Fatigue - the bane of the AI?

[Jambo]

Playing RTW for some time now and I think I've come to conclusion that the real bane of the AI is the fatigue option.

As it stands it's too severe - giving both morale and combat (?) penalties - and the AI simply doesn't take it into account during prolonged battles. It will not rest its units. I find this particularly poignant in siege battles where often by the time the AI has negotiated the walls and streets its units are exhausted and wavering by the time they reach the city plaza.

I know my good TW friend Puzz3D has since set this option off and I'm interested to hear what you all think of this. I think I'll try fatigue off from now on and see how it impacts on the difficulty level, after all it doesn't really impact on the human anyway, as they'll rest tired and exhausted units during a prolonged battle.

[professorspatula]

Playing RTW for some time now and I think I've come to conclusion that the real bane of the AI is the fatigue option.

Absolutely. This is made even worse by modding the game to have lower kill rates. The AI just can't understand the concept of fatigue, hence will needlessly tire out it's troops and leave them like lambs to the slaughter when your fresh troops arrive to spill some blood. Ideally, CA would have allowed us to edit the rate of fatigue, rather than giving limited stamina attributes or turning off fatigue altogether.

I think in the spirit of fairness, all players should force their armies to run back and forth for three minutes before engaging the AI army. Anyone who refuses this is exploiting the AI weakness, thus is a blatant cheater.

[Jambo]

Couldn't agree more Prof! Incidentally, how does one turn off fatigue? There's no option in-game...

Is it in the preferences file and if so where's this located?

[Afro Thunder]

I think you can turn on "Arcade style battles", but this option also makes units have an unlimited amount of missiles.

[Jambo]

Yeah I think that also affects morale too, something which I don't want to touch. :/

I done a test or two with the preferences file and it would appear that changing fatigue is only possible at the start of a campaign. Once it's ongoing and you're loading from saved games changing fatigue to FALSE in the preference file doesn't do anything.

Is there a Romeshell command for enabling or disabling fatigue?

[fallen851]

I've only had a couple of battles I thought I might lose, and one of them was one where two spanish armies (about 1000 men each) were about to engage my Roman army (1200 men), but one of them showed up after I had routed the first army.

So I sent my units over, and the second spanish army routed my mounted troops and nearly my entire left side until I got it under control. The first army killed 36 Romans, but the second army killed 471 Romans before I routed them. It left a "historic victory" (or whatever) marker there, only my 2nd in 139 battles.

If fatigue had been removed it would have been a lot easier for me and not as fun.

I've modded my game to slow down the killing and I don't see AI fatigue as a problem really. Often times the AI runs to the nearest hill and hides while I tired my troops out chasing them around... this doesn't happen to you guys? Maybe because I'm always the attacker....

[IceTorque]

It would be nice if we could mod the rate at which they tire.
My answer to this problem was to make all units very_hardy.
For field battles it seems good. As for siege battles I try and avoid em.

That reminds me how are the siege battles in 1.5, 1.6 ?