BI (still) too easy for aggressive players

[Dorkus]

I won my WRE campaign VH/VH in 375 AD, 12 years after the start of my campaign. I have 10 provinces after turn 8 or so in my new AlemVH/VH campaign, including Rome.

The campaign AI is still far too susceptible to blitz tactics. If you focus your forces into a single point of attack, and expand quickly and early, the AI does not respond appropriately. In particular, it does not seem to scout out the cities you leave completely unguarded, so it does not recognize that the 500 man garrison stacks left behind are composed completely of peasants.

Just as importantly, it does not defend with focused forces. I rampaged through the ERE with a full stack army (mainly sar aux cav, which are vastly overpowered) and tore through the empire's armies piece-meal. I think the AI is too worried about splitting its forces to cover its entire empire (to maintain order), and not worried enough about the massive 6 star general controlled stack marching for its capital. It is assuming that I, like the AI, will be happy with taking one province. When I instead march straight on, exterminating every population behind me and trailing with a 500 man peasant garrison "support" army, it dies a quick death.

Oh well, I got one weekend out of it, which is better than I can say about any other game on the market :P

[Kor Khan]

I generally find that about ten turns at the beginning of the game of doing not much, just building up and not invading anywhere, makes the game more fun and challenging. Blitz tactics dont work that well anymore once the AI is built up (I dont have BI so I dont know how it works there though).

[KSEG]

I won my WRE campaign VH/VH in 375 AD, 12 years after the start of my campaign. I have 10 provinces after turn 8 or so in my new AlemVH/VH campaign, including Rome.

The campaign AI is still far too susceptible to blitz tactics. If you focus your forces into a single point of attack, and expand quickly and early, the AI does not respond appropriately. In particular, it does not seem to scout out the cities you leave completely unguarded, so it does not recognize that the 500 man garrison stacks left behind are composed completely of peasants.

Just as importantly, it does not defend with focused forces. I rampaged through the ERE with a full stack army (mainly sar aux cav, which are vastly overpowered) and tore through the empire's armies piece-meal. I think the AI is too worried about splitting its forces to cover its entire empire (to maintain order), and not worried enough about the massive 6 star general controlled stack marching for its capital. It is assuming that I, like the AI, will be happy with taking one province. When I instead march straight on, exterminating every population behind me and trailing with a 500 man peasant garrison "support" army, it dies a quick death.

Oh well, I got one weekend out of it, which is better than I can say about any other game on the market :P

Then why won't you DON'T do the blitz tactics?
Whats the fun if your going to finish the game in a hour?

[Bob the Insane]

I say each to their own, but as above, you get out of the game what you put in... We could get in a whole discussion of beating the game vs. playing the game, etc.. But that would be a little pointless. I can certainly understand that since you know how to beat the game pretty easily, where is the fun in handicapping yourself to give the AI a chance.

Perhapes one of the upcoming or converted mods would provide more of a challenge.

I would be interested in hearing a little more of your strategy, how you maintain order and deal with the WRER when they pop up while putting together a large enough army to reunit the empire (plus defending against the Berbers, Celts and Saxons)...

[Akka]

Oh well, I got one weekend out of it, which is better than I can say about any other game on the market :P

Perhaps it means that it's not the game which has a problem, but you ?

[a_b_danner]

I've found it reasonably easy to expand once you get your economy going. I think the solution is to have faction specific barracks. I'm just finishing up a new export_desc_builidng where romans, barbs, nomads, huns, celts/berbers each have their own tech tree. So funtionally, Romans will have an easier time capturing former roman territories (or other roman factions), but will have a much tougher time going into barbarian territory. Horde factions will have a tougher time once they establish a new home, because they will have to build from scratch (I did shorten the build times to help compensate).

I'm also planning on modding the descr_strat to make it harder for the Romans right off the bat. Following that, i might do an 408 campaign, with Rome loosing quite a bit of its territories, and the Vandal horde on the French/Spanish Border. That should spice things up a bit.

