VH post 1.02: still way too easy...

[Slaists]

1The AI's territorial economic development is also very poor. The AI has a fetish for religious buildings, at the expense of industrial buildings.

2It also taxes heavily, so that town wealth does not grow, and new towns don't pop up late into the game, after it has managed to researched several farming & enlightenment techs.

The AI prioritizes unit recruitment at the expense of economic development, and thus fails to utilize whatever financial bonuses it gets from CA in the long term...

3In my pre-patch Swedish game, whatever money I gave to the AI was used to recruit more units. As a result, the AI nations fought some pretty epic battles amongst themselves, which I watched from the sidelines (it was a semi-peaceful campaign, only ~35 regions in the end). 600K can buy a lot of units...

#1: It's reasonable to build lots of religious buildings to bring a conquered province under control fast. However, the AI should be coded to be able to DESTROY the unnecessary religious buildings once the province is pacified. On the same token, the AI should be coded to destroy unnecessary fisheries and replace them with trade harbors.

#2: That IS a problem. In my campaign, economic growth (due to enlightenment techs and medium taxes) was the key to my treasury staying above the water. Interestingly enough, due to bonuses on VH, AI out-teched me by a good margin all through the game, but seemingly the AI DID NOT USE the techs to develop provinces. I purposely did not try to rush the research though. I did not build any other universities just the starting one and added more only as part of the conquest (if there was a university in the conquered province; I left it and used it).

#3: I did the same thing and wondered what the AI was doing with the money. I would give a destitute faction 100K + for several turns just to see it still being "destitute" 5 turns later. In my case, I even did not see them raise more troops and go on a rampage... No idea, what they did with the cash.

I can't help but remain positive.

based on what you guy's are explaining here, if CA manage to get the sea invasions sorted out, which seems to be a product of their new infinity location map they implemented for this game, AND get the socio-economic-political AI sorted out...then we might just have more than we can handle.

I keep my fingers crossed. I'd love to have a meaningful (as opposed to how VH was handled in MTW2 and RTW) and challenging campaign game on VH; Easy should probably be easier than it is now though to serve the pool of players that are new to the game.