How does the AI in M2:TW compare to R:TW?

I have very little faith in CA making substantial changes to the meaningful parts of their games, as opposed to making them look spiffy and shiny. Meaning I expect graphical "improvements" (which are more resource-hungry) but not gameplay improvements (involving much more complicated tinkering with the AI).

I've mused in another thread about how the R:TW engine's limitations hamper my enjoyment of EB, I wonder how much the same will be true of EBII?

To be clear, I've never even played M2:TW, the time period doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'll only pick it up for the express purpose of playing EBII. So I ask those people who have played it, is it any better?

Does the AI build proper sized stacks and with decent compositions left to its own devices? In EB far too often it's the never-ending assault of 3-5 unit stacks every other turn. No matter whether you're at war with the faction in question or not. Bigger armies seem to be a load of skirmishers, a couple of elites, and maybe some regular line troops with no thought to balancing them.

Do diplomacy and military movement actually work together rather than each do their own thing? Far too often you conclude a war, sign a peace agreement and within two turns another stack has arrived to attack your periphery. With BI's executable it's even worse, you get pointlessly weak (but annoyingly regular) naval invasions from distant factions who would have left you alone with rtw.exe.

Is the AI capable of actually holding a line in battle, rather than breaking up to chase after individual units? Do generals still suicide against the thickest part of your battle line?

Please tell me things have improved.

Well, the diplomacy is far superior than RTW: thanks to the "appreciation" scale (dunno the actual ingame name XD) factions can be allied for virtually forever even if they share borders...
I remember in a campaing in a M2TW mod, i was playing HRE and even though my standings with the poles and hungarians were awful since the beginning, they became my best allies. The magyars attacked me, and after I crushed their invading army as I was approaching Buda, I offered peace, alliance and (this time) military access, they accepted and never attacked me again.
Also seems that factions are reluctant to attack if your "fame" is far superior than theirs...

About the army composition issues; check this out.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

I've never even played M2:TW, the time period doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'll only pick it up for the express purpose of playing EBII. So I ask those people who have played it, is it any better?

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"You will grow tired blunting your weapons on a poorly-led horde of mindless corpse-men; and once you have reduced them to so much sausage filler, the sweet taste of success will turn to ashes in your mouth" ™


The AI in TW games hasn't been good since shogun first came out, imo at least. Though I expect the single-player campaign in EB2 to be something amazing, I will try to get most of my fun out of multiplayer battles (there should be a big enough of a community to support that on a regular basis).

We can take it as a fact that the AI in M2TW is better than in RTW. It's been a while since I last played it, so I can't give you examples off the top of my head, but I've played it enough to be certain of it. Also, an important point is that there are more possibilities to deal with the shortcomings of AI. One example is the feature to limit recruitment of certain units, which will do a great deal to prevent pure elite armies, but perhaps the most important is that the AI itself is actually moddable. Never done it myself, so I have no idea to what extent, though.

Edit: I'm aware that the elite army is not the most pressing matter, but there some factions are quite prone to that (played some years in a Romani campaign over the weekend and fighting elite african pikemen and other assorted elite infantry becomes tedious; same goes for the notorious grey death's argyraspides stacks).

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Originally Posted by Arjos

Well, the diplomacy is far superior than RTW: thanks to the "appreciation" scale (dunno the actual ingame name XD) factions can be allied for virtually forever even if they share borders...
I remember in a campaing in a M2TW mod, i was playing HRE and even though my standings with the poles and hungarians were awful since the beginning, they became my best allies. The magyars attacked me, and after I crushed their invading army as I was approaching Buda, I offered peace, alliance and (this time) military access, they accepted and never attacked me again.
Also seems that factions are reluctant to attack if your "fame" is far superior than theirs...

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That sounds promising. Like perhaps they've fixed that particular issue.

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Originally Posted by Paltmull

About the army composition issues; check this out.

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I'm not entirely sure that addresses it; the thread talks about free-upkeep units as garrisons and control over what can be recruited where (possibly). Within what's available we could still see the AI spamming useless armies.

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Originally Posted by James Purefoy

"You will grow tired blunting your weapons on a poorly-led horde of mindless corpse-men; and once you have reduced them to so much sausage filler, the sweet taste of success will turn to ashes in your mouth" ™


The AI in TW games hasn't been good since shogun first came out, imo at least. Though I expect the single-player campaign in EB2 to be something amazing, I will try to get most of my fun out of multiplayer battles (there should be a big enough of a community to support that on a regular basis).

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Hmmm, to be honest multiplayer doesn't appeal. I'm only in this for the single player campaign, battles alone don't really do anything for me. They need that context of the campaign (and strategic maneuvering) to make them interesting.

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Originally Posted by Lysimachos

We can take it as a fact that the AI in M2TW is better than in RTW. It's been a while since I last played it, so I can't give you examples off the top of my head, but I've played it enough to be certain of it. Also, an important point is that there are more possibilities to deal with the shortcomings of AI. One example is the feature to limit recruitment of certain units, which will do a great deal to prevent pure elite armies, but perhaps the most important is that the AI itself is actually moddable. Never done it myself, so I have no idea to what extent, though.

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Again, that gives me a little hope, even if no one is really sure yet it works, that it can be modded opens some possibilities.

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Originally Posted by Lysimachos

Edit: I'm aware that the elite army is not the most pressing matter, but there some factions are quite prone to that (played some years in a Romani campaign over the weekend and fighting elite african pikemen and other assorted elite infantry becomes tedious; same goes for the notorious grey death's argyraspides stacks).

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I don't play on Very Hard campaign difficulty, so perhaps that's why the army of skirmishers is a more frequent occurence and thus a concern to me than the army of elites.

I know how you feel: the predictability of R:TW's A.I. can make it seem like a chore. The A.I. of M2:TW has definitely been improved, although it was not a priority for the developers. From my brief experience with M2:TW I got the impression that the strategic A.I. is now competent. It can develop its cities and field credible stacks, something R:TW always struggled at. Partly this is due to better game-design (recruiting units does not deplete cities and prevent upgrading), but also because the A.I. is grouping and deploying its units better. The same thing applies to diplomacy: the new negotiation screen gives more feedback, allowing you some grip on what's going on; but the A.I. is also more reasonable. Neither A.I. is likely to outplay all but complete newbies, and at higher difficulty levels you simply get a load of elite stacks flung at you, but it doesn't make as many glaringly stupid moves.

The one thing I am less sure about is the tactical A.I. Again, it has been improved and I didn't see as many stupid moves, but I also didn't get much of a challenge. It's nowhere near M1:TW.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

I'm not entirely sure that addresses it; the thread talks about free-upkeep units as garrisons and control over what can be recruited where (possibly). Within what's available we could still see the AI spamming useless armies.

