I'm clamoring for reform. We need seaborne invasions in this game or it is an EPIC FAIL in my opinion, especially given the time period of this game. I hope CA patches this ASAP.Quote:
Originally Posted by knoddy
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I'm clamoring for reform. We need seaborne invasions in this game or it is an EPIC FAIL in my opinion, especially given the time period of this game. I hope CA patches this ASAP.Quote:
Originally Posted by knoddy
not entirely true u can walk through from persia to india and back, but thats a moot point, im all for naval invasions BUT! i dont want them done like the M2 Patch where it was just stupid, every faction would launch naval invasions to the other side of the freakin camp map.Quote:
Originally Posted by amritochates
Dear All,
as a basic rule we should all state our difficulty level at the start of a post in a thread like this.
It's hard to hear people complain about the AI when they are playing anything less than VH/VH.
***plays the broken down record player from 2001***
Complaining about the AI when you are not playing VH/VH, is like a Polar Bear complaining it's hot in Australian around February each year...because I feel like saying; 'No :daisy: Sherlock, you don't say...really it's not very hard...how about that.'
I play on small unit size (all my comp can handle :clown:). I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, but I tend to take very heavy losses on battles that are supposed to be even, and managed to lose one in the Grand Campaign at the end of the tutorial.
The first 40 turns of my (H/H) Austrian campaign have been pretty easy despite my taking things extremely slowly. The most disturbing thing so far has been a number of AI vs AI wars that seem to stalemate forever.
I'm holding out hope that things will become more challenging. Poland-Lithuania has been building up a lot of troops on my border despite being "very friendly" with Austria, and a few factions have been aggressive with their neighbors (Russia vs Sweden, Sweden vs Denmark, and the Mughals completely wiped out the playable Indian faction).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
I suspect the smaller number of provinces and ease of making money has something to do with how easy ETW feels even on VH.
When the Dutch declared war on me as Prussia I was hoping for a few epic battles given they're a major faction but it ended up them being destroyed as a faction in a siege of Amsterdam.
Five turns from being a world power to being a disorder stat in my province details.
My Maratha campaign I purposely stopped myself from attacking the Mughals for years to try and build up a challenge but I'm rolling in so much money I could annihilate them at any point.
A larger number of provinces might give the AI more strategic depth and prevent the easy blitzes by making you have to deal with conquered territories.
Having the army stacks of defeated factions remain as rebels would also be good. Atm you can decapitate a large military force by taking out the faction capital and they disappear.
VH/VH is does not change the AI behavior. And, where have you been since 2001?Quote:
Originally Posted by AussieGiant
I play on M, and I like M.
I'm not saying the AI needs to be "Harder". I do think though if a feature is broke (AI cannot do something), it should be fixed.
It's one thing to say it's less challenging, it's another to say something's broke.
Heh i remember the hojo horde in shogun, i believe the ai used to cheat heavily in those days with ALOT of extra income, the community (the not so good players anyway) complained and it was changed. When playing single player campaigns in previous titles i would play as say scotland and give egypt and surrounding nations a major financial boost modded in and send a crusade there and establish a nation there, was more difficult but still not that hard :\
I think multiplayer campaigns will be a good thing for the game and hope it actually gets delivered this time and that it takes off, having played rome totalwar multiplayer campaigns before i can tell you a full multiplayer campaign vs an old vetaran player like amp is quite bloody hard and brings so much more to the game.
Playing on VH/VH; can only say that I agree with the observations of the original poster.
The AI CAN figure out how to attack lone, vulnerable stacks (though often to its detriment), but it is completely unable to stage any kind of reasonable strategic offensive.
I would agree! If you want a big challenge and lots of blood and surprises play multiplayer!Quote:
Originally Posted by Swoosh So
The AI is not going to be as challenging for some of us as for others, no matter what.
If it wins every battle against the novice player it is just not going to sell.
I suspect that the AI factions have random personalities and may be more or less aggressive in some campaigns than in others. But that is only a guess.
I don’t wish to see every faction in a mad dash to conquer all of their neighbors and launching massive sea invasions to Iceland and the Bahamas. It is silly.
I think it should reinforce its holdings, by sea if that is the very best option, but not large ill considered invasions.
