How does anyone play this game?

[Hoplite7]

Everyone already knows the AI issues, so I won't go into that.

My question is: how then does anyone have a good campaign game?

For instance, in my Sicily campaign, the Byzantines arrived in Tunisia on turn 24. That already makes zero sense, and is a bug/terrible feature. But in the battle, they had reinforcements without siege equipment. When the main force was defeated, the reinforcements just stood there.


I had to quit the game because of this, I refused to give up Tunisia because of a bug. It was a critical battle, and it's simply broken. Another campaign out the door.

What do you do to deal with the ridiculous AI? I'm probably going to just give up. This is my fifth broken campaign

In order:

Britain (142 turns)
First Sicily (36 turns)
Turks (43 turns)
Egypt (87 turns)
Sicily 2 (28 turns)

[Guyus Germanicus]

Can you give us more info, Hoplite?

What settings are you playing on? vh/vh, m/m?
Are you using anthing other than default settings on your video options?

Are you using the patched version of M2TW or the original release?

What is your PC running for an operating system, what's your memory size, have you got anything running in the background while you're playing the game? etc.

Some of our real Guild pros might have run into your problem before.

[Hoplite7]

It's more of an AI problem than a software/hardware thing, but:

VH/H Long Campaign
Fully patched
Visual settings are maxed, 2AA, Huge unit settings

Computer:
Core 2 Duo 6400
7900GS
1Gb Ram
Windows XP MC
Running on a clean boot, only 250mb page file or so

I can't be the only one that has given up because of AI issues.

What annoys me most is that the patch is documented as fixing this, where it clearly doesn't in my game.

[phonicsmonkey]

Agree that is a documented problem - I haven't encountered it myself, largely because I don't let the AI siege and assault my cities

you have a couple of options in that situation - you can try to lure the reinforcements closer to your walls so you can engage them with towers and missile troops on the walls, or you can sit tight, go make a cup of tea and wait for the timer to run down and win the battle by default

not ideal I know, but it's not a game-breaker for me..

i don't have a problem with the byzantines trying to expand into north africa - ok it's a-historical (like much of the game) but it adds to the unpredictability of the game, and it's not unreasonable if you consider that (without the sea) they "border" you on that front

[Hoplite7]

Agree that is a documented problem - I haven't encountered it myself, largely because I don't let the AI siege and assault my cities

you have a couple of options in that situation - you can try to lure the reinforcements closer to your walls so you can engage them with towers and missile troops on the walls, or you can sit tight, go make a cup of tea and wait for the timer to run down and win the battle by default

not ideal I know, but it's not a game-breaker for me..

i don't have a problem with the byzantines trying to expand into north africa - ok it's a-historical (like much of the game) but it adds to the unpredictability of the game, and it's not unreasonable if you consider that (without the sea) they "border" you on that front

I always hated the timer, but in my next campaign it looks like I'll have to activate it. While luring sometimes works, it opens the door (literally) to a much worse bug: the never-closing front gate.

As far as the Byzantines go, I kind of liked how they "colonized" other parts of the map. But then I remembered colonizing isn't a documented feature, and chances are it was a bug. Most "cool things the AI does" seem to be bugs with each campaign.


Oh well, back to the buggy warfront. Here's to hoping the next game puts strategy before flashy visuals.

[joe4iz]

If you are playing with the battle timer off then maybe that's some of your problem. I've had them stand there if they have no seige equiptment of their own, they cannot breach the walls unless they knock open one of the doors themselves. Send one unit out to route and they will follow him back thru the door. Kind of hokey but it works.

Yes there are some issues with the AI, the oddest one is the "wandering Papacy" who now sends armies out to conquer North Africa, leaving a rebel province right at his door step.

[phonicsmonkey]

you can egg the wandering pope on a little by granting him a couple of provinces to whet his appetite for expansion, and offering military access through your bordering lands

in my venetian campaign I had northern italy and gave him access and a few provinces in the smouldering wreck of hungary, and off he went...took toulouse, and pushed on into spain

go pope!

[Hoplite7]

If you are playing with the battle timer off then maybe that's some of your problem. I've had them stand there if they have no seige equiptment of their own, they cannot breach the walls unless they knock open one of the doors themselves. Send one unit out to route and they will follow him back thru the door. Kind of hokey but it works.