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I'm not sure what the EB team intends to do, but a possibility would be forming the unit pools so that they are proportinate to an army. For example, if regular line infantry units had high avaliability the AI would be likely to recruit and use those in large numbers, rather than units with low availiability. This way, you could control what kind of army composition that the AI (as well as the player) would use.

Campaign AI is a lot better for M2TW and we are tweaking it too. Not really sure about battle AI (i don't play battles enough now to form an opinion).

As has been said, both campaign AI and battle AI have improved, though not by as much as you might hope. I've been playing Stainless Steel (a popular M2TW mod) lately and have found its AI, which was imported from other mods, to be greatly improved over the vanilla game. I would expect the EB2 team would likewise try to implement these improvements as much as possible.

Campaign AI is improved in vanilla and many mods take that a good step further. The main issues are AI going bankrupt and requiring huge money scripts to be competitive and AI tends to leave many cities on coasts with a single garrison unit making surprise invasions very easy to do which some mods address by garrison spawn scripts. Also the sea invasion AI is not very good and the AI tends to waste many of its naval ships in strange places- IE, depending on the mod AI often deploys its entire navy in a small area of water unreachable to anywhere else like Red Sea, Persian Gulf etc.

Battle AI is a little better than RTW but still exhibits many of the same flaws. There are some good attempts to make it better and to a degree they are successful but a veteran human player should still be able to defeat the AI on 1 to 1 odds every single time. The biggest problems with BAI is that AI does not get the idea to use infantry and cavalry together and charges ahead with all its fast units when on offensive or holds them in place and doesn't move when on defensive so missiles or charge to the rear easily wipe out their army.

Since most generals in MTW2 and mods are mounted that means within 1-3 minutes of battle start the AI commander is dead and another 1-3 minutes battle is over unless its a siege or there is a 2nd reinforcing army. EB2 having more commanders as infantry should help this issue as well they could try different things such as give AI generals high defense but low charge and melee so the AI doesn't charge so quick and when it makes mistakes it doesn't always kill its commander right in the start of the battle.

Also with the allied forces' "command", many things can be done in battles: as deploying HA or cavalry forces, while you move the infantry and viceversa, or having the reinforcements not standing still while in offense...

I'm not sure of what you meant Paltmull, but it gave me an idea anyway. Suppose you have an AI-city which is controlled by a faction whose army should consist of an equal amount of phalanxes and cavalry. You might script it that the AI in each of her settelements can either recruit a phalanx-unit or a cavalry-unit, both with a priori chances 0,5. Thus: in half of the settlements, the AI recruitment options are 'cavalry', and in the other half 'phalanx'. All other recruitment options are grayed out (maybe by an invisible event?). Next turn, the recruitment options are recalculated. Some cities get phalanxes, others get cavalry. The AI might still opt not to train one kind or another, but the problem would manifest herself less.

Andy: M2TW uses a recruitment system with unit pools of various sizes, along with a certain level of replenishment for each pool. Pool size and replenishment rate is individual for each unit type.

My idea was that you would use larger recruitment pools with higher replenishment rates for the units that you would prefer the AI to recruit many of and smaller pools with lower replenishment rates for those that you want the AI to recruit fewer of.

If an ideal army for example has lots of standard infantry, some cavalry, a couple of skirmishers and very few elites, you could, through unit pool sizes and replenisment rates, arrange the availiability of those unit types so that the AI's recruitment - and therefore also its army composition - follows that model.


EDIT: I have this bad habit of using awfully long sentences. I hope the above is readable :sweatdrop:

That works well in other mods and sounds like what EB2 will at least make some use of. I just hope EB2 also takes account of mercenary recruit pools in the same way as AI tends to recruit all mercenaries available if it has the money which it probably will with a money script.

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Originally Posted by Ichon

Also the sea invasion AI is not very good and the AI tends to waste many of its naval ships in strange places- IE, depending on the mod AI often deploys its entire navy in a small area of water unreachable to anywhere else like Red Sea, Persian Gulf etc.

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I'm hopeful that this particular point won't be an issue in EB2. I recall that EB1 placed some serious restrictions on where ships could be produced, and I suspect that they can and will make it so that regions with access to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman will at least not be able to produce anything more advanced than the most basic ships, which will hopefully save the AI some money.

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Originally Posted by Ichon

Since most generals in MTW2 and mods are mounted that means within 1-3 minutes of battle start the AI commander is dead and another 1-3 minutes battle is over unless its a siege or there is a 2nd reinforcing army.

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Though I've heard it many times before, I've actually not seen this happen often at all. My most frequent experience is that generals linger around behind the main lines for most of the battle, occasionally charging my flanks, only to retreat when I send someone to after them. And then sometime after half their men have died, they charge into the center of the already engaged line and eventually get killed. I've rarely seen the kamikaze behavior so often brought up. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I did want to mention it.

Well its great enough that EB(RTW+BI+Alex) has been permanentely uninstalled- as the old saw goes "There's no going back"

I won't comment on vanilla which is a disaster, but the mod that I am playing DLV 6.2 (http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=309) is amongst the best.

The Tactical AI is competent, no more single units of pike-men doing solo attacks on your entire army thank goodness!

Though some do comment on the AI in MTW-VI being superior, IMHO the battle AI is the same, but the battle mechanics were better in MTW-VI.

The real culprit here is the animations issue, where the unit animations play an equally imp role as its stats, which leads to units with slower stats to severely under perform. Additionally clumping is still an issue. Also units with dual weapons aka RTW under perform severely.

The Strategic AI is miles ahead, if played on H and not VH.

For a better look at that wonders may be done with the AI have a look at this:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=637

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Originally Posted by B_Ray

I'm hopeful that this particular point won't be an issue in EB2. I recall that EB1 placed some serious restrictions on where ships could be produced, and I suspect that they can and will make it so that regions with access to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman will at least not be able to produce anything more advanced than the most basic ships, which will hopefully save the AI some money.


Though I've heard it many times before, I've actually not seen this happen often at all. My most frequent experience is that generals linger around behind the main lines for most of the battle, occasionally charging my flanks, only to retreat when I send someone to after them. And then sometime after half their men have died, they charge into the center of the already engaged line and eventually get killed. I've rarely seen the kamikaze behavior so often brought up. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I did want to mention it.

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I think the solution to the ships is likely very restricted ports but if pirates still spawn there has to be some ability to make ships somewhere. Relatively low replacement rate should be more important than low cost to keep the AI from spamming ships because it can be a huge issue. I've screen shots from 2 different mods that included ports in Red Sea where the AI faction there had built over 30 ships that were filling the sea so much they could barely move. That AI was going bankrupt just from its fleets.

