NPC Armies online?

Greetings,

I've recently gotten a few old friends to pick up MTW 2 for some online matches. Back in RTW, one of our favorite things to do was to go online and have a match of say two of us defending a castle against 4 NPC/computer controlled armies.

However, I do not easily see the ability to add an army under computer control when playing online in MTW 2. Has this wonderful ability been removed?

Any help would be appreciated.

Unfortunately MP games are player against player. AI armies cannot be selected. Even trying to set up a LAN game has the same effect. You can only play against another person.

Here's a thought. Now I know someone has made a retrofit mod of MTW2 vanilla to include Kingdoms balancing. Maybe you could convince

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

them

to bring back the bots.

From what I've heard

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Creative Assembly

is not making any more patches for MTW2.

There's still a lot of Rome lurking behind the frontend. Maybe there is a simple way to turn it back on:holmes: