Sending the ai bankrupt?

[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?