Campaign ai turtling too much?

[BenShinobi]

I've noticed the same behaviour across a few campaigns since the free update and unless I misunderstood the changes the ai seems to default to this strat of sitting a 20-stack on a province while building up its second army and then moving both those armies together against me.

It's not a last stand situation, they just seem overly cautious and it feels a bit dull tbh with how frequently it happens, especially in early game when you don't have the means to uproot that 20-stack turtling on a province.

If the ai has a full army and are in the process of building up their second one they should generally feel more confident to use that army on the offensive, because the second will be ready to defend if things go wrong. If they're at war with a faction of a higher power ranking I think it's reasonable to wait until they can more closely match their opponent, but this is happening even when their faction strength is more than mine with just their one full army.

This strat isn't a bad one, it's just repeated too much and has led to some boring early campaigns

[Scar]

They got tired of us beating their ass and being more prepared :L

[gachi is manly]

Best thing to do is bait the stack out with ambush stance. They're not going to come near you if you also have a stack waiting for their stack. Give them a juicy target like sitting a lord by himself within range of their camping stack with another lord in ambush behind them and it may draw them out.

I mean, it may not work, but in my experiences they're pretty easy to bait.

Your army may be smaller than their single stack, but they have to beat your army + whatever garrison of the town they're trying to take. Usually results in them waiting until they have overwhelming force. It's kind of just the nature of the AI that has to rely on auto resolve, since even 60-40 odds is a lot of losses for them.

[BenShinobi]

That's the thing. I've had an army sat in ambush with the enemy army within range to attack a settlement for multiple turns. That used to bait them most of the time but now they seem to still prefer to wait to have more than 1 full army to move on you with both. Think it's a matter of their priorities either being over-corrected in the update or it's not working as intended.

Worst case was with Kairos against Oxyotl. forget the settlement names but he had 2 almost full armies on settlements to north & south of each other and was still waiting until he had a 3rd before moving against me with 1 army that was hiding. It's better than just sending weak stacks to their deaths but it feels like it's happening too frequently. Getting tired of having to ambush several armies in a row

[Ashley]

They'll done this for years nothing new. They don't come out if they know they can't win with AR values.