I've experienced the AI general hiding behind its frontlines ONLY when its on the defensive and lacks cavalry. Usually playing on mods where AI has money script it is rare it is on the defensive as the human player is always undermanned and fighting usually 2 AI armies on H or VH difficulty levels. If the AI has even 1 or 2 other cavalry units it usually charges with them and then the general right behind. Plus- when the general hides behind the line it often sits there and ignores HA or other missile units concentrating fire on it and does not move away until all the BG nearly dead.

Honestly the most difficult AI to deal with is usually the super aggressive one which charges everything right at your lines because your army will take some losses no matter what wereas if the AI hesitated even for a few minutes it would give human player ample time to setup flanking maneuvers etc and accomplish nearly bloodless victories.

My hope is that with EB2's stronger focus on infantry melee and less on powerful charges by heavy cavalry there is more tactical importance to lengthy maneuvers then simply eliminating enemy cavalry and charging from the rear whilst using infantry as a distraction meatshield. The numbers in the units might make a large difference as well... most mods follow the vanilla formula of cavalry being half the strength of infantry unit which means that it would be 2,000 infantry vs 1,000 cavalry. Not that such battle were impossible but generally infantry greatly outnumbered cavalry- even horse culture factions which fielded almost all cavalry did so in numbers much smaller than an infantry faction could field. Of course infantry not being as mobile those extra numbers weren't as important but they still mean something. If infantry units are usually 150 men I hope most cavalry is 50 or less. So cavalry used carefully is still decisive but requires some care in use and HA might actually run out of arrows before killing the entire enemy army and have to engage in some melee or have infantry hidden on the field somewhere to mop up the survivors.

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Originally Posted by amritochates

The real culprit here is the animations issue, where the unit animations play an equally imp role as its stats, which leads to units with slower stats to severely under perform. Additionally clumping is still an issue. Also units with dual weapons aka RTW under perform severely.

The Strategic AI is miles ahead, if played on H and not VH.

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I agree animations are as or more important than stats but is that really part of AI? AI is where units move and how they react to your own moves.

I've heard a few people make this claim about H vs VH but I've never seen anyone offer proof why H makes better strategy choices than VH?

Well I am assuming from your post above, that your knowledge of M2TW game mechanics is limited, so I shall explain in greater detail.

In M2TW some genius came up with the idea that units should fight the way they look, which translated into the fact between two units with more or less similar or inferior stats the one with a faster animation will win. So if you to read up the forums on the 2H bug, people were using older slightly inferior units with faster animations over newer units with better stats but slower animations.

But the AI chooses its units purely on the basis of stats leading to unit mis-matches that were detrimental to the AI.

And unit balancing as anyone will tell you is an integral part of the BAI.

And as far as the H v/s VH thing goes, no the AI doesn't make smarter decisions. What it does is cut down on the ridiculous DOW that the AI does on VH, and the AI factions don't surround you screaming Blood! Blood! all the time- so diplomacy actually works.

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Originally Posted by amritochates

But the AI chooses its units purely on the basis of stats leading to unit mis-matches that were detrimental to the AI.

And unit balancing as anyone will tell you is an integral part of the BAI.

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I'll agree unit balancing is important but I don't think you'll convince many that its integral to modding BAI. There are too many other variables other than stats and animations that affect how units perform. Cohesion, mass, formation, etc. I follow many of the modding discussions in 3 or 4 MTW2 mods and there are interesting things being done but the AI won't simply be fixed by balancing stats and animations. For instance you can create a 2 handed spear unit with long spears rather than pikes and if give them decent mass and cohesion they will defeat units with much higher attack animation speed and better stats because the longer spear length and decent mass allows more spear animation attacks along the frontline. Now if you take the same spear unit and face it with a unit with identical stats and attack animation as before but give them looser cohesion and mass it tends to spread out around the spear unit and inbetween the spears and more parts of the unit are in contact and then the faster attack animation wins.

Yeah, I would agree that the AI in M2 is overall better. It does have significant weaknesses still however. But some of the new features of M2 such as multiple recruitment per turn, recruitment pools and free garrisons do mean that many of the worst flaws of the campaign map AI have been concealed.

As for the BAI, Ichon speaks words of wisdom.

Sorry about the late response- bit of a series of exciting events in my HRE campaign- don't seem to find time to log on !!

but the AI won't simply be fixed by balancing stats and animations And Pray where did I say so explicitly ?

What I had said that due to the new animation system unit balancing is now infinitely more complex as compared to the RTW engine- and Cohesion, mass, formation are integral to balancing- its just that animations are currently the biggest offender.

For instance you can create a 2 handed spear unit with long spears rather than pikes and if give them decent mass and cohesion they will defeat units with much higher attack animation speed and better stats because the longer spear length and decent mass allows more spear animation attacks along the frontline. Now if you take the same spear unit and face it with a unit with identical stats and attack animation as before but give them looser cohesion and mass it tends to spread out around the spear unit and inbetween the spears and more parts of the unit are in contact and then the faster attack animation wins.

And what about clumping?? your unit with looser cohesion and mass is more likely to have just a couple of men fighting while the remainder sit around admiring their navels.

I'm surprised that no one has emphasized the fact that given a long enough map distance every AI army eventually morphs into a giant ball of out of formation units. The only really interesting battles are when you deploy in a line in the middle of the deployment screen and move towards the AI and a few rare cases where the BAI works right. Barring very few case, most battles devolve into you sitting there in a nice formed up line and the AI army twice as large with their formation turning into a giant clump as they close....

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Originally Posted by amritochates

And Pray where did I say so explicitly ?

The real culprit here is the animations issue, where the unit animations play an equally imp role as its stats, which leads to units with slower stats to severely under perform. Additionally clumping is still an issue. But the AI chooses its units purely on the basis of stats leading to unit mis-matches that were detrimental to the AI.

And unit balancing as anyone will tell you is an integral part of the BAI.

What I had said that due to the new animation system unit balancing is now infinitely more complex as compared to the RTW engine- and Cohesion, mass, formation are integral to balancing- its just that animations are currently the biggest offender.

And what about clumping?? your unit with looser cohesion and mass is more likely to have just a couple of men fighting while the remainder sit around admiring their navels.

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Clumping is an issue but it really only severly impacts during sieges but sieges can be 50% or more of the battles so it is a problem but I haven't seen any good solutions. Certain things are limited due to the engine CA built.

