Lazy campaign A.I.?

[hozemaat]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but there has been something on my mind that had bothered me for quite some time now.
I play the Grand Campaign on Hard/Hard and while I am happy with the resistance put up in battle i am disappointed by the small amount of land battle's.
I'm in 1710 with Prussia and have had only 2 ''big'' land battle's which usually means that i build up an army and march straight to a city to capture it! It seems that there is a severe lack of land battle's.
my question is, will this change over time? (as it is 1710) or would changing campaign difficulty to very hard make for more land battle's?

I love land battle's and sieges are starting to get on my nerves!
Thanks for any help.

[carlisimo]

It's probably the second-most asked question here.

It doesn't necessarily get better, though if the stars align and wars break out between alliance blocs, you can have a very interesting few years of war.

[hozemaat]

oke thanks, so what happens if i turn the difficulty on battle's and campaign up to very hard? what are the changes in both categories?

[BigB]

oke thanks, so what happens if i turn the difficulty on battle's and campaign up to very hard? what are the changes in both categories?

I dont know exactly, but on VH battles it seems your troops get *very* inaccurate and the AI troops get more accurate. I think there is a drop in your morale and an increase in the AI morale as well.

In my VH campaign at the year 1740 nobody is attacking anyone anywhere. I went 10-20 years just hitting the next turn button to build up infrastructure and techs and nobody did anything.

[hozemaat]

oke thanks for your answers guys, anyone have any experience with this DarthMod 0.2?

[ssmarine]

oke thanks for your answers guys, anyone have any experience with this DarthMod 0.2?

Yes, get it. Darths doing wonderful things with the AI. Still needs a little more tweaking..but I can ensure you will be fighting plenty of open field battles.

[MyKingforahorse]

It just depends sometimes on who gets to war against who and what their financial situation looks like.

In my GB game, I literally steamrolled over Europe until I got to Russia at which point I had at least 2 major battles every other turn it seemed.

However in my more recent Spanish game, There is the Dutch/GB alliance making my life in the Americas hell, the Ottoman/Russia Alliance who constantly pushing westward against my fronts in Europe.

Not a turn goes by that I don't have someone attacking me it seems.

But then again... this is on VH/VH

[GaMMwl]

It just depends sometimes on who gets to war against who and what their financial situation looks like.

In my GB game, I literally steamrolled over Europe until I got to Russia at which point I had at least 2 major battles every other turn it seemed.

However in my more recent Spanish game, There is the Dutch/GB alliance making my life in the Americas hell, the Ottoman/Russia Alliance who constantly pushing westward against my fronts in Europe.

Not a turn goes by that I don't have someone attacking me it seems.

But then again... this is on VH/VH

lol an AI alliance between the Ottomans and Russia? Thats like France and Britain teaming up! I wonder if anybody have experienced that!

[Paranoid Android]

In my GB game, I literally steamrolled over Europe

Awesome. Now where do I get this British steamroller unit? Do I have to unlock it?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. For some reason it really bothers me when people use the word 'literally' to add emphasis rather than in its correct sense.

[gord96]

get Darthmod 0.2

makes the AI much more aggressive.

[zligor]

would changing campaign difficulty to very hard make for more land battle's?

It would. I am playing VH French campaign and it`s year 1750 now. I started war with Spain. Right now, Spain has seven full stacks within France! I cannot field more than three to defend my capital. In other campaign, playing as GB, I almost couldn`t count all French fleets off the English coast (1750 again). So, AI has much more money on VH difficulty and it spends it on army. That means much more battles.

[J. Fishman]

The campaign AI isn't really so much "passive" as it is "very cautious" and leans towards maintaining the balance of power. In Medieval, the AI would occasionally act quite recklessly and strip a city of its defending garrison to launch an attack, which tended to result in wild power upheavals: One faction strips a city to attack another faction, and win or lose, both are weakened and fall prey to a third faction easily, etc., etc. As AIs all fight the same way, they don't deliver one-sided assbeatings like humans do to other AIs and each other, so an AI-on-AI struggle generally ends in mutual near-annihilation pyrrhic victories.

In Empire, the AI is much more conservative and is unwilling to strip its defenses (and there are a lot more things to defend in this game). Therefore, you'll see a lot of AI stacks lounging around defending towns and whatnot within striking distance of enemy armies: In fact, if the AI notices you hanging an army around menacingly, it WILL react to this, by consolidating all of its armies into a big army defending the regional capital. It is far more responsive to this than it was in Medieval, where it would often dispatch its armies off on a big marauding mission to godknowswhere for no apparently sane purpose, to engage in purposeless battles that would deplete its forces for no gain until both sides were weakened enough to fall prey to another (In all cases, the AI was very opportunistic). In Empire, they are more fixated on maintaining the balance of power, but you WILL see AIs roll each other if you do something drastic to upset the balance, like curbstomping a nation in the field and destroying 8 fullstacks in a single round of combat.

The kicker is that nations fall easily in Empire. Many nations possess only one or two regions, and will topple like a house of cards if something leaves the capital open and someone marches in and sacks it. A human will typically aggressively seize such an opening, taking bold risks against tough odds to do it. An AI won't, because he doesn't want to risk it and can't achieve the kind of one-sided smackus-maximus that will produce anything other than pyrrhic victory.