Rtw/bi

[caravel]

Well, to be honest, I would put this in the "it's not a bug - it's a feature" camp. Making cavalry impetuous - liable to charge without orders - is defensible, from a historical point of view. Think of the charge of the light brigade or even the French cavalry at Waterloo. Your suicidal general was a prototype Marshall Ney.

A constructive way at looking at it.

Yes. It's a really big deal and a key reason why general's units can crush most opposition.

How does this work? Do they affectively have to be critically hit twice before they actually die? If so I may change them to 1HP as you had stated that you had done in the previous post.

Agreed. I experienced that, but on the losing side, in a recent Julii PBM battle against the Scythians. I had slightly more men but no archers, insufficient cavalry and just died. But in this case, I did rather admire the AI. They would evade contact, use the Parthian shot, charge any infantry that turned their backs to them, quickly mob isolated units etc. It was actually rather awesome, if mortifying. I'm pretty sure it would not have happened in STW or MTW.

Strange, I've found the opposite to be the case so far. Another thing. Have you been using the BI exe for RTW? If so, how is it going?

In RTR, your archers etc need unshielded targets to do a lot of damage.

I'll have a chance to try this out from saturday onwards when I'll have more time.

The same turn I also lost a big battle against the Spaniards. I think I went back to vanilla RTW with a contempt for the AI and was given a spanking in return. (The Romans in RTR may actually be stronger than the pre-Marian ones in vanilla RTW.) Try fighting battles at 1:2 odds or worse (use half-stacks) before you dismiss the AI as horrendous. The Risk-style campaign map of STW/MTW meant you tended to face much tougher battle odds than the dispersed RTW one, where the AI struggles to keep up.

My point is that I shouldn't need to face a numerically superior force in oder to lose, and most of the battles I've fought so far in RTW have been against the odds, well outnumbered, by 4 to 1 in some cases and my forces have still won the day. The battles I've lost have been those where my units were seriously undermanned and routed. I find that the AI either attacks en masse or just sits there and waits until my units advance to a certain distance and attacks anyway. Though if my horse archers move to a certain range and open fire, the enemy still just sits there. The AI is also baited by certain units, it rushes weaker missile/javelin type troops or archers, with no thought of maintaining a battle line or flank protection, just to score a cheap kill.

OT, but I beg to differ. M:TW's A.I. is superior to S:TW's in several aspects, including bridge battles, suicidal generals and flanking. It also cheats less on the campaign map. On the other hand, the M:TW A.I. has serious problems setting up a profitable economy, but that can be modded. However, I agree that R:TW's A.I. was a failure. There's a couple of things it does better than M:TW, but that doesn't matter because it's got the basics all wrong.

By 'steadily worse' I was referring to the transition from STW/MTW -> RTW, not throughout the series. I have always found MTW's AI to be better than Shogun's overall. Bad wording on my part, sorry.

CA has repeated their intention to improve M2:TW's A.I. several times, and they even recruited a long-time MP player to assure that this would work. The first M2:TW development blog was dedicated to the battlefield A.I.

Let's hope that CA do the AI some justice this time around.