AI recruitment - problems

[Ironsword]

I have great fun battling away in MTW, but sometimes I want to give the AI more of a chance... :sweatdrop: As, the way I see it, the AI is always limited because;

a)Too many peasants, - I know that they have been dropped from some of the mods... A good thing!
b)Way, way too much siege - Is there a mod out there that can limit the crazy AI stockpiling of ballista and catapults? Or is this hardcoded?
c)No mercenaries; - This is hardcoded I believe.
d)In my experience the AI often ends up with lots of micro units; 7 arbalesters, 14 Halberdiers etc. These are annoying, not least as they are easy to rout due to their low numbers, which affects their comrades morale. Does the AI retrain or is there a way to stop this happening?
e)Finally, am I correct in assuming that the AI will never disband an obsolete unit and replace it a better one?

That said, overall the AI is pretty decent, I just wish there were a few ways to tweak these annoyances!

[drone]

Ditch the peasants, you can do this by clearing the building requirement column in the unit_prod file (currently {CASTLE}, i.e. a Fort). This leaves them available for revolts and starting forces though, which is fine.

Not sure about Ballistas. The Unit Choices column in the unit_prod might allow you to cut down on the siege craziness, but I'm not sure how those numbers work.

I think you are stuck with the others.

[Martok]

As drone has already addressed the first two issues, I'll do my best to tackle the other three:



c)No mercenaries; - This is hardcoded I believe.
Correct. In working on the Pocket Mod, Cambyses II found the only way to equalize things was to eliminate mercs entirely (which we did). It's an admittedly not-entirely-satisfactory solution, but it seemed the lesser of two evils. :shrug:



d)In my experience the AI often ends up with lots of micro units; 7 arbalesters, 14 Halberdiers etc. These are annoying, not least as they are easy to rout due to their low numbers, which affects their comrades morale. Does the AI retrain or is there a way to stop this happening?
e)Finally, am I correct in assuming that the AI will never disband an obsolete unit and replace it a better one?
Unfortunately no, the AI does not retrain or disband units. That's one reason why some players choose to execute all prisoners after a battle, as doing so frees up the AI to train full fresh units (and hopefully of better quality).

[macsen rufus]

Not sure about Ballistas. The Unit Choices column in the unit_prod might allow you to cut down on the siege craziness, but I'm not sure how those numbers work.


It's a bit long-winded but you can do it, if you're comfortable editting the unit_prod file. Each unit has an entry which shows the likelihood of each "AI personality" recruiting it that runs along the lines: "Deperate_defence(100), catholic_naval_expansionist(50).....close_to_support_limit(1)" etc.

If you turn down these values by a substantial amount, the AI will train a lot fewer of the particular unit - (1) is a good value, not impossible to acquire, but not common either :2thumbsup:

There is also another column which covers "rebelling troops types the unit can belong to", with entries like "Muslim_peasants (20), Muslim_loyalists (5)..." etc. I usually edit siege engines so that they have 0 chance of appearing in rebellions. There's nothing more pointless than a stack of "peasants" turning up for a rebellion with nothing but a single mangonel :laugh4: You can just see it, down on the farm:

Peasant 1: "Gah! Taxes keep rising..."
Peasant 2: "And the King's a heretic, been ex-communicated I heard..."
Peasant 3: "Well, I heard the garrison's left and gone to invade Pomerania."
Peasant 1: "Now's our chance boys, grab your pitch-forks!!!"
Peasant 2: "Pitch-forks are soooo 11th century..... lets's build a MANGONEL!"

:clown:

[Ironside]

About the peasants, adding the muster field from VI works very well to (iirc it's only to copy-paste it from the VI building file and change the building requirement in the way drone mentioned). Drops the AI peasants with about 80-90%, only province that will still seriously produce them is Provence due to the bonus.

The Egyptians benefit mostly from that one.