To move a full stack army the AI should want a full stack fleet of mostly 3rd rates and above to move it. Not sailing around with a couple of galleys with a full stack army on board. Some should be more aggressive at sea than others but not every faction in every campaign.
I don’t know how the AI decides what to build where, or how to make it have more logical choices. That is more likely to need FIXING than it’s aversion to launching sea invasions.:smash:
lol i love it when people say the game is so easy and then go on to explain how they are exploiting it to make it so easy.
As Austria on Hard/Hard I just got annihilated by the Prussian military, not by numbers but by the seeming omnipotence of their soldiery. I had done an example campaign as Sweden on M/M and things were really quite passive for 100 turns. I decided to change nations/difficulty to see what would happen. In this case the Crimean Khanate was eliminated early by Russia and I had a good 10 turns to just build improvements to my nation. Eventually Prussia declared war, and historically went for Silesia, which they took easilly. My relief army came by a turn later and was attacked in the forests south of the city. Even though I had my men behind fenced cover, the AI overcame this by having ring bayonets earlier than I did, and by firing once and charging my entire line all at once such that the battle became little more than one big melee. out of 1500 men I had, 200 survived. I did win the battle.
Somehow despite a 3 to 1 disadvantage in schools, Prussia had out teched me militarily. I'm not sure how they did it, possibly by buying techs, cheating (perhaps due to Hard Difficulty), perhaps a country specific modifier for certain technologies or something else. They got to ring bayonets early somehow, and I paid the price. Later I sent a near-full stack to attack Brandenburg, that stack was also annihilated by Prussia's line infantry, despite tactics that worked on medium. I need more time to digest the AI behavior on hard (battle wise) before I decide if I want to keep it there. On every other Total War title I've used Hard/Hard settings, I might have to change that this time. I'm still learning new battle strategies too though so perhaps in time I'll figure out something better. I wouldn't say the game is too easy though, just a touch too passive.
And you guys should be careful what you ask for, if you want more aggressive AI you might get it, then we'll be fending off full stacks every turn while 6 or 7 amphibious landings are choking our shores with enemy units. Some of you may enjoy spending a whole day on one turn of battles, but I lack actually having down time and fewer but more intense wars. The last thing we need is a hyperactive AI similar to RTW/M2TW in which the game sends wave after wave of full stack armies at you, will never accept a truce/peace and has unlimited man power. ETW is far from perfect but I pray they don't roll things back to earlier installments, the game needs tweaks, fixes and more factions, not a new "attack the player every three minutes" routine. Anyway sorry to rant on this, I just -really- don't want to go back to how things were done before with AI mindless-warmongering.
A solution to the AI being to predictable and to passive, is to place the AI in the hands of the current ruler. Dont know if that has been done already, since I dont have the game yet, but that would be a good solution. That means that some rulers will be passive and morons, and some very aggressive. That would give your enemies some personality and make the game harder to predict.Quote:
Originally Posted by amritochates
I say that, because I live in the land of the :viking:
Yes try to remeber one of the major complaints of MTW2 was the fact that by turn 6 you could end up at war with 4-5 factions and nearly excommunicated.
Several things have been improved.
You can now actually have peace and allies for a number of years if you want them. I kept the dutch as my ally for 50 years.
The AI now has mobs, they arn't a fullproof, but they do make it to where even if the AI only has 2 units it will double it's size with armed citizens.
The AI has a very aggressive navy. That will already pirate you, choke sea ports, and blockade and cut off your sea trade completly.
If you want a aggressive land AI go fight the natives in either India or North America who are both quite aggressive and will send full stacks against your settlements if you go to war with them.
At least that's my view. I don't really want a harder AI, only because I know even if they did UBER hard AI half these people still would not be happy.
CA should patch what it can and focus on the Multiplayer.
What do you mean by 'exploiting'? As the OP suggests, it is frustrating to have to intentionally play dumb in order to get a challenge (which is what was required in RTW/M2TW), actually doing that is not really a challenge is it? It is not like there is some great glitch that can be exploited in an unrealistic way.Quote:
Originally Posted by crpcarrot
I agree that a diverse game where you need to use trade, diplomacy, research AND war is ideal, but if the game CAN be beaten using war alone, then the other features become meaningless. This was the case with say the Pope and merchants in M2TW. I at first used merchants and made lots of priests go and convert the heathen so I'd have high piety priests to control the vatican. Pretty quickly though it was clear that this was completely unneccesary as steamrolling the map was so simple to do.
