Europa Barbarorum 2.08e is released!

[Artemisia]

Hi there. I loved EBI but took a while to try EBII due to remembered M2TW as an unplayable trainwreck, so I'm still a little wary about the engine

So far, I've played 50-60 turns with both Saba and Pontos.

Campaign AI behaviour - does the AI combine armies properly and attack with large stacks; move with purpose; respond appropriately either to attack or defend; conduct diplomacy consistent with it's military activities; use balanced armies; use it's navies appropriately; does each faction feel like it is acting according to it's own agenda, not all following the same script?

It looks like mostly the AI does these things, a big improvement over both EBI and vanilla Kingdoms. However, it's not very good at them; the AI still makes some boneheaded decisions like starting wars on multiple fronts when it can't really afford to do so, but at least it's not some crazy berserker that always attacks its neighbours, and I've had the AI offer ceasefires when it starts losing and actually honour treaties (however, it still has trouble making concessions during negotiations, this is Total War after all).

On thing I've noticed with the AI merging stacks is that, while it tries to avoid attacking piece meal with small stacks, it tries to merge them too close to its target, so if the player is proactive they can attack the small stacks before they merge together. If possible, the AI should be programmed to first merge its forces, and only then move towards its target.

Campaign AI economics - harder to discern, but does the AI seem to have unlimited money, throwing stack after stack at you, or it is more constrained than it was; is the replenishment rate change noticeable?

I don't know if it's the replenishment rate holding it up, but the AI seems to spam stacks less than what I'm used to. Although I have noticed it emptying a merc pool in one turn.

Early campaign difficulty - are the Rebel garrisons in particular appropriately daunting, or are they too big? How quickly to AI factions expand?

Rebel garrisons looked really scary at first glance—but the autocalc allows the winner to take relatively little attrition past a certain point in the balance of forces (3:2 to 2:1). If you can achieve that it's possible to take rebel settlement after rebel settlement, especially if your faction doesn't have cultural issues (so you don't need to drop large garrisons to hold your conquests). Some AI factions expanded very fast in my two saves (Hayasdan and Bosporos grew surprisingly fast for instance) while others remained stuck in their starting position for 50+ turns.

One thing I noticed is that the rebels cause a huge ammount of lost income through devastation in the early game. It makes them feel like much more of a threat and forces you to deal with them, but the ammount of lost income is rather brutal for smaller factions—and essentially forces them to blitz or die, which I don't think is intentional.

Battle AI behaviour - does the AI hold a line, execute a plan of it's own rather than trying to "match" your movement, try to turn your flanks with cavalry and light infantry?

The AI seems to stick to its plan, to a fault even. It has definitely stopped shuffling its units around and responding constantly to small movements. On the downside, it appears very reluctant to change its plans, leading to things like heavy infantry chasing cavalry all over the map, and AI units spending too long finishing off a surrounded unit and not moving to help elsewhere on the battlefield.

The AI seems to make clumsy flanking attempts at times. But not really with cavalry—it uses its shock cavalry in the centre, which IIRC is a vanilla behaviour.

Overall I was very pleasantly surprised with the AI behaviour.

Unit performance - does cavalry move at a realistic speed and have the right impact when charging; does infantry move at a realistic speed and keep their formations when moving and fighting; do skirmishers use their missiles properly and seem effective against unarmoured targets and from the rear; are elephants effective and realistic-seeming; do units generally have a feeling of weight and solidity to them, not like two blobs brushing against each other? When feeding back here, be specific about which units you observed.

This is where it shows that the M2TW engine is still a trainwreck

Charging impact for both cavalry and infantry is often negated by pathing and formation issues. An extreme example was a unit of AI Hoplitai who became stuck in place with "Charging" as their status. They didn't move at all for several minutes, except for two soldiers (out of 150).

Units have trouble keeping formation when marching. Some examples fresh in my memory include the Cappadocian axemen/skirmisher soldiers randomly switching from line to column formation while marching and Pantodapoi Phalangitai moving to a narrower, deeper box from their assigned line formation.

Missile troops in general feel terribly ineffective. However considering how slowly melee troops kill it may not be unbalanced, although the very slow pace of battles makes for insipid gameplay, honestly. I would like lethality to go up across the board.

Skirmishers have issues because of their limited range, which generally forces compact formations—the loose formations that feel more logical are inefficient, because you end up with part of the unit out of range of the target. When put on skirmish mode, skirmishers get caught less often than in EBI, but they also tend to spend all their time running away and not use their javelins much or at all. In any case, I often disable skirmish mode because the units tend to be really dumb about which direction to run in.

Units in melee inevitably lose formation sooner or later and become blobs pouring into each other. Even phalangites with guard mode enabled fighting hoplitai get mixed up in the enemy formation.

I did not play with or against elephants.



Some more general observations:

• Units have a lot of trouble killing each other. My first battle was quite a shock when I (as Saba) tried to storm a rebel settlement and the battle ended in a draw because defenders weren't dying fast enough, and this is with lightly armoured Arabian units. In several battles I've see a general surrounded lose all his bodyguards and proceed to fight alone against hundreds of men for minutes, being knocked down dozens of times in the process. It just looks silly. I realise that historically armies didn't slaughter each other in ten minutes, but it's just pointlessly time-consuming and, honestly, a bit boring for battles to drag on like this. Please make casualties happen faster.
• levied Toxotai, Persian archers and Cretans all have the same missile attack value. I realise there are limits to how granular you can make it, but generic Greek archers being as accurate and deadly as the most famous mercenary archers and the bowmen of a renowned archery nation feels wrong. It also means there's little point in hiring the more expensive Cretans.
• Western Tribal culture fades noticeably in Galatia. It looks possible that Celtic units will become unavailable there by around 220BCE. Maybe the unique building in Ankyra (the Galatian meeting forest) could have some cultural conversion to Western Tribal?
• This was already the case in EBI, but Kappadokia Pontika can't produce warships—despite including Herakleia Pontika which produced some very big warships historically.
• Misthophoroi Hoplitai are the unarmoured Hoplitai Haploi kind, even though their unit card shows body armour shouldn't professional mercenary hoplites be the better equipped flavour of hoplite anyway?
• Using the minor settlements and no-upkeep slots to garrison units for free and then gathering them up for campaigns feels a lot more immersive