This is probably an old question, but perhaps worth a new thread. What simple coding changes do people think CA could implement to improve the AI?

To start the ball rolling here are some that strike me immediately:

Strategic AI:

(1) Do not attack when outnumbered. I regularly get attacked by AI armies that are weaker than my own and there seems no strategic reason for a desperate assault.

(2) "Double team" armies. Sometimes the AI will have three full stacks and attack me with them sequentially, losing one each time. Instead, they should put two in "contact" and then attacked with the third, so that the first two could reinforce. That would be a challenge (even if only one army was on the field at a time, I would have lost my ammo by the time the second arrived).

(3) Stack fleets. The naval war is a joke - unlike MTW, the AI builds enough ships but loses now them piecemeal because they seldom stack.

(4) Keep armies out of reach of stronger armies (ie keep inferior armies out of the movement range of stronger armies). The AI in Heroes of Might and Magic III did this very well - it makes it frustrating to bring the AI to battle, but greatly increases the chalenge.

(5) Put good generals in command of large armies. Most large AI armies are led by strutting fools and mewling infants (captains), yet there is the occaisional high starred AI generals sometimes left alone in towns.

Tactical AI:

(1) Do not attack piecemeal. It is fun to fight Seleucids in RTR v6.0, as they combine phalanxes with fiercesome sword units. But what happens is that the non-phalanx stuff charges in, gets defeated and then the phalanxes arrive. If the phalanxes hit at the same time as the other stuff flanked me, I'd be in trouble.

(2) Keep phalanxes in a line and march forward into combat - stop them veering off to make piecemeal unit to unit match ups. In vanilla, a phalanx can crush most other infantry if kept in a solid wall (my German spears could overrun massed armies of hastati with virtually no loss). But the AI can't pull this off and so phalanxes become very weak units for the AI.

(3) Do not open combat by charging in missile or skirmisher units! (Really bizarre behaviour). When attacking the AI does not seem to use ranged superiority if it has it.

(4) Do not open combat by charging generals into battle (suicide Daimyos are sometimes back in RTW).

(5) Do not stand on the defence if getting shot to death. Better try to take some of the enemy with you, than just step into the position of a unit wiped out to enemy missile fire.

(6) Do not parade up and down in front of missile fire when defending wooden walls. (Again very wierd behaviour).

(7) Do not reposition to lower ground when the player tries to maneouvre you off a hill. (This refers to Puzz3Ds observation in the recent MTW AI vs RTW AI thread.

Pretty much all the above should be easy for CA to code and would make the game much more fun. Modders can do a lot - I'm enjoying RTR v6.0 as much as I did MTW - but not everything.