To me (and I think many others) the fun of a game is in trying to simply beat it by whatever means neccessary. It should be sufficiently challenging such that even a veteran cannot beat it easily at the first try. Take CivIV for example, it took weeks for the community to collectively compose a playing style that could beat the hardest level, and for many players doing so was never possible, no matter how hard they tried.
With the TW series (from RTW on) you could either play to win, and do so easily and boringly using very few of the features, or you could 'role play', i.e. intentionally play sub-optimally to 'give the AI a chance'. The problem with that approach is that when the going gets tough you can also bend your own rules a bit and stay on top, there is never the seat of your pants thrills of *really* having your back against the wall.
I still don't have ETW (and probably won't for a year or so for various reasons unrelated to the quality of the game) but if ETW doesn't prove to be an interesting challenge maybe I won't bother getting it (or wait till it is a bargain bin game that will run on my future computer with ease!).
To summarise, I love the idea of all the complex features in ETW like trade, genuine diplomacy, research etc, but I want to HAVE to use them to succeed, rather than them being ignorable micro-management and flavour unneccesary to the path of victory.
@ Polemists
I would agree.
I suppose a new AI level could be made…the pawn everything level…where all AI units become as tough as M2 elephants and rolls over all the earth!:2thumbsup:
:laugh4::laugh4:
It would be nice to see a more precise choice regarding AI's in games soon, the EASY/HARD/VERYHARD/IMPOSSIBLE thing is like, well, getting old?
How about adding a preference tab for the AI? "Naval invasions on/OFF", "Aggressive Guerilla raids on/OFF", "AI HP boost on/OFF", etc, instead?
First off
CivIV I found the easiest game I think I have ever played in my life. Maybe impossible is bad but comparing medium CIVIV to RTW is like comparing Medium Red Alert 3 to Supreme Commander, it's not a contest in my mind.Quote:
Take CivIV for example, it took weeks for the community to collectively compose a playing style that could beat the hardest level, and for many players doing so was never possible, no matter how hard they tried.
I think perhaps more then all this jazz about new AI difficulties it might be better to go back to the old system of Eras. Such as MTW's early, middle, and late.
Not saying this works for all games (obviously etw had to short a time frame)
but for instance, let's take England.
For those of you who like the Euro theme you could pick early, holding the crown, securing yourself. Building up.
For those who liked more in the thick of it, they could choose middle. When France is a power, colonies are ready to rebel, and your navies are much larger and contesting with Spain.
For those who wanted a impossible difficult they could do late, you've lost the colonies, France's power dwarfs you, and rebellion is abound everywhere.
I honestly think those scenarios would be more amusing. Then say something like Defensive AI and Aggressive AI sliders or something.
I could be completely wrong, and everyone will probably complain but I liked the Eras that MTW 1 had, it didn't mean you couldn't start early and go into the medium, or start med and go into late. If you did the game stayed different because you were shapping it. Yet the later eras provided unique scenarios and gameplay perspectives that may not exist in your own games do to the AI.
Just a thought.
I would tend to agree, and I may even remember one or two being in MTW but not since.Quote:
Originally Posted by Namarie22
Some people will not be happy until they loose. Some want other things, but everyone has to deal with the changes.
While you usually make a very vocal segment happy with a change you disappoint and discourage others.
I have no trouble with people who always play on Easy or VH. It is just that changing some things effect the whole game and not everyone was Iceland to be conquered by the Barbary States.
Not everyone wants to have their hat handed to them every time they go into battle. They should be interesting but not impossible to win.
Lots of people are still having trouble beating the AI, while we have some that want an impossible level.
In the end it is impossible to please everyone. So if it is too easy wait for a mod and don’t try to spoil the fun of those just learning.
hmm didn't play that much yet only 2 grand ones don't realy care for the short campaigns,
One with the United Provinces (the dutch) invaded Flanders turn 2 or 3 got it a turn or 2 later. yippie :); Since France was an ally of Spain. they Send in 3 small army blocking my small cities etc
they came with 2 navy's to block my ports. I directly attacked the navy but since there the two ports are close got the 2 navy's against me :oops: so lost only got my admiral out. Tried a few times to get those pesty little armies out, eventualy worked.