As for looser formation and less mass having only a few men fighting- on offense with several units involved that can happen as parts of the formation get tangled up but if on guard mode and the denser formation with greater mass approaches and attacks it will push the lesser mass formation back and eventually most of the formation comes into play. It does take quite alot of balancingto try and get unit to reflect stats and historical function though but my only point with you is that such balancing is not really part of BAI. You can test 1 vs 1 for a long time and then in some battles still get a different result because of clumping but unless EB team comes up with a novel solution there isn't much you can mod to change that part of the engine so that clumping is never an issue. Just reduce severity of its impact.

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Originally Posted by antisocialmunky

I'm surprised that no one has emphasized the fact that given a long enough map distance every AI army eventually morphs into a giant ball of out of formation units. The only really interesting battles are when you deploy in a line in the middle of the deployment screen and move towards the AI and a few rare cases where the BAI works right. Barring very few case, most battles devolve into you sitting there in a nice formed up line and the AI army twice as large with their formation turning into a giant clump as they close....

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Some of the better BAI have addressed that a bit but the more aggressive the AI is the more that tends to happen- however the more aggressive AI is usually the one that does the most damage even in clumped formation. The AI does try and straighten its lines out before making contact in most of the modded BAI's I've seen lately but doesn't always succeed. If you could force the AI to move in neat formations that would actually make it easier for the human player to divide and conquer though wouldn't it? I find trying to mess with that giant mass of approaching units is difficult with anything besides ranged units until you commit your forward line. If the AI kept its units nice and separate you can more easily line of charges or draw just 1 unit out etc.

The Campaign AI is slightly moddable for sure. Broken Crescent has made an AI that will rarely break alliances unless it has bad relations and sees a great opportunity. They also expand very readily into rebel provinces. This had the result in one of my Rum sultanate games where we had world peace with a web of alliances ensuring that there was no war on the whole map for about 40 turns. Then when the mongols invaded and broke the peace, almost every single nation turned their fullstacks on them and beat them back to world peace again.

Obviously bad for gameplay coz it meant I had to fight the entire world when I attacked any nation but I like the idea behind it and hopefully it can be balanced and used for EB so that at least some diplomacy can be attempted.

I just let them hit me. This is mostly coming from TATW and SS experience so enemy armies are much bigger than yours. I have two lines of units and the AI routs the first one but has absolutely no stamina left over. Then they get charged in the back and mass rout. The main issue is that it will be detrimental to the EBII experience if the AI completely throws realistic formations out of the window.

I will say that the TATW AI will flank and that 20 battle trolls plowing through your lines is not a good experience. Still can be salvaged as the free peoples of Middle Earth has better quality units.

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Originally Posted by antisocialmunky

20 battle trolls plowing through your lines is not a good experience.

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Well, that's not a factor of the AI, it's just a factor of their ridiculous stats. That is one of the nice things about trolls though, it doesn't matter how stupidly the AI uses them, they will always cause significant damage, which is really nice if you want a challenge.

I remember a battle in my Hungarian campaign where I fought a Danish army of mainly dismounted feudal knights.

It was just standing there waiting for me to attack, I ripped it to shreds using the full ammunition of my crossbowmen. They just stood there till the last man dropped dead with a bolt in its head.

Maybe this is fixed in Kingdoms? Still, it doesnt tell much good about the M2TW AI.

~Fluvius

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Originally Posted by Fluvius Camillus

I remember a battle in my Hungarian campaign where I fought a Danish army of mainly dismounted feudal knights.

It was just standing there waiting for me to attack, I ripped it to shreds using the full ammunition of my crossbowmen. They just stood there till the last man dropped dead with a bolt in its head.

Maybe this is fixed in Kingdoms? Still, it doesnt tell much good about the M2TW AI.

~Fluvius

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That can be modded. Take a look at this demo of XAI for example (It's an old version though. The latest one is 4.0). I haven't tried it myself, but it does seem quite amazing.

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Originally Posted by Paltmull

That can be modded. Take a look at this demo of XAI for example (It's an old version though. The latest one is 4.0). I haven't tried it myself, but it does seem quite amazing.

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Looks promising, this can bring up some exciting battles!

In my AS game my royal army faced off with a Makedonian Royal fullstack full of elites.
They started by throwing their Basileus in the pikes of my Argyraspides followed by his hetairoi. He died soon and the elites were easily outflanked and routed. Thus ended a promising battle which really disappointed me in the end.

If I see this I can imagine him using that cavalry instead to battle my cavalry, or trying to flank me.

~Fluvius

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Originally Posted by Fluvius Camillus

Looks promising, this can bring up some exciting battles!

If I see this I can imagine him using that cavalry instead to battle my cavalry, or trying to flank me.

~Fluvius

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XAI and some other working along similar principles have been succesful in getting the cavalry to flank and even avoid stakes that some archers in MTW2 can place but so far none have been able to get cavalry to function as screen vs other cavalry or stop the AI from throwing all its cavalry ahead of its infantry without support if it has an advantage in cavalry numbers. The AI will hold cavalry in reserve if your own army has equal or greater amounts of cavalry but if not... throws away its cavalry and usually its general as well then its an easy battle to flank and finish off the remaining infantry. The only time battles are really tough is when AI has way more cavalry than your own army and even if it loses 1/2 of it stupidly the other half does some damage.

The problem seems to be to make the AI cautious enough to hold back its cavalry in the face of having superior numbers also means it sits there when attacked at range by missiles and does not react very well. I think some versions will chase the unit targeting them with missiles but then that is almost as bad as it is quite easy to draw out single unit or even one I tried that all cavalry within a certain radius would converge on the missile unit firing on any cavalry so it was a simple matter to line up horse archers or whatever on a hill and run 1 HA down to fire on the AI cavalry and then a whole string from one flank of the AI army chased that single cavalry back and forth on the bottom of the hill until all were dead.

Making sure AI armies are relatively well composed and that using replenish rates that players have a problem creating 100% heavy cavalry armies is key to more often good interesting battles than just improving BAI alone. If the AI percieves the forces as equal is when it seems to act most intelligently under all the BAIs and when paired with one of the better BAIs that has been developed can lead at least to some interesting battles on VH where AI gets a slight morale advantage that can sometimes make a difference. Usually it still fails somewhere but to exploit that failing takes more work and thought by the player.

Been playing some more EB1 and getting annoyed with the army composition and battle AI again. I just fought a Makedonian full stack comprised of twelve units of classical hoplites, a single levy phalanx at a tenth of it's normal strength, a unit of cavalry, a unit of akontistai, a general (who charged the centre of my line; I had to make an effort not to kill him) and the rest useless Illyrian levies. Who of course came forward piecemeal, not even as a single line. Seriously, how hard is it to at least stick to a single line?

