The more time I spend with the DB-files and playing the game I wonder if CA has made the choices too many and complex for the AI. I often encounter AI that has cities with no military buildings even though they have several provinces. I've seen region-capitals with all temples, coastal-towns with a harbour and a temple or a field. I've met empires, like Libya, that spanned all of north Africa and almost all of Iberia and they had not a single building capable of making siege engines.

Looking at the CAI files I understand that Rome II was a very ambitious project, and I think they wanted to make a very intelligent AI but it just fell to the ground with a loud whimper. If one play vanilla Rome II, the average player won't notice this because of how the AI can't handle food resource management and end up armies with no food and rebellions thus there aren't many big empires just small ones that rise and fall every other turn. When one decreases food as a destabilizing issue the AI can expand and these issues become very apparent by the mid/late game stages.

When looking back earlier incarnations the AI always had the possibility to get most from any region, even if they only had one. They could set up buildings for units, siege engines, food/growth, economy no matter what. Now the AI has to make choices, think and try to decide what is best and it does so poorly. And if they manage to set up a tri-region area with a balanced setup then their neighbour swoops in and takes a region and it becomes unbalanced again. If they make peace and the previous AI expands and take another region it does not demolish to build needed buildings. If it is a different culture it becomes a coin-toss what it builds.

RTW and MTW2 had all buildings in all cities buildable. ETW had military, research and some economic/happiness buildings in each city with raidable towns that you could improve for economy/religion/happiness. Both of these, preferably the former, are in my opinion far better than what we have now because the AI is not advanced enough. It's simply not enough to set up a table with preferred values for each building type and pray really hard that the AI understands and get it right.

I am posting this in the mod workshop section because we're the ones that will ultimately do something about this, if CA won't. We all want the AI to do things better. What I am going to do with my mod is to consolidate buildings and have fewer choices and rather let technology research set what units can be built at what time. This is a far simpler way for the AI, and also a far simpler way to edit as well.

What are thoughts of the rest of you on this subject?