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

[QuintusSertorius]

I spent half an hour typing out an in-depth answer to your questions and suddenly my connection timed out. Once more unto the breech.

I'll be concise: yes. Keep in mind, though, that a faction with bad relations with you will probably violate the ceasefire after re-building their forces, unless another faction distracts them. But that's only natural.

Shame you lost that in-depth answer, I would have been interested in reading it.

If it were due to relations, I'd be fine with that. It's when you happen to share a border, thus you are attacked irrespective of any other engagement that gets tiresome.

To the first question, yes but it's expensive. The second question is a bit more complicated. Yes, they both had quite a lot to gain, especially since my armies in the theatre were generally weak. However, the decision to invade is balanced against the target faction's standings (global standing, or reputation, and faction standing, or relations) and risk. The Byzantines viewed Egypt - an ally of their nemesis, the Turks - as a weak and obvious target. Portugal is essentially sandwiched between two continental powers - the Moors and Castille - and take to the sea seeking Lebensraum. So, even though the English and Portuguese might have lukewarm relations, the rewards of a successful invasion far outweigh the risk. In some cases, the AI seems to behave irrationally when it is operating on a logical game mechanic. For example, Poland may start a war with Russia by blockading Russian ports simply because their navy is too weak to defend their trade-lanes, the lifeblood of the Rus' treasury. Basically, neutrality means nothing, standing means everything and weakness will be exploited. A close ally will likely remain a close ally. But neutral factions are wild cards.

To be fair, I've developed a theory base on my trawls through the descr_campaign_ai_db.xml file that the game has hardcoded "enemies" - or factions that will always remain rivals, which would explain a lot of the AI's behaviour.

Even that is an improvement, it's better than "your border touches on a body of water that ours does, therefore we will attack".

On your second, I don't have a problem with hardcoded enemies - as long who that enemy is can be altered. The Diadochi (the big three, that is) being hardcoded enemies would be fine, for example. After all they all want the same thing, to reunite Alexander's former empire under their banner.

On an endnote, the AI can be vastly improved by altering a few values in the game files. There's one line in the config_ai_battle.xml file that's massively powerful:

<friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>0.8</friendly-to-enemy-strength-ratio>,

this measures the balance of forces to determine whether an army should attack another army, on the campaign or battle map. In Vanilla, an army needs to be only 80% the size of an enemy's force to attack. By increasing the value to, say, 1.5 the AI will only attack with a 50% numerical advantage, which would eliminate most of the small-fry offensives.

That does sound promising.

By the way, why doesn't the medieval period interest you?

I just find it boring in the extreme. I'm a tabletop/PnP roleplayer and it's been done to death in fantasy games. When compared to antiquity it's such a small, poor and dull place. Compare how tiny medieval armies are compared to those in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, because every state was small and weak. Then we have the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church, best epitomised in the abject failure that was Spain. Enough gold and silver was looted from the New World to have established Spain as the foremost power in the world, with the right investment in infrastructure even today it should have been a leading nation. Instead they wasted all that money gilding churches and fighting pointless religious wars. What's left to show for it now? We're talking about a nation where even into the early 20th century, they were still reliant on roads built by the Romans for transport.

If you want to destroy both the Campaign AND Battle AI, use that setting. The King of M2TW AI feels differently:

Like I said, we are conducting phd level research on this topic. Trust us.

I have to say, a less aggressive, less expansionist AI isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. So if it's over 1.0 that's bad, but 0.95 or so would be good. I play a very slow game, the AI on the other hand blitzes all the time. Factions shouldn't be wiped out within 50 turns of the game starting, as often happens in EB1.