Mod: Better Independents v2.1

[Edi]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Keep it coming!

MaxWilson, EA Ulm with BI is brutal, precisely because it seems to prefer Steel Maidens and Warrior Maidens to the other stuff and has a decent smattering of Iron Warriors mixed in for heavy hitting. I'm fighting it now in a co-op hotseat game where I play Abysia and the attrition is chewing up my infantry at a pretty good clip. That's with somewhere around 12-15 Salamanders and 2-3 Rhuaxites per army raining fire down on the AI, no SCs. I had one smaller army almost obliterated because they just kept on coming. Without large squads of E9F6 blessed Burning Ones I'd be looking at a whole different picture. Ulm actually chewed Fomoria up and rolled over it like it wasn't there. If the map approaches to my territory weren't through only two bottlenecks, I'd have been history long ago.

[hunt11]

It is so refreshing to not need massive armies, SC or massive spells to actually win against the AI

[Edratman]

I scanned the dm files and it looks very well thought out. The indies you left are pretty much the ones I recruit.

I'm at the 45 minute/turn portion of my current game, which is about my limit, so tonight I'll start a new game with version 1.

[Edratman]

OOPs, double entry deleted.

[HoneyBadger]

Great work, Edi, as usual.

To balance out the theme, does anyone have any suggestions for units to add in, to help the AI, rather than taking away units which don't?

[MaxWilson]

Okay, my assessment after playing with v2.0 for a week or so and spying on the AI armies fighting each other:

I think allowing archer indies improves AI armies significantly, precisely because missile troops scale well. I just watched EA R'lyeh attack MA Jotunheim, for instance, and get smeared because there were about 70 deer tribe archers mixed in with the Jotun PD + troops. At the same time, you don't see armies composed ENTIRELY of deer tribe archers--the nationals are used where they make sense, and EA Ulm doesn't really use indies at all (preferring the Ulmish archer-maidens instead). So yeah, I think this improves the AI further.

I don't know if it's necessarily more *challenging* because allowing archer recruitment helps me out significantly too. I may (or may not) go back to No Independents on thematic grounds[1]. However, BI was conceived as an AI booster and on that level v2.0 is a definite improvement. Nice work!

-Max

[1] I have mixed feelings about having squads of Woodsmen and Deer Tribe archers mixed in among my Human Slingers and Bashanites. On the one hand, I *did* conquer those lands and conscript the inhabitants, and arguably that's more logical than me building a castle there and suddenly having a pool of Rephaim to conscript in that province. On the other hand, it papers over a weakness in the nation that I should perhaps have to live with (slingers have poor range and have a nasty habit of advancing practically into melee range of one or another enemy group if you leave them scripted to anything but "fire closest").

[Edratman]

After a couples days of playing I changed all indy commanders back to standard costs because I was having troubles ferrying good indy troops and assumed the AI would have the same difficulty. AI seems to expand slightly better now.

[Alderanas]

I was playing a game last night in LA. I was a mod nation named theran the reign of the vampiri if you know it. I was fighting against LA abysia and got smashed when i attacked an army containing crossbowmen and archers because they held my vampirir hoards off with heavy abysian infantry while they peppered me with arrows and bolts. I love 2.0 it works great in my oppinion.