What is the ReallyBadAI battle system and how can it be installed?

As we all know, the AI in Broken Crescent can sometimes get passive during battles, for example AI units will move towards you army in sally outs, etc but if you move away, they will retreat back to the edge of the map and redeploy there. They will often camp on top of a hill and cannot be budged from there. They will not cross river crossings for a million dollars and a holiday home in Hawai. The ReallyBadAI system makes the enemy units somewhat more active on the battlefield. However, this comes at the cost of increasing the campaign script length by four times !!! - while adding lots of code in other places, potentially making everything run a little slower on some computers, so install it at you own risk!

So here is how you do it. You can download the submod from HERE. You will find a description with installation instructions in THIS thread and further installation instructions HERE. However, attachments and images have gone missing and so I will add some more explanations:

Download and install the entire submod into your Medieval II folder called mods. It is the same folder in which you will find Broken Crescent being installed.

When the first part of the installation finishes, you will find a tickmark next to a question saying something like "search for my mods". If you leave the tickmark as it is and click on Finish at the bottom of that window, a very clever tool will go through your mods and if you do not have as many as I do, it should list all of them, including Broken Crescent, Buff and Shine and so on. Then you can choose the mod you want to install the ReallyBadAI system for. After installing itself, the g5 mod will create a backup of all the files it has changed. Then, if you do not like the mod, or if you get tired of it, or whatever, you can copy paste those files back onto your mod and your mod will revert to how it was before installing the latest version of ReallyBadAI. Quite clever and nice to have.

What does it change in Broken Crescent?

One the plus side:


  • The AI micromanages more effectively and seems quicker to respond, especially when its units are fresh at the start of the battle.
  • It tends to stay more active in bridge battles than the current AI and will cross a river crossing. That's usually not a good idea for the AI but sometimes it can succeed.
  • I have the feeling that AI units are more effective when defending in a siege. They seem to cause more kills when fighting, e.g. in the streets. I had occasionally several units of light spearmen breaking from fighting a single AI cavalry unit in the streets of a settlement. I do not know how to explain this but it may be that the AI pathfinding is superior to the human player's or that it gets a morale boost when defending a settlement (outside the town plaza) or some such thing.
  • Overall it is very good, perhaps the best battle AI around, when it comes to individual AI units responding fast to the human player's moves.


On the interesting side:


  • The AI does not try to hold its formation so much, so individual units are more likely to charge here and there. They don't try so much to return to their formation if the human player moves away. So the AI tends to be less passive.
  • The AI likes to camp on top of hills and will not move from there easily, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The current battle AI by GrandViz does the same but maybe less so.
  • When the AI moves back when you sally out when besieged, it really moves all the way back to the edge of the battle map and camps very close to the edge of the map.
  • One thing I found frustrating is that if you give a command to a missile cavalry unit to skirmish some 50 meters away or more, if that distance is more than 4 horsemen wide by x men deep (x can be 30 or more horsemen if you are playing on huge), then your skirmishing horse archers go into a long narrow formation, with the first 4 moving off, then another 4 behind them, then another 4, until this ridiculously long narrow formation is formed that tries to skirmish away. Now the AI units are so quick at responding and at charging after the human player's units that even infantry can catch up now with these long formations by the time the last horsemen have started moving. Also I was hoping to see unit sizes increased by 70%, so some skirmish cavalry may have up to 170 horsemen in a unit, but then micromanaging your skirmishing cavalry could get very awkward.
  • You can exploit this boosted-up liveliness of the AI to tire it with a couple of small fast moving units at the flanks, so this can sometimes feel more tedious rather than more fun, depending on how you like to play.
  • I also feel the g5 ReallyBadAI of Germanicu5 discourages the human player from choosing large or huge unit scale, because microing your own units works best for smaller unit sizes.
  • The fact that the AI is more effective when defending in sieges means that you almost always now get a better result from autoresolving a siege as an attacker, whereas previously you rarely ever did, which you may like or you may not.


On the minus side:
  • The Really Bad AI makes the current Broken Crescent 2.4.2 campaign script 4 times as long !!!!!! This may have effects on the campaign and turn times for some computers. Check that it does not cause campaign lag and that it does not affect turn time too much. If it does, see if it is possible to move your game folder to an SSD or a disk partition that has plenty of free space in it and check again for campaign lag.