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

[Ichon]

And Pray where did I say so explicitly ?

The real culprit here is the animations issue, where the unit animations play an equally imp role as its stats, which leads to units with slower stats to severely under perform. Additionally clumping is still an issue. But the AI chooses its units purely on the basis of stats leading to unit mis-matches that were detrimental to the AI.

And unit balancing as anyone will tell you is an integral part of the BAI.

What I had said that due to the new animation system unit balancing is now infinitely more complex as compared to the RTW engine- and Cohesion, mass, formation are integral to balancing- its just that animations are currently the biggest offender.

And what about clumping?? your unit with looser cohesion and mass is more likely to have just a couple of men fighting while the remainder sit around admiring their navels.

Clumping is an issue but it really only severly impacts during sieges but sieges can be 50% or more of the battles so it is a problem but I haven't seen any good solutions. Certain things are limited due to the engine CA built.

As for looser formation and less mass having only a few men fighting- on offense with several units involved that can happen as parts of the formation get tangled up but if on guard mode and the denser formation with greater mass approaches and attacks it will push the lesser mass formation back and eventually most of the formation comes into play. It does take quite alot of balancingto try and get unit to reflect stats and historical function though but my only point with you is that such balancing is not really part of BAI. You can test 1 vs 1 for a long time and then in some battles still get a different result because of clumping but unless EB team comes up with a novel solution there isn't much you can mod to change that part of the engine so that clumping is never an issue. Just reduce severity of its impact.

I'm surprised that no one has emphasized the fact that given a long enough map distance every AI army eventually morphs into a giant ball of out of formation units. The only really interesting battles are when you deploy in a line in the middle of the deployment screen and move towards the AI and a few rare cases where the BAI works right. Barring very few case, most battles devolve into you sitting there in a nice formed up line and the AI army twice as large with their formation turning into a giant clump as they close....

Some of the better BAI have addressed that a bit but the more aggressive the AI is the more that tends to happen- however the more aggressive AI is usually the one that does the most damage even in clumped formation. The AI does try and straighten its lines out before making contact in most of the modded BAI's I've seen lately but doesn't always succeed. If you could force the AI to move in neat formations that would actually make it easier for the human player to divide and conquer though wouldn't it? I find trying to mess with that giant mass of approaching units is difficult with anything besides ranged units until you commit your forward line. If the AI kept its units nice and separate you can more easily line of charges or draw just 1 unit out etc.