
Originally Posted by
resonantblue
Give TROM a try. I'm engaged in an epic struggle against the Mughal Empire which owns all of India. Every turn a new stack shows up (of course I haven't raided their trade, which would certainly help, but I'm enjoying the epic land struggle) and I've only got one understrength army there to fight the hordes, running from province to province to try and stem the tide. The AI is building balanced armies with artillery, cavalry and infantry and I'm actually forced to withdraw from a good number of battles (VH/H) because my army is not at full strength. I'm losing provinces every other turn and gaining them back once my army replenishes.
I can't spare anything else because in Europe as Austria I'm engaged in conflict on three fronts - against the Russians who send a stack (not always full, but at least 14-15 units strong) to my borders to seize Galcia every second or third turn, France who continues to try to seize my protectorate Westphalia (whom I have had to protect with an army because, unfortunately, the AI fails to build settlement defences so it loses to a French full stack everytime) with a seemingly endless number of stacks and against the Ottomans who are desperately trying to expand into the Balkans after I seized most of it from them.
So essentially you've admitted that you're playing a MODDED version of the game. Why? Could it be possible that you felt the vanilla CAI was subpar? If your arguments about an "improved CAI" are based on your playing a mod then your entire argument here is disingenuous. I'm NOT talking about a MODDED game!
I disagree. I can't tell you how many posts I recall from previous TW games where people are complaining about the lack of AI amphibious assaults. Oh yes, they happened once in a while, just like in ETW. Of course in MTW it was a non-issue mostly because for example England and Flanders were connected by a land bridge - but do you not remember people compalining about the CAI mostly ignoring the fact that a land bridge is there? The diplomacy was horrible in MTW, RTW and M2TW. THe only difference was that it was easier to make peace. And in 1.2 ETW it was relatively easy ot make peace. They changed that for some reason and we might disagree about the reason, but the fact remains that this is not something that was never fixed. Obviously they felt the design needed to be different. The random DOWs were just as bad in previous games of the TW series as they are now.
Amphibious assaults in ETW are rare to non-existent which was NOT the case in previous TW games. Further, when I'm talking about the AI not using diplomacy I'm NOT talking about the player being able to squeeze a deal out of the AI, but that the AI nations are not using it amongst themselves which is a FAR bigger problem and something I made very clear in my first post. This was NOT the case in previous TW titles. The AI nations in ETW is not making peace amongst themselves, not maxing out their trade routes with each other, and not making new alliances. It's killing their economies and killing the game! (Well, at least, the vanilla version, maybe not the modded version that you're playing.) The AIs of ALL previous TW games were able to do the above. Further, the AI knew how to retreat in all previous TW games (in STW and MTW the AI even knew how to make tactical retreats), but not in ETW. I actually had to fight a battle in which 12 men attacked my 1000+. Of course, I auto-resolved and suffered over a hundred casualties! Also, you keep ignoring my statements about ETW's AI treating each province as a seperate country which was NOT the case previously and is HUGE problem with the game.
When you embark on a 2-3 year software project, you can not perform a proof of concept on everything. That's just not how software works. I'm sorry you think it should be different, but as someone who manages software projects let me just tell you that thinking is totally detatched from reality.
So my expectations of the AI being able to function within a game are detached from reality? To expect the AI to be able to handle new features introduced in a game is not part of the deal when I purchase that game? Sorry, but I think that is absurd. That sounds like you're grasping at straws to find some excuse for a proven fact: ETW's AI doesn't know how to handle MANY of the game's features. That's not an industry standard, but just shoddy work and excusing it sounds like rabid fanboyism.
Plus, CA has been making these games since 2000- they are not some start-up company. They're the BIG BOY on the block with massive resources in comparison to other PC game makers. There is no excuse for the state ETW was released in especially in comparsion to other strategy games on market. Further, ETW has been in development longer than 2-3 years. It's been development since 2005.
You are certainly implying it whether you know it or not. Whenever you make a case that the AI does X when it should do Y (such as why does the AI declare war or not make peace or whatever) you are implicitly comparing it's "irrational" behaviour to what a human would do.
Nonsense. You're just ignoring what I wrote to attack a strawman argument. My point was simple: CA should not have added in a new feature that made the game MORE difficult for the AI which is what the addition of raiding did. I'm ALL for simplification to help the AI (as you chose to ignore by not cutting and pasting my remarks on it. I guess they didn't fit into your version of my argument.)
As a fan of the EU and HOI series, let me just say that the AI there sucks horribly too. Ever seen an amphibious invasion in EU2? Yeah right. You think "mini" raiding armies are a problem in TW? Did you even play EU2? it's funny because mos tof the things you complain about in the TW series have also plagued the EU series. One great thing about the EU series though is the diplomatic model is way ahead of the TW series. Protectorates/vassals all automatically are a part of your alliance and no one can dow them without dowing you, etc. But the AI there is also problematic. Like when your bad boy rating goes up everybody DOWs you even dinky little Savoy that has a tiny army will join in.
Again you're creating a strawman argument. I didn't say word about EU2. I specifically mentioned EU3, which has a pretty darn good AI by PC gaming standards (all of which are exploitable, but some are clearly better than others), and certainly vastly superior to ETW's CAI. If you want to compare the AI of a game released almost a decade ago to ETW's then go ahead, but you're being disingenuous again. And it's a sad fact that EU2's AI is still better than ETW's.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion and I can not quesiton the integrity of your feelings. But the arguments and comparisons you're making don't really add up.
So my arguments and comparisons, which you either ignored or purposely distorted, don't add up, huh? Well, if you're arguing against a bunch of stuff that I didn't actually say and then of course its not going to add up in your estimation! How convenient! Further, the few of my statements you have directly addressed apparently have the fatal flaw of being at odds with your opinion so undoubtedly those don't add up either. Wow! Big surprise!
If you're angry because you think CA is omnipotent and when they start a 2-3 year software project they knew the CAI would break on certain new campaign map features they added, well yes, I can see why that would frustrate you. But that's rooted in ignorance - that's not how it works and if they halted all progress on the rest of the game until the AI was good enough we'd still be playing Medieval Total War and CA would be bankrupt.
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