Best AI?

[Gleemonex]

My guess is that CA tried to reduce system requirements by including less A.I. routines. Increased battle speed probably also played a role. Or they may simply have wanted to make the game easier and more accessible.

It's hard (but not impossible) to imagine them skimping on the feature they touted so proudly in S:TW -- an engine inspired by Sun Tzu! -- when most everything else going from S:TW to R:TW was a major revamp.

I think they wanted to make it more accessible. Especially since they included ways to trick the AI ('loose formation' units looking more numerous, for example) piling the natural AI disadvantage with extra, purposely-programmed "stupidity".

The S:TW engine didn't have such debilitating nuances, so I still posit that it had a simpler task overall.

-Glee

[We shall fwee...Wodewick]

I think they wanted to make it more accessible. Especially since they included ways to trick the AI ('loose formation' units looking more numerous, for example) piling the natural AI disadvantage with extra, purposely-programmed "stupidity".

The S:TW engine didn't have such debilitating nuances, so I still posit that it had a simpler task overall.

-Glee

See I don't mind if that was in RTW or M2TW, but that should be what easy battle difficulty is. I would much rather that Very Hard was realistic morale, but your fighting against a napoleonic Hannibal the Great of Macedon then what you do have is a general with the iq of a chicken and the will to live of a suicidal mental patience on the top of a large building who can miraculously rally his soldiers no matter what.

[Ludens]

It's hard (but not impossible) to imagine them skimping on the feature they touted so proudly in S:TW -- an engine inspired by Sun Tzu! -- when most everything else going from S:TW to R:TW was a major revamp.

I agree, but really, if you study the way the R:TW A.I. responds and compare it with the way the M:TW A.I. does things under similar conditions, you cannot but conclude that something has gone very wrong. Off course, because CA completely redid the R:TW engine, they probably had to rewrite the A.I. as well. Game A.I. doesn't necessarily work like the human player: its interface is highly dependent on the engine itself.

I think they wanted to make it more accessible. Especially since they included ways to trick the AI ('loose formation' units looking more numerous, for example) piling the natural AI disadvantage with extra, purposely-programmed "stupidity".

The S:TW engine didn't have such debilitating nuances, so I still posit that it had a simpler task overall.

I rather doubt that was implemented. A more important factor would have been that more CPU power was allocated to the graphics. Also the increased speed of movement and battle resolution in vanilla R:TW would have left the CPU with even fewer CPU cycles to formulate tactics. If the S:TW A.I. responded a bit sluggishly, you probably wouldn't notice and it wouldn't matter much because battle resolution is slower and quick strikes count for less. In vanilla R:TW quick strikes are all-important, however.

[Gleemonex]

See I don't mind if that was in RTW or M2TW, but that should be what easy battle difficulty is. I would much rather that Very Hard was realistic morale, but your fighting against a napoleonic Hannibal the Great of Macedon then what you do have is a general with the iq of a chicken and the will to live of a suicidal mental patience on the top of a large building who can miraculously rally his soldiers no matter what.

Very few people would be as happy as I, if (when?) that were to come about. But that's delving deep into neural net and fuzzy logic research. I can only hope that some budding PhD out there is a rabid EB fan.

It's hard (but not impossible) to imagine them skimping on the feature they touted so proudly in S:TW -- an engine inspired by Sun Tzu! -- when most everything else going from S:TW to R:TW was a major revamp.

I agree, but really, if you study the way the R:TW A.I. responds and compare it with the way the M:TW A.I. does things under similar conditions, you cannot but conclude that something has gone very wrong. Off course, because CA completely redid the R:TW engine, they probably had to rewrite the A.I. as well. Game A.I. doesn't necessarily work like the human player: its interface is highly dependent on the engine itself.

I never got to play much M:TW -- I had a CTD three years after getting my scrumptious and sorely-missed Ghazi infantry :(

I think they wanted to make it more accessible. Especially since they included ways to trick the AI ('loose formation' units looking more numerous, for example) piling the natural AI disadvantage with extra, purposely-programmed "stupidity".

I rather doubt that was implemented. A more important factor would have been that more CPU power was allocated to the graphics. Also the increased speed of movement and battle resolution in vanilla R:TW would have left the CPU with even fewer CPU cycles to formulate tactics. If the S:TW A.I. responded a bit sluggishly, you probably wouldn't notice and it wouldn't matter much because battle resolution is slower and quick strikes count for less. In vanilla R:TW quick strikes are all-important, however.

I don't know the specifics of the GPU/CPU performance breakdown for R:TW, but I suspect that the battle AI was given fewer and sparser time slices of CPU time. Maybe that counts as 'simplicity'.

-Glee

[Ludens]

I don't know the specifics of the GPU/CPU performance breakdown for R:TW, but I suspect that the battle AI was given fewer and sparser time slices of CPU time. Maybe that counts as 'simplicity'.

That is most likely. IIRC a stated goal of R:TW was to keep the system requirements similar to M:TW. Since it obviously had a heavier graphical engine, something else had to be scaled down.