How does the AI in M2:TW compare to R:TW?

[Tuuvi]

Been playing some more EB1 and getting annoyed with the army composition and battle AI again. I just fought a Makedonian full stack comprised of twelve units of classical hoplites, a single levy phalanx at a tenth of it's normal strength, a unit of cavalry, a unit of akontistai, a general (who charged the centre of my line; I had to make an effort not to kill him) and the rest useless Illyrian levies. Who of course came forward piecemeal, not even as a single line. Seriously, how hard is it to at least stick to a single line?

Yea that's one of my pet peeves to, the trick is to play as Hayasdan and be at war with AS early on in the game, you'll be glad the AI is so dumb.

[QuintusSertorius]

Yea that's one of my pet peeves to, the trick is to play as Hayasdan and be at war with AS early on in the game, you'll be glad the AI is so dumb.

There's really nothing much fun for me winning because the AI is incapable of the most basic tactic of holding a line.

[QuintusSertorius]

Does M2:TW use the naval AI from BI? Meaning that if you happen to have a coastal boundary, you'll be spammed by insignificant but annoying stacks from factions you don't even have a meaningful relationship with.

[antisocialmunky]

Does M2:TW use the naval AI from BI? Meaning that if you happen to have a coastal boundary, you'll be spammed by insignificant but annoying stacks from factions you don't even have a meaningful relationship with.

I think this was actually a big problem in Vanilla M2TW.

[vollorix]

Yea, it´s annoying when a powerfull faction like Carthage tries to "raid" Latium with a "3 unit stack", though i suppose it has some reasons i might have observed in my campaigns:
- the AI seems to be designed to send an "adequate" force to fight you at a designated place, means: if you have only couple of troops in that province, the AI will send you a small raiding party instead of a whole army
- the same one can often observe when AI tries to take Eleutheroi towns - it sends a half way decent army while trying to take the chances on the even odds; but it mostly sends captains against 5-10 star gouverneurs of that towns, and we all know the results.. But in the same time there are huge stacks guarding homelands, led by capable generals. One should take this into account too, imo.
- that funny AI behaiviour when you see all those reinforcements lining up along the roads toward the final target, and the often observed siege with a pathetic force ( a captain, a quoter stack, too light units - all that against a multiple star commander of yours with a decent army; the AI sallys mostly on the favorable odds, so the attacker AI seems to think - hey, why not besiege the town earlier, build some siege equipment, while the reinfocements are on the way? I really would like to know what is responsible for the choices of the AI to let a FM lead the army instead of a captain! This would make things not only more realistic, but also more challenging, i think ( for example: the AI never recruits generals on BI.exe, it´s a feature only the player might use, afaik. If one could change that, or script a general for every decent - 1/3 stack at least, or so - army, this would spice up things too ).

Such raids from less powerfull, and less rich, factions seem more then apropriate to me. The full scale warfare is something that didn´t happen every year, unless a huge conflict between some local superpoweres was goning on - like the First Punic war, for example.
It could be a matter of diplomatic presets, how much one faction is suspicious about another, but when choosing the campain difficulty, one, sadly, has to choose between a passive, poor ( no mercs etc. ) AI and the super agressive, insane factions with the top priority to take the player out. That´s why i mostly play on "hard" as a bit more balanced setting. I hope, the settings for the AI on MTW2 engine are more sofisticated.

[QuintusSertorius]

What's the latest on this? It was some time ago that I originally asked the question, has AI been addressed now? Have any other mods borne fruit in ternms of getting campaign AI able to recruit and mobilise properly, and battle AI capable of holding a line?

[Moros]

There are a lot of mods that have custom AI adn there are many AI mods out there. For example Lusted on is quite well known. Currently we have a few people working on it. And as you can read on our twitter we've tweaked a mongol faction AI from Lusted to fit to our Saka faction. So AI especially in second or later release will probably even be customized for each faction/fation type/culture. In other words it should be a huge improvement over RTW1 and MTWII:k.

[Kull]

What's the latest on this? It was some time ago that I originally asked the question, has AI been addressed now? Have any other mods borne fruit in ternms of getting campaign AI able to recruit and mobilise properly, and battle AI capable of holding a line?

One thing you have to keep in mind is that only very recently did the team finally slay the bugs that made it impossible to play for more than a few turns without some sort of CTD. And you really cannot test a campaign AI without, well, a campaign! So from that standpoint we are definitely playing catch-up, but it is a key focus area, and we have made progress.