Well, playing the AI was always a mess, too easy, same like the whole SP campaign…
The problem is always the same, the AI cant fight well in battles. You simple outplay the AI all the time with a much smaller army.

About the town/city war. The engine doesnt really allow any good "battle" in cities.
You would need a completely different engine to play that any good and maybe a little bit realistic.
Do anyone of us think, that units would keep in like while fighting in a town? probably not. They would split up in many small groups.

In the end, you need something I asked since years… splitting units. Also you would need a ton of different bonuses. I would like to see some proper defensive bonuses,
something this game had back in STW-MTW with the hillbonuses. There should be a heavy defensive bonus for holding houses.

If you want you can go and test the old castle defensive bonuses in STW/MI. Maybe not this strong, but thats the right direction. You would also want to see some real zone map.
Imagine a map with a castle in the center and many house (the city) around it, divided into 8-16 zones. The defender win, if he hold 6 or 10 of the zones, while the attacker would need
to take all zones to cut the defensive bonuses of the castle.

This would play around a little bit with the stringent bonuses we have right now.


All in all, you need 3 different kind of battles:

1. Standard land battle
2. the castle/city battle
3. naval battles

I wrote about this in another forum back at the start of S2.
some short things:

The current system, more or less, take the engine from the landbattles and transfer it to the naval battles.
The cannon ship, is just a bit cannon, without hills and trees. Same goes with archer or the melee units… Its eyecandy, almost pointless, since the naval battles are based on a system,
which cant really work.
Right now its only about, who can fire more and focus on same targets.


Naval battles will shine if you introduce stuff like this:

1. Fog of war - this would change a lot
2. Wind - hard effect of movement
3. bigger maps
4. Area of waves - big waves reduce firing range



About city fight I wrote already. I dont think you ever will see any good AI or fighting in towns or castles with the current engine/system.
I think the zone fights could solve a lot of the problems.


Landbattles. Well, thats what the engine was made for. Apart of some very annoying problems, like the OOS problem ( I wont say bug)
and units not shooting or all kind of movement problems. Not to mention the cav which just runs trough your units straight into your back…

The landbattles are okay. Too many different kind of units, too many different ranges of influence and effect, too many different abilities,
which you can stack. No way that any AI will ever stack abilities and do a nice movement.



All in all, the AI will suck as always. Thats based on the system itself, the engine and the endless effects and bonuses in the game.
If they would reduce all the different things and keep it simple, the AI would be a lot better.
While a human can decide in less than a sec what he takes out of 200 possible ways, the AI never can do that.
But the AI has one advance, thats the "CPM", the AI actual could do a heck of a movement, since he could sent out tons of
different orders each second.

But look at the game… CA focus more on eyecandy, than on the AI or gameplay. You are supposed to buy the game once again and than buy the addon
and than the next game and than the addon. The game hasnt to be perfect, just good enough till the next thing comes out.


Koc