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

Been playing some more EB1 and getting annoyed with the army composition and battle AI again. I just fought a Makedonian full stack comprised of twelve units of classical hoplites, a single levy phalanx at a tenth of it's normal strength, a unit of cavalry, a unit of akontistai, a general (who charged the centre of my line; I had to make an effort not to kill him) and the rest useless Illyrian levies. Who of course came forward piecemeal, not even as a single line. Seriously, how hard is it to at least stick to a single line?

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Yea that's one of my pet peeves to, the trick is to play as Hayasdan and be at war with AS early on in the game, you'll be glad the AI is so dumb.

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Originally Posted by Chuchip

Yea that's one of my pet peeves to, the trick is to play as Hayasdan and be at war with AS early on in the game, you'll be glad the AI is so dumb.

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There's really nothing much fun for me winning because the AI is incapable of the most basic tactic of holding a line.

Does M2:TW use the naval AI from BI? Meaning that if you happen to have a coastal boundary, you'll be spammed by insignificant but annoying stacks from factions you don't even have a meaningful relationship with.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

Does M2:TW use the naval AI from BI? Meaning that if you happen to have a coastal boundary, you'll be spammed by insignificant but annoying stacks from factions you don't even have a meaningful relationship with.

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I think this was actually a big problem in Vanilla M2TW.

Yea, it´s annoying when a powerfull faction like Carthage tries to "raid" Latium with a "3 unit stack", though i suppose it has some reasons i might have observed in my campaigns:
- the AI seems to be designed to send an "adequate" force to fight you at a designated place, means: if you have only couple of troops in that province, the AI will send you a small raiding party instead of a whole army
- the same one can often observe when AI tries to take Eleutheroi towns - it sends a half way decent army while trying to take the chances on the even odds; but it mostly sends captains against 5-10 star gouverneurs of that towns, and we all know the results.. But in the same time there are huge stacks guarding homelands, led by capable generals. One should take this into account too, imo.
- that funny AI behaiviour when you see all those reinforcements lining up along the roads toward the final target, and the often observed siege with a pathetic force ( a captain, a quoter stack, too light units - all that against a multiple star commander of yours with a decent army; the AI sallys mostly on the favorable odds, so the attacker AI seems to think - hey, why not besiege the town earlier, build some siege equipment, while the reinfocements are on the way? I really would like to know what is responsible for the choices of the AI to let a FM lead the army instead of a captain! This would make things not only more realistic, but also more challenging, i think ( for example: the AI never recruits generals on BI.exe, it´s a feature only the player might use, afaik. If one could change that, or script a general for every decent - 1/3 stack at least, or so - army, this would spice up things too ).

Such raids from less powerfull, and less rich, factions seem more then apropriate to me. The full scale warfare is something that didn´t happen every year, unless a huge conflict between some local superpoweres was goning on - like the First Punic war, for example.
It could be a matter of diplomatic presets, how much one faction is suspicious about another, but when choosing the campain difficulty, one, sadly, has to choose between a passive, poor ( no mercs etc. ) AI and the super agressive, insane factions with the top priority to take the player out. That´s why i mostly play on "hard" as a bit more balanced setting. I hope, the settings for the AI on MTW2 engine are more sofisticated.

What's the latest on this? It was some time ago that I originally asked the question, has AI been addressed now? Have any other mods borne fruit in ternms of getting campaign AI able to recruit and mobilise properly, and battle AI capable of holding a line?

There are a lot of mods that have custom AI adn there are many AI mods out there. For example Lusted on is quite well known. Currently we have a few people working on it. And as you can read on our twitter we've tweaked a mongol faction AI from Lusted to fit to our Saka faction. So AI especially in second or later release will probably even be customized for each faction/fation type/culture. In other words it should be a huge improvement over RTW1 and MTWII:k.

from eb1 empire posting it seems the koinon hellenon are very naval invasion prone so now having acess to the sea is no longer just a way to increase revenues trough merching or an highway to invade other lands but also a weak point that must be adressed guess that the river fort strategy to secure your core lands won´t be enough anymore without a decent navy to protect your shores so the strategic ai as improved

lets see how the diplomacy ai and how the tactical ai compare to real players

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

What's the latest on this? It was some time ago that I originally asked the question, has AI been addressed now? Have any other mods borne fruit in ternms of getting campaign AI able to recruit and mobilise properly, and battle AI capable of holding a line?

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One thing you have to keep in mind is that only very recently did the team finally slay the bugs that made it impossible to play for more than a few turns without some sort of CTD. And you really cannot test a campaign AI without, well, a campaign! So from that standpoint we are definitely playing catch-up, but it is a key focus area, and we have made progress.

Right now it's all to hard to say. Other than we have a lot of studying, questions to ask fellow modders (I'm sure CA as well), "Follow AI" for 100000000's+ of turns, internal discussion, and work, before we're done with regards to the CAI. We're going to aim high that's for sure. But for this instance of the mod, it's likely, "done when it's done."

The some problems ahead of us are because of the fact that EB2 is a total conversion; concepts like religion are gone, and other unrelated concepts have been introduced. How do we get the AI to work in concert with those new concepts? Specialty scripts? Gentle nudges/hard pushes in already established AI files? Etc? Some things are hardcoded and out of reach, some things are more softcoded than they were in RTW.

Anyways, the best way to help get that "Dream AI" in as fast as possible is to point knowledgeable people in the teams' direction, or take some days to learn about it and help us out yourself if you have the time and motivation.

Concerning the naval AI in Vanilla: playing as Egypt on VH/VH, the Byzantines would frequently land small stacks near Alexandria. The armies were usually slightly larger than my garrison and composed of more professional units. However, due to the BAI's incompetence, I always defeated them, but they also mauled my force in the process. Whenever the landing force was weaker than the garrison, they wouldn't attack at all but evacuated in the same turn. In my England campaigns, the Portuguese frequently landed huge, powerful stacks in Wales.

In other words, naval invasions are possible and are generally well-calibrated. In my experience, the bigger problem is the tactical AI.

Edit - For extra challenge, it's easy to integrate the Hardcore ReallybadAI mod into any build. It essentially introduces a command-chain, ensures the AI uses stakes and limits the deployment time.

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Originally Posted by Moros

In other words it should be a huge improvement over RTW1 and MTWII:k.

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This sounds like... hype from R2TW.

If you're lying like they were, I'll kill you myself. But if your not... then EB2 will really be something special. For a long time I couldn't think it could possibly be better than EB1... but this...

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Originally Posted by fallen851

This sounds like... hype from R2TW.

If you're lying like they were, I'll kill you myself. But if your not... then EB2 will really be something special. For a long time I couldn't think it could possibly be better than EB1... but this...