[Dorkus]

Then why won't you DON'T do the blitz tactics?
Whats the fun if your going to finish the game in a hour?

Or why not just not use cavalry? Or not use generals?

Heck, let's field an all peasant army!!!



I'm not doing anything extraordinary. I'm just scouting ahead with spies and taking the stuff that is sitting there for the taking.

Anyone who has multiplayer experience in other strategy games of this sort would do the same thing.

[Dorkus]

I would be interested in hearing a little more of your strategy, how you maintain order and deal with the WRER when they pop up while putting together a large enough army to reunit the empire (plus defending against the Berbers, Celts and Saxons)...

Here is a concise version of my post from the WRE turnaround thread. I never saw the WRER. What triggers their appearance? If it is date, perhaps I beat the game too quickly for them to appear.

1. Sell off useless buildings (each province should have AT MOST one troop type building; and none of the econ buildings are worth keeping except ports)

2. Keep only as many units as you need to maintain order; in particular, disband ALL cavalry that is far from the warfront. (300g upkeep)

3. Train a ton of peasants. (High man #; 25g upkeep)

4. Shift high law/influence generals to key locations. (especially gov on island north of carthage to carthage)

5. Change capital to central/strategic location. (had it in island north of carthage for first couple rounds)

6. Use and build arenas/races. 400 gold for 20% order; 800 gold for 30% order. Cannot be beat in a high pop province.

7. Build temple according to majority wishes. (eventually convert faction leader to pagan, even if by suicide, and change all provinces to pagan because combat bonuses are better)

I had some civil unrest but no revolts. The main thing is that there's a LOT of micromanagement in this strategy; you need to pick out the useless buildings to destroy, maintain ONLY enough troops to keep 80+% order, and eventually replace all garrisons with peasants. You also have to be very careful of which governors to send to which provinces (especially the one general with the christian relics; keep him sitting in enemy provinces)

But even if it's labor intensive and a bit boring, it's worth doing. Giving up provinces is counterproductive in the longrun. With 25g upkeep peasants, there is no reason to lose a single province. Even economically unproductive provinces can generate massive denari from taxes alone.

Once you get through the first couple rounds, you're raking in so much cash that you no longer even look at the treasury. Then start making an all (upgraded) sar aux cav army (for speed), tail it with an all peasant army (to hold the ladders the cav army builds prior to siege), and rampage through the map leading with a spy or two (who, if you're lucky, will often open the gates up, especially once he gains a few ranks)

[Dorkus]

Perhaps it means that it's not the game which has a problem, but you ?

I'm not saying BI isn't a good game. It's a wonderful game. But I got three weeks out of RTW (learning how to handle squalor was particularly fun), and a few months out of MTW. Part of this is because there's a learning curve, and once you get past the learning curve for one TW game, you don't need to fight through it again.

But a bigger part is that the game is not designed well for moderately aggressive players. Which is unfortunate because TW is a war game, first and foremost. Shouldn't CA have expected that some players would be, well, "warlike"?

[Dorkus]

[QUOTE=a_b_danner] I think the solution is to have faction specific barracks. QUOTE]

This would definitely make things harder. As things stand, with infinite retraining, you can replenish your entire army, no matter how devastated, in one round. And since there is no distinction between faction troop buildings, you can do it at the warfront, without having to take even a single turn to regroup. Even better, troops are still retrained at their original experience level. So if you have one gold bar horseman left in a cav unit, the entire unit reappears with gold bars!!!

[Taiwan Legion]

I've found it reasonably easy to expand once you get your economy going. I think the solution is to have faction specific barracks. I'm just finishing up a new export_desc_builidng where romans, barbs, nomads, huns, celts/berbers each have their own tech tree. So funtionally, Romans will have an easier time capturing former roman territories (or other roman factions), but will have a much tougher time going into barbarian territory. Horde factions will have a tougher time once they establish a new home, because they will have to build from scratch (I did shorten the build times to help compensate).

