So where the hell are people getting their high standards from? Because it ain't other games...
Sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Did you really compare the OpenAI FIVE Dota player to game AI logic? Because they are not even related. Game's AI logic is not even anything related to Neural Networks or training. It's just a set of rules that should be get triggered under certain conditions. And fixing this is possible. Especially campaign AI is fairly easy to fix or test. By fairly easy, I'm comparing it to other, relatively complex AI systems.
But apparently no one from Testing team bothered the play the game and witness the snowballing and instability for a playtime longer than 2 days. Now since they are all reported, they fixed the snowballing issue ( well at least they had, not sure what happened with the last update I haven't played for a while ) but some instability is definitely still there.
Like OP explained, there is no "faction" feeling on AI at the moment. All other lords go to the brothel, drinks wine while your most strategic points are getting raped by your powerful and even by less powerful enemies. Same goes for armies, they don't have a proper agenda on their mind, they are just wandering around. It's possible that lords don't care about the faction's territories but even ruler doesn't give jack about those at the moment. I'm assuming this is somehow a downside of personalizm of lord clans. They don't care if a property gets ruined by someone since that castle/city is not theirs. But that's obviously wrong because it's faction's property and they are in that function. If they want to go that path they have to change the game to Mount&Blade:CityStateLord. And even in that case your relationship should go down if you refuse to help your
friends. They should implement a negative effect for such cases so that AI can be less reckless.
Or they can boost it with having proper system. Like
- Call to arms by ruler: As in the missions, you have to give up some parts of your soldiers for until call to arms is finished. If you decline your relationship will impacted by a faction
- Ask for help: Asking the ruler to redirect the faction's resources onto your location.
- Tasks: In moment of war, ruler should be able to assign you to certain locations. Like: Go wait at XX - or just go and defend this place. If you fail to do that within the time limits, your relationship will be impacted.
These are just the things I come up within seconds. I bet there are more ways to improve it. AI can definitely need more work on it. Bannerlord is promised to be better and more depth compared to Warband but Warband had more "faction" like sense in it's AI.
This is not related to the human species' capabilities. OP is not asking for Skynet. Please refrain using arguments like "It's bad but all games are bad. We, humans, are just bad at AI ?
"