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It's not hype. As Moros mentioned there are other custom AI's out there that surpass vanilla. If others can do it, we'll learn how to do it as well; And being a labor of love like EB2 is for us, we're not going to settle until we're proud of every part of it and the fans are happy too.

Anyways, I wouldn't threaten Moros. I once saw him turn a camel into a balloon before flying off into the sunset... I still hear the screams at night.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

Been playing some more EB1 and getting annoyed with the army composition and battle AI again. I just fought a Makedonian full stack comprised of twelve units of classical hoplites, a single levy phalanx at a tenth of it's normal strength, a unit of cavalry, a unit of akontistai, a general (who charged the centre of my line; I had to make an effort not to kill him) and the rest useless Illyrian levies. Who of course came forward piecemeal, not even as a single line. Seriously, how hard is it to at least stick to a single line?

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Hopefully the recruitment pools and the ability to add recruitment priority to units will fix this somewhat.

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This sounds like... hype from R2TW.

If you're lying like they were, I'll kill you myself. But if your not... then EB2 will really be something special. For a long time I couldn't think it could possibly be better than EB1... but this...

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Doh't expect to have a product of the same quality as the final EB 1, with the first release. Don't forget it's still an Alpha/Beta release. Comparable with the 0.7x versions.

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Originally Posted by RAWROMNOM

It's not hype. As Moros mentioned there are other custom AI's out there that surpass vanilla. If others can do it, we'll learn how to do it as well; And being a labor of love like EB2 is for us, we're not going to settle until we're proud of every part of it and the fans are happy too.

Anyways, I wouldn't threaten Moros. I once saw him turn a camel into a balloon before flying off into the sunset... I still hear the screams at night.

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I am well known for my empty threats. But don't tell Moros that.

Anyway, it is good to hear that the EB2 team plans on committing to finished EB2, but I've heard that before. In many ways, I felt EB1 was left in an unfinished state. To install the game, you have to download and then install EB 1.1, then patch it to EB 1.2, then install a bunch of hotfixes. Why was it never all put together into a single download and install? Also, there have been a lot of improvements to RTW mods since the release of EB 1.2 in graphics quality (RS2 terrain), and game stability (the no quotes fix) that have greatly improved RTW mods. EB hasn't been updated with these either. Finally, I think most of the EB community will agree that certain mini-mods should be rolled into the main game, such TWFanatic's phalanx mod (among others). Phalanx units fight in a much more realistic and historic fashion with that mod, and with one of EB's goal seeming to be historical accuracy, I feel it should be added and can't conceive of an argument why it shouldn't be added.

Hopefully, EB2 will be finished and polished.

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Originally Posted by Moros

Doh't expect to have a product of the same quality as the final EB 1, with the first release. Don't forget it's still an Alpha/Beta release. Comparable with the 0.7x versions.

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Don't worry, I have realistic expectations regarding the quality of the first releases. I was around for the earliest EB releases. But if there isn't an AI improvement in the final EB2 releases compared to EB1, I'll be pretty disappointed.

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In many ways, I felt EB1 was left in an unfinished state.

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Can't say I agree. Sure, numerous improvements could have been made, because there is always room for improvement, but EB1 v.1.2 was quite polished IMO. Also, the team's manpower is limited. There is a point when they have to say "that's enough, the mod is finished" and move on. And there are always unofficial submods for those who want to enhance the game further. RTW1 is a very old game by now, while MTW2's engine gives the team a chance to do things which were impossible to do back in the RTW1 days.

i still defend that eb2 should be released in mini mods style and then in the end when everything works fine all would come together to make a trully amazing single big game

eb steppes warfare \o
eb the barbarian world \p
eb the diadochii (eastern greeks) \o/
eb land of the hellenes (the greek world and the politiks of the city states) d/
eb the mediterranean world \~/
eb the ties of kart hadast /T\

the lst 3 overlap i´m aware but mini campaigns could be trully amazing and tweak specific war zones like the desert or the steppes and tweak political organisations like the carthies the roman/italians and the greek city states or work better in the development of the barbarian civilizations and how the barbarian diplomacy worked

That's something that would be highly impossible to coordinate. We're simply a bunch of guys and gals donating our freetime. Work, family, friends, and other responsibilities come first before EB2 development. We're not a professional development team with a budget. This means that everything comes together at different times. Like for instance, right now some of our historians/programmers we had before are busy with real life issues. Thus the areas they have been working on are basically stalled.

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Originally Posted by RAWROMNOM

Thus the areas they have been working on are basically stalled.

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What areas in particular?

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

What areas in particular?

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Koinon Hellenon Unicorns, Seleukeia Opium cut to 80% with hashish, and Sweboz hookers (Back then there was no ID; so the more hair, the better).

Actually, that's a lie. EB2 is finished and we've been playing it for years. Eb3 is already halfway finished, built on Rome 2 Total War.

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Originally Posted by RAWROMNOM

Actually, that's a lie. EB2 is finished and we've been playing it for years. Eb3 is already halfway finished, built on Rome 2 Total War.

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The Warscape Engine makes me shudder.

A more general question; in RTW the military and diplomacy AIs didn't talk to each other. A faction massing troops on your border for invasion could happily sign trade rights with you, then attack the next turn. Another faction you were pasting in battle after battle wouldn't accept a ceasefire (without Force Diplomacy) even though they'd been greatly weakened. And so on.

Is there any evidence the two actually interact in M2TW? Does the AI respect a ceasefire and alter what it's doing, or throw whatever it has at you as soon as it can build up an army again?

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Originally Posted by Moros

There are a lot of mods that have custom AI adn there are many AI mods out there. For example Lusted on is quite well known. Currently we have a few people working on it. And as you can read on our twitter we've tweaked a mongol faction AI from Lusted to fit to our Saka faction. So AI especially in second or later release will probably even be customized for each faction/fation type/culture. In other words it should be a huge improvement over RTW1 and MTWII:k.

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That's reassuring that we don't have the exact same AI as we had in RTW (as before, I have very little trust in CA applying themselves to deeper, more complicated things than spiffier graphics).

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Originally Posted by Kull

One thing you have to keep in mind is that only very recently did the team finally slay the bugs that made it impossible to play for more than a few turns without some sort of CTD. And you really cannot test a campaign AI without, well, a campaign! So from that standpoint we are definitely playing catch-up, but it is a key focus area, and we have made progress.

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Well, I was hoping more from a general modding perspective that people might have been playing with the AI and have experience that could be applied to EB2. Rather than expecting the developers to have necessarily achieved it themselves.

