Nothing like the Youtube Videos

**Quacka** · February 28, 2010, 04:14 PM

So Ive been playing Empire total war for awhile now but something always bothers me.

First off the AI I face seem so stupid compared to the ones I see people go against in you tube videos.
Basicly When I watch people fight AI on youtube they seem to have nice Battles where its your line VS there and some little variation but when I fight the AI They just seem to run all over the place and half the time they dont even shoot. They just run into my forces or run right up to them and do something dumb. Can someone help me figure out if this is normal behavior or am I doing some wrong to provoke this behavior.

Ive posted this image below to help explain what I mean. this happens within the first 3 min of battle. I moved my men forward to confront the enemy. The enemy then starts moving units all over the place. You look in the distance the enemy just charges my light infantry without ever firing a shot. In the foreground you can see there is a big mess of units. Some shooting. Some randomly doing a square formation. and some charging me. This all makes little sence in my eyes as my light infantry absorb the the charge and my line infantry slaughter them from a distance. Note that the enemy had an equal force.

**Lumina** · February 28, 2010, 06:14 PM

Because they Broke the AI when they tried to make it Smarter, the AI is trying to react to too many different things going on in the battle, it's very unorganized and very confusing. A lot of games similar to this have issues with AI trying to be too complicated, but the issue here is the AI doesn't even form into lines very well, often charges without any real reason, and sometimes runs about like a crab lost at low tide, or Mr Zoidburg from Futurama when he lost his sandwich.

This is why I always Preech the Pre Patch AI was better than this, it was so retarded it would defend by standing there behind stone walls under Artillery fire for two in game hours until the player gets so frustraited with the solid shot in early campaign being useless against a stone wall that you charge your troops up the hill into troops behind a bullet proof wall and actually suffer casulties, much better than the blob mantality the AI has now, one explosive shell can take out 50+ men if not 100+ men sometimes if lucky. I had cannon balls just a normal round ball wipe out a dozen + men in a single shot because the AI bunches up so much, its a round ball!!! why do they blob up!? Round ones are for hitting hardened targets not infantry.

AI used to be more direct, less reactive, and more stupid, which actually made it better. Yes an idiot could outflank them and rape them, but even the early AI would send cavalry in flank moves like it does now, but the line infantry performed so much better as it was less likely to banzai charge.

**SMIDSY** · February 28, 2010, 06:24 PM

A lot of the Youtube vids you are seeing are probably taken in multiplayer against another person.

**Lumina** · February 28, 2010, 06:37 PM

Even the trailers for this game had troops running around in a crappy way as the designers most not of known anything about the era of warfare. They ran around in 5-6 rank deep square like formations.

I know there are column formations but ..... actually road columns I'd love to see on ETW but the maps still need to be 10 times larger and each battle should take 3-5 hours most of the time with fog of war and line of sight based scouting and locating of enemy movements and such..... gah why did Take Command have to be far more tactical than Empire... atleast Empire is prettier in most cases. lol