Help to measure up the tactical AI

[Ars Moriendi]

Results for the second scenario :



Screenshots :

danish1
danish2
danish3

milan1
milan2
milan3

hungary1
hungary2
hungary3

france1
france2
france3

Write-up later, when I get time...

[nikolai1962]

Oops, i did it the wrong way round--kept the same hre army against the four armies you specified as the opponents

[Ars Moriendi]

Evaluation for the second scenario : Harder than the first. If I had not the experience from the first scenario with similar armies, the outcome would have been worse.

1.Danish - identical deployment, similar battle. More difficult, although the results are almost the same.

2. Hungary - identical deployment, battle not so similar. First, the AI just stood there for a while getting shot, whereas in the first battle it attacked right from the start. Second, more cavalry for the HRE allowed the AI to chase my HA more effectively. Horse archers still dominate the battlefield, but they're difficult to manage against large numbers of cavalry so this time more maneuvering was required. I took more than twice as many casualties.

3. France - identical deployment. I started with a frontal charge (4 Chiv Knights), destroying 4 units of dismounted knights. I pulled back to prepare a second, but there was no time for it because the AI countercharged his imperial knights throughout the line. All the rest of the battle was cavalry maneuvers : charges, counter-charges, flanking, surrounding etc. The few casualties my infantry had were probably caused by boredom, since they were never issued any orders...

4. Milan - here's the ugly part : I lost the first time, the results listed in the table are from the second run. I know we're supposed to give the first try only, but I was so pissed I just clicked "Play Again" before thinking about recording the results. Sorry.
...
That being said, the problem here is the uselessness of the foot missile units. The first three battles can be won without much of their assistance, but the Milanese is close to being unwinnable (well, for me at least). Not having any kind of terrain advantage and with a cavalry balance of 3-vs.-9 it's quite difficult to employ them effectively. My usual plans for missile units would be (a) deployed in front in a wide line, fire at the approaching enemy - which in these scenarios was useless considering the AI just ran at me and there was no way to delay them enough for the xbows to cause serious damage; or (b) deployed on flanks to move outward and fire at flanks and rear of the engaged enemy line - not achievable due to significant disadvantage in cavalry. I might as well start the battle with 6 less units.
The way I solved this in my second Milan attempt : a kind of deployment I've never used before. I put the italian spears in schiltrom and placed them with rather wide spaces between, like this :

   *          *           *

   m    *     m     *     m   *

        m          m 

 x     x     x     x     x     x

where * is schiltroms, m is dismounted man at arms and x crossbows.
The AI charged the schiltroms, and while they formed these "circles" around the spearmen it allowed the dmaa to engage in a sort of flanking. More importantly, the wide spaces allowed the xbows to fire between the engaged units long enough to kill significant numbers, while being protected from the initial charge. If you look at the results you'll notice they had the most kills (with the exception of the very special "router patrol", of course). Some of them were eventually caught by enemy cavalry going around the infantry formations, but they did enough of their job by then.
This solution allowed the foot missile units to change their role of "power amplifiers", meaning they just helped reduce casualties by killing from afar in battles were I had the upper hand and would have won anyway without them - to a more active part, being the little something that wins the day.

[Tyrac]

Are there any rules in terms of PAUSE or speed? Being able to hit Pause in a SP battle at any time makes things far far far easier.

[hrvojej]

Well, I managed to lose all 4 battles on the first try, and then win them all on a second try. I am very happy with the balance I managed to achieve in my mod.

I am not really surprised though. In my mod, DFK have total def of 32, and I had spear militia to counter that. I managed to win the encores by pretty much rushing a single flank as fast and as hard as I could, then rolling up the other. However, there was no way my classically-deployed combined arms lines could hold against a charge by an army the half of which is cavalry and the other half is elite infantry. With the higher morale, I simply ran out of men in the battles I lost when my lines were spread wider, even though half of the AI army was routing too.

This is also why I disagree with people who advocate upping the costs of cavalry to balance the game: this does not prevent a player from using it, but it does prevent the AI from buying overpriced units, which makes the game easier in fact, not harder.

In any case, I can conclude from these two batches of tests that:
- the AI has problems handling missile units, both using them and defending against them (especially when it has its own missiles too)
- the massed cavalry rules the day even with a simple frontal charge
- the AI's biggest problem is bad campaign map recruitment
- combined arms is still more fun than spamming the elites, and I'd prefer that the AI can do well with combined arms than to spam a single kind of unit