The hard and very hard campaigns.

[groundhogie]

Hi all, I've been looking at this forum every now and again for tips and reading a few battle stories but never have posted. I just started playing the game again after a long break and was just wondering about the difficulty settings. I usually play a campaign with hard battle difficulty and medium campaign.

But the campaign AI on medium really isn't cutting it for me anymore, they seem to just hang back in their castles while I tromp across Europe and the Middle East and it has become boring/repeditive. My questions is if the higher level difficulties give a change in the AI of other kingdoms? Such as making them more aggressive on the map and making better use of their agents..or does it just give the AI cheaper upkeep and a big chunk of money, basically like the AI has cheated to gain an advantage over the player?

[FactionHeir]

The difference is that the AI at very hard has the same boni as you do (in addition to the cheats they have at EVERY difficulty level), as at the lower levels, it actually gets penalties.

However, the AI usually still won't be much of a challenge, as the main visible effect of higher difficulty will be their units being as tough as yours on the battlefield and their relations with you deteriorating faster on the campaign map (i.e. higher likelihood of them declaring war on you).

If you want to have a tougher AI, you probably will need to play with a mod

[G^2]

As Faction Heir stated a mod is where your going to find a better AI. For me personally, M2TW didn't shine until I started playing Stainless Steel (SS). This mod uses Lusted's new AI which greatly increases AI competency. I have also heard good things about Broken Cresent if your into the middle east, and Lands to Conquer, which I understand is like a more challenging version of vanilla.

[FactionHeir]

Meh, the only true challenging version of vanilla is VanillaMod (which uses Lusted's new AI to some extent and other AI coding made by myself), the others are quite a bit different

[G^2]

Sorry Faction Heir, I suppose Lands to Conquer does change quite a few things from vanilla.

[PBI]

What does LTC change? I know it has the rebalancing of unit stats used in Kingdoms, but what else?

[ArtistofWarfare]

The difference is that the AI at very hard has the same boni as you do (in addition to the cheats they have at EVERY difficulty level), as at the lower levels, it actually gets penalties.

However, the AI usually still won't be much of a challenge, as the main visible effect of higher difficulty will be their units being as tough as yours on the battlefield and their relations with you deteriorating faster on the campaign map (i.e. higher likelihood of them declaring war on you).

If you want to have a tougher AI, you probably will need to play with a mod

Whoa wait a sec. "the main visible effect will be their units being as tough as yours on the battlefield".

Sounds like better AI to me...at least as far as AI goes these days.

[G^2]

I know in SS the AI won't declare war on you for no reason and on the campaign map it seems to react better to the player. One time playing as the Knights Templer I had a stack sitting on a bridge near Ciaro, the AI managed to placed a full stack infront of me while attacking behind me with a few units in a pincher, thus forcing me to have to cross the bridge to take out the smaller army while a full stack was behind me. Won the battle but with heavy causalties, and won only because I had a maxed out dread general that caused a route. Never seen anything like it in Vanilla.

[Joh]

If you want a tough campaign you could check a mod called Deus Lo Vult (sp???) at:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=309
but be prepared for a lot of changes and a rough time because of code changes that benefit the AI. Some of the new features, namely cavalry animations, are controversial, so you could try to check earlier versions.