national armies?

[Pocus]

Dont understand? Must I point the problem?

[Peter Ebbesen]

I believe Pocus is trying to draw attention to the sad fact that the AI likes to build massed light infantry (and occasionally heavy infantry) rather than the more expensive national troops.

[Arralen]

Finally I found out:

Originally posted by Pocus (in another thread):
add to this the preferences about castles, temples, etc. in AI budget. 2 patches out, and we still have AI building mostly light indeps troops, because there is never new castles build by the AI.

That is to the point that fighting Ulm, Man or Pythium is often the same thing, with a mass of rabble in front of you, with the occasional national unit or mage thrown into the lot.

AFAIK the problem is two- or morefold:

1) The provinces stats have been dumped (dumbed?) down. DOM2 prov are smaller, generate less income and ressources than those from DOM1

2) The AI doesn't build forts. Maybe because of 1) - could be it's still searching for the right place when the game is already over.

3) It has the annoying habit of building troops all over the place. Fits nice to the other bad habit of moving armies constantly around - they could pick up troops quite nicely this way. But results in a hodgepodge of indie troops with few nation-specific ones (mostly the handful the initial commander started out with from the province I think)
Thinking 'bout it - could it be the case that the AI build troops in the forts first, than in the provinces in DOM1, and that this has been reversed somehow in DOM2?
Would not so easy to test this, but doable !?

4) The AI understands the concept of troops types only partially. It's uses rider for flanking, javelin-equipped troops are kept apart from other so they can fire their weapons during approach (at least, most times), it even sometimes uses "target Archers" or "target largest monster" instead of nearest for it's archers.
But it doesn't now about blessable troops or those with special aurae, or medium/heavy troops.
So obviously it cannot know if there's some type lacking in numbers or effective orders.
------------------------------------

Than again, I had Vanheim throw armies at me which where 80% those human guys with javelins and prot 15, backed up by some Vans etc., in a SP game lately. 'Was the Karan map (which has few "small" provinces, in contrast to Illwinters maps), with ressource settings on default.

[ February 25, 2004, 12:13: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Of course the "knowledge" of the troops problem is because there is only one AI. It operates in general Categorys. An AI for Ulm would probably act differently than an AI for Man if there were seperate AIs.

It would be very difficiult to come up with a generalized plan which would fix this problem for Ulm without making a bigger problem for Man, or worse yet for Pangaea.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

It would be very difficiult to come up with a generalized plan which would fix this problem for Ulm without making a bigger problem for Man, or worse yet for Pangaea.

It might be possible to put a greater preference on national troops for recruitment - whatever the nation, whatever their type, without greatly hindering the AIs ability to fight. (This is probably already done to some degree, but only the developers know whether the "home troop" weight can be boosted even further)

Even if, God forbid, the resulting force composition was actually worse than the current one (which seems unlikely, but you never know), it would at least result in thematically more different armies, which would make for more interesting battles in SP.

In an ideal world, of course, the AI would be better at saving up for and building fortresses. Even if we ignore the troop recruiment aspect of fortresses, most of them pay off handsomely long-term when built in high-population provinces simply for the increased gold income.

(Alas, we do not live in an ideal world, and the buy/save issue is hard to make good rules for an AI to follow)

[Pocus]

as of now the AI put tons of temples everywhere, and dont build any castles. Perhaps some tweak is in order Gandalf. Stop thinking that something is not done, because it cant be done.
Its a game made by a small team, and they cant fix things, if nobody report them. Its a well known problem, and I'm rehashing it, with pictures this time, because it's a problem still overlooked.

[Wauthan]

In Gandalf Parkers "Poke in the Eye" map, with its large number of castles, the AI builds quite a lot of national units. I does however seem to go for quantity over quality. It makes sense though since the AI doesn't know what will hit it and a larger number of low tier troops are usually a lot more flexible tp use than fewer, more expensive, troops.

I got nothing to complain about in the summoning aspect of things.