AI is too stupid for this game

[Antaeus]

I disagree. It’s a cheap solution that makes for a bland game. “Let’s balance it by giving everyone the same tools”.

No, they need to improve AI and autocalc. Battanians should not be cavalry heavy.

Why not?

People can't ride horses in Battania?

Their nobles walk - they don't lack tactical nous.

 

[BoBB]

Why not?

People can't ride horses in Battania?

Their nobles walk - they don't lack tactical nous.

Sure. If we’re going to ignore lore, why not lightsabers too.

we could make a case that obiwan looks battanianish.

 

[comradcommodore]

Is it just me or do the formations not do anything as far as dmg output is concerned?

Square and shield wall work well at absorbing arrow fire, but that seems to be about it. I get the sense the a.i cant fight while maintaining a formation?

(not including loose for archers)

 

[Midnitewolf]

I disagree. It’s a cheap solution that makes for a bland game. “Let’s balance it by giving everyone the same tools”.

No, they need to improve AI and autocalc. Battanians should not be cavalry heavy.

I kind of feel your overthinking it.

Remember this game is singleplayer which means it is supposed to revolve around the player. That being said, in a perfectly designed world revolving around the player, each faction should be pretty equal in power and have an equal chance of winning or losing. That being said, for AI vs AI scenarios, the best solution would be just to make all things equal and ensure that all factions could recruit about the same ratios of troops. For variety you could have different ratios of troops but then you would want to weigh them differently. For example a faction without Horse Archers might want their archers to count for more in autocalc than archer alone would count for the faction with Archers, this to compensate for the lack of horse archers. You might even want them to only count for more when facing a faction like the Khuzaits or even Aserai that use a lot of horse archers. This is all behind the scenes stuff stuff happening ONLY when AI vs AI is going on. This ensures that the factions are on equal standing so in this case, balancing by giving everyone the same tools is the perfect solution. Again AI vs AI autocalc only, just to keep it all equal between faction so one cannot dominate over another. This has no effect on the player other than preventing snowballing because one faction has horse archers and others do not.

Now there should be a different calculation for AI vs Player autocalc where perhaps army composition it taken heavily into account. I mean army comp of the player is as much a strategy as using formations and tactics. Obviously in this situation cultural differences should have an influence on the autocalc results but not necessarily the same balance as a player fought battle. Rather it just has to give you fair and reasonable autocalc results based on your army composition and that is it.

Then of course you have normal battles where the actual unit's actions and performance combined with the players interactions and performance would determine the battle outcome. This would need to have its own balance and this is where things like Battanian's having access to good cavalry while only having access to archers in their noble line would come into play.

My point is there isn't just one balancing method that works for everything. Much of what you want to accomplish for balancing would depend on what results your trying to get out of that particular aspect of the game.

To summarize, AI vs AI you just want everything even and equal with no one faction standing out. Basically simple 1+1 = 2 sort of balance regardless of anything else. Player vs AI simulation you want a player's army comp to matter but outside of this you want a similar result result to AI vs AI autocalc, just something fair and balanced. Player controlled battles, you want the individual units combined with player interaction to be balanced against the AI's units and its interactions.

I would even go as far as saying, even in a Player controlled battle, you might want to give the AI advantages behind the scenes out of player view to compensate for its limited flexibility, just to make the game challenging.

 

[Midnitewolf]

Is it just me or do the formations not do anything as far as dmg output is concerned?

Square and shield wall work well at absorbing arrow fire, but that seems to be about it. I get the sense the a.i cant fight while maintaining a formation?

(not including loose for archers)

Shield Wall will reduce your damage output. Your troops don't swing as much or maybe can't swing due to being so crowded together but generally speaking if you leave your troops in shield wall after the enemy has reached their lines, you will take an much larger amount of casualties than you would if you put them back into a simple line formation before they engage in melee. At least that is what I have seen. So great for those times when your having a ranged duel but mostly useless at other times.

As far as the other formations, I honestly never use them because they don't seem to be useful for anything. Square just means you have less men facing front and I usually use my cavalry and/or horse archers to counter their cavalry and/or Horse Archers. Circle is similar. Maybe if I was in a battle where the enemy had an overwhelming amount of cavalry they would be useful but I tend to run cavalry heavy formations myself so never see this. Also it doesn't seem to work well against my cavalry and horse archers when the enemy uses those formation so I don't feel my men would fair any better. The cavalry and horse archers never seem to stay in any kind of formation no matter what formation you put them in so I don't even bother. I mean why put your cavalry in a wedge formation when the second you tell them to charge they are going to break off in 20 different directions. Honestly the reason cavalry seems so blah is that they never line up and charge in formation to use their weigh to flatten the the enemy. They always just kind of individually rush in, in ones and twos and often die because of it.

The only other formation I use is loose for archers/crossbowmen.

 

[cadadr]

Is it just me or do the formations not do anything as far as dmg output is concerned?

Square and shield wall work well at absorbing arrow fire, but that seems to be about it. I get the sense the a.i cant fight while maintaining a formation?

(not including loose for archers)

Pretty much any formation is a waste of time unless you're making shield walls or squares out of legionaries and using hordes of archers to run the enemy down around that. Apart from that, and attack-retreat cycles with archers, no other tactics in this game is worth wasting your time when you can F6 and let RNG decide. It becomes real old real quick.

