annoying, pesky piece-meal raiders: please fix these, CA!

[Slaists]

I'll shortly describe an extremely annoying ETW feature. Hopefully, CA notices this issue.

AI would sent 2-3 units to raid, get intercepted and defeated, then (on the same turn) send two-three extra units, get intercepted and defeated, send two-three extra, get defeated... rinse, repeat...

Yesterday, in my British game, the Spanish sent such piecemeal 'raiders' to the Spanish port right next to British held Gibraltar 10(!!!) times during the same turn. I could not "auto-resolve" this series of raids either since the battle balance was always estimated to be quite close for an auto-resolve. Imagine doing the battle load 10 times in a row and re-fighting essentially the same battle just to utterly defeat 2-3 units...

I understand, the AI really, really, really wanted their harbor back. 10 times 2-3 units makes a full stack army, and, in this case, quite a decent one since the 'raiding parties' consisted of line infantry, cavalry and artillery. I suppose, it should be not that difficult to put some 'checks' in the code to make the AI combine such forces and carry out one efficient assault instead of the piecemeal suicide runs.

[Hooahguy]

i feel for you. russia sends the same type of raids in my sweden campaign. bt still, the battles are fun and never play the same way. at least for me.

[Slaists]

i feel for you. russia sends the same type of raids in my sweden campaign. bt still, the battles are fun and never play the same way. at least for me.

Well, I had seen this type of raiding before but the 10(!!!) runs in one turn "made my day".

My battles fought the same because I had a star fort in Gibraltar and all the raiding parties had essentially the same composition. It boiled down to an integrated sepoy + puckle gun line across the diagonal of the fort (slightly off the center), 6x speed, the AI climbing the walls one-by-one, running to the center while exhausted, getting shot to pieces and running...

[Sheogorath]

I don't think it's so much the raiders...they sort of make sense. It's the fact that AI units retreat INWARDS, away from their own lines. If AI raiders would retreat like the players units, AKA: Towards their own country, it would be more plausible to deal with them.

As it is, I've had AI units retreat all the way to my capital. Very, very, annoying.

[Slaists]

I don't think it's so much the raiders...they sort of make sense. It's the fact that AI units retreat INWARDS, away from their own lines. If AI raiders would retreat like the players units, AKA: Towards their own country, it would be more plausible to deal with them.

As it is, I've had AI units retreat all the way to my capital. Very, very, annoying.

Do you really find it makes sense that, during ONE TURN, the AI sends 10 times 2-3 units to raid the SAME TARGET (and subsequently get them all killed one by one) rather than combining those 20-30 units into ONE army? All these raiders came from Madrid, by the way, so, them coming from different sources was not an issue.

As to retreating deeper into ones territory: I find this to be less of a problem in 1.03 than it used to be earlier. Then again, it could be that I find it less of a problem because now, taught by my previous experience, I fight ALL the battles myself. Usually, no enemy survives...

I was thinking of describing the same Gibraltar situation as an example for retreating deeper into the player's territory not being an issue in 1.03, but then realized that I was intercepting the Spanish while they were still in their own territory. They all retreated back to Madrid.

[GFX707]

I agree. This seems to be the AI's primary method of "warfare" - send a load of one-two unit stacks running around your country breaking everything so you have to fix it by way of micromanagement.

No standing armies, no big battles, just a load of piddly two unit stacks to chase around. The worst part is that even if you send cavalry against them and defeat them they can retreat further than you can chase them in 1 turn and even with 1 soldier they can still damage your resources - so you spend most of your time forced to chase these two stack armies around until they are utterly exterminated.

WHICH. ISN'T. FUN.

The worst part is that if the AI just put all these little two stack armies together they'd have a decent force which they could use to at least present a challenge rather than a minor nuisance.

[Daveybaby]

The AI is engaging in psychological warfare, hoping you will give up in disgust, thus it will win the game by default. Sounds to me like it's getting there.

[GFX707]

The AI is engaging in psychological warfare, hoping you will give up in disgust, thus it will win the game by default. Sounds to me like it's getting there.

The point is....this is a game. A game is supposed to be fun. A game is not supposed to be frustrating. No one likes being frustrated. There are already enough things in ETW to get frustrated about without this....and clearly I am not the only one who feels this way.

