ALEXANDER EB

[Redmeth]

It is first of all a problem for the AI itself. The human player will most likely hunt down all enemy units on the tactical screen and take towns in the first attempt. The AI on the other uses autocalc, where always a number of enemies survive. And the AI usually needs three or four attempts to take a town.

That makes every province that has survived an assault or two a real hard nut to break. I see it the last now 30 years in Pella. It is constantly under attack by three strong factions but they are not able to take it because Makedonia has several tripple gold chevron full strength elite units inside.

It doesn't do so much on the AI field armies, because these often stay away from towns very long; and with the EB recruitement system units can only be retrained in their parent provinces (can be quite a lot, if you are for example moving an army of Hoplites around the Eastern Mediterranian).

So, no need to "panic" or change the script. The player must be aware that, using the ALX.exe, he has to strike fast, hard and brutal; otherwise he will breed the enemy an experinced crack army. RTW:Alexander was a game in which the player was expected to blitz the AI. Therefore, I think, was the AI retraining implemented. So, its missing in RTW and BI is not a bug, it's a feature to make the game easyer.

I believe the AI is the one unable to cope with this too, I guess this accounts for the slow expansion Tellos noticed in a pic of an Alex campaign, the Romans would have a hell of a time taking Taras if they ever could, and in Gaul the civil war will probably be never won since autocalc gives such results. I believe Alex was you Alexander vs the computer Persian Empire and there was no computer vs computer action going on or very limited... Unless there's an exe switch to turn off retraining or some sort of option I'll stick to BI the AI expansion and different scenarios playing out are a good part of EB, and plus I like to roleplay and not have to fight a lot of battles each turn.

[konny]

I believe the AI is the one unable to cope with this too, I guess this accounts for the slow expansion Tellos noticed in a pic of an Alex campaign

I suppose that was more the result of Epeiros killing so many AI factions. I have a Casse campaign in the 240s with ALX.exe and there is a lot of more expansion on the map (screenshot tonight).

and plus I like to roleplay and not have to fight a lot of battles each turn.

I don't think that there are more battles for the human player, in particular because the AI is much more merging its stacks and does not have the money to raise more armies than with the BI.exe. The difference is that the AI armies are now much better - "You have the brain, the AI has the chevrons".