Bannerlord AI when you go down as commander is horrendously bad

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secondpink

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Strategy is relatively straight forward in my opinion for effective and efficient field battles. Place shield wall infantry in front, place archers in loose formation behind, guard against horse archers with your own cavalry.

But when you go down, and this issue is exacerbated in large battles of 1000 vs 1000 men, the AI defaults to some horribly stupid things that make no sense.
First off they just go back and forth spamming useless commands - Infantry advancing, Ranged forming skirmishing line, Ranged falling back, cavalry advancing, cavalry flanking, blah blah blah.
What just happens is that they move back and forth doing nothing while getting picked at by archers and getting slapped by inferior infantry.

BUT THE ABSOLUTE WORST, and I repeat, THE WORST thing the AI does is when they do "Form Defensive Ring around Ranged Units" and they do this even when you have the advantange.
The infantry just form a stupid circle around a bunched group of archers and they don't move, the archers can't fire because they are stuck too close together and have no vision, and they just STAND THERE GETTING SHREDDED by enemy archers.

I have literally lost huge battles going down halfway through the battle because the AI defaults to my army doing nothing competent while my army is superior in strength.
Yea I know that the TW is tryna implement smart AI, but so far, it is an abhorrent failure when these current commands literally, by far, have a worse outcome than F1 + F3. When you go down as commander, the AI should just F1 + F3, the results are better and it's not even close.
 
I use a mod to cheat and counter this, to play as ally after incapacitation https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/407. Helps also to avoid senseless rant about how bad armor is, because then it is not that bad, if the player "spills his guts out", to cite a beloved kind of NPC.

As the game is not exactly about player char only (who can die and be replaced by a dump offspring seemingly) and other members of your group presumably are not all totally retarded and would take over command, I don't feel too bad with the mod.
 
It is that bad and worse, when i go down in a battle i usually just retreat my troops and fight another day

Yeah, that's usually what I do.

The strange thing is, it wasn't quite this bad on release. Then I could go down in battle and my side would fight more or less competently. They wouldn't do anything exceptional but they also wouldn't do anything so stupid as to lose a battle we were winning handily.
 
They're incompetent on their own that's for sure, but it does add some challenge and pressure to how you handle your MC.
I do admit that in mods with "body sliding" on KO like 1257 AD it was much easier and I could survived absurdly bad odds because of it.
I think maybe if they did add a body sliding to BL, have it have a "panic" system or something where if it keeps happening eventually you can't order troops anymore and it's a ll chaos.
 
The punishment when introducing a "body shift" should not be that high. Wether you play as other char after player char incapacitation or use retreat and try again is not such a big difference for me. It's more a matter of time economy. So there is already an ingame cheat.

I understand that knowing of control loss after being gutted has some nice benefit, as it puts interesting pressure on the player. But the wounding of the leader should not make it impossible that other members take over control. Maybe the ability to give orders could be restricted to let's say two "shifts", to designated units acting as lieutenants.
 
Im confused, doesnt the enemy army use the exact same AI as your army? why would yours perform worse
I think not, Its like they said, they get a spam of orders instead of just fighting. In fact, it will be better to fight brainless instead of non stop running and not fighting at all.
 
I think not, Its like they said, they get a spam of orders instead of just fighting. In fact, it will be better to fight brainless instead of non stop running and not fighting at all.
so did the devs design one AI for the enemy army and a dumber AI for our own armies? that makes no sense
 
I am surprised your army does not instant route. I can point out many examples of an army winning, their commander dies and this army gets wiped out when they route because of leader death or suspected death.

fix commanderai and implement this would help immersion.
 
so did the devs design one AI for the enemy army and a dumber AI for our own armies? that makes no sense
I think its more like a bug. But you can test it. Just get a big army and get knocked so you can see your army start doing weird things.
 
Im confused, doesnt the enemy army use the exact same AI as your army? why would yours perform worse

Because the AI gets all wonky depending on what units are currently on the battlefield and the balance of power.

I'm playing with an empire army and have been constantly fighting the Khuzait. I will personally normally kill 50-100 horsearchers/cavalry before going down, but when that happens the enemy still has more cav than me.
This forces my army to get into stupid defensive formations such as "infantry form defensive ring" despite it having no functionality, but the enemy AI will not because they have more cavalry.

For some reason my armies want to take the defensive when they have a huge battle advantage and incur heavy losses moving around doing nothing but the enemy will always just F1 + F3 when they have the advantage.

The enemy AI will also use this strategy when their cavalry are outnumbered and its garbage for them as well. Its just shooting fish in a barrel.

And the enemy they will also spam stupid commands and get troops lost for no reason when they should just charge (but because of the way I position and train my armies it makes no difference in the end result).
 
Hmm, it would be fun if the game turned into an RTS after you die, meaning you could still command troops with an overview look. Don't know if it would somehow ruin immersion, but I'd say it would be a fun feature, definitely creative
 
Clipped just lastnight. 700+ vs 400+

The obvious visual toing and froing of inf and the weirdly skewered archer line, but pay close attention to the orders feed in the bottom left. Fresh orders are given after my knockdown, then shortly after, chaos. We're seeing something in the region of 40, maybe 50+ seperate AI orders issued. Conflicts in abundance.



I held the high ground prior to knockdown, had superior numbers, so basically the only thing the AI needed to do was hold position. Which is what I would expect once this issue gets resolved, TWs.
 
I made the mistake in my latest playthrough of going down in a routine raid of a caravan with my 50 odd fianns and forest bandits, my archers decided to stop firing and started dancing around in front of the enemy archers. In what should have been a quick battle where I lost no one, I lost 10 troops and it took forever for the AI to stop spazzing out.

Really dissapointed in how bad it is.
 
I think the devs wanted to simulate a sort of panic, once the leader has been killed. A funny side note is, that the panic also strikes the whole army, when You have contributing only a small amount of troops and are not the commander in chief.
For me this behaviour denies me of the most fun part of the game. It was the same in M&B and Warband, but I think the time I had to change my gameplay from warrior to commander was more towards late-game there.
I do love to climb walls, wielding my axe or just shooting arrows from an isolated tower. So being out of the action - or being forced to hold back - is not a good game design from my point of view.
If I go down, I want my men - and only them - to be confused for a bit of time, but no longer than 3-5 minutes or so. I want the opportunity to take over the next soldier at the top of my troop list. If this consists of more than one man, then the one with max health, of course :wink:
I want to be able to rally my troops or to recover a "BANNER" from my fallen commander, restoring order again with that action.

There are so many ideas coming within 5 minutes... Devs, what have You done the eight years, that passed? What games do You play Yourself - try Warband or even Bannerlord for once.
 
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