Yes there are some issues with the AI, the oddest one is the "wandering Papacy" who now sends armies out to conquer North Africa, leaving a rebel province right at his door step.

I tried eliminating the Pope, only to later discover in my Africa invasion that he was hiding in Moorish territory for 20 turns or so.

That was pre-patch. Now in my game the Pope just sends a grand armada that sinks rebel ships and defeated the entire Milanese navy in two battles.

[Guyus Germanicus]

You're definitely playing the hard settings.

I know this may not make the game a delight for you, but you might consider dropping back to the default video settings, and setting your unit size to simply 'large' rather than 'huge.' I'm not a real expert at the technical aspects of the game's features AKA, audio, video, etc. But it's possible that you're just taxing your machine's video card a little too much and developing addressability problems.

Yes, I'm speculating. I am a programmer, but my professional expertise is in IBM mainframe programming and not PC or midtier applications like video games. But some things in the programming culture are the same across architectures. If you're running into performace problems, getting freaky occurances, or just plain stoppages, it just might mean that you've run out of core memory to address the open items in your current game. If you're using the finest most video expensive/detailed display settings along with huge unit sizes, you're asking alot of your machine.

Try dropping down your unit sizes a notch and switching back to the default video settings and see what happens.

The video features in M2TW are more sophisticated than RTW. I have a laptop that I'm playing the game on and I have 2 gig of memory, 512 meg of videocard memory with my Nvidia 7950 GTX, and a 2Ghz machine. So far, (knock on wood) I haven't had any performace problems. But I'm just getting into the game and haven't played out a campaign to 100 turns yet. I usually try to kick up my virtual memory settings to 2Gig as well, but haven't done that yet. (I love this machine!) Or, as the pizzaguy would say --->

Sorry, for all the techie talk. Give the lower unit setting a shot with default video settings. See what happens. I'll be routing for you.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

One wonders in which direction the developers are heading. I know how frustrating the AI and bugs can be, but fortunately the multi-faction loiter around Tunis can be easily solved.

By changing "prefers naval invasions" from yes to no on desc_factions_sm.txt seems to prevent this and prefer to grab all the rebel settlements around them. They become quite large and even manage to become a bit of a regional superpower.

faction byzantium
culture greek
religion orthodox
symbol models_strat/symbol_byzantium.CAS
rebel_symbol models_strat/symbol_rebels.CAS
;artificially made darker to show up on sm banner
;actual colour is:
;primary_colour red 237, green 234, blue 179
primary_colour red 133, green 18, blue 137
secondary_colour red 239, green 239, blue 239
loading_logo loading_screen/symbols/symbol128_byzantium.tga
standard_index 15
logo_index FACTION_LOGO_BYZANTIUM
small_logo_index SMALL_FACTION_LOGO_BYZANTIUM
triumph_value 5
custom_battle_availability yes
can_sap yes
prefers_naval_invasions no
can_have_princess yes
has_family_tree yes

You probably want to repeat this for Portugal and the Moors. Just ridiculous watching Portugal sailing of to Britain rather than taking the rebel settlements around them.

Unfortunately not much can be done about the wondering pope carrying a hatchet.

edit

lol. The nonsensical AI (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with graphics cards or settings I'm sure.

You also want to make sure that you installed the patch over a clean install of 1.0 of the game and not 1.1.

[Budwise]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Everyone already knows the AI issues, so I won't go into that.

My question is: how then does anyone have a good campaign game?

For instance, in my Sicily campaign, the Byzantines arrived in Tunisia on turn 24. That already makes zero sense, and is a bug/terrible feature. But in the battle, they had reinforcements without siege equipment. When the main force was defeated, the reinforcements just stood there.


I had to quit the game because of this, I refused to give up Tunisia because of a bug. It was a critical battle, and it's simply broken. Another campaign out the door.

What do you do to deal with the ridiculous AI? I'm probably going to just give up. This is my fifth broken campaign

In order:

Britain (142 turns)
First Sicily (36 turns)
Turks (43 turns)
Egypt (87 turns)
Sicily 2 (28 turns)

Do what I would do and just turn on battletimer. But, if I am sure I could win I will send out a siege engine or two outside the gates to pepper them so they attack and be annialated by my archers.

