How does the AI in M2:TW compare to R:TW?

[QuintusSertorius]

I spent half an hour typing out an in-depth answer to your questions and suddenly my connection timed out. Once more unto the breech.

I'll be concise: yes. Keep in mind, though, that a faction with bad relations with you will probably violate the ceasefire after re-building their forces, unless another faction distracts them. But that's only natural.

Shame you lost that in-depth answer, I would have been interested in reading it.

If it were due to relations, I'd be fine with that. It's when you happen to share a border, thus you are attacked irrespective of any other engagement that gets tiresome.

To the first question, yes but it's expensive. The second question is a bit more complicated. Yes, they both had quite a lot to gain, especially since my armies in the theatre were generally weak. However, the decision to invade is balanced against the target faction's standings (global standing, or reputation, and faction standing, or relations) and risk. The Byzantines viewed Egypt - an ally of their nemesis, the Turks - as a weak and obvious target. Portugal is essentially sandwiched between two continental powers - the Moors and Castille - and take to the sea seeking Lebensraum. So, even though the English and Portuguese might have lukewarm relations, the rewards of a successful invasion far outweigh the risk. In some cases, the AI seems to behave irrationally when it is operating on a logical game mechanic. For example, Poland may start a war with Russia by blockading Russian ports simply because their navy is too weak to defend their trade-lanes, the lifeblood of the Rus' treasury. Basically, neutrality means nothing, standing means everything and weakness will be exploited. A close ally will likely remain a close ally. But neutral factions are wild cards.

To be fair, I've developed a theory base on my trawls through the descr_campaign_ai_db.xml file that the game has hardcoded "enemies" - or factions that will always remain rivals, which would explain a lot of the AI's behaviour.

Even that is an improvement, it's better than "your border touches on a body of water that ours does, therefore we will attack".

On your second, I don't have a problem with hardcoded enemies - as long who that enemy is can be altered. The Diadochi (the big three, that is) being hardcoded enemies would be fine, for example. After all they all want the same thing, to reunite Alexander's former empire under their banner.

On an endnote, the AI can be vastly improved by altering a few values in the game files. There's one line in the config_ai_battle.xml file that's massively powerful:

<friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>0.8</friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>,

this measures the balance of forces to determine whether an army should attack another army, on the campaign or battle map. In Vanilla, an army needs to be only 80% the size of an enemy's force to attack. By increasing the value to, say, 1.5 the AI will only attack with a 50% numerical advantage, which would eliminate most of the small-fry offensives.

That does sound promising.

By the way, why doesn't the medieval period interest you?

I just find it boring in the extreme. I'm a tabletop/PnP roleplayer and it's been done to death in fantasy games. When compared to antiquity it's such a small, poor and dull place. Compare how tiny medieval armies are compared to those in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, because every state was small and weak. Then we have the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, best epitomised in the abject failure that was Spain. Enough gold and silver was looted from the New World to have established Spain as the foremost power in the world, with the right investment in infrastructure even today it should have been a leading nation. Instead they wasted all that money gilding churches and fighting pointless religious wars. What's left to show for it now? We're talking about a nation where even into the early 20th century, they were still reliant on roads built by the Romans for transport.

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:

Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

I have to say, a less aggressive, less expansionist AI isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. So if it's over 1.0 that's bad, but 0.95 or so would be good. I play a very slow game, the AI on the other hand blitzes all the time. Factions shouldn't be wiped out within 50 turns of the game starting, as often happens in EB1.

[moonburn]

and with the tweaks the ai will get they won´t (unleass you play as the seulekids since if you do you need to get rid of the armenians pontians pergamese and kick out the egyptians out of messi asia fast if you wanna survive the eastern push that the phalava baktrians and takashilians will make on your eastern border and considering that your eastern regions are you worst developed and less able to create soldiers ... ) ofc you can always turn the pergamese the pontians and the armenians as protectorates i don´t know how that will work

as for your remark regarding spain you´re being a bit unfair what you call spain is a federation of "countries" and troughout their entire history they always had problems in exerting authority over those same regions to put it blatantly only the castillans during the time period you refer to pulled their own weight the galicians asturians basque aragonese catulunians valencians and so forth where always fighting and promoting instability to get political advantages and autonomy

also during this period spain made the mistake to add the portuguese to this entire mix with further unstabalised their core regions and depleted castille and leon´s hability to run their empire if you combine that with the dutch english and french constant pressure you can´t expect them to fight in so many fronts

there where probably more rebellions and major armed combat in what you call spain today then the fights they had to conquer their empire

also before it was the kingdom of castille and leon spain comes from hispania wich meant the entire peninsula so they only adopted that name to try and get a new "suport" and unify people under one banner so spain means the united iberians

the church was suported because it was one of the most effective ways to try and keep the unity of the country just as giving it a new flag and name and the english didn´t mind the church much when they used it´s comunication networks to get the spanish to rise against napoleon and suport wellington

also the rulling elite of spain where the hapsburgs so if you wanna see the infrastructure that that gold bought you should visit the checz republik hungary or austria and even the netherlands

the gold was used to buy social peace not only in "spain" but also the low countries and in the austrian hungarian empire

ofc france had the same problem with corsica bretagne and so forth just as the english did with the scots welsh and irish

please avoid making remarks wich are uncalled for particulary now that once again spain is having to contend with the independists again (if they suceed and i kind of hope they do the corsicans and the scots are next in this new europe )

[Rex Somnorum]

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:



Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

I actually got that particular value from the ReallyBadAI mod, where the AI is more aggressive. At much higher values, like 1.7 or 2, passivity might be a problem, but I haven't seen it at 1.5.

I just find it boring in the extreme. I'm a tabletop/PnP roleplayer and it's been done to death in fantasy games. When compared to antiquity it's such a small, poor and dull place. Compare how tiny medieval armies are compared to those in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, because every state was small and weak. Then we have the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, best epitomised in the abject failure that was Spain. Enough gold and silver was looted from the New World to have established Spain as the foremost power in the world, with the right investment in infrastructure even today it should have been a leading nation. Instead they wasted all that money gilding churches and fighting pointless religious wars. What's left to show for it now? We're talking about a nation where even into the early 20th century, they were still reliant on roads built by the Romans for transport.

Inflation due to that very gold, combined with high taxation, contributed most to Spain's fall. Not so much religion.

[Rex Somnorum]

Last night, I ran some tests to see how influential that ratio really is. I unpacked a fresh copy of Vanilla and played 20 turns on M/M as Egypt for a control. I then increased the ratio to 1.0 and played Egypt again for 20 turns. After that, I increased the value to 1.5 and played Egypt for another 20 turns. At 1.0, I didn't notice much change from 0.8, except that the AI tended to build bigger armies (which is the whole point). At 1.5, the AI expanded at a slighter slower rate (it took essentially 1.5 turns for some factions to take a province that originally took 1 turn) than for 0.8 and 1.0. However, I did notice a few factions build huge armies and park them next to a settlement. In other words, a value of 1.5 resulted in a minor increase in passivity. On a harder difficulty, the should be more aggressive, too. It's important bear in mind that 20 turns in EB equates to 5 years, so a hyper-aggressive AI might expand too quickly. I think that anywhere between 1.0 and 1.5 would be ideal for EB.