AI presentation issues

[hep]

I've just watched the siege AI presentation at EGX rezzed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj05Ll1Mark - Video

http://gdcvault.com/play/1023038/Hav...ing-the-Castle - presentation slides

An excellent presentation that went into a good level of depth, for anyone who is interested in how the game itself works this is a must watch video.

It also showed off some good new detail on certain units e.g. chaos spawn and cairn wraiths

Well done CA on their transparency and communication.

However, there were issues in the way that the battle AI is intended to work, which this presentation highlighted.

Because this was a good presentation which exposed the inner workings of CAs product, any criticism should be constructive, so that CA don't feel that releasing this video was a mistake.

Right, now that's been said onto the criticism.

Design philosophy

There are five warhammer siege goals as stated by CA:

• Fast high intensity battles
• single attack direction
• focus the battle on the city walls
• quick resolution once past the walls
• press the defender quickly and broadly

CA have said a few times now that their intention is to create "fast battles with high intensity", this was repeated today. I suspect this is a major factor in the fast battles in previous games which receive a lot of negativity (including from myself). This isn't a fault with the finished product, because the finished product works as intended.
Depending on your point of view it is a problem/feature of the design philosophy. What this means is that nothing is broken/bugged and this will be present in the finished product.
Its also worth noting that 3 of the 5 goals there mention battle speed, this is obviously a major concern of CAs. I personally enjoyed the slower battles from previous total wars so it would be interesting to know what are the thoughts behind CAs slow battle concerns.

CA have said that "the walls are key" and that once you are past the walls it should be a quick finish, again this may result in less street battles, which could be an issue if you enjoy a battle where you have to fall back to a secondary defense point, but from the videos we have seen, the street battles don't seem to be reduced too much.
I suspect they have positioned the victory point closer to the walls so that the attacker doesn't take as long to reach the defenders at the choke points.
This could help the AI's separate attacks to happen at the same time, instead of a piecemeal stream of units.
Personally I think a closer victory point could be beneficial to the game, but it remains to be seen.

"quick to battle", this philosophy is probably behind the defensive towers being able to attack the entire deployment zone, which pushes the attacker into assaulting quickly before loosing too many units to ranged fire.
Personally I think this is a mistake, particularly if you like artillery heavy armies such as the empire and dwarfs.
and it is probably behind "pocket ladders" which means every unit has access to a method of climbing the walls without having to slowly walk with siege equipment.
In a siege the attacking force has absolute control over when the attack takes place, unless the defender chooses to sally forth.
By pushing "quick to battle" onto the player, CA are pushing certain tactics to be more viable than others, instead of allowing the player to make their own choices about how they want to play the game. I think this will feel more frustrating for the player rather than challenging.
Personally I think it is flawed because the attacking player doesn't have control over the attack. The defender has control over the attack by choosing to occupy certain sections of wall or not. (occupying certain sections of wall activates the defensives towers).

Overall strategy implementation

CA have shown us the architecture of how the battle AI and siege AI looks at the overall strategy.

The "grand tactical analyzer" works for the battle AI and looks at the overall battle and determines the objectives that each detachment (group) of units will perform.
The intended purpose of each subsection of the grand tactical analyzer seems rational, it seems like CA have a decent architecture in place to provide a good AI.
Where the AI fails is probably due to exceptions which the logic doesn't consider, design philosophy and the inability to call off an attack.

Exceptions which the logic doesn't consider are always going to be present in games until an AI that actually learns from previous mistakes has been created. Unfortunately this is a case of repeated testing, feedback and patching. These are typically the "gamey exploits" that get used by the human player.

The design philosophy covers heavily scripted events such as quest battles, e.g. if CA script the AI to be stupid then it will be stupid.
and such features as the "fast high intensity battles" so If CA want the melee combat to start quickly, then the AI will try and engage melee combat early, regardless of whether it would be beneficial for the AI to hold back with a ranged advantage (see azhags quest battle).

It was mentioned that "the AI wont ever withdraw", which can be seen in previous games for example in shogun 2 you would successfully defend against a siege and still have most of your army left, but the AI would still continue the attack even when it had only the general unit left against a near full army.
The AI not being able to withdraw is a fundamental flaw in the overall strategy.
Fleeing from battle is not withdrawing, withdrawing would be a controlled walk to the edge of the map (so that they could defend themselves) then fleeing, to preserve as much of their army as possible.

