I can`t see how this Dropin` Player for AI` feature that`s supposed to be in NTW is a good thing.

We are told from kieren`s last that for the more veteran players who don`t like the BAI there`s a drop Human feature where, presumably, a Human Player can randomly take over your enemy in battle.

Ok, on the superficial face of it this sounds good. Wonderful even.

It`s actually quite realistic. There you are playing your Single-Player game. you have a battle. The NTW BAI is still crap after all what a surprise. But, woohoo! A player from online has volunteered to play the enemy in this battle. You start, he uses what he has to give you a tough fight, using strategy and tactics on you, ambushing you, retreating to consolidate then fighting you, but finally you win. Wow you fought a real life Player who made it feel like you were fighting a real general. And to top it off, no dodgy bugginess with the AI. He stays till the end and says `Well done` and you congratulate him on a good fight. He leaves.

BRILLIANT... in theory.

But what would happen in reality?

A player drops into your game. He starts as general leading the enemy forces...

"This army sux!" he quits.

Or he drops in and plays and as soon as you make a great move, it`s "WTF! I hate this BS!" quits half way in the battle.

Or he messes about with your enemy forces killing his own forces with his own arty or running them to the end of the map just to annoy you.

I am an experienced Online Player of many years and always, ALWAYS I go back to playing against AI because ultimately you`ll have your time wasted by 80% of time wasters Online. Sure, in a squad or Clan you`re fine, but this `drop in` idea doesn`t suit that. how many of your Clan m8s are going to sit around waiting for your battles just for you?

Not many.


I predict that this `drop` in player thing will be a total abortion failure. It`s a white elephant.

The truth is a good Single Player game should always have a good AI and Devs should make the EFFORT to make a good AI so that the OFFLINE Player can stay OFFLINE and enjoy his game peacefully. He shouldn`t play a game of chance with the internet just to see if he might get a fair Player who`ll stay the course until the end without ruining his Single player gaming experience. Other game Devs have made great stratgey game (yes battle map) AIs. It is not impossible.

This `drop-in` thing is just lazy from devs who can`t be arsed. Of course, I don`t like being Online in my single player games either. Single Player should always be offline.

Well in that case just take the MP campaign against a clan member and you'll be fine...

I agree that it could be a major problem, if I get the game, then Ill only use it with people on ym friends list, who I can gaurantee wont have "Connection Trouble"...

Maybe we can prevent this by not allowing people who have a history of quitting in battles, to join battles.
Some kind of record that counts how many times you've quit a match before it ends?

Originally Posted by Greve Af Göteborg

Maybe we can prevent this by not allowing people who have a history of quitting in battles, to join battles.
Some kind of record that counts how many times you've quit a match before it ends?

They would except ca doesn't give a flying since people can unplug in etw battles with no penality which is why i don't play it. CA should forget about multi as they don't have the first clue how to do it.

Originally Posted by Greve Af Göteborg

Maybe we can prevent this by not allowing people who have a history of quitting in battles, to join battles.
Some kind of record that counts how many times you've quit a match before it ends?

Just have a rating next to their name of % battles entered completed...

Originally Posted by DoomBunny666

Just have a rating next to their name of % battles entered completed...

That would work, you would choose the guy with 100% over the guy with 20%.
Good idea.

Agreed. Personally I don't see myself ever using the Drop-in player feature. It just wasn't a good idea I think.. people drop in with a random army and can do certain things to mess up your campaign in the long run. They should just stick with their multiplayer campaign: it makes the drop-in feature somewhat redundant.

I plan on playing the single-player as it was meant to be played, and playing the multiplayer campaign with my wife

I hope that you can choose the person who will take over the AI forces, to prevent exactly this from happening.

Originally Posted by Shāhānshāh

I hope that you can choose the person who will take over the AI forces, to prevent exactly this from happening.

Yeah, otherwise you could have some joker imitate the AI and form blob in the center and canister his men in the back.

I really don't like the random drop in. 50% of the time you'll get Bozo the clown and 45% of the time you'll get some kid that found some cheesy glitch and he'll whipe you out with some cheesball tactic that wouldn't work in real life. 5% of the time you'll find a mature person that will embrace Napoleonic Warfare. I don't like those odds but those are pretty much the odds of any on-line game.

I hope that this sort of people will prefer normal Multi player battles, because of "This army sux!" argument. I'm an optimist personally I want to drop to other people's campaign taking some unknown army composed by CAI

No one's said the AI's going to suck. CA said they're doing whatever they can to provide a good AI experience, and they plan to make it competent enough to best the player, even good ones under the right conditions. They just said if you're an expert and don't find the AI challenging enough, you can have a player join the battle.

rage quitters deserve to be gang raped by fat old hippos.

Some good points raised there Humble Warrior,
One aspect that could be covered by you the player who wants to invite someone in would be, don't invite someone in to a crappy battle, but plenty will I suppose, damaging the fun and a sense of fair play.
But your post basically demeans the whole multiplayer aspect, because folk just are disciplined enough to interaction with other players with any integrity. But folks suffering from the human condition of being wet bottom burps isn't quite CA's fault in all fairness. Try not to be to negative, how about coming up with ways in which more reliable players can be sort, at what times, remember saved games can be loaded just prior to battles, and come up with good basic rules for fair play. You could call it Honourable Warriors clan!

