Battlefield AI - Actually Accurate?
I've just started playing ETW, after a long hiatus from serious TW playing. Ever since I've I started playing MTW on an almost daily basis, when it first came out, people have complained about battlefield AI. I played MTW non-stop for a couple of years and got tired of beating massed attacks of infantry units, mounted archers, a handful of knights, and the inevitable hobilars.
I spent most of Saturday running single player land battles. I haven't tried naval battles yet. A couple of times I peaked at my beloved and well worn copy of David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon, which includes a great primer on 18th century warfare as a background to Napoleon's campaigns. After a good 10 hours, I came to a shocking conclusion that I want to run by you my Org Brethren: The ETW Battlefield AI Is Pretty Accurate
1. Think about the time that we come into the battle. The armies are in each others line of sight. The field has been set, and they have fallen out of their marching columns into preparatory battle ranks. Historically at this point, moving to the flank would be counterproductive, because both sides can see each other. You lose the element of surprise. The majority of the marching and counter-marching occurred before the armies were in sight of one another.
2. You can get flanked by the AI. I haven't played a campaign out in ETW yet, but it happened to me in MTW2. When the enemy has a reserve army that appears on the map, they are usually to your flank or rear. It even goes so far as to sort of depend on where the army icon is relative to yours on the campaign map.
3. Again with the history, there was not a lot of command and control between armies. Think about the end of Waterloo when both Wellington and Napoleon were straining to see if the incoming army's coats were Prussian Blue of French Blue. Grouchy and Blucher were in striking distance, but no one really knew where. Chandler also talks a great deal about how Napoleon used short internal lines of communication to move armies from one area of concentration to the other, and that he told all of his generals "march to the sound of the guns." When you look at a Napoleonic battle, the initial forces fought head on, and then the battle would often go to the army with the most reserves or whose allies came up first.
3. Most battles - particularly the ones that aren't as historically recognized - were basically slug fests. Two armies would meet, but they didn't have other armies marching to their relief or overwhelming reserves. The army with the better training, the more artillery, and the higher morale could keep more troops in reserve, until the very last minute when the fresh troops would be unleashed to drive home the final attack. Until Marshall Davout arrived at Austerlitz - thus completing Napoleon's "revolving door" battle plan - the two sides were almost entirely fighting face to face.
4. Even in the 18th century, most generals were still a little hazy on how to turn a flank. You have your Suvorovs, your Fredericks, and your Napoleons, but most generals were pretty workmanlike in their approach to warfare, either from ignorance or lack of confidence in their command and control. It takes a lot of skill to pre-arrange for a part of your line to start flanking during the heat of battle. You couldn't make last minute decisions once the battle was joined, because it was very hard to move messages.
So, no the AI isn't perfect because it doesn't seem to produce Frederick the Great, but it does a better job than I used to give it credit for. I'll be curious to see what happens when I start getting deeper into a ETW campaign and whether the AI is able to successfully gang up on my armies and successfully replicate the march/counter march elements of an 18th century campaign.
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