When the AI can be exploited/gamed due to unforeseen exceptions, but must continue the attack because it cannot withdraw, then the AI will always perform badly, these are fundamental failures of TW AI that have been present in many games.
e.g. rome 2. you would set up a unit of pikemen in a chokepoint, which was an overly powerful defense, and the AI would not be able to withdraw after suffering enough losses to realise that its tactic is not working.
Gamey tactics will still be very much possible in TW:W, unless the AI is given the ability to; withdraw, call off an attack or learn how well that tactic is working.

Also, if the AI was attacking a city it could not begin the assault, suffer enough losses to realise the assault was not going to work and then withdraw and maintain the siege on the campaign map. The AI has to fully commit with the attack, regardless of circumstance.

Specific tactics

it was stated that the grand tactical analyzer is not present in sieges due to the tactics being the same during siege attack regardless.
e.g. take the walls, then take the victory point.
CA showed the layout of options that were available to the AI and "holding back and bombarding" will not be possible for the AI as it is not an option and because it has no way of deciding to hold back or advance forward because it doesn't have a grand tactical analyzer.

The AI will attempt multiple simultaneous attacks, one of which is bombarding the walls to break the walls and create entry points.
However, the AI could have a huge ranged advantage, which could cause your defending melee heavy army major losses, but they will still try and melee the walls from the beginning, regardless. They have no way of considering an initial melee assault a bad idea, due to no grand tactical analyzer.

This will be terrible for AI armies which have strong artillery and weaker melee infantry. The melee infantry will have begun their assault and may be thrown away by the time the artillery has done damage to the walls and units. In the demonstration battle they showed the artillery destroyed the wall after the melee infantry had reached the walls and engaged in combat.
When this is paired with the inability to withdraw then the siege AI it is effectively just throwing its units at you regardless of circumstance.

The one redeeming feature is the implementation of a "reserve pool", this allows the AI to withdraw units out of an assault (based on circumstance), back to the reserve pool and back into a different assault.
However, this will not stop the AI from throwing most of its melee infantry at you from the beginning regardless.
It also does not give the artillery time to be useful.

Siege battles will feel very similar due to the AI not being able to consider alternative tactics, particularly with similar layouts between cities.
It also will be fairly easy for the human to recognise the patterns and create gamey tactics to counter those patterns.
I also did not see any option for the artillery to destroy the defensive towers, it seems like it will just attack the walls directly infront of it and then units in the city.
The only options I saw for the artillery (and the rest of the units for that fact) were:
Assault walls, assault gates, breach walls.
Hopefully this doesn't result in heavy artillery losses and the AI not doing anything about it due to the defensive towers ranged attacks, once the rest of the units are past the walls. if you keep a unit on that section of wall.

CA showed how they set the perimeter of the city so that the AI knows where the walls are. This is so that the defending AI knows the perimeter to stay within. CA did say that the image was a representative and not an actual image, but it doesn't seem to work very well for the gates.
The 2D perimeter sits where the outside of the walls are, but it doesn't take into account the gate being slightly in from the walls.
The perimeter sits outside the gate, which allows the AI units to sit outside the gate, this is possibly responsible for the glitches in previous games where half of an AI unit would stick through the gate. either way I think it might have been sorted in later games, but if not, I hope this has been addressed so that units stay within the perimeters when they are meant to.

With that in mind, I don't believe the defensive siege AI has the option to send out cavalry or fliers to take out enemy artillery, but the defensive siege AI wasn't really discussed as much, so It could be possible, either way I hope it is. Because it is a viable tactic, especially with fliers.

In the event of a wall being knocked down, the AI spots this and send units from the reserve pool into this breach, there was no mention of considering which units were on the other side of the breach, e.g. a unit of pikemen in phalanx.
I hope they consider which units are defending the breach, so that they don't throw units away e.g. charging cavalry into a phalanx.

Reserves

This being the new feature of TW battle AI deserves its own special section. Personally I think it is a fantastic feature that allows the AI to re-analyze decisions that have already been made. The intention is excellent.

CA said, that if a tactic fails, units are sent to the reserve pool. Although it was ambiguous what causes a tactic to fail, I believe CA meant, things such as, if the siege tower is destroyed then the 2nd and 3rd unit that would have assaulted the walls via that tower would return to the reserve pool, to be allocated to a new/existing tactic.
I would like to see some clarification about what causes a tactic to fail though.

The main issue that I have with the reserves pool, is that CA said that units have to walk to a specific area (reserve pool area) before being re-assigned to a new tactic.

This means that a unit at the walls that has lost its siege tower would have to walk all the way back to the deployment zone before walking all the way back to the walls as part of a new tactic.
This is easily exploitable, e.g. hold fire on the nearly dead tower, until the tower is nearly at the walls, then destroy it so that the units spend longer walking back, which exposes them to more ranged fire.

Also they will tire more through walking more, and the reserves which are meant to reinforce certain tactics will not be able to reinforce those tactics when they are needed most, they will have to walk back and forth before reinforcing.

This reserves pool walking back and forth was very evident during the recent chaos/empire field battle. There was a heavy focus on bringing back a unit to the reserves pool as soon as the previous reserves allocation has been performed, there was little consideration that all of the units are currently in the right place so let them stay in place, until they can be brought back to the reserves pool.
I've provided evidence and a breakdown in this post.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1#post14927324

Summary

There were plenty of decent features mentioned here, but I haven't touched on them because they seem to work. I've only wrote about the features that need further work/consideration.

As always during the recent few games, CAs design philosophy is called into question, particularly with regards to fast battles etc.
This is a case of personal preference, but I would like to see a better effort on CAs part to accommodate for all tastes, e.g. battle speed settings.

The individual tactics of the battle AI does seem to be improved over the previous games AIs, which is particularly good seeing as we are at pre-launch. However their are plenty of exceptions that need to be accounted for.

The overall tactics of the battle and siege AI seems to have major issues that will result in throwing away units, which we have seen in a few videos so far and a lot in previous games.
That being said, they do look like they have the architecture in place to be able to fix the existing AI, rather than creating a new architecture which would have its own problems.
It sounds like the AI needs a few more tactics to choose from, e.g. withdrawing from battle.

CA need to make their list of exceptions per tactic as complete as possible, which means plenty of testing, plenty of feedback and plenty of patches.
Seeing as we are getting 3 games ,which all have to work together, CA should have been able to spend more time testing this AI at the end of the trilogy than any previous games, which hopefully should result in many improvements, unless their design philosophy blocks certain improvements.

The reserves pool is a welcome addition to the game and given enough testing and patches should become a good feature.

Conclusion

CA have the basis to create a good AI, but need to remove the design philosophy influences that hold the AI back. Testing and patches can fix the bugs/exceptions with the AI, but they need to be allowed to fix those errors in the first place, which seems to be what is holding the AI back.

[Markas]

I actually think the Siege AI is going to be challenging and competent... but it has come at the price of cutting corners (literally). My concern is that it will simply be a field battle with some obstacles rather than an entirely different system of battle. I also don't get the emphasis on fast, epic to me is not defined by a fast pace. S2 sacrificed scope for AI competence and S2 was great... but haven't we moved on from 2011? It seems a decision was made early on to maximise the AI with the use of things like Logic prefabs to allow AI hints across multiple layouts, along with decisions like magic ladders and towers covering the map- all leading to a fast City Assault scenario. I liked it when Age of Wonders 3 switched to limited walls and magic ladders, but that was turn based. Real time battles in TW are fast enough as it is.

[AlexSMD]

I actually think the Siege AI is going to be challenging and competent... but it has come at the price of cutting corners (literally). My concern is that it will simply be a field battle with some obstacles rather than an entirely different system of battle. I also don't get the emphasis on fast, epic to me is not defined by a fast pace. S2 sacrificed scope for AI competence and S2 was great... but haven't we moved on from 2011? It seems a decision was made early on to maximise the AI with the use of things like Logic prefabs to allow AI hints across multiple layouts, along with decisions like magic ladders and towers covering the map- all leading to a fast City Assault scenario. I liked it when Age of Wonders 3 switched to limited walls and magic ladders, but that was turn based. Real time battles in TW are fast enough as it is.

Yep I'm with you on this one. What's most important for me is that... well nothing here reminds of Rome 2... If it did you'd see 80% of the army blobbed up at the gates while the 20% was on the walls being destroyed.... or even a small amount of units standing outside the walls enjoying the view. Cavalry would rush through the blob to meet their doom at the defenders spears and the general would be the first to die.