I'm also planning on modding the descr_strat to make it harder for the Romans right off the bat. Following that, i might do an 408 campaign, with Rome loosing quite a bit of its territories, and the Vandal horde on the French/Spanish Border. That should spice things up a bit.

if you do that, make sure you share it. I'd like to play that.

[Red Harvest]

The opening blitz is something CA could address, but it would take some work. Essentially, a routine could be run to randomize starting positions/buildings/units to a limited degree. With fog of war, this would make blitz strategies very dangerous for the player. The current blitz relies on knowing ahead of time what the optimum strategy is, and where the enemy strenghts and weaknesses are. Remove that knowledge and it is a new game.

[Sjakihata]

Im a very slow player. It takes me time to move, mobilize and plan my advances. But when I do move, I have it all thought out. Be it a tricky navy landing, plots assassinations, ambushes or what not. When I do hit the opponent I am sure to win.

I can easily use the first 20+ turns just building my one or two settlements up and ready, while forging alliances, trade rights and other diplomacy.
Also I love to micromanage my characters, trade retinues, sending them off to special missions etc.

[Kekvit Irae]

omg zerg rush kekeke

[hoof]

I have only ever played one game where it was possible to face insurmountable odds to win w/o the AI cheating, and that was Moo3 (Master of Orion 3, patched version of course). In that game, I recall being trapped in an 8-system neck of the woods with one big empire in my way. No matter what I did, if I went to war, I lost. Any other game I've ever played, there was always some tactic or method you could use to win unless the odds were ridiculous, or the AI cheated. Thus I'm not particularly upset that BI is winnable regardless of initial situation using certain strategies.

I suggest what others in this thread have suggested: Limit yourself in some way to make the game interesting. Way back when, when Doom I/II was the In game, I found it all too easy to beat levels using regular tactics, even on the hardest difficulty levels. Thus I started trying some variations, like only using pistol/fists, or completing nine levels in a row w/o save/load, etc. Suddenly the game became fun again.

Sometimes there are simple things a game dev team can do to make a game more challenging w/o sacrificing the fun factor (remember: frustration is *not* fun, repeat after me all prospective game designers!). But we must not always rely upon the devs to solve our gameplay problems for us. If slash'n'burn tactics make the game too easy, don't do them (many strategy games can be won this way, just go in and decimate the production pipeline of the AI). If blitzkrieg makes it too easy, don't. In Vanilla RTW, I remember once playing as Parthians. I took over what is currently modern day Turkey and Egypt, then waited 50 turns to let the Romans build up (so I fought their best armies possible instead of wimpy pushover units). In my last Carthage campaign, I deliberately chose not to take over Sicily and the Italian Penninsula to give the Romans a chance (easy win for Carthage: Take Italy in the first 50 turns before they can build up their empire or tech base).

My point is don't bother waiting for the Devs to solve all your gameplay issues. A lot of them are very very difficult to solve and don't yield all that much bang for the buck (you and a few others might be happy with feature X, Y or Z, but most will never notice). Some of them are not. But I've been waiting 20 years for a "better" game like you're talking about and have found it only once (Moo3 again, post patch). Learn from my experience and don't bother trying to change the world. Find your own challenges. Why do people restore cars, when they could "blitzkrieg" and buy a new one? Why do people run a marathon when driving a car is so much easier? Why do people play RTW with self-imposed restrictions when playing with the "best" tactics/strategy would be so much easier?

[Dorkus]

The opening blitz is something CA could address, but it would take some work. Essentially, a routine could be run to randomize starting positions/buildings/units to a limited degree. With fog of war, this would make blitz strategies very dangerous for the player. The current blitz relies on knowing ahead of time what the optimum strategy is, and where the enemy strenghts and weaknesses are. Remove that knowledge and it is a new game.