I had to take my navys back from India and the Americas to get rid of them, I only managed to get a peace treaty with france after capturing Paris by chance (and offering it back to them I couldn't keep it any way the army was almost gone) got lousiana in Return so not to bad, lucky I did that because Spain was ready to land turn later with 2 armies in Flanders and Holland :help: and that was before 1705, now 5 years later things are a bit better but now those nasty Pirates are giving me a bad time. :wall:
Always play on the Hardest level since Shogun, and only lost a few times doing so :beam:
A well maybe I'll try the short campaign if that's easier :idea2:
Spain launched a sea invasion?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dradem
Maybe there just has not been enough play to determine that it is not done!
:laugh4:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
What not done?
It has been said that the AI will not launch sea invasions.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dradem
If Spain landed troops in Flanders, that would not seem to be the case!
I see a thread like this for every TW game, and every time I see it my self confidence shrinks even more. I love the TW games, I'm obviously just not very good at them. :embarassed:
I just went back to one of the safe games and they came from the East :thumbsdown:Quote:
Originally Posted by Fisherking
I thought they came by Sea because I had a unit stack under brussels so they had to fight them first but since they came from the East it didn't matter :inquisitive:
but still I think the AI wouldn't have done that in other TW games.
CIV IV is the easiest game you've played in your life? Wow. I think Total War isn't even a walk in the park compared to the harder settings in civ. I guess I never learned the "spam the world with immortals" technique... I mean the AI is pretty dumb in wars sometimes, but at least it attacks you where you're weak or when you are at war with someone else etc. And falling behind in the tech tree really isn't advicable.Quote:
Originally Posted by Polemists
I agree with the OP, the game is too easy. I understand it can't be harder because newbies would cry and quit, but the solution seems simple. Just increase the difference in difficulty between the settings, or actually make the AI behave differently between the settings, making it more aggressive on teh campaign map.
Aggresive AI doesn't always equal difficulty though. Sometimes super aggressive AI factions are easier to beat because they throw low quality troops at you and don't take the time to ttech up and get a strong economy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dead Guy
If you really want a TW game to beat you you are going to have to fight against another player :2thumbsup:.
I recently fought a danish army consisting of 8 regiments of pikemen, 3 militia and 2 regional cavalry, I don't think it will get any worse ;)
Seriously though, you have a point. I guess what I mean is making it more aggressive "in a good way". Aggressive so that you have to worry about defending your land from time to time. Oh well, I still enjoy the game a lot, I just think it could have one or two clicks harder than very hard on the slider.
TW should go the same wasy as Galactic Civilisations 2. That game has so many difficulty settings it's hard to remember them all, I think it has ten or more. They range from pathetically easy all the way up to hellishly difficult.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dead Guy
:2thumbsup:It's a personal opinion of course but I never found CIV IV any comparison to TW or even CIV III or CIVII even (which were both far superior in my view.) Yes though, I found civ far to easy, thus the expansion packs I found boring and useless and stopped after I bought the second one.
The AI is where it needs to be. CA most likely will not make a higher difficult level. If they did, you would all still groan and moan and CA would feel like they didn't actually accomplish anything.
As stated, the only way people who want impossible difficult will be happy, is if they fight a real human, who will zerg rush them every turn. If that's what you want, great, go find a player who likes that tactic.
I'm very happy with the game at Medium as are alot of people apparently, so I see no point to mess with M, if CA wants to go fiddle with VH be my guest. Though I imagine H and VH already are more difficult then Medium and the Ai is more aggressive.
As I said, I think CA should just focus on multiplayer. That way the die hards can all go fight each other and leave the rest of us who like the game alone :2thumbsup:
This goes back to opinions. I had over 1000 cheroke attack lower lousiana, and then Florida in a wave of blitzes that lasted 5 turns when I had only 100's of men as I was trying to hold off Rebellions back in Europe. That was on M, and is plenty of difficult enough for me.Quote:
Aggressive so that you have to worry about defending your land from time to time.