The AI here spreads uses it's strengths and creates multiple ways to invade actively and aggressively in a quite cunning way for a TW AI which I did not expect.. It spread it's forces to utilize them to the max methinks and even kept reserves for when it would open holes in the walls so it can flank/create more chaos to the defender.

Overall if this was a standard normal difficulty custom battle AI... I'm more than happy with it, and the siege's feeling and style.. It's an Assault Focus Siege which for a change, I welcome

[hep]

Challenging, yes. Depending on the race. These are melee focused tactics, which the AI has to perform. So it will work for melee heavy armies like chaos, but not melee weak armies like bretonnia.

Competent, no. To be competent, regardless of race it would have to be able to perform a set of tactics that suited the race, the army and the circumstances. The siege AI can only perform one set of tactics, regardless of influencing factors. Which still doesn't make it competent because it has to be lucky for those circumstances to be in its favour.

After what I've seen today, I think the infantry will behave like its a field battle, but the cavalry and artillery wont. The cavalry wont be able to flank and will only be used late battle when most of the work has been done and the artillery will only start attacking your units in the latter half of the battle once it has breached its section of the wall.

I think it will be a battle that is won in deployment. match your units up to the enemy units stood on the opposite side of the wall to them, then use magic on the threatening units and your defense towers on siege towers/artillery. put a unit that is good at fighting monsters near the gate, and a unit or two of spearmen near the gate for when the cavalry try and charge through after the monster has broken through the gates.
Possibly have a flying unit attack the enemy artillery.

The AI won't be able to adjust to your plan, so it will work the same every time.

As soon as the battle looks unwinnable the AI should withdraw, and continue the siege in the campaign map to attempt to starve you out of the castle, which would force you to sally forth to break the siege or reinforce the army from another province. But this wont be possible as it currently is.

Although shogun 2 was one of the best in the series, the AI siege attacking was poor. The army would start split into 3 different deployment zones and would walk in a straight line towards your victory point, only the archers would stop to fire arrows. everything else would continue marching in a straight line, there weren't really any tactics tbh, it was very similar to how this sounds. march in a straight line with minor alterations.
The infantry were the first to attack the walls, so you'd deal with them first, then the archers, then the cavalry would dismount and attack the walls, then the general would dismount and attack the walls.
All because the AI couldn't withdraw.

I think many people will spot the patterns in the siege battles and begin to find them easy due to being repetitive. Just like shogun 2's siege battles.

I appreciate there have been big improvements in certain aspects of the siege battles, but I also think there is a lot more work to do before they are at a competent level. Which is frustrating, because a lot of the methods they are using will provide good results, but there is no method for the AI to recognise when those actions will likely produce poor results.
Which is crazy because the AI has the ability to recognise when certain actions will produce poor results in the field battles due to the "grand tactical analyzer", which has been removed from the siege battles, because of CAs design philosophy.

They have the ability to make a dynamic siege AI using the "grand tactical analyzer", but they have chosen not to, because they want battles which meet the 5 project goals (listed below) everytime, instead.

1. Fast high intensity battles
2. single attack direction
3. focus the battle on the city walls
4. quick resolution once past the walls
5. press the defender quickly and broadly

Therefore they will be using the fast assault tactics regardless of circumstance, which absolutely stinks of management interference, instead of allowing the AI team to make the best possible AI that they can, which could include these fast assault tactics where appropriate.
Those 5 goals sound positive and amazing, like many ideas during conceptualization, but not all good concepts turn out to be good ideas.

If they want to please more people with a decent siege AI, then at normal difficulty the AI should attack, regardless like it is now, but at hard difficulty the AI should use the "grand tactical analyzer" to determine better alternative strategies.

[lavez]

This is kind of sad, but in line with CA's game design since ... ever. AI holding back on a hill is 'boring', let's nudge it to attack. AI bombarding the player is 'unfun', let's nudge it to send units to the walls immediately. Pfff.

I've been tweaking a couple of CA's games already, such as removing all CAI handicaps and making minor battle adjustments, but so far my verdict is that the AI, be it in campaign or battle, simply isn't designed to weigh choices carefully and optimise strategy in a short, medium and long perspective/lookahead. Even in the tables available to us for modding, most parameters address AI's personality/flavour and level of aggression, rather than core logic.