 

[comradcommodore]

At least I know its not just me lol

I was experimenting a bit and I just didnt know if I was doing something wrong with the formations or not, but sounds like they are actually just broken

 

[BoBB]

I kind of feel your overthinking it.

Remember this game is singleplayer which means it is supposed to revolve around the player. That being said, in a perfectly designed world revolving around the player, each faction should be pretty equal in power and have an equal chance of winning or losing.

I disagree. You can't make them equal with just troop trees. The balancing factor has to be terrain. That's where the autocalc fails amongst other things.

That being said, for AI vs AI scenarios, the best solution would be just to make all things equal and ensure that all factions could recruit about the same ratios of troops.

That would make for a truly bland game. Every army you face is exactly the same. No thank you.

For variety you could have different ratios of troops but then you would want to weigh them differently. For example a faction without Horse Archers might want their archers to count for more in autocalc than archer alone would count for the faction with Archers, this to compensate for the lack of horse archers.

Well that's what I said. They need to improve autocalc.

 

[Apocal]

That would make for a truly bland game. Every army you face is exactly the same. No thank you.

I dunno, after 2000 hours, basically every army is the same.

A plurality or majority of infantry. Archers and skirmishers. Cavalry. A relative handful of horse archers. If you fight enough, the only meaningful difference between the armies is that sometimes they have like 30% ranged and sometimes they have 25% cavalry and those can cause different problems. Differences between troops don't really matter because, tier-for-tier, the gap between the worst and the best isn't big enough you'll ever notice unless they have some capability (shield, ranged weapon, mount) than the other troop. And because beyond the early game, whatever specific advantages a certain troop has are washed out because the AI never bothers with uniform party composition the way some players do. Like, Vlandian sergeants are pretty boss against other high-tier melee troops because of their maces. You can do a sterile room test of 500 of them vs. 500 of whatever other kind of T5 infantry and the sergeants will almost always come out on top. But that will never happen on the campaign map so it really isn't relevant.

 

[Edward the Bastard]

I feel for you OP. Battian's are very easy to bully with ranged currently, at least if caught in the plains. But, damn if they catch me in the woods without a good shooting position they have field day eviscerating my armies. One of my first playthroughs I did an very heavy ranged Battian army composition playthrough and she was almost unstoppable. It was very effective vs Vlandia. I don't understand why they bring more archers. I brought this up in a steam technical support discussion recently but apparently this is not a bug or error and is working as intended. So it's basically, Vlandia always wins if they have a shooting position, or can lure Batttania into one. This is far too deterministic in my opinion. Lords should adapt to their enemy.

Moving on...

The AI could be improved to learn to adapt to ranged pressure. Before advancing because of high ranged pressure, attempt to take cover and force the attackers to advance. Defenders usually attempt to hold the high ground. This is useless if are unable to counter ranged pressure because now the enemy now has a shooting position with impunity. A much more effective tactic would be to take cover BEHIND the hill to force the enemy advance. Sometimes they will stand on a hill which actually increases the surface area in which arrows and bolts can hit. I have a perfect screenshot to showcase this, as I have encountered almost exactly what you did, but on the other side.

 

[Edward the Bastard]

Battanians should not be cavalry heavy.

I know what you mean. I've seen some Battanians lords with more or equal cavalry as Vlandian lords and just a blob of infantry with about ten or fifteen archers despite them being portrayed as the bait and switch trappers of the forest if you ask them about Neretzes Folly.

 

[Lord Bryggan]

AI was stupid in Warband too. That is why I always tried be marshall. I don't know how many times I slapped my forehead in disbelief regarding the decisions of AI. I feel safer using auto calc.

I do really wish that the fighting would slow down a bit. When two melee lines meet, it takes about 3 seconds for one side to break the other. If the soldiers would turtle up a bit more and try to stay alive we could have time for tactics. Flanking or breaking through the line was always the path to victory in real life, and it could be here too since it is a simple concept that AI should be able to grasp. It can split the cavalry up, so it should be able to split the infantry up too. If they have greater numbers, have two smaller groups of infantry try walk around the flanks and attack from behind (currently, even when inf is killing the last clump of enemies they all attack from the same direction when they could easily swarm them). And, if outnumbered, it could put 'line breaker' infantry in the center and try to smash through the middle. An oblique attack could be an option too (put top tier troops on one side who push, and weaker troops on the other who fall back).

Most battle plans in medieval times were very simple since communication was difficult. You'd think the AI could have a few preset plans, and all we'd need then is a little time to implement ours.

 

[Rybn47]

Also as a funny sidenote. I dropped my brother and his wife in my castle to keep them safe and make babies, and few seconds later, she has teleported to a distant city in Sturgian territory, and it's not the first time. Why the heck why is she doing this stupid a** s***?

I think this is because they smell tournaments and inmediatle teleport to participate. Not a dev but my guess.

What the F is going on with AI and why is no one doing anything to fix it?
Why is it that mexxico, god bless this man, instead of telling us that they will fix AI says that leadership in TW wants to make AI ever more stupid in order to reach fps target in console? What in the entire crap are they thinking?

Is this for real? I kind of felt like the AI was different from when I last played in July. It felt like they all got downgraded. Still looterss love legionaries and palatines tho.