Battle Difficulty (an experiment)
Let me start by saying that I'm blown away by this mod, and nothing in this post is to put down AE. The work the team has done in taking everything they can out of the Attila engine is nothing short of amazing, and this is quickly shaping up to be one of my favourite mods of all time. My intent here is simply to present the my experience with the battle A.I. and results of some testing. After all, the mod is in BETA phase.
The main problem with the Battle A.I. in my opinon, is that it's incapable of moving its forces in formation, or conducting manouvres efficiently. The A.I. rarely attempts flanking or encircling you, opting instead to throw massive piles of men on few points of your line, making it trivially easy to encircle them in turn, even when they have the numerical superiority. When facing an enemy of equal size or slightly bigger (around 1.5:1), my usual casuality rating on normal is 200-500 men to the enemies 2000-3000 men. I mostly play as the Romans, but have encountered this issue with the Punics also.
To illustrate this, I've conducted 2 custom battles, one on Vanilla, the other on AE. Both battles have been fought using Normal difficulty. To be fair, my numerical inferiority was slightly bigger on the Vanilla test, and the enemy had a few more elite troops. However, as you'll soon see, I believe the deciding factor is the A.I's use of its forces.
On the Vanilla battle I'm fighting as the Gaets against the Jutes. The armies are nearly identical, with the exception that the A.I. has a slight advantage on infantry, while I have 2 bow units to draw them into attacking. I start the Battle in stretching my frontline wide and putting some elite troops in reserve to flank and counterattack possible breaches. The A.I. has all it's infantry in a single line, and after some encouragement from my archers, it charges in a single, cohesive movement.
On my weaker left flank, the A.I. uses its superiority to envelop my line. On the rest of the line it uses its numbers to do massed assaults against single units where it can afford it. The important thing is that my entire front line is engaged. I can't use my reserves for fancy shmansy manouvers, because I have to keep feeding them to counter the envelopment of my left flank and fill the gaps in my line. Ultimately, my army is broken in two, and both halves of my line are enveloped. The Result:
On AE I fought as Rome against AI Rome to ensure a level playing field. Both armies have the same amount of elite units, while I gave the A.I. 2 extra Hastati. I grabbed a unit of missile cav to draw the AI into attacking. At the start of the battle both armies are in almost identical formations, with the exception that I've set my infantry into three lines instead of two.
I move my formation closer, but the AI smartly keeps its defensive positions. To encourage them, I send my missile cavalry to harass them. And then this happens:
My Charge of the Light Brigade sends the AI army into such a panic, that they start rushing down the hill to my left, not having even thrown their pilas at my cavalry, who likewise haven't had the time to open fire. I halt my ferocious assault to see what the AI does next. Having reached the safety of the bottom of the hill, the AI Generalissimo starts plotting a counter-offensive. I send my cavalry unit to troll him a little more. Under the preasure of my renewed assault, the AI decides there's no time for subtlety. He opts for the tactic of forming his infantry into a single moshpit of mayhem, which he then sends charging towards the general direction of my army:
The brunt of the force is rushing towards my left wing, so I send 2 reserve units (1 Hastati, 1 Triarii) to guard the flank. While the start of the battle has been rather comic, the rest of the engagement follows the pattern of most campaign battles. About a third of the enemy army crashes against my left flank. The rest of the units keep running straight ahead, until they are evenly distributed across my line. On my right flank, the 2 furthermost hastati are left twidling their thumbs, so I send them to flank the enemy. On my left flank, where the enemy would have enoguh men envelop my flank if it would so desire, it has instead piled 5 of its units against my 3, so I send a single reserve unit of Principes to envelop the AI instead:
The unit of hastati you see there on the back is one of my units from the right wing, where the enemy is already being ground to dust. The lone red dot you see there on the upper right corner of the tactical map, is the AIs general unit, which has staid put through out this entire battle. From here, the battle is over in 3 minutes. Also, as you can tell from the unit roster above, I have 1 unit of Triarii and 1 unit of Principes still in reserve. This means that of the forces engaged in battle, the AI has had 4 unit superiority (720 men), and I've still managed to envelop it completely with no more than 3 flanking units.
While in vanilla the enemy had a slightly bigger advantage, I think the deciding factor here was in its ability to coordinate its forces. The only problem that's common to both battles is that the enemy leaves its general behind. It should also be said, that while this is the first experiment I've documented for Beta testing porpouses (and for your reading pleasure), this isn't the first time I've made this observation. In the historical battles, and in the battles I run into in the vanilla campaign, I have to use the pause button more often, readjust my tactics and do manouvres to outsmart the enemy. Could it be that the Attila AI can't handle the slightly slower pace of AE battles?
I'm a big fan of most of the ways the AE battles are different from the Vanilla. The pace is slower, the engagements last longer and my god those unit models are gorgeous! The basic mechanics seem to have all the charm of DEI battles with none of the tedium.
But please, look into the AI.
P.S. My apologies for the shoddy graphics. I'm gaming on a laptop.
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Originally Posted by Petellius
