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I have found the AI very easy to exploit and its taking the fun out of the game. I play on hard and will start my next campaign on expert but I dont think it will help.
Here is an example. Playing the danes I jumped on a teritory from the HRE and planned to just loot the province and retreat. But I had just saved the game so when they invaded I battled them for the hell of it.
They had 1200 men I had 600. I had my king and four princes so I had 5 units of royal cavalry. What I did was run my cav units around behind the enemy and they totally repositioned thier army to face them leaving all my other troops at thier back, albiet out of site or thier troops.
Thier general of course went to thier rear while thier army went after my princes and king. I sent my army marching at thier back and thier general spotted my archers first so charged them leaving my unit of spear men and 4 units of vikings to slaughter thier general. All the while my cav units were running thier units in circles. Afterwards it was an easy win. I lost about 100 men they lost 400 and 300 taken prisoners. I saved the replay thinking it was a strategic masterpeice but when I showed it to may friend he said it was a cheap exploit.
Next is Im fighting the russians who have mostly boyars and archer cav units. I set all my troops to hold thier ground so they dont chase after them. All the enemy does is harrass my troops and run off trying to draw out the ranks. They dont even try to send thier foot troops even though we are evenly matched.
So I just set the time adjust to 100% and waited till the time ran out. I lost about 90 troops but held the province. Too easy. Next time they attack I plan to have like 4 or 5 archery units so they will lose more trops than me and we will never actually engage in hand to hand combat.
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Welcome JoeBax. Welcome to the Org. I see you've done the right thing and have made yourself comfortable here.
About the AI, there are smart generals and there are dumb generals. Some of us have seen the AI do some pretty smart things.
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Did you install the patch? I found the AI battlefield tactics to be better after I patched. Pre-patch the attacking enemy army would often just line up and stand in front of my lines and let my archers kill their best units, but I never saw anything quite like you describe. I've been given a run for my money more than once by the AI.
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Yeah I have seen some smart ones do serious damage to my armies and duumb ones who rout easily. Not all generals were good in history.
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welcome to the org JoeBax.
I'm not sure why your friend called the cav tactic a cheap exploit. I see it as a legitimate although risky tactic.
With enemy heavy cav hovering about behind your army, even a human opponent would have had to do something about it or risk having his rearward units charged once he engaged your main force.
The risk you took was splitting your forces which the AI could have taken advantage of by throwing a small delaying force at your cav while he took on you infantry with superior numbers.
Far from being a cheap exploit I see it as outsmarting an enemy who outnumbered you 2 to 1.
I'm sure there are examples of this happening throughout history.
And yes, AI can be both smart & very stupid Definitely better inital choice of units pre-patch. Rather surprised to see 10 units of AUM facing me on my first pre-patch battle - good fun though.
umm, I mean post-patch, doh
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Ok, last nite I played some battles against some rather clever generals. The general I faced in the above scenario had a high command rating but he must have just been low intellegence.
I'll also go get the patch even though I just read a post about rebellions acting strange after the patch.
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JoeBax,
You'll find in v1.1 that the ai uses its general and its cav better. Even so, the ai does become predictable after a while. I always play without the timer to remove that method of winning the battle. However, some battles can turn into very long affairs, and there is no way to do a gamesave once the sequence of battles starts on a turn. If it's the battles you are interested in, online MP offers more of a challenge, although, there are some playbalance issues which means careful army choice is required to be competitive at the highest level.
