The Daily Update at the Com

**TinCow** · 05-21-2009, 17:47

Originally Posted by Slaists

Tell me if I am imagining things, but some time before ETW was released, didn't CA hint that the stupidity of the AI in the previous titles was due to the fact that in the previous platforms strategic map diplomatic and military decisions were made separately from military and tactical map decisions. The new engine was supposed to blend them together producing a more sensible overall AI decision making process.

Hmm... the current (game) evidence, for some reason, indicates otherwise.

You're not imagining things, that's exactly what they've said. I do think the ETW CAI is a significant improvement over the RTW/M2TW CAIs. Yeah, it may still declare war randomly, but at least when it does it attacks you and the CAI is perfectly willing to accept a fair peace deal in many situations, even if it will never propose one itself. It still needs a lot of improvement to achieve the level it should be at, but it's still better than it used to be.

I feel the same about the BAI. In RTW, it was possible to defeat a full enemy stack while taking less than a dozen casualties. In ETW, victory is still easy if you know how to play, but casualties are much higher, especially in serious battles, and the AI can regularly win battles if it has numbers on its side. After only a few months of ETW, I've already lost far more battles than I have ever lost in both RTW and M2TW combined. Again, major improvement is still needed on the BAI, but I do feel like it's improper to say that CA hasn't made any improvement at all

**Marquis of Roland** · 05-21-2009, 18:23

I've had problems getting peace treaties when the cause of war was a campaign objective region. For example, with Prussia, after taking Rhineland and Flanders (owned by Westphalia at the time), the French, who were very friendly with me, declared war. I wiped out their stacks in France and besieged Paris. I made a peace proposal, but it was rejected. I tried again, this time with a few tech thrown in, still rejected. My last offer, 100k in cash, Flanders region (the reason why they went to war in the first place), and the techs I threw in earlier. Still, rejected emphatically. Oh well, captured Paris and didn't bother to stick around, the following revolution bought me about 10 turns of peace and quiet.

**Monsieur Alphonse** · 05-22-2009, 17:42

Todays update

May 22nd

We're currently experimenting with a new campaign AI technique called 'faction focus'. This causes the AI factions to assess certain nations as a threat at startup and then focus their efforts on eliminating or defending against that country. This makes the aggression process more streamlined and more 'proactive' on the part of the AI, in the sense that it makes a judgement on its national neighbours and others and focuses aggression based on that and subsequent world events.

This is in very early stages and is really a test tech at this stage, so we can't say with certainity whether it will make it into any forthcoming update.

We're now entering a British bank holiday weekend which means the next daily update will be posted on Tuesday 26 May. Naturally some of us will be working on fixes and issues over that time. We continue to focus the majority of our effort on addressing the remaining issues with Empire whilst increasing performance.

More details of the free units will appear shortly.

Enjoy your weekends!

Kind regards,
Kieran

Nice to know that they are working on the AI

**Servius** · 05-22-2009, 18:18

These updates still make me much more patient and hopeful about the patching/improvement process.

**Barkhorn1x** · 05-22-2009, 19:36

Originally Posted by Servius1234

These updates still make me much more patient and hopeful about the patching/improvement process.

Word.

**antisocialmunky** · 05-22-2009, 20:10

And the fact that they seem to be based on the responses on threads like these so they actually answer some of our questions.

A nice picture but... no word about a huge breakthrough in regards to CAI or BAI...

"We'll give them some AI even though were are nowhere ready:"

May 22nd

We're currently experimenting with a new campaign AI technique called 'faction focus'. This causes the AI factions to assess certain nations as a threat at startup and then focus their efforts on eliminating or defending against that country. This makes the aggression process more streamlined and more 'proactive' on the part of the AI, in the sense that it makes a judgement on its national neighbours and others and focuses aggression based on that and subsequent world events.

This is in very early stages and is really a test tech at this stage, so we can't say with certainity whether it will make it into any forthcoming update.

We're now entering a British bank holiday weekend which means the next daily update will be posted on Tuesday 26 May. Naturally some of us will be working on fixes and issues over that time. We continue to focus the majority of our effort on addressing the remaining issues with Empire whilst increasing performance.

More details of the free units will appear shortly.

Enjoy your weekends!

Kind regards,
Kieran

**Monsieur Alphonse** · 05-26-2009, 19:47

And today an other update:

May 26th

Several smaller fixes today including:

1. Battle - Routing units will now no longer seek to garrison structures if they have utterly shattered. This was caused by conflicting priorities.

2. Campaign diplomacy - Repeated make deal/break deal actions by the AI have been eliminated. This was caused by a similair logic issue as the repeated region attempts issue.

3. Campaign diplomacy - Added weight/potency to the 'backstabbing' variable. When AI/player makes an alliance and breaks it shortly afterwards this now has a more significant effect.

4. Campaign map - Trade route bug where small ships indicating trade animations 'jumped' across theatres has now been fixed.

Hope you all had a good weekend.

Kind regards,
Kieran