AI dumber than before....

[ntrekie]

So today I gave up playing the crusades portion of this game...
1. everyone seems to love the new uber assins, am i the only one who when through 8 faction leaders in 20 turns...really annoying that all the historical characters die the turn after they appear but whatever...tried moving chars with assins and spys, they get the first couple...then the remaining 5 get the dude...
2. I played alot of vanilla m2tw and while the ai wasnt that smart...if they had a better army and reinforcements they would win, but in kingdoms crusades I have yet to fight a semi normal battle, the closest I got was when I intentionally attacked three stacks. It seems that the ai's response to an equal or stronger force is to run around all over the map and get slaughtered
3. In the dozen of so battles i did so far the ai has never had a reasonable starting pos...except on the perfectly flat maps..it looks like it cant handle terrain and always want to move to a higher elevation than me...until it gets to the highest point on the map...then it gets really confused and breaks formation...leading to point 2. it used to be if i let the ai run around for awhile it would settle on a pos some where and i could attack it...now if I line up right in front the ai will run across the map to another hill...and if im angry die enroute.
anyways so battles suck but I never like m2tw battles anyway. So I was wondering if the battle difficulty lvls did anything, i play on vh/vh or h/vh.
oh and is auto resolve affected by the diff lvl too?

[Turbo]

That hasn't been my experience but I have been playing primarily the crusades.

The campaign AI is better and I don't see much difference between the Battle AI either way. I play on VH and I don't see the reforming you speak of. What I do see is the AI marching straight towards me regardless of whether it is on the defensive or not.

I've actually had some good battles against the AI in the Crusades as the Turks that I lost. Thats a pleasant change.

[Farnan]

Oh I've seen the enemy do some pretty smart moves, such as hold position even under artillery fire when they have an advantageous position.

[ntrekie]

I think i just have real bad luck with my crusades campaign...
I stopped fighting the battles i attack in and in the defense battle the ai doesn't suck as much...

Ive been able to replicate the constant moving around on the really hilly maps...the only way I can stop the ai from doing it is when I move my men to the bottom of what ever hill they are on and rush them...all the while taking huge amounts of arrow fire...the whole battle becomes a mess because some of the ai units run away to reform elsewhere...leaving giant holes in the line which collapses soon after.
I guess this kinda works since i lose a lot to arrow fire which would be the same as losing men fight them in the line....

[Frost, colonel]

I don't play on V/hard campaign map, as I do not go in for to much skull duggery(assasins). I want my generals to die of old age/the pox or on the battlefield, not by a snake in his bed.

[HoldSteady]

hmm, I do play VH/VH, never go for assassins except for killing religious folks upsetting my happiness level. One thing I noticed in the Crusader Campaign that except for me as Byz and 1 or 2 turkish merchants, the AI doesnt use any merchants there! And in the Brit campaign I saw very very few too. It's rather easy to get a monopoly. I still have to encounter the first AI assassin though..
I did nottice the AI running around akwardly on the battle map, when I attacked 3 medium sized stacks at once with 1 stack of mine. I could easily finish them off 1 by 1 because they just kept shuffling about, until I got in arrow range.

Besides that, the AI has made me break a sweat from time to time though. Fighting the Turks can be particularly dicy, probably the same for the Egyptians. All those mounted troops move very very fast, and he sometimes does all-out charges with his infantry, combined with flanking from his cav. I would say that on VH/VH attacking an even force with an AI general with a few stars and yourself leading with a captain, there's quite some chance you end up as toast.
If u attack with a general yourself, an even force will most of the time not present problems.. I would have liked to see the Byzantines in more trouble though. It is rated as 'Hard' in the crusader campaign, but financially you're ok, even on VH/VH. I could keep expanding against the Turks without much trouble, and am making 15000-20000 a turn now (3000 from merchants).

[Miraculix]

the battle ai seems to play not so clever. it moves forward with all troops ignoring your calvalry and without proper flanking support. but the ai on the strategic leve sometimes made shocking mistakes (on vh/vh): If you want to conquer konstantinopel as egypt you can get it easily because venice only has a little army in the city so i took two bombards in my army, landed next to the city and took it. it seems that the ai wasn't able to use one of its three or four really big stocks to defend the only city it has while it didn't use them to conquer new provinces either. so the last step on my road to victory was the easiest of all.

[TD GUN]

Absolutely Horrible AI ... Cavalry charges up to enemy lines and just stops.
units constantly reforming and facing all directions, units don't follow orders, high morale upper tier soldiers struggle half the battle against peasants ... i could go on for an hour.

Spain's Army just stands there and does nothing in the America's campaign unless you are playing as Spain. Mayans take their main City and all the Spanish stacks turn into Rebels without a fight.

But hey ... who cares how it plays right? - just how good it looks and how many they can sell.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

ntrekie you are absolutely right. The player can easily manoeuvre themselves to highest ground and the AI is more than willing to give it up with endless reshuffling and re-positioning.

Crusades is an appallingly easy campaign offering no challenge what-so-ever nomatter what faction you play.

Battle difficulty is pretty meaningless and only increases unit micro-management frustration levels and little else. On the campaign map it kicks-in a "dogs-of-war" diplomacy. Autocalc is probably a better option for some players as difficulty does seem to have an effect to a point.

Its well about time that CA moved forward and considered adding a semi competent AI in their games.

[pwijnands]

Increased battle difficulty gives your units a penalty and AI units a bonus. I'm not sure what the bonusses mean though.

[SonOfCrusader76]

Are you saying that they've undone some of the good that patch v1.2 did, in Kingdoms? Are there any mods for Kingdoms that improve the Cavalry's AI?

[Hesus de bodemloze]

verry annoying is the fact that units keep sending in 5 to 8 man and the rest stays miles behind the others so thy get killed the easy way. and cavalary units that just dont want to charge if you tell them thy first start moving in colom posision then start walking and eventualy when an unit routes thy charge and stop behinde the routing enemy its a realy frustrating game

[TheKaiser]

I play the game vh/vh and I must say that I find the Ai much more defensive on the campaign map. I never really get attacked.

On the battlefield I win most of the times. As said before the Ai charges me all the time even tho they are defending.

[Spurius]

Compared to earlier maps the heightsmap seems to be 'upped' in how it gets converted to elevation info. If you compare an M2TW heightsmap to say MM2 which works fine under RTW, that heightsmap is so bright, it's useless, you really have to tone down the curve of the white. So I decided to curve that down even further so you get something between all-flat, where it has no problems, more the 'normal' accidentation we were used to in RTW. It still needs further investigation, but I've not seen the silly behaviour yet, only the fact they attack when defending, which is HC, I guess. Just stupid, really - they probably reversed some percentage by mistake, in 5 percent of the cases they actually keep the superior position.

BTW I would not go so far as calling it AI, it's game mechanics with the smarts of a spreadsheet. Game mechanics compares to AI, as AI to us. Hardly.

And it CAN be pretty smart and greedy, if you provide the right initiatives to it. Keep feeding it free money, and that goes out the door fast - can show plenty of examples of games run on auto that prove me right.

Put one army with 50000 in the bank next to an empty rebel settlement, and it will collectively start checking its nails, and posture them into submission.

Take it away, and it will JUMP to attack it as soon as it checked its treasury next turn (just a bit red). Weird hunh?

Fat lazy cats don't catch any mice. My granny knew that already.

Kill (most of) the money scripts and check again. Never let it accumulate cash, just keep it slightly in the red, and up the sacking bonus from 0.4 to something closer to 1. Set their economy's effectiveness to 90%, keep them hungry, and I guarantee an active map.