Quote Originally Posted by Garnier
5 of 10

As of yet at least. Reasons:
No battle AI, bad campaign AI, ridiculously demanding on my pc(which I thought would run it ok on medium... but nope. sparse unit rosters, horrible pathfinding, strange un-epic battles, unbalanced, few to no open field battles, big castles lag and you don't really fight in most places, same as RTW: bash the gate, rush for square, end.

I have not noticed any of this.

The battle AI has been fine with the exception of the passive AI which is caused by fielding masses of archers. The campaign AI is far better than Romes, the only issue I have seen is lightly defended castles, I believe this is caused by the AI putting too much value into the defenses of the castle. The performance has been amazing for me it runs better than RTW, I do have a fairly hefty computer but knocking the game because your system isn't up to snuff really is silly.

I have experienced no serious pathfinding problems, the battles have been epic when massive armies clash. The balance seems spot on to me.

If you are experiencing no open field battles, I kindly suggest you seek them out. The objective of an AI army is to capture a city, you can choose to allow them to siege and assault, or you can choose to meet them in the field. If you always sit inside your walls then obviously you will not find any open field battles. I have had on several occasions had large stacks surround a sieging army and then have the defenders sally forth.

Huge cities lag for me, this is simply due to the size of the cities and all the stuff that needs to be rendered.

Siege assaults are always a huge fight if the enemy has garrisoned the town. They fight you on the walls. They retreat to the next ring of defences and fight there, and then they retreat to the center of town and fight at the town square, this is assuming you successfully take each section of the castle.

I have found the AI to be much more capable both on the attack and on the defence. Once the passive AI bug is fixed I dare say that many people will be getting their asses handed to them because the sloppy battle AI of the past 3 games is not even close to as intelligent as it is in this game.

Finally I would like to mention something that I heard mentioned in another post, it has to do with game performance and AI. Someone suggested that the AI calculations in the game are sacrificed to give playable framerate. In all the threads I have read in which someone states the AI is non-existant or terrible, they also complain about the performance of the game. Alternately, in all the posts in which people are praising the AI the game runs flawlessly on their machines. I don't know if this is the cause of this apparent lack of AI, it is however a substaintial coincidence in either way.