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

[QuintusSertorius]

I have very little faith in CA making substantial changes to the meaningful parts of their games, as opposed to making them look spiffy and shiny. Meaning I expect graphical "improvements" (which are more resource-hungry) but not gameplay improvements (involving much more complicated tinkering with the AI).

I've mused in another thread about how the R:TW engine's limitations hamper my enjoyment of EB, I wonder how much the same will be true of EBII?

To be clear, I've never even played M2:TW, the time period doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'll only pick it up for the express purpose of playing EBII. So I ask those people who have played it, is it any better?

Does the AI build proper sized stacks and with decent compositions left to its own devices? In EB far too often it's the never-ending assault of 3-5 unit stacks every other turn. No matter whether you're at war with the faction in question or not. Bigger armies seem to be a load of skirmishers, a couple of elites, and maybe some regular line troops with no thought to balancing them.

Do diplomacy and military movement actually work together rather than each do their own thing? Far too often you conclude a war, sign a peace agreement and within two turns another stack has arrived to attack your periphery. With BI's executable it's even worse, you get pointlessly weak (but annoyingly regular) naval invasions from distant factions who would have left you alone with rtw.exe.

Is the AI capable of actually holding a line in battle, rather than breaking up to chase after individual units? Do generals still suicide against the thickest part of your battle line?

Please tell me things have improved.

[Arjos]

Well, the diplomacy is far superior than RTW: thanks to the "appreciation" scale (dunno the actual ingame name XD) factions can be allied for virtually forever even if they share borders...
I remember in a campaing in a M2TW mod, i was playing HRE and even though my standings with the poles and hungarians were awful since the beginning, they became my best allies. The magyars attacked me, and after I crushed their invading army as I was approaching Buda, I offered peace, alliance and (this time) military access, they accepted and never attacked me again.
Also seems that factions are reluctant to attack if your "fame" is far superior than theirs...

[Paltmull]

About the army composition issues; check this out.

[James Purefoy]

I've never even played M2:TW, the time period doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'll only pick it up for the express purpose of playing EBII. So I ask those people who have played it, is it any better?

"You will grow tired blunting your weapons on a poorly-led horde of mindless corpse-men; and once you have reduced them to so much sausage filler, the sweet taste of success will turn to ashes in your mouth" ™


The AI in TW games hasn't been good since shogun first came out, imo at least. Though I expect the single-player campaign in EB2 to be something amazing, I will try to get most of my fun out of multiplayer battles (there should be a big enough of a community to support that on a regular basis).

[Lysimachos]

We can take it as a fact that the AI in M2TW is better than in RTW. It's been a while since I last played it, so I can't give you examples off the top of my head, but I've played it enough to be certain of it. Also, an important point is that there are more possibilities to deal with the shortcomings of AI. One example is the feature to limit recruitment of certain units, which will do a great deal to prevent pure elite armies, but perhaps the most important is that the AI itself is actually moddable. Never done it myself, so I have no idea to what extent, though.

Edit: I'm aware that the elite army is not the most pressing matter, but there some factions are quite prone to that (played some years in a Romani campaign over the weekend and fighting elite african pikemen and other assorted elite infantry becomes tedious; same goes for the notorious grey death's argyraspides stacks).

[QuintusSertorius]

Well, the diplomacy is far superior than RTW: thanks to the "appreciation" scale (dunno the actual ingame name XD) factions can be allied for virtually forever even if they share borders...
I remember in a campaing in a M2TW mod, i was playing HRE and even though my standings with the poles and hungarians were awful since the beginning, they became my best allies. The magyars attacked me, and after I crushed their invading army as I was approaching Buda, I offered peace, alliance and (this time) military access, they accepted and never attacked me again.
Also seems that factions are reluctant to attack if your "fame" is far superior than theirs...

That sounds promising. Like perhaps they've fixed that particular issue.

About the army composition issues; check this out.

I'm not entirely sure that addresses it; the thread talks about free-upkeep units as garrisons and control over what can be recruited where (possibly). Within what's available we could still see the AI spamming useless armies.

"You will grow tired blunting your weapons on a poorly-led horde of mindless corpse-men; and once you have reduced them to so much sausage filler, the sweet taste of success will turn to ashes in your mouth" ™


The AI in TW games hasn't been good since shogun first came out, imo at least. Though I expect the single-player campaign in EB2 to be something amazing, I will try to get most of my fun out of multiplayer battles (there should be a big enough of a community to support that on a regular basis).

