the late-game and AI need a few changes

[snuggans]

1. Perpetual war was introduced in patch 1.6.3 if you fail to stop the conspiracy which is a very annoying repetitive quest, it forces a 3 vs 1 scenario and you are forbidden to make peace. it has stalled the late-game, there is no progress being made, just infinite battles typically with almost no rest in-between them, mostly between the player's army and dozens of armies from 3 factions-- which brings me to my next point:

2. Friendly AI does not help you very much, is clumsy with their movements when they do, and seems to be less aggressive than enemy AI. i'm the one that has to defend from enemy siege attempts, i'm the one that has to siege enemy lands. even when the enemy has a town with only 70 defenders nobody in my faction tries to take it, they just walk by. i just watched my faction make an army 1900 men strong, walk over to Marunath, siege it for a bit, pull away from the siege and then walk back to Amitatys, meanwhile the 3 enemy factions took Lageta, Ortysia and Sargot from us. the late-game has essentially become "3 factions vs my 1 army"

3. Friendly AI is filling dungeons to capacity with captured footmen rather than lords. so one of the ways i can fight back against this late-game zerg is to make sure that captured lords are in secure prisons so im able to catch my breath a little longer. but in a certain patch they capped the size of dungeons and the AI is instantly reaching this cap by filling it with regular troops instead of ransoming them off, so im being forced to travel back to my fiefs which are away from the frontlines so i can drop captured lords into my own prisons, however being away from the frontline means the enemy makes more gains.

4. the Food:Garrison dynamic is too punishing even when not being sieged. if i want to bolster a weak town's defenses i can't because then the garrison starts to lose 10 men or more each day, the only alternative is to babysit the town for a long time, but then you lose every other town that you're not babysitting, and the issue spreads exponentially. what's occurring in my game is that all the towns near the frontlines have almost no garrison and thus they switch hands very quickly, or they rebel

i understand that TaleWorlds wants to hinder the player snowballing but because of other factors that are not working smoothly the game has become more frustrating and less fun, just makes me want to restart campaign. my faction is the largest yet i feel completely alone holding back the tide, this is not the way.

 

[Ask]

even when the enemy has a town with only 70 defenders nobody in my faction tries to take it, they just walk by.

This is stupidly infuriating and happens so much. They ignore weakly defended fiefs because they already had some objective. Sometimes they'll walk past an army with half our soldiers and not engage because they are going to recruit. Specially once you join an npc army you start to notice all these really mindnumbing patterns they can't stop doing.

A few days ago I joined an army at Husn Fulq. The army leader went to defend that castle that's right next to it, I forgot the name (Tamnuh castle?) because it was being sieged. He closed in, stopped, and inmediately changed their objective to go back to Husn Fulq again to recruit more troops. Their army wasn't bigger than ours. He kept doing it and was stuck in this cycle for about 6 loops until they took the castle and we went to it to besiege it.

Now I'm not an AI genius and I don't claim to say that programming this stuff is easy, but really now? Ignoring easy targets and getting stuck on loops? Just why?

I agree with all your points by the way, the entire late game one way or another ends up being exactly the same - endless conflict and stupid AI.

 

[snuggans]

my army is on the left here and its a rare occasion that a friendly army is nearby to help me, so we both attack the Battanian army in the middle, i thought this outnumbering would mean less casualties than normal for me but i was mistaken. instead the friendly army gets to control half the available forces on the field, which meant they sat back and watched me fight the enemy and only charged when my formation was wiped out. this means that friendly parties joining you turns out to be a negative handicap because they use up limited unit slots and then sit back

on a separate note, im having trouble believing that the reinforcement system is working as intended, that units spawning out of thin air point-blank straight into the melee or even behind your line is what the devs wanted? its a monstrous advantage to the defenders, especially if they start the battle 400-600 meters away

additionally, if you get knocked out in battle, your troops start walking backwards, which means the casualty log starts turning red because they're easy pickings. so the player is discouraged from taking part in combat even with permadeath off

what's going on with this game is that due to certain mechanics not working correctly, what arises is a singular "meta" way to play the game in order to ensure positive outcomes, and that meta might include choices like: avoiding friendly parties from joining your battles, your character avoiding combat, try to be defender always. yet these things are major game features that shouldn't have to be avoided

 

[geala]

Yes, so true, that all keeps me from playing campaigns for long. And I assume that this game behavior will not change considerably, as it's probably deep in the code of the core mechanics.

Using RTS Camera mod at least helps with being knocked out in battle as it allows you to control an NPC. It's a bit cheating but the AI is just too dump to be left alone.

I would like to have two additional mods, one that allows you to force AI armies to be under your control in battle if you are leading a party in it, and one that make parties, and as consequence armies, as well as garrisons much smaller than in vanilla. I don't need to see big numbers, I prefer to have all soldiers on the battlefield without respawns.