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

Concerning the naval AI in Vanilla: playing as Egypt on VH/VH, the Byzantines would frequently land small stacks near Alexandria. The armies were usually slightly larger than my garrison and composed of more professional units. However, due to the BAI's incompetence, I always defeated them, but they also mauled my force in the process. Whenever the landing force was weaker than the garrison, they wouldn't attack at all but evacuated in the same turn. In my England campaigns, the Portuguese frequently landed huge, powerful stacks in Wales.

In other words, naval invasions are possible and are generally well-calibrated. In my experience, the bigger problem is the tactical AI.

Edit - For extra challenge, it's easy to integrate the Hardcore ReallybadAI mod into any build. It essentially introduces a command-chain, ensures the AI uses stakes and limits the deployment time.

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That is also reassuring. Is it possible to effectively stop naval invasions if you strongly garrison coastal settlements?

As a side-question, were the factions landing troops those you were actually at war with, or had something to gain by invading? The problem with the naval AI from RTW:BI was that anyone on the same body of water was a potential aggressor, regardless of diplomacy status (because of course, military and diplomacy AI didn't talk to each other in RTW...).

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Originally Posted by Moros

Hopefully the recruitment pools and the ability to add recruitment priority to units will fix this somewhat.

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Fingers crossed.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

Well, I was hoping more from a general modding perspective that people might have been playing with the AI and have experience that could be applied to EB2. Rather than expecting the developers to have necessarily achieved it themselves.

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"People" have been playing with the AI, just not people on the EB2 team. Do a search for "campaign AI" or go browse discussions and tutorials and you'll see that many folks have spent lot of time customizing the AI either for specific mods or as "bolt-on" improvements to the original vanilla M2TW AI. What we are doing - now that we can actually TEST the AI in EB2 - is looking at the entire corpus of research, identifying existing improvements made by others, testing those, and making alterations accordingly. The EB2 AI is ALREADY customized based on that initial testing and research, but we are looking to do even more as we go forward.

That said, i would encourage people to have realistic expectations. The AI will never be a human player, and will always feature limitations of some sort that simply can't be overcome. What I can promise you is that the AI will be better than it was in M2TW, and probably quite a bit better than it was in EB1.

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Originally Posted by RAWROMNOM

and Sweboz hookers (Back then there was no ID; so the more hair, the better).

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I'm useless at modelling, but I could certainly script in some modified princesses, if you need help.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorius

Is there any evidence the two actually interact in M2TW? Does the AI respect a ceasefire and alter what it's doing, or throw whatever it has at you as soon as it can build up an army again?

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I spent half an hour typing out an in-depth answer to your questions and suddenly my connection timed out. Once more unto the breech.

I'll be concise: yes. Keep in mind, though, that a faction with bad relations with you will probably violate the ceasefire after re-building their forces, unless another faction distracts them. But that's only natural.

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That is also reassuring. Is it possible to effectively stop naval invasions if you strongly garrison coastal settlements?

As a side-question, were the factions landing troops those you were actually at war with, or had something to gain by invading? The problem with the naval AI from RTW:BI was that anyone on the same body of water was a potential aggressor, regardless of diplomacy status (because of course, military and diplomacy AI didn't talk to each other in RTW...).

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To the first question, yes but it's expensive. The second question is a bit more complicated. Yes, they both had quite a lot to gain, especially since my armies in the theatre were generally weak. However, the decision to invade is balanced against the target faction's standings (global standing, or reputation, and faction standing, or relations) and risk. The Byzantines viewed Egypt - an ally of their nemesis, the Turks - as a weak and obvious target. Portugal is essentially sandwiched between two continental powers - the Moors and Castille - and take to the sea seeking Lebensraum. So, even though the English and Portuguese might have lukewarm relations, the rewards of a successful invasion far outweigh the risk. In some cases, the AI seems to behave irrationally when it is operating on a logical game mechanic. For example, Poland may start a war with Russia by blockading Russian ports simply because their navy is too weak to defend their trade-lanes, the lifeblood of the Rus' treasury. Basically, neutrality means nothing, standing means everything and weakness will be exploited. A close ally will likely remain a close ally. But neutral factions are wild cards.

To be fair, I've developed a theory base on my trawls through the descr_campaign_ai_db.xml file that the game has hardcoded "enemies" - or factions that will always remain rivals, which would explain a lot of the AI's behaviour.

On an endnote, the AI can be vastly improved by altering a few values in the game files. There's one line in the config_ai_battle.xml file that's massively powerful:

<friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>0.8</friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>,

this measures the balance of forces to determine whether an army should attack another army, on the campaign or battle map. In Vanilla, an army needs to be only 80% the size of an enemy's force to attack. By increasing the value to, say, 1.5 the AI will only attack with a 50% numerical advantage, which would eliminate most of the small-fry offensives.

By the way, why doesn't the medieval period interest you?

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Originally Posted by fallen851

The Warscape Engine makes me shudder.

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If you're a fan of Amnesia: The Dark Decent and other horror games (Silent Hill 1, etc.), EB3 will be right up your alley!
We're also taking design cues from this fighting game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip5coYUTRg

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

I'm useless at modelling, but I could certainly script in some modified princesses, if you need help.

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If you're clever enough, it just might make it in as an Easter egg. Who knows? ~;) (No points if you steal the dwarf marriages image from Third Age!)

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

On an endnote, the AI can be vastly improved by altering a few values in the game files. There's one line in the config_ai_battle.xml file that's massively powerful:

<friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>0.8</friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>,

this measures the balance of forces to determine whether an army should attack another army, on the campaign or battle map. In Vanilla, an army needs to be only 80% the size of an enemy's force to attack. By increasing the value to, say, 1.5 the AI will only attack with a 50% numerical advantage, which would eliminate most of the small-fry offensives.

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If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:

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Originally Posted by CavalryCmdr

You can do that, and the AI would build impresive armies that would probably do nothing, and would definately do nothing in battle. Anythong much over 1:1 tends to cause unreasonable passivity in battle. Also note Lusted's post, even a 1.2 caused expansion dificulties for the AI on the campaign level.

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Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

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Originally Posted by Kull

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:

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impressive what a single number will do. it's clear improving the AI to an ideal or near idea level will be a challenge, if even possible.

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

I spent half an hour typing out an in-depth answer to your questions and suddenly my connection timed out. Once more unto the breech.

I'll be concise: yes. Keep in mind, though, that a faction with bad relations with you will probably violate the ceasefire after re-building their forces, unless another faction distracts them. But that's only natural.

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Shame you lost that in-depth answer, I would have been interested in reading it.

If it were due to relations, I'd be fine with that. It's when you happen to share a border, thus you are attacked irrespective of any other engagement that gets tiresome.