Even if the online player drops out, the AI will just take over at that point, so I don't really get the problem? If you encounter pranksters who sabotage their own armies so much that it upsets you, then just don't enable the drop-in option. It's not like it'll be a requirement for every battle.

I'm almost 100% positive that with the drop in "John Doe" would be able to see what army he will be using before he even decides to fight. I just don't see it working unless he sees it.

Humble as usual is being short-sighted negative. No one would ever call in a drop-in player when the AI army they are fighting has only 3-4 militia units. If they want a good fight we'd obviously would be calling it in when the AI army we are contesting is at least 1:1 ratio against us.

As for dropping out in the middle of the fight, well the AI will take over at that point. Not much you can do about it. What happens if the guy's internet connection cuts off or something? There are things CA cannot control. As others pointed out, this is something that plagues MP and you cannot just point everything at CA.

As for pranksters. Perhaps it's time I remind people the difference between campaign and custom battles.

In Custom battles there are NO defending/attacking armies. You can't set it.

In Campaign battles there ARE defending/attacking armies. Those screenshots of the loading battle screens clearly marks whose the attacker and whose the defender.

Therefore, if John Doe is defending, then it'd make sense for him to bottle up or hole up in strong defensive positions to make it difficult for you to drag him out.

If John Doe is attacking, he will be disappointed that he cannot just sit in one corner of the map and hide and force you to come because HE is attacking so he has to come to YOU.

Even if the online player drops out, the AI will just take over at that point, so I don't really get the problem as far as "rage-quit" goes. Pranksters are different. If you encounter pranksters who sabotage their own armies so much that it upsets you, then just don't enable the drop-in option. It's not like it'll be a requirement for every battle. It's far from a lazy thing on the part of the developers - for all of the reasons you've outlined, they still need a workable single player AI. This is just something they've thrown in the pot, since they have all the coding for multiplayer-involvement in campaigns from the Empire MP beta and now the Napoleon full MP campaigns.

Yeah it'll be frustrating at times, but what online game has ever had a perfect userbase? You're projecting an inherent problem of multiplayer online videogames onto one particular game. That's not a very fair thing to do. It'll suck for Napoleon, sure, but it also sucks for Modern Warfare 2, WoW, and every other MP game ever made.

There SHOULD be a button for the campaign player to press that immediately ejects the Drop-In player from the battle too, if they start pranking like idiots. Of course, this then will be used in the reverse rage-quit method, where the campaign player will kick their opponent when they start losing. But once again, that's the fault of the individual, not the game, nor of the developer.

The problem with your argument is that it rests upon the assumption that the developers have sacrificed any AI improvements for this drop-in feature.

And frankly, the notion that the developers specifically designed this feature so they wouldn't have to work on the AI is baseless. You may spin an insidious theory behind the reason why developers included this feature (i.e., laziness), but it's exactly that: spin.

I don't understand why this community is so upset with every new thing CA adds, declaring that all it does is detract from existing issues...and then wonders why CA is not innovating and being more creative with its game design. Am I the only one that sees something wrong here?

You can't eat your cake and have it too.

Something I noticed in another thread posted by someone else

http://static.jvn.com/files/data/med...r-pc-67928.jpg

I'm pretty sure by the looks of it the guys on the other side will at least see what army they will have and are facing and what the conditions are.

I don't understand why this community is so upset with every new thing CA adds, declaring that all it does is detract from existing issues...and then wonders why CA is not innovating and being more creative with its game design. Am I the only one that sees something wrong here?

Which is why some of us stated dozens of times that no matter what CA does, people will find ways around it to scream and cry about it. Nothing you can do about it.

Originally Posted by hitokiri2486

The problem with your argument is that it rests upon the assumption that the developers have sacrificed any AI improvements for this drop-in feature.

And frankly, the notion that the developers specifically designed this feature so they wouldn't have to work on the AI is baseless. You may spin an insidious theory behind the reason why developers included this feature (i.e., laziness), but it's exactly that: spin.

I don't understand why this community is so upset with every new thing CA adds, declaring that all it does is detract from existing issues...and then wonders why CA is not innovating and being more creative with its game design. Am I the only one that sees something wrong here?

You can't eat your cake and have it too.

All we want is for them to fix the BAI before moving on to other features. Thats the point. The game is worthless to me and many others if the BAI is borked. If thats having your cake and eating it too, then I guess I'll go eat some pie instead.

Originally Posted by irish437

All we want is for them to fix the BAI before moving on to other features. Thats the point. The game is worthless to me and many others if the BAI is borked. If thats having your cake and eating it too, then I guess I'll go eat some pie instead.

The point is, the success/failure of this feature does not have any affect on how good the BAI is. The BAI will either be good, okay, or bad, or somewhere in between. That's it. The AI won't 100% be bad because we have the option to play a human opponent in the campaigns, just like the AI wouldn't be 100% be good because we didn't have the option to play human opponents.

The correlation being drawn between the two is completely unfounded.