And while a point could be made that it's possible to sufficiently dumb down/streamline the building/research part of campaign and adjust unit stats/battle mechanics to make the AI somewhat competitive without cheats, such a mod from the player's point of view would be so gimmicky/stripped-down-of-features so as not worth playing in the first place.

Which brings us to the core problem of challenge versus competition.

If you ramp up the difficulty in any vanilla CA title, you'll generally get a lot of epic fights that push your micromanaging and cheesing/glitching skills to their limits, as you try to 'game' the AI into unwinnable situations. But that is repetitive, it's a pattern that once mastered on highest game difficulty is simply no longer entertaining. Challenging, maybe, but mostly at first.

As for competition, CA seems to think that it's place is only in multiplayer battles against human opponents, and that making singleplayer AI actually competitive would either alienate the core singleplayer audience, or simply not be worth the effort. Which perhaps would be a bit easier to swallow, if we actually had the tools to change core AI logic, along with a good supply of proper AI documentation.

Right now, the time-consuming guesswork combined with a low spectrum of possible changes makes modding of AI/core game systems one of the least understood, most difficult and least rewarding modder pursuits. Which is kind of a shame, because no matter how many cool units, buildings and scripts you add to the base game, they're all kind of worthless if the AI simply isn't there. In fact, there've been a couple of mods already (such as DEI for Rome 2) where the AI needs even more cheating than in vanilla to pose a challenge, just because it doesn't understand the new player-created systems added to the game.

But I rest my case.

CA won't change and debating this point any further, even for the sake of a purely academic discussion, is a time wasted fighting windmills. Total Warhammer will be fun and will sell well regardless of our critical viewpoint on it's wasted potential to be something more, something different, something better - and not just in regards to AI, or the classic complaints of wrong sandals/banners/thickness-of-spear-shafts.

PS. What's even more hilarious, is the portfolio of their AI guy. With 21 years experience, he could easily be a lead game developer. Instead, his talent and experience are being wasted tailoring the AI to a ridiculous design paradigm set out by CA's gameplay department. Quite honestly, CA doesn't deserve this guy. Hope the salary is good, can't think of any other reason he's there in such a subservient role.

[Ichon]

This is kind of sad, but in line with CA's game design since ... ever. AI holding back on a hill is 'boring', let's nudge it to attack. AI bombarding the player is 'unfun', let's nudge it to send units to the walls immediately. Pfff.

PS. What's even more hilarious, is the portfolio of their AI guy. With 21 years experience, he could easily be a lead game developer. Instead, his talent and experience are being wasted tailoring the AI to a ridiculous design paradigm set out by CA's gameplay department. Quite honestly, CA doesn't deserve this guy. Hope the salary is good, can't think of any other reason he's there in such a subservient role.

The two main takeaways I had from the presentation about CA's design philosophy was that they understand there is a problem but not why there is a problem. It is actually a series of problems but anyway- the nature of turn based and real time does draw a more diverse mix of customers and CA seems to have made the decision to cater to both groups independently for the most part rather than blend the likes/dislikes.

So the first takeaway is that CA does have a design goal to make quick high intensity battles- they've never stated it so explicitly before but it was rather obvious in most instances that something like this had to be part of the design philosophy.

The second takeaway is that CA is trying to improve the player experience but is only now after several years of Steam metrics finally approaching some of the real issues which has been holding the franchise in place. As well there is now the computing power to do some new things is a real part of the reason as well.

I remember some of my favorite battles in MTW2 is when the AI actually realized it was likely losing and did a fighting withdrawal. It is actually quite a bit more difficult to pursue a retreating AI than occupy a solid defensive position and bait the AI into poor attacks and it was loads of fun because you already know you have probably won the battle but are now trying to prevent problems on the campaign map at the strategic level which linked the 2 game modes together in a very nice way.

The design choice to make the AI suicide its army in sieges I don't quite understand. It makes sense 90% of the time but the remaining 10% is very noticeable and just makes the AI seems, well- robotic and idiotic. This goes along with the tendency of the AI to launch siege assault earlier than it should. Some of that tendency has been mellowed and a few sieges in Rome 2 actually became a race for me to get 2 relief armies into range before my city garrison and reinforcing army starved. That added quite a bit to the strategy and made it feel like a real war was happening. Especially when I forgot I had marched in double time and was ambushed on the following turn by 2-3 enemy armies and had to do the most damage I could to make the next turn's battle winnable.

