A new challenge: Can you win a Rome II campaign on easy?
Can you win a Rome II campaign on easy?
Can you even go past the first 20 game turns after patch 2?
I expect some of you will think this is funny. Prove me wrong but I sincerely believe this is a real challenge, on two conditions: 1. You do not start a war first. 2. You only autoresolve battles.
Quite a few people put Let’s plays on YouTube showing how they can beat the game. Nearly all have something in common: attacking too early, before the AI is ready. There are only a few post-patch 2 Let’s plays on YouTube. This videoclip
is one I made from a game post-patch 2, a patch that made some fixes to the campaign AI. I could never get past game turn 15 or so. This short Let’s play (the campaign part is only six and a half minutes) mainly shows the most important moves by the AI. The patch 2 AI was meant to improve the campaign and make it more difficult and this is really the case under one condition: not invading first. Most players very familiar with the Total War series tend to invade as soon as possible, even more if they are in a blitz challenge, attacking from game turn 1.
The campaign AI has to deal with a large number of factions and to make decisions for all in a short time with a program that is much much smaller than the human brain. It takes a few turns for it to settle, and sometimes the AI has hard limits not to attack before the first 4 turns or the first 10 turns. Expert human players are intuitively aware of that and attack as soon as possible. The second “problem” is that the AI will not attack the human player unless several measures such as military strength, production, number of settlements, units per length of faction border, comparisons of alliances, etc have been determined over a few turns and are in some cumulative favour for the AI. This can mean that the campaign AI will not attack unless it considers itself twice as strong in at least some of these parameters. By attacking the AI before the AI is ready to attack the human player, you give yourself an early advantage.
After a few conquests, let’s say a couple of settlements won in the first 3-4 game turns before the AI can react, the human payer may become the strongest faction in this game. That is serious, perhaps more so than in other games in the Total War series. Once disadvantaged to the point that it is not longer confidently stronger, every AI-controlled faction will tend to go on the defense (i.e. it will not attack the human player’s unguarded settlements) and eventually go into deep-defense, which means it will become practically completely passive. The players who complain that the CAI is completely passive, should start to worry about how they play the game. It is a little bit like playing a game of chess when your opponent has not yet arrived. It does not matter who your opponent is supposed to be, and whether you “beat” him, if he was not actually present. The names – hard, very hard, legendary - and settings mean nothing, if the player has broken the AI. Playing a lifeless campaign against a passive AI is not all that exciting. And when playtesting, think of the average player, of 90% of the gamers out there, who will not start with the intention of breaking the AI from game start. Maybe think how much enjoyment are they going to get from being beaten within 15 game turns on every campaign they start, because no one has really playtested this game for the average player.
Any of you who think the AI is not good enough, if you really want a challenge, you can play this game even on easy, just let the AI attack you first. Then you know that the AI has put itself together to the point where the developers think it can be a challenge to you. So, only invade or declare wars after the campaign AI has attacked you. Only autoresolve battles. See if you can win or even if you can just capture 2-3 settlements, with which faction and post how you did it.
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Originally Posted by Geoffrey of Villehardouin
out of North Africa worked for time, but now the enemy is ridiculously powerful. To make matters worse, they've all allied, so my city garrisons and such are pitted against a multinational force, often from both the land and sea. Compounding my problems are the massive slave populations as a result of looting the North African coast before the city itself rebels. (Whoops) I can't lower taxes because I need to support my military, and I can't figure out how to free the slaves besides slaughtering them on the battlefield when they revolt. 
