Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
The AI really cuts its own throat and makes the campaign game tedious by sending out so many understrength scraps of units at the player. When you are sitting in a town with a half stack or a full stack, why will the AI trickle in 1, 2 or 3 units every turn? Or worse yet, a single unit, plus another army of a couple, plus a third of a few more. You end up having to fight 2 or 3 battlefield map actions to clear them. Plus you have 2 or 3 "AI withdraws" type strategic map events giving you victories.

All of this gives the human player a lot of easy victories and command stars out the wazoo. My generals are going from 1 up to 6 or 10 stars in only a few years.

Unfortunately, this means you have to fight many small battles that are simply a waste of time (but auto resolve is bizarre and untrustworthy.) CA could easily cut the number of battles in half or even a quarter, by having the AI merge its armies and fight in strength, rather than being killed in detail. It would make sense for it to skip turns and merge big armies rather than trickle in a few at a time. The Gauls seem to do this some...but they also like to send family members and faction leaders running about by their lonesome.

The one advantage of "nuisance armies" would be to lure you out into a trap or to lure your general out so far that he could not get back to the city on the same tuern. But usually the AI sends the little armies right up to your city wall, but doesn't even start a siege on that turn. That's really a dumb move.

In a related area: I've been thinking about sieges and blockades (because if the AI is fixed it is going to get truly nuts with them.) I don't think units that fall under some relative or absolute strength threshhold should be allowed to initiate a siege or blockade. Perhaps it would take X + 1 units to initiate a siege if the settlement was at X level (so higher level cities would require more to initiate siege action.) Same for blockades. Perhaps it might take 2 boats for the base level port, 3 or 4 for the next size, and so on. This type restriction should apply to moving armies as well...

Any thoughts?
I pretty much disagree with everything you've said so far about RTW apart from this.

This is a real downer for me, especially getting into the late game now and beginning some scraps against superpowers.
One thing I think the strategic map should do when a battle is joined, is merge all available armies together who have movement points remaining.
That way you'd get some of the truely large scale MTW battles that we all are sorely missing.

The command star thing is pretty ridiculous too, especially since the AI rarely has any.

However, at least the AI doesnt retreat and retreat and retreat out of all its provinces not even GIVING you a fight like it did in MTW when you had the stronger army, but still, im not sure the RTW system is more fun or realistic to be honest.