Quote Originally Posted by Foz
One of the biggest problems with this is that you aren't considering the limitations of the game at all. You can't just throw all the remaining AI units together into a giant multi-stack army, and have them all fight your massive multi-stack army in a single huge battle. The amount of calculations you're trying to have the game do will just go through the roof, and it won't much matter what system anyone has, they won't be able to handle trying to draw the hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield who might be involved. And that's not even to mention the AI and calculations to maneuver and decide battles outcomes on each individual man.
Foz, during Medieval I, my countless stacks of Almohads defended Europe against countless Mongol Horde in an Epic Battle that took hours to resolve so I think the technical problem can be overcome if CA is willing to look into it.

Quote Originally Posted by Foz
Even if this could be accomplished, I wouldn't want it to be: It doesn't represent what happens historically in such situations. Consider World War II for example. While it's true that much of the outside world ended up banding together to oppose Nazi Germany and its allies, to represent the situation as a giant pivotal battle would be completely incorrect. Battles continued to be fought primarily at the borders of the German-controlled territory, beginning in the West with the D-Day invasion of Normandy of course - the primary point being to capture territory. Russia in the East didn't somehow magically end up in D-Day to help with the push there. So from that standpoint, I'd have to say that suggesting some huge battle should happen that involves all the remaining countries at any given point is just ridiculous, as there's no way it would happen like that. And that's not even taking into account that forcing you to fight on many fronts due to the expanded nature of your empire is in fact a better decision for any group of opposing allies to make than it would be to try to mass a huge force to attack one place. Without other distractions you will quickly and easily turn all resources against that one large army, where if you have to defend 15 points from constant danger, odds are you can't allocate the same resources nearly as effectively and are much more likely to end up in a compromised position due to the intense micro-management required in such multi-front situations. In fact it is commonly suggested that Germany's involvement in a 2-front war is the primary reason they in fact lost - that their inability to focus on a given opponent compromised their entire empire.
As for the World War II example you cited above. Well, there were of course long campaigns but then once in a while there would be a pivotal battles that could have gone either way (the Battle of Kursk and the Operation Market Garden comes to mind). These battles involved massive armies of both parties since the strategic importance of the outcome was simply too important to ignore. In M2TW, I have yet to find a battle of strategic importance and this not only frustrates me, it bores me.

To sum, all I am asking is to enhance the strategy level of the AI so that it could plan a coherent attack and defense strategy. Is it too much to ask?