[Quickening]

The AI is engaging in psychological warfare, hoping you will give up in disgust, thus it will win the game by default. Sounds to me like it's getting there.

Well it worked on me. I have to agree with the opening poster. A large part of the appeal for me with the Total War games is the relationship between the campaign map and the battles and in Medieval 2 it always feels great to go into a battle or return to the campaign map. But when you have Poland-Lithuania sending four stacks of two or three units to "burn" the same two sites it quickly gets so very boring. Eventually I didn't even bother intercepting them so then what did they do? Having no more sites to burn one of these pathetic stacks attacked my fort and that was the point the game finally disgusted me as they all attempted to huddle around one corner and climb five ropes with my framerate mysteriously crawling to a halt. So basically, unless I want to wait for over an hour even on fast forward, I cannot have a campaign unless I somehow avoid the AI attacking my forts for the entire game.

[Sheogorath]

Do you really find it makes sense that, during ONE TURN, the AI sends 10 times 2-3 units to raid the SAME TARGET (and subsequently get them all killed one by one) rather than combining those 20-30 units into ONE army? All these raiders came from Madrid, by the way, so, them coming from different sources was not an issue.

As to retreating deeper into ones territory: I find this to be less of a problem in 1.03 than it used to be earlier. Then again, it could be that I find it less of a problem because now, taught by my previous experience, I fight ALL the battles myself. Usually, no enemy survives...

I was thinking of describing the same Gibraltar situation as an example for retreating deeper into the player's territory not being an issue in 1.03, but then realized that I was intercepting the Spanish while they were still in their own territory. They all retreated back to Madrid.

Eh. It'd be alright if they just did it with a few units. I agree that having it as the main focus of the AI is annoying, but I have seen a few larger stacks marching around.

[Tora]

As to retreating deeper into ones territory: I find this to be less of a problem in 1.03 than it used to be earlier. Then again, it could be that I find it less of a problem because now, taught by my previous experience, I fight ALL the battles myself. Usually, no enemy survives...

I saw 3 units of Austrian Pandours cross into Prussian Poland from Galicia for a spot of burning and pillaging. I attacked them, the remnants retreated. Attacked again with the nearest army, they retreated. I attacked 4 times in all, they retreated further and further into my territory. I finally nailed the last 13 outside Hamburg.
Quite remarkable really, Lvov to Hamburg in one turn, whereas often my armies cant make it from one city to another in that time.

[GFX707]

I saw 3 units of Austrian Pandours cross into Prussian Poland from Galicia for a spot of burning and pillaging. I attacked them, the remnants retreated. Attacked again with the nearest army, they retreated. I attacked 4 times in all, they retreated further and further into my territory. I finally nailed the last 13 outside Hamburg.
Quite remarkable really, Lvov to Hamburg in one turn, whereas often my armies cant make it from one city to another in that time.

I have seen this too, it really needs to be fixed. In old versions IIRC I lost a battle in Norway and my troops retreated all the way back to Finland.

[Beskar]

The game AI battle I had was one of those town maps and my line infantry occupied a church/building in the middle of the town and the AI had to go through the streets to get to it. I was heavily outgunned and out-matched, but because of the terrain and 4 squads of grenadiers I had, I managed to blow them all up.

[Tora]

Anyway, about these piecemeal raiders........

[Cheetah]

I could not "auto-resolve" this series of raids either since the battle balance was always estimated to be quite close for an auto-resolve.

This is the key IMO. How many units were you defending with? I guess that only few righ? Lets say two sepoys and one or two puckle guns. I assume the AI thought that it is enough to send a gun and one or two line infantry to defeat your meagre forces. When it failed it sent the same troops again, and again.
The problems are that (i) the AI obviously cannot learn, (ii) it cannot take into account human cunning and the dreadful siege AI.

[Slaists]

This is the key IMO. How many units were you defending with? I guess that only few righ? Lets say two sepoys and one or two puckle guns. I assume the AI thought that it is enough to send a gun and one or two line infantry to defeat your meagre forces. When it failed it sent the same troops again, and again.
The problems are that (i) the AI obviously cannot learn, (ii) it cannot take into account human cunning and the dreadful siege AI.