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

To the first question, yes but it's expensive. The second question is a bit more complicated. Yes, they both had quite a lot to gain, especially since my armies in the theatre were generally weak. However, the decision to invade is balanced against the target faction's standings (global standing, or reputation, and faction standing, or relations) and risk. The Byzantines viewed Egypt - an ally of their nemesis, the Turks - as a weak and obvious target. Portugal is essentially sandwiched between two continental powers - the Moors and Castille - and take to the sea seeking Lebensraum. So, even though the English and Portuguese might have lukewarm relations, the rewards of a successful invasion far outweigh the risk. In some cases, the AI seems to behave irrationally when it is operating on a logical game mechanic. For example, Poland may start a war with Russia by blockading Russian ports simply because their navy is too weak to defend their trade-lanes, the lifeblood of the Rus' treasury. Basically, neutrality means nothing, standing means everything and weakness will be exploited. A close ally will likely remain a close ally. But neutral factions are wild cards.

To be fair, I've developed a theory base on my trawls through the descr_campaign_ai_db.xml file that the game has hardcoded "enemies" - or factions that will always remain rivals, which would explain a lot of the AI's behaviour.

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Even that is an improvement, it's better than "your border touches on a body of water that ours does, therefore we will attack".

On your second, I don't have a problem with hardcoded enemies - as long who that enemy is can be altered. The Diadochi (the big three, that is) being hardcoded enemies would be fine, for example. After all they all want the same thing, to reunite Alexander's former empire under their banner.

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

On an endnote, the AI can be vastly improved by altering a few values in the game files. There's one line in the config_ai_battle.xml file that's massively powerful:

<friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>0.8</friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>,

this measures the balance of forces to determine whether an army should attack another army, on the campaign or battle map. In Vanilla, an army needs to be only 80% the size of an enemy's force to attack. By increasing the value to, say, 1.5 the AI will only attack with a 50% numerical advantage, which would eliminate most of the small-fry offensives.

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That does sound promising.

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Originally Posted by Rex Somnorum

By the way, why doesn't the medieval period interest you?

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I just find it boring in the extreme. I'm a tabletop/PnP roleplayer and it's been done to death in fantasy games. When compared to antiquity it's such a small, poor and dull place. Compare how tiny medieval armies are compared to those in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, because every state was small and weak. Then we have the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, best epitomised in the abject failure that was Spain. Enough gold and silver was looted from the New World to have established Spain as the foremost power in the world, with the right investment in infrastructure even today it should have been a leading nation. Instead they wasted all that money gilding churches and fighting pointless religious wars. What's left to show for it now? We're talking about a nation where even into the early 20th century, they were still reliant on roads built by the Romans for transport.

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Originally Posted by Kull

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:

Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

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I have to say, a less aggressive, less expansionist AI isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. So if it's over 1.0 that's bad, but 0.95 or so would be good. I play a very slow game, the AI on the other hand blitzes all the time. Factions shouldn't be wiped out within 50 turns of the game starting, as often happens in EB1.

and with the tweaks the ai will get they won´t (unleass you play as the seulekids since if you do you need to get rid of the armenians pontians pergamese and kick out the egyptians out of messi asia fast if you wanna survive the eastern push that the phalava baktrians and takashilians will make on your eastern border and considering that your eastern regions are you worst developed and less able to create soldiers ... ) ofc you can always turn the pergamese the pontians and the armenians as protectorates i don´t know how that will work

as for your remark regarding spain you´re being a bit unfair what you call spain is a federation of "countries" and troughout their entire history they always had problems in exerting authority over those same regions to put it blatantly only the castillans during the time period you refer to pulled their own weight the galicians asturians basque aragonese catulunians valencians and so forth where always fighting and promoting instability to get political advantages and autonomy

also during this period spain made the mistake to add the portuguese to this entire mix with further unstabalised their core regions and depleted castille and leon´s hability to run their empire if you combine that with the dutch english and french constant pressure you can´t expect them to fight in so many fronts

there where probably more rebellions and major armed combat in what you call spain today then the fights they had to conquer their empire

also before it was the kingdom of castille and leon spain comes from hispania wich meant the entire peninsula so they only adopted that name to try and get a new "suport" and unify people under one banner so spain means the united iberians

the church was suported because it was one of the most effective ways to try and keep the unity of the country just as giving it a new flag and name and the english didn´t mind the church much when they used it´s comunication networks to get the spanish to rise against napoleon and suport wellington

also the rulling elite of spain where the hapsburgs so if you wanna see the infrastructure that that gold bought you should visit the checz republik hungary or austria and even the netherlands

the gold was used to buy social peace not only in "spain" but also the low countries and in the austrian hungarian empire

ofc france had the same problem with corsica bretagne and so forth just as the english did with the scots welsh and irish

please avoid making remarks wich are uncalled for particulary now that once again spain is having to contend with the independists again (if they suceed and i kind of hope they do the corsicans and the scots are next in this new europe )

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Originally Posted by Kull

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:



Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

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I actually got that particular value from the ReallyBadAI mod, where the AI is more aggressive. At much higher values, like 1.7 or 2, passivity might be a problem, but I haven't seen it at 1.5.

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Originally Posted by QuintusSertorious

I just find it boring in the extreme. I'm a tabletop/PnP roleplayer and it's been done to death in fantasy games. When compared to antiquity it's such a small, poor and dull place. Compare how tiny medieval armies are compared to those in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, because every state was small and weak. Then we have the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, best epitomised in the abject failure that was Spain. Enough gold and silver was looted from the New World to have established Spain as the foremost power in the world, with the right investment in infrastructure even today it should have been a leading nation. Instead they wasted all that money gilding churches and fighting pointless religious wars. What's left to show for it now? We're talking about a nation where even into the early 20th century, they were still reliant on roads built by the Romans for transport.

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Inflation due to that very gold, combined with high taxation, contributed most to Spain's fall. Not so much religion.

Last night, I ran some tests to see how influential that ratio really is. I unpacked a fresh copy of Vanilla and played 20 turns on M/M as Egypt for a control. I then increased the ratio to 1.0 and played Egypt again for 20 turns. After that, I increased the value to 1.5 and played Egypt for another 20 turns. At 1.0, I didn't notice much change from 0.8, except that the AI tended to build bigger armies (which is the whole point). At 1.5, the AI expanded at a slighter slower rate (it took essentially 1.5 turns for some factions to take a province that originally took 1 turn) than for 0.8 and 1.0. However, I did notice a few factions build huge armies and park them next to a settlement. In other words, a value of 1.5 resulted in a minor increase in passivity. On a harder difficulty, the should be more aggressive, too. It's important bear in mind that 20 turns in EB equates to 5 years, so a hyper-aggressive AI might expand too quickly. I think that anywhere between 1.0 and 1.5 would be ideal for EB.