ALEX.exe significantly worse A.I.?

I went through the hassle to get Alex.exe working (with steam no less) and i have been loving the technical improvements, its a much faster game for me but the supposed smarter A.I. has for me been significantly worse than rtw. I didn't expect diplomacy or anything to improve, i still expect and do experience incomprehensibly stupid AI relations but i thought at least their strategic aspects would improve but!

campaign
-tens of baby stacks (4 units or less) besieging huge cities

-full or half stacks are quite rare but these half stacks are surrounded by many 1-2 units just dilly dallying around

-NEVER seen naval use or transportation/invasion where in rtw i would sometimes see the use of navies for transportation purposes like from Krete to Hellas. There are units in navies but i've noticed for only one reason; the units retreated from a loss into a nearby boat. this was also obvious when out of pity i gave Krete to Epeiros before taking out their last city and for the past 15 years they have not done anything except build huge amounts of slingers who have been standing on the island just hanging out.

-AI will besiege a city, build siege machines, and then not assault the city for literally no reason (a half stack of Macedonians against a KH town of a FM and 2 haploi). This especially irked me because i declared war to help Macedonia out and they just ran away to go stand somewhere else. literally... they have been just standing around waiting for more KH units to spawn or something, IDK!

-NEVER have i seen units be retrained. I waited quite a long time for some garrisons to retrain units I know they could train and with money I know they had (Macedonia was the richest faction and i had 100k currency)

battle - significantly worse than rtw making battle map a huge chore

-attacking enemy will spend, i'm not kidding, 20 minutes doing the shuffle reforming their army. half the time they don't even end up having ANY formation but instead a huge mass of unorganized fools running up and down hills while my small defending army just sits there kind of annoyed. this is consistent with almost every battle, and makes fighting on the battle map very very boring and undesirable.
-defending enemy will run away constantly. not run away as is 'man that's a lot of dudes lets run away from the battle map' but just run run run in a huge circle even if they outnumber me significantly. I can't catch up to pandapatoi or most hellenic levies and you can't fight 2000 dudes with only your fast cavalry.
-when attacking enemies finally charge, its in such an idiotic manner as to make the 20 minutes of waiting a total waste. They will, literally, charge only one unit at a time in a straight line of sorts. instead of using numbers to their advantage, the A.I. will 100% (in my experience) send their units to my line individually, get routed, then the next unit in line comes to fight.
-my own attacking units (often flanking) will often not charge or fight. this isn't because they are scared or tired, but they will just form a line behind or to the side of the unit, walking through the enemy to form this line if necessary.


I wish i had screenshots to show this, but for whatever reason the steam overlay doesn't work with the Alex.exe! ! !

I was just wondering if anyone else had this issue with alex.exe, as the battle/campaign a.i. in rtw was bad indeed, but still playable as enemies would attack in in a cohesive formation and try to flank with cavalry or whatever. to be fair the campaign A.I. is just as bad in both .exe's

I can't say it is significantly worse. The thing I disliked most about Alex.exe is that the governers live way too long. There is a way to fix that though, I just never bothered. I only played 2 campaigns and noticed real improvements in battles and naval invasions.

Only once did I ever encounter a serious (4 full stacks in 3 turns) naval invasion in RTW.exe.

I have played all 3 engines and all 3 will have occasional AI sieges where they are completely outnumbered. If you auto_win it is a minor victory, if you play the battle it is a waist of 10 min as they always run away.

I have been using BI and am quite happy with it. I thought retraining would make things unrealistic, but retrained armies lose some experience. Also, aor reduces retraining.

Thread moved

Since this is clearly not a EB specific bug I moved the thread into the Gameplay subforum.

No campaign is the same so your problems might not affect other players,
The time I used Alex to play EB I received good results, troops were retrained, AI's campaign map movement was over all good and well thought, some minor naval invasions happened (though less than with BI), diplomacy was more stable.
On the other side the battlemap movement isn't that good in battles with reinforcements, maybe you want to check that this doesn't happen too often and can enjoy the battles again.
Overall, Alex is an improvement IMHO.

BTW: Even ShogunII now has problems if the AI gets reinforcements.....

XSamatan

the old age was never an issue for me, my second faction leader lived til about 75 and that was old as all heck, but my 4 campaigns the natural causes deaths averaged around 60 years old

Quote:

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Originally Posted by XSamatan

Since this is clearly not a EB specific bug I moved the thread into the Gameplay subforum.

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Because this isn't exactly a gameplay thread, I think it belongs to the general forum.

Thread moved (again).

well, the babystacks is because the 1 turn unit recruitments, alex EB works best if you turn recruitments into 0 turn and see they spew halfstacks after halfstacks to your territories

sorry about the placement issue, i wasn't sure what this would categorize as.

yesterday i fought Rome again and it was actually a pretty fun fight, they actually had the Hastati/Principe/Trarii formation and i was really really excited to see that. I took many mental screenshots because this never happened before