Cheesy Tactics Definition and List

Gaius: Sorry didnt come across the way I intended it too, as usual. I was simply saying you shouldnt get upset if someone comes here saying "Im the bestest general because...." then start a post about limiting yourself because your a true hardcore gamer. True these are some cheesy tactics, and I think if it were programed correctly, the computer would take full advantage of the trade thing. This is just my view, I wanted to truely see what people thought was cheesy, though it wont effect my play style either way. As for it going south there were a couple ideas that seemed silly to me, though Ill not bring any up here. Besides playing with peasants is the only way to play. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...ons/tongue.gif


Naagi http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...cons/joker.gif

I have had games where the AI has not set up trade routes as mentioned above but I also have had games where the AI has built huge trade routes, at least I think they are pretty big. I am playing as italians, early, normal. French and English both had trade routes from england to the med until they went to war with each other and the english no longer have any ships and french only have from england to spanish provinces now. Turks also have a trade route through the med from the baltic? (or is it the black, cant remember off-hand) sea around up to venice and around naples to the eastern spanish coast. So I dont think trading is cheesy. Also the computer gets money when you trade (taxes on imported goods) that they dont have to have ships for.

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Originally Posted by [b

Quote[/b] (LadyAnn @ Jan. 25 2003,13:52)]no trade route that is more than 2 sea spaces (restricted local trade only), except: (1) when invade islands (2) when want to rescue crusade units that already reached objective, but want to bring them home because they are having low loyalty for being too far from home.

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This will make the game a little more fun.

All of my ships are kept close to its original port. The furthest distance is 2 sea regions away.

In the case that I need to send my troops to or from a distance province, I will have to start stretching out the ship line until I finish moving troops. After that, the ships will go back to its home water. It's like loading the troops onto the ships then set sail. The longer the distance, the more time to travel.

I limit trade by limiting my fleets. I only allow myself to build ships in one province. That one province is the "Home Base" and all ships stay in the sea of that province, usually one of my start provinces or the Capital. This means that when something happens and I need to deploy the fleet it takes a LONG time. The farther away the problem the more difficult it is to deal with.

The only ship allowed to maintain the trade route is one early era ship, a long boat or some such. This gives the AI a pretty good ability to build navies and its own trade routes. It also makes it very easy for the AI to kill your trade.

In my current game I am playing as Novgorod and am allowing no trade past gibralter. I spend about half my time with no trade income do to the ease that the AI is able to disrupt my trade and the time involved in sailing my very small fleet from the baltic and back every time there is a naval conflict.

If you used deep sea vessels for war fleets, it would take only 2-3 moves to get deep into the meditarranean from the North sea anyways.

How about this, one I'm trying after reading this thread.

Rather than looking at your ships as trade, use them as transports. You can only place ships on sea areas that are adjacent to provinces that you own. A sort of glorified bus route.

It's early days so I've no idea how it will resolve.

"I saw a post here that suggested giving the AI 250,000 florins to start. Just wondered how this can be done? I'm interested to try."

That's very easily done. You just modify the starting income for each faction (except the one the player will use)in early.txt, high.txt, late.txt, whatever you want to use.

(As an example)
SetTreasury:: FN_ALMOHAD 250000 250000 250000 250000
etc., etc.

You only really need to modify the 2nd column entry since that's the one the AI uses on expert (unless you play on hard, it don't know which it uses for that - so change 'em all).

The important point is that it isn't money per se, but the inferiority in advanced unit types and development that dooms the AI.

If the AI simply builds hordes of peasants, then giving it more money didn't work. Something else may need to be done. There are a number of additional possibilities suggested by various dungeon dwellers, all of which are fairly easily accomplished, such as :
1. substitute spearmen (oh, hell, even substitute order foot if you want to go that far&#33http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...icons/wink.gif for peasants, (eliminate peasants and change the AI build preferences) (Or you could toughen up the spearmen - assuming you were going to play a Muslim faction).
2. lower the build and/or maintenance costs for AI's units (but not the player faction specific units and/or increase the maintenance cost of the player's units),
3. increase the AI build preferences for high end units so that the AI will build more of them and not so many urban militia & peasants, etc.
4. increase the province title honors (by adding command stars for the province governor's title) for each province (so that the AI gets better generals).

BTW: I notice that the AI does provide a reasonable fight if you tweak the build preferences and province attributes a bit (I based my changes on Kraellin's & DOC's suggestions). You want to see reasonably good play balance between the AI factions? Just increase the rebellion factors in early.txt to 2 minimum for each province and you'll see Last campaign, playing as the Byzantines (probably the easiest faction in early), after I had reached a certain size, all the factions went to war with me and launched crusades against me It was touch and go there for quite a while, my income fell from 80,000 florins to -36,000, I couldn't build any units, no one would make peace with me, no-one would trade with me, it definitely wasn't easy I've got most things under control now, but just lost a mammoth battle against a horde of (4,000+ feudal knights). It's a struggle just to maintain income to keep my armies and replace losses. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...ns/biggrin.gif

To sum up, I don't believe that it's necessary to limit yourself as the player. When you play chess against a computer, would you think it was a good game if you had to refrain from taking advantage of the AI's bad moves? What kind of game would that be? While MTW AI will never be as good as a chess program, the engine isn't really that bad. It can be tweaked to give a reasonable challenge. It just takes a little effort (but lots less effort than the Sisyphusean task of creating new unit bifs, and a new campaign map like the Patrician and LOTR folks are doing). Now THAT'S hard http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...cons/wacko.gif If we're not even willing to make the limited additional effort to tweak the game to produce a better performance, we shouldn't complain CA only had so much time and money for programming and Q & A. They produced a game that is fun to play and generally works

I totally don't agree with those who simply assume the AI is hopelessly broken and that we need to limit ourselves to avoid taking too much advantage of the hopeless cripple. We simply don't know yet because we haven't really made a concentrated effort to check. Kraellin and a few others have made some modest changes and achieved some results, but compared with the amount of work large numbers of people have put into new campaign mods with new unit bifs & maps, we as a community have really only made miniscule efforts along these lines. So, how can we tell?

Preference http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...cons/smile.gif

I don't mind reloading a lost battle. As a matter of fact I would save the game and replay the battle over and over till I win. Sometimes chances are so small to win a battle, some other times we just simply lost them. Thats how I learn and enjoy the game. Likewise in mp games, I'd save my losts and learn the replays. Cheesy? well it's my kinda cheese then. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cg...icons/wink.gif

Finding out AI's limitation is also my hobby in every game i've played (maybe there were some exceptions, but I can't recall). After that I'd move on and find something more interesting.

Some others may enjoy the game differently so when it comes to a preference, is it worth arguing?