@Lurtzae said:
My experience with the campaign AI is that it’s just completely broken.
The difficulty spikes are grotesque. Babylonian campaign with islands is a walk in the park, no challenge whatsoever on very hard. AI doesn’t send any transport ships.
Land maps are often times almost impossible at the beginning, when the AI swarms you with streams of units. Once that stops after a few minutes, challenge is also gone because the AI can’t play and kills all its villagers by walking into the player base.
At 30 minutes in The Birth Of Rome, some players have no vills, the most working are 1-3. No military units being trained any more.
Next mission, Pyrrhus, broken. Ships try to sail into the island, transports can’t land. They only attack after a while.
The whole Birth of Rome campaign is in fact broken by the AI. They send one attack force at the beginning, then all their villagers are dead by walking into the player base and they just don’t do anything anymore. They’re not gathering ressources, they’re not training military or attacking.
I made a one on one comparison with the original version and their the AI isn’t great either, but it works, it uses its own base for ressources and attacks regularly.
Please, if the developers are interested in fixing this, I have savegames with the broken AI states. This is unacceptable, I’m thinking about requesting a refund because campaigns are mostly unplayable. The original game was working so much better, which is ridiculous if you want to sell a new version 20 years later!
Same goes for my favorite mission: Battle of Tunes from the Punic War campaign. The yellow ( island ) AI is only attacking all the time with ships and units as in the demo, but the red ( Regulus and main ) AI is simply standing and doing nothing. I tried all difficulties in order to test it and nothing happened. Then, I used cheats in order to give them more resources and suddenly they developed but played defensive strategy. I remember that in the original demo, the red AI used from the start to send waves of broad swordsmen, improved bowmen and cavalry to attack your city ( base ). I was very disappointed about this and also from most of the campaign scenarios. Looking forward to see an improvement on this as well as fixing the broken unit animations ( Armored Elephants ) are one of them and the pathfinding that was “loudly” presented in the intro before the release.