Sending the ai bankrupt?

[Razor1952]

While pursuing my goal to buy my way almost entirely to victory in Brittania campaign, I note that the ai is largely bankrupt all factions.

1.I surmise that having bought the provinces that formerly paid for the ai's armies the ai is left with overly large armies which sends them bankrupt as they don't release (any or enough) troops to balance their budget.

2.I also suspect that by giving away large sums (like 10k florins) to small factions(to raise relations), the ai trains more troops and this makes them even more bankrupt.

can anyone shed light on these theories, particularly if #2 is true then a good strat maybe is to give large $'s to ai to make them bankrupt.

BTW being bankrupt doesn't seem to make the ai any more (or less) likely to make a deal with you.

[Ramses II CP]

The AI is almost always bankrupt anyway. You have to really give them incredible amounts of 'free' money to keep them afloat, because, to put it bluntly, the AI is utterly incompetent.

[Poncho400]

What happens if a faction completely runs out of money? Do they go into the negatives? Do they split up and become rebels? Or do they sit there with their money at 0 and a bunch of large armies?

It sounds like an interesting way to kill off a faction.(and fun too!)

[Zaleukos]

They sit around with old stacks of crappy units, backstabbing you as soon as they think a border province is weak enough to pick.

Economic warfare could be fun, but in reality isnt, as the default situation already is that the AI is bankrupt. Thats why you get to fight militia units most of the time.

I think that the problem is that the AI makes recruitment decisions on a per turn basis, ignoring long term economic implications as well as what better units might become available. It would probably help a lot if the AI knew how to disband obsolete units once replacements are ready, but that is not moddable.

[ReiseReise]

Also, bankrupt in the diplomacy screen does not always mean they are bankrupt, it means less than 2500 florins iirc. Each 5000 florins after that is another level (<7500 = meagre, <12500 = very poor etc). To find out if they are really bankrupt you have to look at the score graphs. It would be fun if the graph went to negative so you could see exactly how bad the AI mangled its economy .

[Von Nanega]

Often I will butcher AI armies of militiamen just to free up funds for the AI to build better troops for me to butcher. Works nearly every time. I fight DFK from france and portugal in my English game all the time now.

[Razor1952]

Often I will butcher AI armies of militiamen just to free up funds for the AI to build better troops for me to butcher. Works nearly every time. I fight DFK from france and portugal in my English game all the time now.

That's interesting , I wonder also if I should convert a few more towns to castles and give them to the ai so that they may build more castle troops than town militia types.

One problem of not being able to convert stone-walled towns to castles is that when the ai gets beaten down , it is often left with only towns and hence cannot build castle troops. I think the option to destroy a town and build a castle should be present regardless of city wall type, that may help the ai...??

[Zaleukos]

One thing that bugs me about the game is that the "feudal" period is so short. You as a human player tend to fight with militia/mailed knights for a very long time, with feudal knights for a very short time (growth from fortress to citadel is rather fast) and then fight with top grade troops for a very long time. The Feudal knights that supposedly dominate the battlefield for most of the period are rarely seen, particularly not in the hands of the AI that is so busy recruiting crap early on that it wont have money left to field better armies after upgrading settlements. My remedy is to mod castles so that they get feudal (but not dismounted) knights one tier earlier than in vanilla, and it helps somewhat...

In vanilla I've basically had four enemies sending decent armies against me. The portuguese sending dismounted portuguese knights against Caernarvon (that this invasion doesnt make much sense is another matter), the English defending with armoured swordsmen at Caen/Nottingham against my Scottish/French, and the Hungarians sending tonnes of dismounted feudal knights against Sofia (probably recruited at Bran). Finally the danes tend to send a lot of dismounted huscarls (available early) which can be tough to beat with low grade units.

[WhiskeyGhost]

Depending on what your playing (particularly in Vanilla), the AI merely foregos the simplest parts of economy management. That being "FREE UPKEEP MILITIA" they refuse to keep in towns, and would rather have roaming around eating up their funds on a turn by turn basis. I saw one AI faction with at least 4,000 florins a turn being spent on militia upkeep, without a single damned militia in a city. This of course led to him not actually building any real infrastructure and most of his towns/castles never even made it to Citadel/Huge, while all of mine already had

[Old Geezer]

They go broke keeping up their hordes of catapults and useless fleets. I have seen the AI (Byz) keep a huge fleet sitting just west of Gibralter which I had blocked for 50 turns before disbanding it.

[uanime5]

In the campaign_script of the Kingdoms expansion there are several scripts to the give the AI lots of money if they're in debt or only have a few towns. Has anyone noticed an improvement in the AI's units?