Well, I don't think it should take anything that sophisticated. Two things mainly:

1. Attack PC cities that have peasant garrisons. As things stand, it seems that the AI is using mainly mancount to approximate strenght? That or it is just very passive.

2. Combine defensive forces in the face of a superior army, instead of attempting to hold every city. This may have to do with the AI's failed grasp of the efficacy of city walls. Against a human controlled army, walls just aren't that effective defensively.

[Bob the Insane]

I think the solution is to have faction specific barracks. I'm just finishing up a new export_desc_builidng where romans, barbs, nomads, huns, celts/berbers each have their own tech tree.

Rome Total Realism (RTR 6.1) does that and i for one am really looking forward to what ever they do with BI...

[antisocialmunky]

It's very hard to make an AI that can intellegently defend themselves against extremely aggressive unconventional moves. As far as I can tell, the TW AIs are very cautious but stubborn.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

omg zerg rush kekeke

Lol!

I was never any good at that - and the enemy zerg formation always seemed to attack in an intimidating "skull" formation - or maybe that's just me...

I'm sure there will be some good mods to toughen the outset if there is a demand for them - or better yet, figure how to do it yourself.

Using scripting you could possibly randomize the buildings, to an extent.

[Grifman]

I think it would be fairly easy to stop an WRE blitz.

1) First off, it's very easy to blitz the Alemani and Berbers. Neither protects their capital very well. They seem to have enough forces to do so, but at the beginning their forces are too scattered. It's easy to consolidate forces in Spain/Gaul, then move to take their capitals. They need the majority of their forces defending their capitals rather than wandering around.

2) It's too easy to hold Britain. If I move my Britain legions to Gaul (which I normally do), then the Celts should attack. Again, they seem to have enough forces, but they are too passive and after I get my economy going, I can garrison Britain adequately. This would also slow down my Alemani blitz, since I usually use the Britain garrison to assist that or take the place of garrisons that do take the Alemani capital.

These two changes would make a big difference. If the Berbers keep their capital, they can build up a force to threaten or take Carthage. If the Alemani keep their capital, they become a threat. And if the Celts attack Britain, I'm forced to choose. All three of these prevent me from sacking the Alemani and Berber capitals and jumpstarting my economy. Then I'm in for a real fight.

[screwtype]

...the game is not designed well for moderately aggressive players. Which is unfortunate because TW is a war game, first and foremost. Shouldn't CA have expected that some players would be, well, "warlike"?

Yes, I would agree with that. None of the TW series really provides enough challenge, RTW especially. In fact, few PC strategy games provide much in the way of challenge in my experience.

However, I will say that I think you're "cheating" a little by building cav armies. Cav have such a big advantage on the battlefield due to their mobility that you can steamroll anyone with a cav army, at least that's the case for RTW (haven't played BI yet). Personally, I think cav units in RTW are far too cheap, both to buy and to maintain.

As for myself, I spend most of my gaming time these days playing the old strategy game Imperialism II. The graphics and battles are a long way from state of the art, but there are dozens of different variables you can set to "tweak" the game to just the right level of difficulty. I've found that by playing on a custom difficulty of about 200, with both "Aggressive Game" and penalty for human expansion set to "Maximum", that I can get a really good challenge from this game. I only wish RTW had more difficulty variables you could play with, having your choice limited to "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" just doesn't cut it.

[econ21]

[QUOTE=Dorkus]

I think the solution is to have faction specific barracks. QUOTE]

This would definitely make things harder. As things stand, with infinite retraining, you can replenish your entire army, no matter how devastated, in one round. And since there is no distinction between faction troop buildings, you can do it at the warfront, without having to take even a single turn to regroup. Even better, troops are still retrained at their original experience level. So if you have one gold bar horseman left in a cav unit, the entire unit reappears with gold bars!!!

Inspired by the Roma mod for RTR, I started playing with the houserule that you can only build or retrain troops at your capital. That, along with bringing balanced, historical armies makes RTR less of a walkover as the Romans.

