Experiment to see how hard game is...

[Didz]

@Jambo

Well I would like to say your wrong but I have yet to play any strategy game other than chess and backgammon where the AI managed to provide a challenge without using the standard 'mass unit production' and 'universal knowledge' cheats.

I do think that the AI could be improved though, particularly at the strategic level where it does make a lot of really dumb mistakes. Battlefield AI is much more of a problem as its difficult to isolate the poor how much of the poor performance is down to the strategic AI and how much just to poor tactical handling.

In my current 0.5 years per turn game, I've noticed that the biggest problem the AI has is in army composition. With all its cities and castles fully developed one would have expected it to have a full choice of troops. But instead of using this to generate balanced armies that are engineered to maximise its performance against mine, it has developed a fetish for Venetian and Hungarian armies heavy in pavise crossbowmen, trebuchet's and hussars. The result is usually a turkey shoot for my horse archers against the hussars followed by a mounted raid to wipe out their exposed trebuchets and then a mass charge to overrun their crossbows.

However, Egypt did manage to pull off one surprise victory last night when an army heavy in Royal Marmalukes destroy my fully stacked Turkish army on its way to beseige Gaza. That army still had far too many trebuchets wasting units slots, but the combination of heavy infantry and elite mounted archers was enough to wear down my battleline and eventually cause it to rout. Lots of flanking by the marmalukes too, which is something I've not noticed since RTW.

Certainly, good army composition (e.g. Armies designed to counter the strengths of their opponent) by the strategic AI would make a big difference to battlefield performance as would a clear strategic goal that avoided wandering army syndrome.