Anyway- I am not sure Warhammer game 1 will be a huge leap in the franchise after seeing this presentation but I actually feel by the end of Warhammer trilogy CA might have accomplished a few new things which are actually new, not slight variations on previous things.

[lavez]

The two main takeaways I had from the presentation about CA's design philosophy was that they understand there is a problem but not why there is a problem. It is actually a series of problems but anyway- the nature of turn based and real time does draw a more diverse mix of customers and CA seems to have made the decision to cater to both groups independently for the most part rather than blend the likes/dislikes.

So the first takeaway is that CA does have a design goal to make quick high intensity battles- they've never stated it so explicitly before but it was rather obvious in most instances that something like this had to be part of the design philosophy.

The second takeaway is that CA is trying to improve the player experience but is only now after several years of Steam metrics finally approaching some of the real issues which has been holding the franchise in place. As well there is now the computing power to do some new things is a real part of the reason as well.

I remember some of my favorite battles in MTW2 is when the AI actually realized it was likely losing and did a fighting withdrawal. It is actually quite a bit more difficult to pursue a retreating AI than occupy a solid defensive position and bait the AI into poor attacks and it was loads of fun because you already know you have probably won the battle but are now trying to prevent problems on the campaign map at the strategic level which linked the 2 game modes together in a very nice way.

The design choice to make the AI suicide its army in sieges I don't quite understand. It makes sense 90% of the time but the remaining 10% is very noticeable and just makes the AI seems, well- robotic and idiotic. This goes along with the tendency of the AI to launch siege assault earlier than it should. Some of that tendency has been mellowed and a few sieges in Rome 2 actually became a race for me to get 2 relief armies into range before my city garrison and reinforcing army starved. That added quite a bit to the strategy and made it feel like a real war was happening. Especially when I forgot I had marched in double time and was ambushed on the following turn by 2-3 enemy armies and had to do the most damage I could to make the next turn's battle winnable.

Anyway- I am not sure Warhammer game 1 will be a huge leap in the franchise after seeing this presentation but I actually feel by the end of Warhammer trilogy CA might have accomplished a few new things which are actually new, not slight variations on previous things.

We have to remember that M2TW was developed by the (now defunct) Australian branch, and that the company was more or less SEGA's property since second half of 2005. Meanwhile, their Horsham studio was in the early pre-production stages of their Warscape engine. It's not difficult to imagine that after the buyout kangaroos were sidelined over creative differences, logistical and financial considerations (their sway over Total war franchise pretty much ended, instead they developed/ported some mediocre console games until their eventual closure in 2013).

And it is true that M2TW battle tactics analyser had some great stuff in there (with sparks of brilliance in some vanilla battles), but the only modding team to date that actually managed to harness it's power was XAI, until it's eventual dissolution. Then the ham-fisted philosophy of forcing the AI's hand through historic battle scripts was put forward as a more efficient solution - which was perhaps convenient for the sake of integration into other mods, but came at a cost.

M2TW's diplomacy thread was also largely separate from the CAI thread, as was the wonky Diplo/CAI interface with the battle logic. It wasn't until later Warscape titles that we've seen some attempts to link the two, such as with Fall of the Samurai's land battle naval support or generally more predictable & logical CAI with Rome II/Attila titles, if you disabled the AI aggression ramp which turned the player into a single most hated entity on the campaign map once enough turns passed in the game.

And it is true that CA has a much better AI workshop now - an actual toolset with the data to comb through, as well as some human talent to boot. Which is precisely the point I was making - with the resources they have now, constraining the AI's growth by mistaken design paradigms is a sin. But I don't see that philosophy changing for Warhammer trilogy, especially after CA has made comments that they limited game features on purpose to make the AI more competitive (which is a populist argument; the AI is held back by primitive game design, not the other way around).

If we're lucky, cracks will begin to show in their next historic TW title, but that remains to be seen given stubbornness of their conservative upper management. The future belongs to AI-centric game design, where AI considerations dictate the scale and general game design, but as I see it, great deal of developers & publishers still refuse to accept it. As if they could halt technological progress and oppose industry-wide change to keep their games 'simple' and 'casual'¹! The nerve.

¹ games of the future will have scalable difficulty and features, as a result more involved players will no longer be held hostage by the 'wide public appeal, lowest common denominator, one-size-fits-all' developer-publisher mentality

[hep]

Some excellent detailed responses here.

