I've been playing the total war series since the beginning with Shogun 1 and I've never encountered an AI in a total war game as broken as the steam version of med 2 seems to be (at least for me). I took a break from total war after empire as I very much dislike the warscape engine and coming back to the series about a year ago i got med2 and Rome 1 on steam. And this simply isn't what it used to be, please don't think I'm mistaking the AI being stupid for it being broken, it was always stupid, now it just doesn't work. For example the AI would get stuck in a defensive siege about 10-20% of the time back in the day now its 90%. I so rarely beat a defensive siege by beating the AI, its always the timer. AI units will get stuck on every wall they garrison every single time, and in every battle (siege or field) a minnum of 2 or 3 AI units will be stuck in place on a constant moving-idle-ready cycle. On the campaign map the AI will have its last settlement besieged and a full stack 5 steps away, it will not move the stack, the last setttlement gets taken and the faction is destroyed. I could go on but you get the point. This is consistent across vanilla, kingdoms and the dozen or so mods i have tried, even ones that specifically mod the AI such as stainless steel. The path finding, The stuck units, the broken AI in general seems embedded in the core game.

I began to think that maybe i was remembering medieval 2 through rose tinted glasses and maybe it was always this bad, but I'm sure it wasn't. It was dumb sure, but i don't remember it being at all this broken. The game works excellent on my rig in terms or performance so there is no issue there. My thinking is that the steam patches, much like how they caused the black settlement glitch and made Rome 1 run on new systems like a fat kid in a marathon, has broke the Med 2 AI. Is there anyone who played the old disc version who is having the same issues or is it just me?