AI army composition any better in 1.2?

[GFX707]

I am currently playing 1.2, but I am playing a campaign I started in....probably 1.0.

The Danes are coming at me with armies composed of 75% hand gunners, which gets very tedious, although, don't get me wrong, I love kicking the crap out of them, but it's just too easy.

I also have a screenshot from an earlier game where the AI besieged one of my small castles with about 16 units of artillery and nothing else.

Anyone noticed any positive changes since 1.2?

[romanwarmachine]

AI still tends to use alot of balistas and catapults in my games and not much cav which renders pikes as a useless addition to an army.

I think has to probably do with unit upkeep but thats just a feeling haven't actually looked to close

[icek]

sometimes ai can suprise having army of many dismounted knights and cavalry like sicily in my camp, but mostly ai give such power to command for captain and they barely can do anything serious againts you.

[Ars Moriendi]

If you play slow and give the AI enough time to sort out its finances, it will field some good units eventually, growing up from militia phase...

Here's some screenshots from a vanilla 1.2 campaign, about turn 150 IIRC.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I'm sorry but don't have any pictures of the french armies, I remember fighting lots of top cavalry (lancers and chiv knights) plus serious heavy infantry and missiles - they were one of the last factions to die in the campaign I took these screenshots, and had time to build some pretty impressive and quite well balanced stacks.

[ataribaby]

For me, AI army composition would be the most glaringly obvious thing to sort out in making the most out of game.

When I face an enemy army, the most challenging battles are against the well balanced, varied ones. It seems daft to me that you have to wait until the Mongols and Timurids arrive to get that kind of well-balanced, opposing army stack.

For the most part of the game you face stacks of mainly catapults, or stacks of mainly spear militia, or stacks of mainly mailed knights. Army compostion seems to depend on what tech level the nearst enemy settlement has reached: if they've built a siege works then they'll field armies of 15 trebuchets; if it's a fledgling fortress you'll get 15 DFKs; a castle will pump out cavalry only armies until the first barracks is built, and so on.

Then suddenly the challenge ramps up to 100 and you're facing the hordes. Trouble is, like waiting for a bus, ten varied stacks of elite soldiers suddenly appear at once on the same spot. There doesn't seem to be a happy medium.

[I'm not saying that the horde concept is a bad one. There's something humbling about facing up to the concept of a war of attrition. The first time you get genuinely whooped by the AI will probably be a horde battle. You may win the war in the end but the battles are meat grinders that cost you a lot of good soldiers. Facing the hordes in RTW:BI was the first time I felt I might lose the campaign. With wave after wave of horde stacks to fend off, turtling is no longer an option!]

Like most, when I field an army, ideally I like to have a good variety of units. There's nothing more satisfying than to use a combined arms strategy effectively. I have a few criteria before fielding a basic combined arms stack: it should include some infantry, some missile troops and some cavalry; and I usually have a rough ratio in mind, e.g. for a Western power 4:2:1.

In the campaign I'll set about building the right improvements across my settlements to achieve these basic, varied stacks so that I can mobilise an effective invasion force or a territorial defensive army in a few turns. What I don't do is spam the same unit over and over just to form a full stack.

Why can't the AI have this kind of basic strategy?

[GFX707]

I notice the Mongols always seem to field reasonably balanced armies.

When I leave a city on auto build units (or whatever you call it) it always churns out complete crap, like archers in 1410....maybe that's because the unit allowance for the better stuff is depleted, though.

Anyone know if those unit building limits apply to the AI? You know, the ones that say I can only build 2 bagharas (sp?) per turn but 5 desert archers per turn?