CA trying to get rid of the "boring", "unfun" sections drives me crazy. You can see from the 5 siege goals (below) that someone at CA is trying to create "Hollywood" battles.

• Fast high intensity battles
• single attack direction
• focus the battle on the city walls
• quick resolution once past the walls
• press the defender quickly and broadly

Fast, intense, single attack direction, focus on the walls, quick resolution once past the walls, press the defender quickly and broadly. These aren't goals for a dynamic, adaptable battle AI, these are linear directions for a cut-scene. They literally say how the battle should play out, instead of saying how the computer should compete with the player.

If these were goals for a single linear quest battle e.g. AI chaos is assaulting Altdorf, then these goals would be fine, but they aren't...they are goals for every AI attacking siege battle in the game. These aren't goals to create a strategic battle.

Goals for an attacking siege battle AI should be more along the lines of:

• When artillery/ranged has softened the defenses by X amount or for X amount of time the assault can begin if winnable
• Don't throw units into unwinnable combats e.g. general against an army, the AI should attempt to preserve units, unless they have the expendable trait
• When the battle becomes unwinnable retreat to maintain a campaign map siege
• Attempt to get the player to sally forth to lift the siege, unless the assault looks winnable.
• Whilst on campaign map, when "play battle" button has been pressed, perform calculation strength and allegiance of nearby armies to determine how easily the defenders can be reinforced if the assault fails. If they can be reinforced increase odds of attempting an assault after bombardment, if they cannot be reinforced, reduce odds of attempting an assault.

I agree that patterns can be spotted and tactics can be repeated over and over again. Especially when the AI is assault focused, it makes it even easier when I can form a defensive line and know that the AI will come to me.
Basically what I'm doing is setting the same traps every battle and the AI is falling for them every battle, it needs to be able to detect my setup and perform a tactic to counter that setup.

If they really want intense Hollywood battles then they should look at how Hollywood creates tension & suspense in films.

As described by film director Alfred Hitchcock, "an audience experiences suspense when they expect something bad to happen and have (or believe they have) a superior perspective on events in the drama's hierarchy of knowledge, yet they are powerless to intervene to prevent it from happening.Suspense in thrillers is often intertwined with hope and anxiety, which are treated as two emotions aroused in anticipation of the conclusion - the hope that things will turn out all right for the appropriate characters in the story, and the fear that they may not."

They are trying to make the battles exciting and intense, but in reality they are killing the excitement and tension because you know that the AI doesn't pose a threat. It just becomes another boring grind.

They have the easy, normal, hard, very hard and legendary settings to be able to accommodate a wide variety of players. If they create the most capable AI possible and make that the "Very hard" setting, then disable some of its abilities each time you go down a setting then they would cater to all audiences and make a progressively hard AI, but they choose not to despite having the ability to make a better AI, simply because they are focusing on the wrong stuff.

They are removing the threat to create the tense scenario instead of boosting the threat to allow the tense scenario to create itself.

They are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

I seem to remember rome 1 having a fighting withdrawal ability, I could be wrong though. I never bothered getting MTW2 because rome 1 had been really buggy for me.

I agree, a fighting withdrawal is a difficult battle to face against, despite already having won the battle. You are trying to inflict as many losses as possible before they escape, which is far more difficult than trying to inflict losses whilst they are attacking you. Your artillery can no longer hit them when out of range because it cannot move at the same speed and fire, your archers struggle to move and fire well enough. You have to try and pick off stragglers with cavalry and swarm them with units, whilst avoiding having your bait & cavalry units being swarmed.

I assume CA have thought that a fighting withdrawal is boring and that the "all in" approach will be more fun. In reality what happens is that the AI throws its units at you, your defensive line (which probably is still in your deployment zone) shatters their units and then you get the choice to "end battle" or "continue".
I always click continue to leave myself in a stronger position on the campaign map, by clicking continue I then have to use my cavalry to chase down the fleeing army, which often takes longer than the battle itself because I cant put it on fast forward because I have to micromanage 4 units of cavalry that seem incapable of cutting down fleeing enemies.
It is by far the most boring part of TW.

