Rome 2 Patches, Hotfixes, Betas and Such (patch 17 live!)

[Slaists]

I restarted yesterday after the latest hot-fix that's supposed to fix the uphill/downhill mess (units were getting a bonus for fighting uphill rather than the other way around). I rolled as Epirus on VH. The first 12 or so turns were a blast. Rome & Syracuse DOW'ed on the second turn (of course, Syracuse AI decided it was a good idea to declare war on Carthage at the same time...); Veneti joined the fray on 3rd turn and Athens on the 4th (and sent a full stack down some 6 turns later). Alas, AI's aggressiveness stopped at that. Athens, Sparta folded. Knossos soon after [the latter one I attacked myself to complete the province of Hellas]; Roman Brundissium fell as well [but they did send half an army to Apollonia, which almost took the settlement]. I suspect, now I am "too big" for the AI to attack since NAP and trade offers roll in from everywhere.

One pleasant thing that I noticed was that the AI felt much more active in siege battles. I breached Brundissium's walls in 3 places, the AI reacted to all the breaches and, in the end, put up a good fight near the capture point. It might have been a coincidence though. The wall-less settlement AI is still abysmal though.

Oh, about the latter case (settlements without walls): there seems to be a script in place now which makes the AI rotate armored units int and out of the front ranks if under missile fire. I guess, they put it in place to counter minor missiles slowly drilling down hitpoints until the target unit drops dead practically at once. Now, whenever a unit suffers some missile casualties, the AI roates the unit back to the center of the town and puts a fresh unit to guard the front. I have yet to make up my mind whether this is good or not. Those units rotated back to the center are still "damaged goods" (hit-points drilled down) even if the units appear to be full strength. On melee impact they still drop like flies (later). To be more specific: this happened when I was assaulting Sparta. My slingers peppered the defenders for a while without much visible damage. Then, as the melee broke out, the defenders died and/or routed on impact.