Is it normal AI behavior?

[mrdun]

By piecemeal do you mean that AI only attacks from one side? I have had only one siege battle where I was a sort of defender. Well, I was an attacker but since the AI had a small garrison and lot of reinforcements it turned out I had to defend the settlement after taking it. Taking it was very easy because the AI pulled most of its garrison out of the plaza to join the attacking force

??? What???

[Cruelsader]

I guess it may have happened like this:

1) At the start of the battle: small defending garrison in the town, large defending reinforcing army outside.

2) I attack the gates, AI reinforcing army is marching toward my army

3) I break the gates and enter the town, approximately the same time the AI reinforcing army tries to form a line. Two out of three garrison units hurry toward the line (to form up?)

4) I engage and defeat the single remaining garrision unit. Countdown begins. The AI reinforcing army and two garrison units rush towards plaza.

[RickFGS]

Even with all the patches and stuff, the AI remains dumb as a door.

To get a better AI adversary you have to download and play the Darth Mod: RTW, there are several battle formations the AI will follow trough the game, but still it´s an AI, what can you expect..

[Alpha666]

Yupo, the Darth formations are also integrated in RTR.. and it helps. For example the spear + phalanx units build really the useful formations... but it doesn´t help them if they are outmanouvered and attack from 2 or 3 sides.. guess that is quite realistic (?)...

Maybe the battles are to small, I can think of commanders that have 20000 troops or so under command that they try to "anchor" the phalanx on some terrain features or provide protection for the flanks... in reality I mean.

While in the game with 1000 men or so it is quite difficult to build the kind of wall the ancient forces did with spears and phalanx...

[Cruelsader]

Maybe the battles are to small, I can think of commanders that have 20000 troops or so under command that they try to "anchor" the phalanx on some terrain features or provide protection for the flanks... in reality I mean. While in the game with 1000 men or so it is quite difficult to build the kind of wall the ancient forces did with spears and phalanx...

Correct me if I am wrong but one unit of spearman is about 450 men when playing with largest units size. This means that you can field about 9000 men in one army. Playing with large unit size probably has its own problems, e.g. streertfight is too constraining, AI depeleting its population on strategic map etc

[caravel]

AFAIK the largest units in vanilla RTW on the largest unit size are 241 ?

[Shieldmaiden]

AFAIK the largest units in vanilla RTW on the largest unit size are 241 ?

Yes, on "Huge" its 240, +1 if a General's unit.