VH should be harder, or "For gods sake give the AI a full stack"

[chickenhawk]

The entire campaign game is easy busy work until the Mongols or Timurids show up with stacks capable of giving a real challenge on the battle map in single player. The AI needs work here more than any where else.

I am waiting for the patch to start any new campaigns but I thought i would ask for a general opinion on the subject.

Should there be an almost unbeatable VVH setting for campaigns?

[Skott]

Make the game too difficult and they risk losing sales. My guess if you want a really tough campaign you'd need to go to the mods for that. They probably can do it better than CA anyway.

[Quickening]

To be honest I find VH/VH to be challenging. Im no "n00b" to strategy games either. But seriously, I sometimes wonder if my strategies in MTW2 are fundementally flawed somehow. What with folk saying how they've completed their billionth long campaign etc. I just in the last few minutes completed my first short campaign and I was only 5 turns away from the games end! Im not shit, honestly.

On VH/VH the AI seems to always have another full stack army lurking around. The only way I can see it being any harder is having an "Insane" setting.

[TevashSzat]

The challenging part of vh/vh is not how eaily you can win a long campaign, but how fast. If you blitz on everyone around you, the game gets alot harder as you must fight every battle with as little losses as possible or your blitz will run out of steam. Just building up for the firsr 50 turns then attacking everyone isn't that dificult. My fastest campaign is my sicilian one which beat the long campaign at 41 turns.

[HoreTore]

Uhm, blitzing isn't very difficult... If you take it just a bit slower, the AI will start getting better and better armies. Just had a fight with the Spanish, they're first stack was 15 heavy infantry, about egual amounts of chivalric, feudal and swordsmen plus 5 units of knights of santiago. A GOOD ai army.

Blitzing isn't a challenge at all really. You'll get PLENTY of money from all your sacking and mercs can very easily replenish your losses. And the AI doesn't have any tactics at all to counter it. Plus, for the first 50 turns, all you're ever going to see, is AI militia armies. Not very hard to beat them with minimal losses...

But there's got to be a way to make this game harder. The problem isn't the campaign AI, it's the battle AI which keeps screwing up. Isn't it possible to give the AI a +5 or so bonus to everything combat stat or something? Like in MTW...

If the battles were harder, and you could actually LOSE an even odds battle, things would be much, much harder...

And about the "people won't play this game if it's too hard" thingy... Well, as long as you have easier levels, that's not true at all. Look at Civ4 for example. The Emperor, Deity, etc. levels are EXTREMELY hard, and civ4 sells more than enough. In fact, if you have higher difficulty levels who are very, very hard, they will ensure MORE sales, because people will play the game longer as it's more challenging.

[TevashSzat]

The problem is that the computer ai will never ever be as good as a human player because the comp doesn't have any flexibility to react to situations as they occur or to think of new unpreidctable strategies.

[econ21]

But there's got to be a way to make this game harder. The problem isn't the campaign AI, it's the battle AI which keeps screwing up. Isn't it possible to give the AI a +5 or so bonus to everything combat stat or something? Like in MTW...

Personally, I think the problem is the campaign AI. It just does not have a "killer instinct". Try just pressing end turn in the middle of a war, turn after turn, autoresolving and building nothing. Often not much will happen for ages. I suspect you will get tired before the AI conquers you.

I think CA needs to work more on the AI - on VH, just get it to accumulate a huge, multi-stack army (cheating so afford it and that it can see yours and work out it needs 3x as many or something), then come barrelling at you, taking city after city until it hits your capital. The AI in strategy games like Homm3 or Civ can do this. The AI in STW and MTW did this. But with the RTW/M2TW open map, I think more work still needs to be done to get a strategic AI as dangerous as the one on the Risk style maps.

I haven't noticed the battle AI screwing up that much (unlike RTW). But anyway, a human is always going to beat the computer with even odds. The solution is to tweak the campaign AI so that the battles are not at even odds.

[dismal]

The entire campaign game is easy busy work until the Mongols or Timurids show up with stacks capable of giving a real challenge on the battle map in single player. The AI needs work here more than any where else.

I am waiting for the patch to start any new campaigns but I thought i would ask for a general opinion on the subject.

Should there be an almost unbeatable VVH setting for campaigns?

I agree. VH/VH is not VH enough. I don't know that they need to make a level that is as insane as Civ4 on its highest levels, but more challenge would be nice.

At a minimum, I'd like to see a harder level where the AI focuses much more on building full stacks of top of the line units before attacking. And gets enough resource bonuses to pull it off.

I'm not sure if the problem can be attributed to the battle or the campaign AI. If the battle AI was better, much of what the campaign AI does might make mnore sense.

I doubt the campaign AI anticipates how badly it will get thumped in battle. It probably calculates it has a superior force when it sends it's stack of milanese militia out to get a 10-to-1 loss. It's impossible for the AI to make good tactical decision when it's off by several orders of magnitude on what's likely to happen when the battle is fought.

[chickenhawk]

Some further thoughts....

Maybe they should seed each campaign so one particular AI faction is guaranteed to get big fast and present a real challenge. It could be as simple as giving one AI faction a LOT of starting money. So when the player ran into that faction it would be much stronger and holding a fair piece of the map.

Some basic coding to keep it troops together also seems in order. Rule one minimum garrisons, rule two no second stack until the first one is maxed, rule three keep best general with the best stack, and so on. That way you would at least get one real battle per AI faction.

And yes I know it is easy say and hard to program.

Or they could work on the multiplayer campaign some more...