Rtw/bi

[econ21]

I've shaken my head in disbelief at the stupidity of the AI and have seen my best general whom I had spent hours training up (playing as Parthia) charge a formation of Selucid Hoplites without orders and dying instantly.

Mods don't significantly improve the battlefield AI, although maybe by fiddling with the starting formations they make it a bit better. I find sometimes the AI is dumb, but often is servicable. What mods like RTR and EB tend to do is slow down the battles and improve the realism. I suspect vanilla RTW makes the AI seem dumb because you can beat it so easily and quickly. With slower battles (from higher morale and lower kill rates), you still win but it feels more like a real contest.

I'd never trust the AI with one of my generals, though.

Next up was my 'great victory' uphill outnumbered 10 to 1 against the Armenians who suddenly decided to wreck my empire. I thought I had lost it, but repeatedly charges from my generals unit of 30 men, and a few of my HA's (vs their 800+ eastern infantry, general and horse archers) won the day, with the enemy routing in all directions. Surprising as in MTW or STW it would have been all over for me in most cases.

RTW does have balance issues with cavalry and infantry - especially 2HP generals and lamentable eastern infantry. I'm inclined to edit all generals' units to be 1HP.

A horse archer army in the hands of the player can be devastating (as can be an all cav one in vanilla RTW).

After this, tired of finding annoying brigands everywhere ...

This is one of my biggest bug bears, but from 1.5 onwards, you can edit down the brigand and pirate spawn. Find the descr_strat.txt files (there's one each for RTW and BI, hidden deep away under data\world\maps\campaign\whatever) and set the spawn parameters to 100 (you could search the text file for "spawn" - but it is very early in the file so you could eyeball it).

Should I try the "very hard" difficulty for the battles instead of hard? Or just forget it and download RTR?

I've never raised the battle difficulty - I like the historical balance - and never really felt the need. I fight on VH campaigns with less than full stacks and find it challenging enough.

Personally, I would forget it and download RTR Platinum Edition (Gold will not let you edit down the brigand spawn rate).

If you want a challenge, I'd recommend SnakeIVs Roman factions mod for RTR PE - it brings back the Senate and I find Julii a struggle at the beginning (which is striking because Julii is about the easiest faction in vanilla RTW).

But I think RTW factions differ from MTW in being of greatly different strength. In MTW, most factions have similar unit rosters (basic spears, cav, swords, archers etc). In RTW, there is a much wider dispersion in the power of different units. Romans, Macedonians, Parthians etc are always going to be powerful in the hands of the player. Numidians and Gauls are going to struggle etc.