To really increase the challenge, I think {EDIT}Puzz3D's houserule of never retraining units would be very effective. Even with faction specific barracks, it is still too easy to retrain. Unlike MTW, you can retrain a whole stack in one turn and, as you say, create veterans out of newbies.

I haven't adopted either rule with WRE yet, as I thought it would be tougher. But I may do. I've noticed that the horde horse archer armies cause a lot more attrition in my forces than I've experienced before in RTW or RTR, so retraining may be an even bigger issue.

[Bartix]

Dorkus, why not try RTR 6.2?
Is very limiting to rusher tactic, and so much better game than vanilla it is shock!!
I play now heavy mods for long time, so I try vanilla and think " I had fun playing this?"

[Dorkus]

Dorkus, why not try RTR 6.2?
Is very limiting to rusher tactic, and so much better game than vanilla it is shock!!
I play now heavy mods for long time, so I try vanilla and think " I had fun playing this?"

Well, i'm not a big realism fan; I only care about gameplay. And real wars in this time period were not really that fun or tactical.

What exactly does rtr do? I've been to the site, and there's not a lot of specific info.

[econ21]

What exactly does rtr do? I've been to the site, and there's not a lot of specific info.

For me, the attraction is the realism. New units with new graphics. Fantasy Egyptian and other units deleted. Faction starting points changed to be historical. Senate faction deleted and Rome made a unified faction (with only 3 starting provinces, IIRC).

In addition, it slows down the move and kill speeds to be comparable to MTW. I find I can enjoy the graphics now - RTW is so fast, I don't notice them.

Strategically, it creates areas of recruitment so that when you occupy a province, you can't immediately build your own troops. Instead you have to build barracks etc to get increasingly good "local" troops (eg. barbarian type, or Italian type etc). It can take 3-4 upgrades before you can get your own native troops.

It has also fixed naval combat to be bloody and decisive.

There's probably other stuff. It's a really big mod.

[Kraxis]

To really increase the challenge, I think Kraxis's houserule of never retraining units would be very effective. Even with faction specific barracks, it is still too easy to retrain. Unlike MTW, you can retrain a whole stack in one turn and, as you say, create veterans out of newbies.

I don't remember saying that, though it is of course a very good idea. But I'm having enough challenge in my games. Should I suffer weak games then I would do certain things. Such as limiting the really good units (cataphracts, first cohorts, carroballiastae ect ect).

[econ21]

I don't remember saying that, though it is of course a very good idea.

Apologies, Kraxis, if I have wrongly attributed this idea. I heard it recently posted here and for some reason thought you were the poster. Maybe because most of your ideas are very good ones.

[L'Impresario]

Well Yuuki had mentioned that but I wouldn't try it, I don't like an odd-number of men in my units;)

[Kraxis]

Apologies, Kraxis, if I have wrongly attributed this idea. I heard it recently posted here and for some reason thought you were the poster. Maybe because most of your ideas are very good ones.

Why... thank you.

[Puzz3D]

Well Yuuki had mentioned that but I wouldn't try it, I don't like an odd-number of men in my units;)

I've been playing without retraining. You can combine units which will get all but one of the same type back to full strength. Before that, I used to play with only training or retraining one at a time.

I think Dorkus is right about the AI using a simple headcount when deciding whether or not to siege a city. Total War always did this. I think it's so you can eventually realize the trick of saving money by using the cheapest unit to defend a city. I never use peasants to garrison cities because I think CA took the technique too far. I use town malitia.

STW handled upkeep in a simple way that made sense. Each man required 1 koku of upkeep per year no mater what kind of unit he was in. In fact, a koku of rice was the amount a typical man ate in one year. Cavalry required 2 koku if I remember correctly. Presumably, you had to sell rice to buy what the horse ate since they don't eat rice. I suppose you could argue that samurai being a higher cast would have gotten more rice than ashigaru who were a lower cast.