Quote Originally Posted by Fisherking View Post
If the AI is functioning at less than half its potential why would anyone be satisfied with it?
Well, here's what the cynic in me thinks. The pattern has been for CA to get two major releases, plus expansions, from each ground-up rewrite of the game engine. ETW is the first release of this new game engine. I don't think NTW counts as the next in the cycle, since it seems more like a major ETW modding project than a full release. CA may think they have two major game release cycles to really "get it right," with the first one (ETW) only being "good enough" to make some profit. With the large gamer market they're shooting for now, just providing flashy battle graphics is enough to sell a ton of games, and they have two full game cycles to work on optimizing the AI in this current game engine.

I hope that's not the case... I hope someone over there at CA still cares about improving the current state of ETW. But game companies are driven by other concerns than just doing the best possible job on each release. At some point (if it hasn't happened already), they're going to have to pull the programmers off tweaks for ETW and put them on the next Project X after NTW.