Which .exe do you use?

[Dragannia]

Which AI would you guys recommend? There's that formation AI that I've heard good things about, but what about others?

[vartan]

Which AI would you guys recommend? There's that formation AI that I've heard good things about, but what about others?

Here's a great misconception. There are no AI mods out there my fellow Guildie. There are only the three engines and the various formation mods. IIRC there are EB-specific versions of Sinuhet's and Darth's formation mods (both are great; I suggest using both for yourself before choosing between them!) The three engines are actually the same, except they have different version numbers (1.5, 1.6 and 1.9) denoting the progressive releases as the engine was updated. 1.6 and 1.9 can exist regardless of the existence of the other (BI without Alex, or vice versa), and this is clear as not all 1.6 features are existent in 1.9 (shield wall being an ostensible example).

[Kikaz]

I like using BI, but I hate that custom battles don't work. Unusual things seem to happen a bit more often, but it's better than sedentary AI and makes things interesting. An example: In my Arverni campaign, Koinon Hellenon is constantly sending soldiers across the Adriatic to besiege Ariminum despite the fact that I share no borders with them and am not at war with any of their allies. Also, the shield wall feature in BI is superb, Hoplites and such actually move in formation now. I wasn't impressed with Alex as there are many little glitches that you have to deal with, both are more stable than the standard .exe though.

[Dragannia]

I've played it with Alex.exe now, along with that minimod pac that was released. AI is much better in terms of their layout and formation. It doens't seem particularly more stable than vanilla though, I've already had it crash 3 times in only 8 turns. I might go with BI but I do really notice the performance boost on large battles. Does shield wall matter that much though? Can't you just put them on guard mode?

[vartan]

I've played it with Alex.exe now, along with that minimod pac that was released. AI is much better in terms of their layout and formation. It doens't seem particularly more stable than vanilla though, I've already had it crash 3 times in only 8 turns. I might go with BI but I do really notice the performance boost on large battles. Does shield wall matter that much though? Can't you just put them on guard mode?

@Guard vs Shield Wall: depends on how imbalanced you'd like your game to be. As for performance, there's everything from disabling visual compositions, to using it in XP mode, to editing the file header to allow the allocation of over 2GB RAM, and so on and so forth.