[Gray Beard]

By changing "prefers naval invasions" from yes to no on desc_factions_sm.txt seems to prevent this and prefer to grab all the rebel settlements around them. They become quite large and even manage to become a bit of a regional superpower.

Doing this can make a huge difference in the way the game develops.

One of the reasons I play the Byzantines is that in order to get any thing close to a historical situation after a 100 years of so you have to. Other wise the Turks are in Denmark or the Hungarians in Cairo.

However, it isn't really fair to say that the Byzantines would have had no interest in Tunis (They'd have called it Carthage) They ruled that area for 100's of years until the Bubonic plague and and the rise of Islam forced them back. Justinian, perhaps one of the three or four greatest emperors was from there. Indeed, after rioting in Constantinople he almost moved the Byzantine capital to Tunis but his wife talked him out of it.

[icek]

I play as english good knight that just love spies and assasins and attack only rebels and those who attack me. im at 67 turn i think. i have london, nothingam, york, carvenon or what they call it, dublin, caen, rennes, bruggia, antwerpia, oslo, rodos, antioch, allepo, soon will have akka and im going to timbuktu :) . im pretty loved by everybody except venetian dogs that wants so badly my Rodos that they attack it everytime pope will end they warning about this. i spoilered much turns into future and if everything will go this way as it goes then mongols will arive north of the sea near sarkel

[Guyus Germanicus]

Getting ready to go in to work, Hoplite, but wanted to just add -

Your problems do sound as if they are predominantly AI. I haven't encountered the quirkiness yet in my own game experiences. I would hate to think that you have to do a lot of manual programming fixes, like those mentioned above, to reign in the problem. But whatever it takes, I guess? I never use the timer myself.

I do remember that I had encountered some show stoppers when I first bought Civ IV. They had a memory leak in the first release of that game that would irritatingly throw you completely out of the game at unpredictable times. Their first major patch fixed that for the most part, but I still ran into problems in the late game occasionally when the campaign board got really busy. And I never could use huge maps. I haven't installed Civ IV on my laptop yet.

No doubt M2TW's campaign board gets very busy as the game progresses. And at the harder settings, the game designers have made it so the AI controlled factions have more freedom and can play more aggressively. So roving Popes and adventurous Byzantine armies make some sense.

Even so, it sounds like there are some definite quirks in the AI still requiring CA's attention, and my earlier suggestions may not be relevant. Hang in there.

[icek]

to make you happier i will show you a picture and give you advice.
"remeber when you play spanish to first capture saragossa or else..."

[ReiseReise]

The AI did this to me the other day playing as Danes (although it didn't ruin my campaign). Did you try loading and replaying a few turns? Don't know if it would work but I like to save every 3-4 turns in case something really stupid happens. In any case, this is the ONLY purpose of the battle timer. Stupid idea really ("Ok men, we've taken the walls, fought through the streets, lost half our forces and there are only 4 militia in the city center, but we've been fighting for 45 minutes and i'm getting hungry so pack it up boys, we're going home" [This happened to me once in RTW, but the remaining enemy died about 3 seconds after the timer hit 0:00 and it gave me the win])

[pike master]

in answer to the OPs main question. you must first have a compliant computer, then when turned on push eject button on or cdrom drive and insert the software( the software is on the shiny disk with king richard on the label.)

once placed in the cd roms drives tray give the tray a nudge and it will close, from there the computer will guide you through the rest. also as you seem very confused perhaps you should set the advisor mode on high.

[Hoplite7]

in answer to the OPs main question. you must first have a compliant computer, then when turned on push eject button on or cdrom drive and insert the software( the software is on the shiny disk with king richard on the label.)

once placed in the cd roms drives tray give the tray a nudge and it will close, from there the computer will guide you through the rest. also as you seem very confused perhaps you should set the advisor mode on high.

I've played since RTW, I always disable advice. I don't need someone to tell me that I'm charging my calvary directly into spearmen.


Anyways: thanks for replies everyone... trying again as Egypt... hope no epic battles are ruined by AI.