campaign difficulties affecting AI expansion

[seleucid empire]

Hey has anyone else seen different ai factions dominating on different difficulties?
i realized while playing vanilla Rome that the Egyptians own all of the est on medium campaigns and the seleucids own all of the east in H or VH campaigns
I also noticed it in EB, where the Ptolemies become yellow fever on M and the seleucids become an uber grey death on H and VH. Rome dominates the west quickly in medium and Lusotanians dominate on H

[Shadowwalker]

I noticed something similar as well.
I explain this to myself with (among other reasons) the ability to recruit mercenaries.

Medium - no mercenary recruitment, therefore an advantage for large empires with not that many foes around so that they can concentrate their large armies - which they have thanks to their higher "units/turn capability" ( :laugh4: ) - on the few fronts they have to worry about, while small factions and factions surrounded by several enemies are at a serious disadvantage.

Hard/Very Hard: The smaller factions can compensate their lack of provinces to draw units from by hiring mercenaries, the money script often working in their favour as well since the AI seems to spend the additional money on buildings as well. And it's a difference if you have 1 settlement to build in or 20+ ...

And the Seleucids in particular seem to be pestered by rebels on H/VH difficulty, to a much higher degree than other factions. Which is of course not helping their economy....

[Blxz]

I made a little self-mod a while back that doubles movement points. If you can avoid using it to blitz behind enemy lines then most of the time it is very useful for many things, especially roleplay since my generals don't age 30 years coming back to the capital. A side effect is that AI empires tend to expand very aggressively. I have games that have only run a few years and pontus has a few cities and is preparing to take Byzantion and the Hayasdan have complete control of Armenia. Makes for fun times.

In the end I had to introduce negative modifiers for Ptolemy and AS though since the bonus makes them too powerful and able to throw their armies all over the place. But fun times.

And back o topic, yes I do notice a difference. The Ai tends to be less passive on higher difficulty levels to my mind. But I can't be too sure.

[seleucid empire]

I noticed something similar as well.
I explain this to myself with (among other reasons) the ability to recruit mercenaries.

Medium - no mercenary recruitment, therefore an advantage for large empires with not that many foes around so that they can concentrate their large armies - which they have thanks to their higher "units/turn capability" ( :laugh4: ) - on the few fronts they have to worry about, while small factions and factions surrounded by several enemies are at a serious disadvantage.

Hard/Very Hard: The smaller factions can compensate their lack of provinces to draw units from by hiring mercenaries, the money script often working in their favour as well since the AI seems to spend the additional money on buildings as well. And it's a difference if you have 1 settlement to build in or 20+ ...

And the Seleucids in particular seem to be pestered by rebels on H/VH difficulty, to a much higher degree than other factions. Which is of course not helping their economy....

the only small factions i have seen who recruit loads of mercs fromthe very beginning is pontus. the mercs favour the larger empires i think which makes seleucids so powerfeul in H campaigns. they can hire armeis of merce to defend all their fronts and hence become grey death
also the seleucids tend to do especially well in the east because there are 5 different pools of mercs between persepolis and india and wintint these are about 20 recruitable mercenary phalanxes

[d'Arthez]

It could also be the case that the mercs are effective counters on auto-calc? Horse archers used to be quite useless on autocalc, hence the Sauros hardly ever expanding on EB 1.0 (I think this issue was addressed in EB 1.1) and its predecessors.

If that is the case some unit stats could be looked at and redone. But first, we have to determine if merc recruitment is skewed to certain factions on higher difficulties. It might be due to the intricacies of the money script.

[seleucid empire]

i have seen seleucids achieve nearly all the victory conditon provinces by themselves. so happy to see my favourite faction so powerful as ai, but then i had to fight them when i indaded greece. stacks of silvershields are not fun to fight with depleted legions...