Hmmm, to be honest multiplayer doesn't appeal. I'm only in this for the single player campaign, battles alone don't really do anything for me. They need that context of the campaign (and strategic maneuvering) to make them interesting.

We can take it as a fact that the AI in M2TW is better than in RTW. It's been a while since I last played it, so I can't give you examples off the top of my head, but I've played it enough to be certain of it. Also, an important point is that there are more possibilities to deal with the shortcomings of AI. One example is the feature to limit recruitment of certain units, which will do a great deal to prevent pure elite armies, but perhaps the most important is that the AI itself is actually moddable. Never done it myself, so I have no idea to what extent, though.

Again, that gives me a little hope, even if no one is really sure yet it works, that it can be modded opens some possibilities.

Edit: I'm aware that the elite army is not the most pressing matter, but there some factions are quite prone to that (played some years in a Romani campaign over the weekend and fighting elite african pikemen and other assorted elite infantry becomes tedious; same goes for the notorious grey death's argyraspides stacks).

I don't play on Very Hard campaign difficulty, so perhaps that's why the army of skirmishers is a more frequent occurence and thus a concern to me than the army of elites.

[Ludens]

I know how you feel: the predictability of R:TW's A.I. can make it seem like a chore. The A.I. of M2:TW has definitely been improved, although it was not a priority for the developers. From my brief experience with M2:TW I got the impression that the strategic A.I. is now competent. It can develop its cities and field credible stacks, something R:TW always struggled at. Partly this is due to better game-design (recruiting units does not deplete cities and prevent upgrading), but also because the A.I. is grouping and deploying its units better. The same thing applies to diplomacy: the new negotiation screen gives more feedback, allowing you some grip on what's going on; but the A.I. is also more reasonable. Neither A.I. is likely to outplay all but complete newbies, and at higher difficulty levels you simply get a load of elite stacks flung at you, but it doesn't make as many glaringly stupid moves.

The one thing I am less sure about is the tactical A.I. Again, it has been improved and I didn't see as many stupid moves, but I also didn't get much of a challenge. It's nowhere near M1:TW.

[Paltmull]

I'm not entirely sure that addresses it; the thread talks about free-upkeep units as garrisons and control over what can be recruited where (possibly). Within what's available we could still see the AI spamming useless armies.

I'm not sure what the EB team intends to do, but a possibility would be forming the unit pools so that they are proportinate to an army. For example, if regular line infantry units had high avaliability the AI would be likely to recruit and use those in large numbers, rather than units with low availiability. This way, you could control what kind of army composition that the AI (as well as the player) would use.

[bobbin]

Campaign AI is a lot better for M2TW and we are tweaking it too. Not really sure about battle AI (i don't play battles enough now to form an opinion).

[B-Wing]

As has been said, both campaign AI and battle AI have improved, though not by as much as you might hope. I've been playing Stainless Steel (a popular M2TW mod) lately and have found its AI, which was imported from other mods, to be greatly improved over the vanilla game. I would expect the EB2 team would likewise try to implement these improvements as much as possible.

[Andy1984]

I'm not sure of what you meant Paltmull, but it gave me an idea anyway. Suppose you have an AI-city which is controlled by a faction whose army should consist of an equal amount of phalanxes and cavalry. You might script it that the AI in each of her settelements can either recruit a phalanx-unit or a cavalry-unit, both with a priori chances 0,5. Thus: in half of the settlements, the AI recruitment options are 'cavalry', and in the other half 'phalanx'. All other recruitment options are grayed out (maybe by an invisible event?). Next turn, the recruitment options are recalculated. Some cities get phalanxes, others get cavalry. The AI might still opt not to train one kind or another, but the problem would manifest herself less.

[Paltmull]

Andy: M2TW uses a recruitment system with unit pools of various sizes, along with a certain level of replenishment for each pool. Pool size and replenishment rate is individual for each unit type.

My idea was that you would use larger recruitment pools with higher replenishment rates for the units that you would prefer the AI to recruit many of and smaller pools with lower replenishment rates for those that you want the AI to recruit fewer of.

If an ideal army for example has lots of standard infantry, some cavalry, a couple of skirmishers and very few elites, you could, through unit pool sizes and replenisment rates, arrange the availiability of those unit types so that the AI's recruitment - and therefore also its army composition - follows that model.


EDIT: I have this bad habit of using awfully long sentences. I hope the above is readable