muppety AI in MTW

Looking for the things you hate most about the AI in MTW, please.

My personal ones are:

fighting on after I have crushed all but one province (like you are coming back from THAT? make peace suicidal looney&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...icons/wink.gif or when they are needing a peace to fight elsewhere. This ends up with me either conquering them out of frustration or sitting at war with them for 100 yrs but not actually fighting them at any point. Why???

secondly, the tendency to mess up on battles occasionally partic. when storming castles. They just seem to want to lose embarassingly. The AI does nothing to attack, just runs around the place and dies massively under arrow attacks. Why???

any more worth bitching over?

The predictability of AI stupidity. If I'm fighting an 8 star general I want him to kick my ass with tactics not some dodgy boost from the difficulty level.

Attacking me while currently at war with another faction also ranks up there. Refusing peace while holed out in a province like Cyrenecia is also up there, especially after Egypt became rebel controlled. They wouldn't take it and they wouldn't make peace with me.

Deciding that best place for defensive positions is located... *Drums* Behind my army And no, AI didn't think about fighting their way to that hill, they just thought I wouldn' notice.

My own least favorite AI stupid pet trick is to attack my fleet, just because the AI has 2 ships in a sea zone to my 1 (despite the fact that I have a crushing overall naval superiority and wipe out its fleet in a couple of turns).

Another AI boner is to attack one of my provinces, then decide before the battle that it "can't win the battle and is withdrawing". So there's no battle, but the faction is at war with you. If it couldn't win, why attack in the first place? THen naturally, it won't accept peace so I have to wipe it out.

Another mindless thing the AI does is not to consider that strong high end units can beat any number of peasants or militia sergeants. Sometimes it will retreat from armies any human would fight with contempt If you had an army of 300 pikemen and chivalric knights with a decent general, would you retreat from an army of 4000 peasants?

Worse, sometimes fighting the battle, even if you lose is better than retreating, so that you soften up the enemy and then retake the province next turn against a weakened foe. The AI in Shogun actually did this sometimes, but I've never seen the AI do it in MTW. The result is that it often retreats from provinces because it calculates that it can't win rather than making the enemy pay a price for his conquest.

The Ai falls for the same ploy all the time on the battlefied. I hide a few units of fast, skirmishing cav (Jinettes, Turkoman etc...) and when the enemy army passes I have them fire at their general. The general's unit invariably chases the annoying cav away and promptly gets cut off from it's army and crushed by my heavy cav.
Of course this doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like, but the fact that it happens at all shows the AI doesn't understand the basics of tactics. I've never yet seen the AI use a feint or a false withdrawal like I do, and they fall for them every time I use them too.

Also agree that the most annoying aspect is the refusal to make peace when they are nearly wiped out. I don't like destroying a faction completely (maybe I play Civ 3 too much), but I have no choice. In fact the only time I've ever seen the enemy faction makes peace is when it had a strong position and could afford to fight on. I think of it as the bitterness of a defeated foe refusing to give in. They wish to die to the last man and usually do.

Actually, thinking again, it makes more sense for the AI to refuse to make peace when they have only one cruddy province left. An AI faction could never recover and become a major player from Cyrenecia, but if it was destroyed then it could well return years later with half-a-dozen large armies. I once saw the Turks destroyed twice in one game only to reappear stronger each time. They even managed to take Constantinople the third time round (until I relieved it from their hands with my longbows and billmen).