When the battle has gone in your favour strongly, the AI should realise that it cannot win and begin a tactical retreat.
At this point the message box should appear that says "the enemy has started a tactical retreat, do you want to end battle or continue?"
Clicking continue should allow you to attack the withdrawing enemy. (which could still win the battle, if you make a mess of it).
You should still be able to shatter the AI armies, like normal, which would lead to a normal "battle won, end battle or continue?" message box, but this wouldn't happen as often because the AI shouldn't waste its units when it cannot win, this should only happen in situations where it is close enough that its worth the AI going all in.
What this would achieve is that their would still be a battle going on, right up until the last units have made it off the map, and it would be far more strategic. win-win.
If you didn't enjoy the fighting retreat, then you could "end battle" in the same way that you don't have to chase down the fleeing enemies.

In conclusion CA are trying to make the battles enjoyable and exciting, which is a good thing, but they are trying to directly make the battles enjoyable and exciting by putting you in the scenario, which they believe is enjoyable and exciting. e.g. getting rid of the boring bits and adding extra exciting bits.
Instead they should allow the enjoyment and excitement to indirectly manifest as a result of the emotions you've faced whilst playing the game. e.g. hope and anxiety.
All of this boils down to a severe lack of understanding by CA's management during the design phase.

[Ichon]

@hep- you should try a few battles without hitting "continue" because it actually does about the same damage as if you spend all that time chasing now. I've tried a couple battles of different size and chased down routers via "continue" and just hit "end battle" with less than 50 man difference in the enemy survivors. Unless you have enough cavalry to completely eliminate the enemy army there is no point wasting time if you need a second battle anyway. Only with cavalry based armies can I successfully eliminate 100% of enemy fleeing- most of the time with 4-5 cavalry you get 60% of the fleeing enemy and still have to fight next turn to wipe that army. When the difference is 220 vs 280 survivors unless your own army is less than 500 you'll win the resulting battle easily in autocalc and its not worth the time almost always.

More on topic- I think some of what CA is doing is based on various metrics they have seen in Steam where the vast majority of battles are autocalc with sieges especially high. Partly I find myself contributing to this as when I look at end of campaign even on legendary I'll often have 25 manual battles and 75 autocalc because I have to fight 1 battle every 3 turns in the first 60 turns on average and then only 5 more battles in the next 60 to 80 turns are close enough to require that much attention. I'll be honest- the improvements CA has made in autocalc (which is now about 75% accurate within +-10% casualties) to what my own results would be and the fact 10% casualties are healed in 1-2 turns I manually fight far fewer battles. Looking back at some of my old AARs I fought in 80 turn campaign with MTW2 mod about 60 manual battles.

There are a whole host of things which feed into that though but the result for me at least until recently with AoC and a couple Shogun 2 campaigns is that I feel more bored during TW's recent titles than I did in previous titles despite some clear advances by CA in some areas. The main factors to me are that higher tier units in recent titles are MUCH more clearly higher tier. In older TW you could have a chance to defeat a top tier unit with 2-3 lower tier units in the right terrain and the right units. That is hardly ever going to happen in Rome 2 or Attila or probably in Warhammer. Partially that is in response to people complaining about high tier units not being strong enough but mostly a result from both design decisions and driven by the move to the new unit HP system. In past TW the relative strength bar in battles meant very little and it wasn't unusual to win a battle where you're army was 20% the strength of an enemy army and occasionally if your own army was a full stack of militia/levies it might have trouble vs a much lower relative strength 2 family generals and a couple mercenaries.

Basically now battles are determined much more by army composition and less by tactics (though tactics certainly contribute heavily). The other issue which amplifies this is the amount of information players easily have about enemy armies. In MTW2 even armies about to enter battle with 1 tile away on campaign map had unknown units and spies had to actually level up to reliably uncover enemy units. That made the suspense much higher and the temptation to autocalc much lower with the result at least for me of- just 1 more turn... occur far more often.

Basically CA does try to cater to what they perceive as customer wants by listening to a stated reason without seeing the underlying motivations. IE if players mention they want to have better UI and information not hidden behind several screens/spy levels the implementation by CA is to make all spies easily able to detect 100% of enemy army compositions which remove suspense in planning in both campaign and battle maps.

I could actually write quite a bit on small changes that I think reduce replayability/one more turn/suspense but I am out of time tonight.

The final thing is that strategy games more than other types of games are more obviously reliant on how much information a player can receive to build and maintain tension. There is a reason for fog of war and LoS etc.