Ok guys to be fair to those with concerns……………..
I will give you a slight insight into what we have done with the current AI. In previous titles AI's focus was target acquisition and movement, they would choose appropriate targets and move toward them. M2TW’s AI system adds a preference for maintaining formation.
From a developers point of view a balance has to be found between perceived intelligence and actual intelligence. For example a lone infantry unit guarding a village outnumbered by horse archers may withdraw to the plaza and hold its ground. It will continue to stand there and not move even though its being shot. This is actually intelligent because better to be shot in its plaza than run after horse archers in the open. However the lack of movement was perceived dumb or worse broken. To address this particular example a little movement back and forth was added to give the impression of thought.
As far as I know all you veterans out there should know that the way to beat battle AI in the past is to use a few units to draw off many AI units. You then stack the units that weren’t drawn away, route them and then move on the units now chasing your “bait”. Movement equals perceived intelligence so previously staying as a group was secondary to chasing a target that you knew you could kill.
It would have been very easy and safe to leave the AI in this state, however we took the risk to do what no previous title has done with battle AI. Once all battle mechanics were finalized Iain, Artem and myself worked like crazy to employ logic many multiplayer’s would know and appreciate. For human players it’s all about getting more men to the engagement first and maintaining a formation with the rest of the army. The players that don’t keep their units together loose, those that do keep them in formation win.
When we first introduced the new logic the AI became very cautious, players could not draw any units away from the main army but the army stopped and assessed its next move too slowly. This was then sped up but caused it to digress into not considering army formation any longer. We kept refining this until a good balance was found. Once this was achieved all related exploits had to be addressed. The last of which was that when the AI group moved toward its primary target you could keep charging lone cavalry units into the army’s rear and it wouldn’t respond at all. Unfortunately this last fix generated another exploit that made it into build 52 which is Gold. If you interact with the AI it does fine but if you don’t it will move to charge distance and wait for you to make a move, indefinitely.
This was fixed a few days later with many other fixes that will be available for the first update that as far as I know will be available on release.
I know for many what us developers say maybe seen as lip service so my best advice is listen to Epistolary Richard from the .ORG. We have flown him to our studio for 10 days as a community representative here to help us grasp how we can best support modding. He played build 52 today and while doing custom battle tests found the AI defect in question. I then asked him to try using the build with the update fixes installed, as far as I know he is yet to win a battle.
Anyway I picked him up at the airport at 6:30am today and his head hit the table with fatigue by 2:00pm, so we carried him to his hotel where I am assuming he is sleeping like a baby. Anyway I will ask him if he would like to respond to this thread tomorrow if he finds his way to the studio ;) (man should have given him breadcrumbs or pebbles hey it's Australia at most he will be an hour late drunk wearing shorts, singlet and thongs).
What you will love and ER is yet to see, is that when the AI has more missile strength than you it will ensure that its non-skirmish units all skirmish as a battle group so that it can continue to shoot you to pieces. For those that know TW battle AI you know that this change is major, previously when you lost the shootout you could just charge and the AI would oblige and charge back not using its missile superiority. Anyway tomorrow I will set up a custom battle between a Mongol hit and run army and a slow moving infantry heavy European army, ER can play it and I will ask if he can give you an accurate assessment of where AI is at.
So to conclude build 47 was still in very basic overly defensive form, 48-50 smoothed it out, 51 & 52 fixed exploits and introduced a silly one that you wont notice unless you go answer the phone come back and realize “hey, what’s it waiting for?”. The first update fixes this and smoothes out the movement even further. The battle AI has so much good stuff in it and more importantly it will continue to evolve. Already we are designing shootout phase logic with cavalry skirmishing, and better use of elevation and vegetation. This will continue indefinately untill we have a battle AI system we can say is the best out there.
Man this turned into a long post………… please excuse any lack of clarity its getting late and my Wife will kick my ass soon.
Jason
Re: German magazine review
Originally Posted by A.Saturnus
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