Best AI, please.

[vartan]

i would never bother to ask a Question about the KI in this Forum. ;)
Everybody just pretends to know something and follows trends like: Alex.exe and Bi.exe have more naval invasions and better KI etc.
So Im going to pretend a little bit myself. These are the only things I think everybody can experience for themselves and agree with me.
Fact is:
The only things we know are:
Alex.exes units retrain!
BI.exe has more unit traits like swimming and that only indicates the battlefield KI might be slightly altered to aknowledge water has crossable terain. But on the other hand Rome.exe units also tended to drown in water. ^^

That is everything you can know for sure about the KI in EB.

Now. In the Vanilla games:
Rome.exe has plenty of naval invasions. In fact the Ki spawns ships like crazy and atacks relentlesly via Naval invasion, if they are targetting one of your Towns. Still for some reasons people feel, that there are next to no naval invasions in EB with Rome.exe. Some argue its because the map is too big for the Campain map KI other say its because of the high price for ships, but I guess we will never know.
Alex.exe in its own campain has an incredible passive Ki that would never ever atack your homeland and only uses their ships for blocking the sea. Still I dont think that indicates that it has to be the same in the EB Campain.
One thing people feel, that has improved from rome.exe to Alex.exe is the stack size, which seems to be higher in Alex, while Rome has a lot of small stacks, which is really annoying. Again, I am not sure if that is really true, because Rome Vanilla saw a lot! of huge stacks. Maybe again the pricing of the units.
For BI I guess there are no facts we know at all. Maybe its 100% like Vanillas KI. I had the feeling, that the units always tend to make a long line, to avoid beeing flanked, but then again I played Vanilla Rome and Alex and the Ki does the same.^^

Anyway. What we know about all exes is that the AI always has you as their priority. In EB I gave the seleuks huge amounts of money to stop the parthian invasion and even bought parthian cities and gave them to AS. I only neighboured them in Minor Asia and still... 5 turns later the AS atacks me, 30 Turns later the parthian had conquered 12 AS cities without any resistance, because all of their stacks went to atack me.
And that was with force Diplomacy, Alex.exe and hard difficulty. In medium its hard to tell the AI strategy, because they are extremly passive.

Best post. Acknowledging lack of knowledge is key to moving forward. As for why everything is so? Consider this. Rome, BI, and Alex are all the same engine. They are several steps in the development of the same engine. They are known in development by the version number of the engine: 1.5 (rome), 1.6 (bi) or 1.9 (alex). Presumably, Alex is the best of all as it is the latest in the development series. But as you all know, the latest trend isn't always the best! But this IS a game engine, and almost always new releases = better. But you have 1.9 and that's all. Engine doesn't go past 1.9. Must deal with it.

[seienchin]

Simple answer:
MTWII... Is the newest version of the rome enginge and obviously the KI isnt really better.

[Rahl]

Simple answer:
MTWII... Is the newest version of the rome enginge and obviously the KI isnt really better.

I didn't play Mtw2 much, but the AI is slightly better in Kingdoms. Exploits are extremely reduced. They often attack and don't just stay arround. That's a step forward...
Also i didn't test this XAI that is said to be much better, but after playing a other Mod (SuS) i noticed that the campaign AI and the diplomacy is much better (modded). The "we share a border lets go to war my friend and long-time ally" is gone and thats really great. Don't be so pessimistic be happy about every little step forward, you know that will make you a much better general, moral bonus for beeing positiv instead a mali because you are depressed...

[Ludens]

They are known in development by the version number of the engine: 1.5 (rome), 1.6 (bi) or 1.9 (alex). Presumably, Alex is the best of all as it is the latest in the development series. But as you all know, the latest trend isn't always the best! But this IS a game engine, and almost always new releases = better.

To put this in perspective: when BI came out it was 1.4, and at the same time the developers released the 1.3 patch for R:TW. Similarly, rtw.exe v1.5 and BI.exe v1.6 were released at the same time. These numbers indicate nothing but the sequence of release. My guess is that v1.5/v1.6 are the same engine, but v1.6 has the BI-only features enabled.

[vartan]

To put this in perspective: when BI came out it was 1.4, and at the same time the developers released the 1.3 patch for R:TW. Similarly, rtw.exe v1.5 and BI.exe v1.6 were released at the same time. These numbers indicate nothing but the sequence of release. My guess is that v1.5/v1.6 are the same engine, but v1.6 has the BI-only features enabled.

That's correct.

As for M2TW, I wish I had the source. Perhaps others have read up on it, but M2TW was not built completely from scratch (it's engine, that is). Rather, it took the code from Rome and built upon it, bettering it. I'd say it's a better engine. All that time and effort, and our joy playing the games, and to say it's equal or worse to its predecessor, Rome? I don't know. Things like these are opinions, not facts. But I like to think M2TW was an improvement, not a regression.