As a consumer of products made by an industry that often puts out pretty looking crap (not a dig at CA, but the whole shebang), I've decided to be more careful about where I put my money.

Sorry if my speculation causes upset, but it is, after all, my speculation (I think that's pretty clear), and that's that for that.

[edders]

Remember Caliban said that to mod the grand campaign with Kingdoms features, you basically have to transplant the original M2 campaign into Kingdoms (I believe he indicated it to be a simple cut-and-paste-folders job), thus using the Kingdoms .exe. You would need huge amounts of space though - for unpacking both vanilla M2 and Kingdoms and copying these files into a new mod folder. I think that was the jist of it.

[Queen Annes Revenge]

can we control our reinforcement armies in the grand campaign?

[Pachinko]

can we control our reinforcement armies in the grand campaign?

If that is true... Im really pissed. Man, that sucks.

[edders]

Short answer: No.

You can set their general "stance" i.e. agressive, defensive etc. but you can't control them like a regular army, if I'm reading the reviews correctly.

[Dooz]

Short answer: No.

You can set their general "stance" i.e. agressive, defensive etc. but you can't control them like a regular army, if I'm reading the reviews correctly.

Really? In a GameSpot preview it stated that you can actually switch between two armies completely. Can this be confirmed or denied?

[edders]

Really? In a GameSpot preview it stated that you can actually switch between two armies completely. Can this be confirmed or denied?

Huh? In PC Gamer in said that "allied" armies can be controlled only through stances. At first I thought they literally meant the armies of allied nations if they fight a batle with you, but a post from somewhere earlier on indicated that this refers to your own armies...