badgenome said:
Well, that's part of it. Early on, I'd ally with all my neighbors and stuff, and that was actually the hardest part of the game because I'd try to develop my economy and tech up while also preparing for one of those fuckfaces to backstab me. But before too long, I'd have annihilated the traitor, taken all their lands, and turned into a little superpower. The game was always pretty much over by turn 20, except for screwing around with the Mongols/Timurids/Aztecs. But the bigger issue is with the 3D maps themselves, I think. Chief among the gripes that I have is that the AI just isn't very good at controlling territory on them. I don't know how many times I've gotten a faction down to their last city, marched an army right past one or two huge stacks of their troops, and sieged and eliminated them. The AI was a lot more competent in Shogun and Medieval. |
Never played Shogun, but perhaps the reason why the AI seems more competent is because they don't have to worry about the 3D map, but just sit on their province, and wait for you to attack? Part of the strategy is to pick off straggling parts of the army before they merged. I'm not denying the campaign AI needs a lot of work (At least in Rome, can't handle Medieval II or Empire), but I do think we may be underestimating the difficulty of creating such an AI that'll have human concepts such as loyalty, and develop long term plans. Perhaps they should hire a lot of people and make the campaign their biggest concern... but that'll require either a larger budget or a under development in other parts of the future games... I say that both Sony and Microsoft should make it so that you can plug in mouse and keyboard into each respective console, and play some games (if you want, there'll still be controller layout) as a normal PC game. I will so buy Medieval II and Empire if they were on console. It might not be million sellers, but they can certainly get a bigger revenue and sales if they port their games over to consoles.
