Quote Originally Posted by Servius1234
If it's true that if a player saves/loads each turn, the AI never expands, then there is something wrong with the deeper analysis the AI performs after loads. It's important to differentiate that, while this behavior by the AI may be dumb, it's not necessarily a bug. It may just be an overly-defensive tendency built into those more indepth reviews. If that's the case, it's likely the devs would not have seen this pattern during development for the bell curve reason CA mentioned. It may very well have taken the sheer number of games we've played to expose this tendency.
I don't buy that argument at all. The AI should be doing its best analysis every turn. The turn after a load doesn't take any longer than the same turn without a load, so I think both evaluations are going to the same depth. You don't have to play a lot of games to see the problem, but you do have to turn fog of war off. You can readily see the problem on turn 4 of a Julii campaign, and possibly on turn one as well. The thing is nobody tested the savegames because who would have thought the AI wouldn't be able to properly continue the game from a reload? Nobody designs strategic games that way except apparently CA, and I don't think STW or MTW were designed this way either. According to CA, STW and MTW were made by a different design team which may be why so many nice features of those previous games didn't make it into RTW.

Quote Originally Posted by Servius1234
This may be another example of a negative consequence of too much complexity and/or too many variables. The more variables in an equation, the more difficult it is to ensure a favorable and outcome. RTW has a TON of variables the AI is supposed to take account of. This may just be an example of the cart getting ahead of the horse, of the complexity of an equation getting ahead of the AI's ability to make good decisions based on it.
I agree with you except for the last sentence. It would be more accurate to say the complexity of the game got beyond the ability of CA's development team to handle. It's obvious that all the variables are not being restored to their prior values upon a reload. If they were, the AI could easily come to the exact same decisions that it does in continuous play. Computers are excellent at doing that task, but humans are not.

This game required much more development time than it got, but that probably would have bankrupted company. So, now CA has to scramble to justify the state of the game despite a sincere attempt to correct all the problems with the v1.2 patch effort. I'll bet they are completely strung out trying to get the add-on finished, but, if they continue to underestimate the developement time required to get things done, future releases are going to be plagued with the same plethora of issues. Far too many to be all caught by one patch.