As a Carthaginian, Romans to weak in manpower and too passive

[Blxz]

Ok - maybe more cities isnt the solution. As i said above maybe the easiest way would be to use the solution vanilla RTW used - more than one Roman faction. Have two Roman factions, so at the start one goes North and the other goes South and they're allied to each other.

As a Roman player you can only control one of them - and the other will have the same poor AI the other computer player factions have, so it won't make it too easy.

Not sure if you realize. Apart from favouring roman's too much, or in your case favouring the human player challenge for the Carthies. There are no more faction slots available in EBI. In order to create an evil twin of the romans you would have to completly remove another faction. (And if I had my way it would unfortuanetly be your damn carthies.)

As for manpower, I think you might mean population that can be used for making armies. The AI factions have UNLIMITED manpower. Everytime they recruit a unit they get somewhere around 200 or so people added to their city. If your unit size settings are really low then the cities can actually grow much faster than is normal.

Everything you have suggested to fix it is impossible or has already been dealt with in another way. Its unfortunate, but the AI is being asked to do something way more complex and out of its league than what it was programmed for. And sadly cannot be modded to fix this. Keep in mind that some AI modding is possible in M2TW. i recommend you have a look at Broken Crecent for some pretty decent diplomacy AI especially in regards to alliances. EB2 is being made now and hopefully the team will do everything they can to get the AI working the way they want for that mod. We can only wait and see.

[Andronikos]

As for manpower, I think you might mean population that can be used for making armies. The AI factions have UNLIMITED manpower. Everytime they recruit a unit they get somewhere around 200 or so people added to their city. If your unit size settings are really low then the cities can actually grow much faster than is normal.

Very good post. I am surprised that nobody mentioned that.

The only problem remains AI and that cannot be solved. RTW AI tends to prefer northern direction of invasions. If you want to have some challenge against Romans, pick a Gallic faction. In all campaigns I played as Aedui or Arverni, Romani were the worst nightmare, they sent stack after stack especially after I took some city in Italy. My defenders there were the most experienced soldiers commanded by the most experienced generals of my faction thanks to all battles they had to fight.

[Ludens]

The only problem remains AI and that cannot be solved. RTW AI tends to prefer northern direction of invasions.

It's true that the A.I. favours a northern direction of expansion (maybe because the EB team located the original Roman province in the north?), but its first priority seems to be to go after the player. Worse than that, factions that are at war with the player tend to get cease-fires far more easily.

[Cute Wolf]

Bet that Romans get many enemies against them, so they must divide their force....

[mountaingoat]

using alex.exe ,have had several full stack sea invasions from carth when playing as KH in my invasion of magna grecia.

[Weebeast]

I've had Macedon conquered Rhodos and even Pergamon by boat though it took them a while. They seemed to forget what they were doing and sieged the city like couple years after they landed. I've had an AI Aedui lifted a siege at Vienne once. I'm just gonna speculate that it was because I destroyed every building as the city was falling to them. Clearly it wasn't because they had to attend a wedding of some Arvernian relatives! As for Pergamon, I think it's because Byzantium was owned by someone else allied to Macedon, kinda like vanilla Roman families "blocking" each other. So in conclusion, I think the AI is a lot smarter than we think. It's just sometimes they know too much and we don't.

edit- Has anyone tried putting a land bridge connecting Sicily and Africa? Well no one builds ships anyway and the pros might outweigh the cons here. Honestly who here bought RTW for naval battles? Also I'm not sure if the "warning you're entering Sicily" script deters Rome AI from crossing but it should be looked at if we haven't.