units

[Sword_Monkey]

Gettysburg was very good. Another fine example of how you can have a real time game without it being a click fest and have real tactics. One of the things I found appealing about Shogun was some of the initial favourable comparisons to Gettysburg.

Unreal Tournament still has the best AI for an FPS that I've seen. The Homeworld games had some good if not outstanding AI (and considering the fully 3D playing field, that's very impressive).

In general, RTS games tend to have a hard time with good AI. I think it's sad commentary that with the 3rd party tweaks (e.g. Queller) Total Annihilation has better AI than most modern RTS games and it was coded over 5 years ago.

Overall, Shogun has a good AI but some of it's elements should have been done differently. Balanced army composition is one of them because it should have been relatively simple to code in a list of army makeups that are viable and have the AI construct those armies. With the very good rock paper scissor units strengths a player shouldn't find themselves 25 years into the campaign facing off against an army of 12 archer units and some Ashi. I get the feeling that the AI army composition was done with some sort of weighting algorithm that doesn't work as well as quasi-scripting would in this game.

[DeathOnaPaleHorse]

Sword_Monkey, I agree completely with you about the AI on Shogun... As a matter of fact, just yesterday, I was thinking of the personality options on Gettysburg, like General Lee prefered flexible attacks (direct and indirect) and cautious advancing. If i recall, Grant prefered direct and aggresive advances, and Meade was indirect and passive. I think if each enemy general, whether in a campaign or in a custom battle, was given random army layouts and tactical personalities, the game would be improved immensely.

As for UT having the best FPS AI, I disagree... I can toast those bots day in and day out... And they can't cooperate. Half-Life has the best FPS AI. The way they work together can be spooky.

[YagyuKamiizumi]

My favorite unit is whatever I am experimenting with and getting positive results without unbalancing my army or creating/compounding a weakness.
I find that two units of h1 Cavalry Archers skillfully employed can be the great softener
of some of the hardiest armies one can devise.
They are fast enough to avoid getting zeroed in on with muskets or archers or chased down by other cav (Yari Cav being the exception)and accurate enough to whittle away your opponents attack/counterattack power. That is until they run out of arrows then they are reduced to a good chaser of routing troops when you can't spare your heavier cav units to the chase or just as targets to absorb fire from a distracted players archers or guns.
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'Any philosophy that can be put into a nutshell belongs there' -George Carlin

[james]

nice sig!!