Actually, this was an odd case (on my part), because I had a full stack of sepoys + green jackets (camping the houses) + light dragoons, even a couple pike-men to guard the gates. So, no... in this case, the force was not meager at all. Gibraltar was my choke point (gateway to Northern Africa) after all. Maybe just that the AI might count sepoys as mere milita...

[Martok]

Let's stop with the sniping at each other and stick to the topic please. You know who you are.

[Hooahguy]

hm. russia used to send small raids against me, but in the past 5 turns all the raids have been with at leasy 8 units....
and tha goes for all other nations against me as well, like poland. they just sent a hge army, and now i need to reliate.

[Zarky]

I've partly solved this problem, I just send 2-4 unit guards to chokepoints (from which I can intercept more than 1 of my buildings), or if they're too far from each other I just send 2 to each building. The flaw in my plan is that it's rather costly to send line infantry to guard duty like that, because if I send militia there's higher chance for losing on auto-resolve.
Other option would be to send those guards to enemys territory for better interception locations, but AI has nasty habit of sending entire citys guard to clean no matter how small force.

[GFX707]

There's really no point in bothering to chase the raider stacks around. The AI will send these stacks into your territory when they should be garrisoning their own cities, so instead of sending 3 or 4 small armies to take on the raiders you can just send a half-stack into their territory and take their ungarrisoned cities.

The last few wars I've had have just been me taking all the AI enemy's cities while they abandon their own cities to run around looting my seminaries and farms for hardly any detrimental effect to my economy. They're trying to destroy my economy while I am taking large chunks of their country. I barely have to fight a battle other than pushovers against firelock armed citizenry. End result, they cease to exist, I get all their cities and they cost me a few thousand in repairs. It doesn't even matter if you don't have the forces to keep those cities because even if you lose the city to rebels, you are denying it from your enemy and once you take all the enemy's cities all those pesky raider stacks just vanish. Then you can concentrate on taking the cities from the rebels and holding them.

[resonantblue]

I've just loaded the TROM mod and the problem is greatly reduced. I don't know if specifically they did anything or it's simply the power of suggestion, but it seems like I rarely deal with mini raiders. "Raiders" actually come in as small armies of 6-7 regiments of which there obviously aren't too many. Only in India were the Mughals doing it to me occasionally, but that seemed more a by product of my lack of defences in a province than anything else.

[Slaists]

I've just loaded the TROM mod and the problem is greatly reduced. I don't know if specifically they did anything or it's simply the power of suggestion, but it seems like I rarely deal with mini raiders. "Raiders" actually come in as small armies of 6-7 regiments of which there obviously aren't too many. Only in India were the Mughals doing it to me occasionally, but that seemed more a by product of my lack of defences in a province than anything else.

Don't take me wrong. I'm not unhappy about the AI raiding in small parties in general. That's realistic. I have a problem with the AI sending multiple small stack raiders (for the same target) to their doom DURING THE SAME TURN... In the extreme cases, the AI could have combined those multiple single-turn raider forces into a mighty army.

[ZIM!!]

This might be off topic a bit but I still think its related. I was playing the GB campaign so naturally I was at war with France and Spain, its about 1785 and France never crossed the channel despite England being sparsely defended, but ok this was to be expected but all the sudden a huge stack of mostly heavy ships shows up of the cost of Whales and its containing a full stack army, for a moment I thought I was in big trouble as all my navies and armies were off all over the globe fightng colonial wars and pirates. I dreaded hittting the turn end button

So I put an army and navy quickly into production hoping that my few existing units combined with the couple of units created next turn could delay them till my Army came back from America to come to the rescue

Well rest assured the invasion never came. In fact the invasion army sat off the coast for for 2 or 3 years sitting in their ships. In that time I was able to raise a huge army at home, my Army from America showed up. I built a fleet of 8 2nd rates and a sloop to scout them out. I Fortified Whales with a series of forts. I sent my Army out right in front of the ship inhopes they would attack but no. Finally I just sunk the whole fleet and Army with my fleet of ships. Nice try AI……..i guess???

[Cheetah]

Actually, this was an odd case (on my part), because I had a full stack of sepoys + green jackets (camping the houses) + light dragoons, even a couple pike-men to guard the gates. So, no... in this case, the force was not meager at all. Gibraltar was my choke point (gateway to Northern Africa) after all.

In that case I agree with you.