Holy crap, Barbarian Invasion is stupid

[SD1987]

So I tried playing it for the first time and after about 5 turns as the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire attacked me
These games have the WORST AI I've ever experienced. Honestly, Civilization 2 had better AI than this. Could the developers not have hardcoded it so that the Eastern didn't attack the Western Empire (and vice versa) for at least a hundred years or something? I honestly don't understand what goes through the heads of the people at Creative Assembly when they release games with zero AI.

[Myth]

Play your campaign on a lesser difficulty setting if you don't like aggressive AI.

[Zim]

RTW (and its main expansion) have always had the weakest AI in the TW series. Other than lowering campaign difficult,y there are a few tricks. Small monetary payments to a faction over a long term can help (250 per turn for 20 turns, for example), and even more so keeping very large garrisons (In one of RTW's mods I've kept a neighbor neutral for over a hundred turns just by keeping a full stack in the one city I had that bordered them).

[econ21]

I also find the WRE vs ERE conflicts tiresome, although with the hordes about to hit both factions, it often just degenerates into a border skirmish.

If you can get past that, the WRE campaign is one of the best of all TW games, imo. It's very satisfying trying to hold things together. We used it for a Throne Room game:

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=60372

To the OP: I am not sure why you say even Civ2 had better AI. I've always thought the Civ games set the standard for good AI, so I would not use them as a kind of lower bound on what to expect. But I agree, it would be nice if TW could get a bit more of their cut throat AI quality. STW2 may have achieved that though - check out the legendary difficulty thread in the Tea House.

[SD1987]

Because Civilization 2 is ANCIENT compared to TW.

[econ21]

Because Civilization 2 is ANCIENT compared to TW.

You are making me feel ancient now.

Eight years or so? That is a long time in computer games development, I guess. But one thing that seemed to have happened during that interval was the move to 3D graphics. They improved the visuals no end, but sucked a lot of development time up, often at the cost of gameplay. It was not just TW. You can compare Baldur's Gate with Neverwinter Nights, Panzer General with Panzer General 3D, Heroes of Might and Magic III with Homm 4, etc. (A lesser case might even be made for Civ2 compared to Civ3.)

With TW in particular, the move to the open campaign map away from the Risk based map seemed to raise challenges for the strategic AI. The freedom of maneouvre this provided made it harder to program a good AI. [The reason Chess AI is better than wargame AI - the computer has less options to evaluate and so comes into its own.] STW2 may have finally allowed the campaign AI to get back the quality of the original Shogun and Medieval TW ones, in part by restricting the movement by judicious use of mountain walls and roads etc.

[wumpus]

Because Civilization 2 is ANCIENT compared to TW.

Oh, do you think so? I always favored TW games over Civ2 [or even Civ3 for that matter]. IMO, Civ5 is the FIRST Civilization game that I like--but then again, that's my own feelings. To each one his own brand of poison. Hawooh