How does the AI in M2:TW compare to R:TW?

[Moros]

Been playing some more EB1 and getting annoyed with the army composition and battle AI again. I just fought a Makedonian full stack comprised of twelve units of classical hoplites, a single levy phalanx at a tenth of it's normal strength, a unit of cavalry, a unit of akontistai, a general (who charged the centre of my line; I had to make an effort not to kill him) and the rest useless Illyrian levies. Who of course came forward piecemeal, not even as a single line. Seriously, how hard is it to at least stick to a single line?

Hopefully the recruitment pools and the ability to add recruitment priority to units will fix this somewhat.

This sounds like... hype from R2TW.

If you're lying like they were, I'll kill you myself. But if your not... then EB2 will really be something special. For a long time I couldn't think it could possibly be better than EB1... but this...

Doh't expect to have a product of the same quality as the final EB 1, with the first release. Don't forget it's still an Alpha/Beta release. Comparable with the 0.7x versions.

[QuintusSertorius]

A more general question; in RTW the military and diplomacy AIs didn't talk to each other. A faction massing troops on your border for invasion could happily sign trade rights with you, then attack the next turn. Another faction you were pasting in battle after battle wouldn't accept a ceasefire (without Force Diplomacy) even though they'd been greatly weakened. And so on.

Is there any evidence the two actually interact in M2TW? Does the AI respect a ceasefire and alter what it's doing, or throw whatever it has at you as soon as it can build up an army again?

There are a lot of mods that have custom AI adn there are many AI mods out there. For example Lusted on is quite well known. Currently we have a few people working on it. And as you can read on our twitter we've tweaked a mongol faction AI from Lusted to fit to our Saka faction. So AI especially in second or later release will probably even be customized for each faction/fation type/culture. In other words it should be a huge improvement over RTW1 and MTWII:k.

That's reassuring that we don't have the exact same AI as we had in RTW (as before, I have very little trust in CA applying themselves to deeper, more complicated things than spiffier graphics).

One thing you have to keep in mind is that only very recently did the team finally slay the bugs that made it impossible to play for more than a few turns without some sort of CTD. And you really cannot test a campaign AI without, well, a campaign! So from that standpoint we are definitely playing catch-up, but it is a key focus area, and we have made progress.

Well, I was hoping more from a general modding perspective that people might have been playing with the AI and have experience that could be applied to EB2. Rather than expecting the developers to have necessarily achieved it themselves.

Concerning the naval AI in Vanilla: playing as Egypt on VH/VH, the Byzantines would frequently land small stacks near Alexandria. The armies were usually slightly larger than my garrison and composed of more professional units. However, due to the BAI's incompetence, I always defeated them, but they also mauled my force in the process. Whenever the landing force was weaker than the garrison, they wouldn't attack at all but evacuated in the same turn. In my England campaigns, the Portuguese frequently landed huge, powerful stacks in Wales.

In other words, naval invasions are possible and are generally well-calibrated. In my experience, the bigger problem is the tactical AI.

Edit - For extra challenge, it's easy to integrate the Hardcore ReallybadAI mod into any build. It essentially introduces a command-chain, ensures the AI uses stakes and limits the deployment time.

That is also reassuring. Is it possible to effectively stop naval invasions if you strongly garrison coastal settlements?

As a side-question, were the factions landing troops those you were actually at war with, or had something to gain by invading? The problem with the naval AI from RTW:BI was that anyone on the same body of water was a potential aggressor, regardless of diplomacy status (because of course, military and diplomacy AI didn't talk to each other in RTW...).

Hopefully the recruitment pools and the ability to add recruitment priority to units will fix this somewhat.

Fingers crossed.

[Kull]

Well, I was hoping more from a general modding perspective that people might have been playing with the AI and have experience that could be applied to EB2. Rather than expecting the developers to have necessarily achieved it themselves.

"People" have been playing with the AI, just not people on the EB2 team. Do a search for "campaign AI" or go browse discussions and tutorials and you'll see that many folks have spent lot of time customizing the AI either for specific mods or as "bolt-on" improvements to the original vanilla M2TW AI. What we are doing - now that we can actually TEST the AI in EB2 - is looking at the entire corpus of research, identifying existing improvements made by others, testing those, and making alterations accordingly. The EB2 AI is ALREADY customized based on that initial testing and research, but we are looking to do even more as we go forward.

That said, i would encourage people to have realistic expectations. The AI will never be a human player, and will always feature limitations of some sort that simply can't be overcome. What I can promise you is that the AI will be better than it was in M2TW, and probably quite a bit better than it was in EB1.