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

[QuintusSertorius]

A more general question; in RTW the military and diplomacy AIs didn't talk to each other. A faction massing troops on your border for invasion could happily sign trade rights with you, then attack the next turn. Another faction you were pasting in battle after battle wouldn't accept a ceasefire (without Force Diplomacy) even though they'd been greatly weakened. And so on.

Is there any evidence the two actually interact in M2TW? Does the AI respect a ceasefire and alter what it's doing, or throw whatever it has at you as soon as it can build up an army again?

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.

That's reassuring that we don't have the exact same AI as we had in RTW (as before, I have very little trust in CA applying themselves to deeper, more complicated things than spiffier graphics).

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.

Well, I was hoping more from a general modding perspective that people might have been playing with the AI and have experience that could be applied to EB2. Rather than expecting the developers to have necessarily achieved it themselves.

Concerning the naval AI in Vanilla: playing as Egypt on VH/VH, the Byzantines would frequently land small stacks near Alexandria. The armies were usually slightly larger than my garrison and composed of more professional units. However, due to the BAI's incompetence, I always defeated them, but they also mauled my force in the process. Whenever the landing force was weaker than the garrison, they wouldn't attack at all but evacuated in the same turn. In my England campaigns, the Portuguese frequently landed huge, powerful stacks in Wales.

In other words, naval invasions are possible and are generally well-calibrated. In my experience, the bigger problem is the tactical AI.

Edit - For extra challenge, it's easy to integrate the Hardcore ReallybadAI mod into any build. It essentially introduces a command-chain, ensures the AI uses stakes and limits the deployment time.

That is also reassuring. Is it possible to effectively stop naval invasions if you strongly garrison coastal settlements?

As a side-question, were the factions landing troops those you were actually at war with, or had something to gain by invading? The problem with the naval AI from RTW:BI was that anyone on the same body of water was a potential aggressor, regardless of diplomacy status (because of course, military and diplomacy AI didn't talk to each other in RTW...).

Hopefully the recruitment pools and the ability to add recruitment priority to units will fix this somewhat.

Fingers crossed.