They removed global recruitment cost and time from the AI, it seems.

[Mazisky]

DISCLAIMER: At the moment we have no official confirmation about this, so as usual, take all of this with a grain of salt.


I've found this interesting comment by the authors of the popular SFO mod, which are known to be experts of the game code.

"5.2 update mentions big changes to AI among many other things that should make it more “smart”. While playing now you can see AI more aggressive and harder at the first glance. We went deep into those changes and found out why. Actual AI changes are very minimal to the point of not affecting the campaign at all. The big change that was introduced is the insane amount of cheats that AI received. We are talking about 80% cost reductions for buildings, recruitment or units upkeep. No technology costs, high replenishment, no attrition damage or free experience for units and characters. Those values are almost double from the previous vanilla version and a base when the game begins so with few more technologies that AI researches way faster than players we have a situation when everything is just free. But what really changed that AI has more elite armies is not the fact that it started to move to proper provinces and recruit there, no. AI after the update has NO global recruitment time and cost. Yes, AI can do it for free now and instantly. And things that I just mentioned are not only on Legendary difficulty but on all of them, added to AI stronger the player is (even 3 player provinces can provide 50% reductions for AI). It all causes situations when 1 enemy province can produce an unlimited number of armies. So if you want to win a war you need to wipe out the enemy.


What do you think about it? Do you agree or disagree with these changes and why?


DISCLAIMER: At the moment we have no official confirmation about this, so as usual, take all of this with a grain of salt.

[MadArtillery]

I think I understand what inspired them to do it, mostly Tamurkan being as strong as he is because of Nurgles recruitment style actually allowing the ai to do things. Personally I do hate it though, I'd be honestly fine if they just made everything global recruitment for the ai and just made it all work identically to local recruitment for them but free global and no time to recruit? wtf man. If it's all true that is just dumb. The ai at least needs to pretend to have an economy and at least pretend to play the same game.

[bradhunter]

The AI is recruiting too many armies with this change, and you have to totally destroy your enemy for it to stop. They need to nerf this real quick.

[Justaprank]

I wouldn't mind the AI getting more cheats if they weren't so PAINFULLY passive. Playing as Skrolk, I cleared south to the tip of the icontinent and Oxy immediately declared war on me. He spent the next 60 turns raising up army after army that all just sat in the waters off shore of my coast searching for a weak settlement to sack. Despite having multiple armies, they would run away from combat if there was any sign of resistance, sitting all of their armies one inch outside of my movement range, and withdrawing any time that I advanced.

I know that the kill shot here is to just push into oxy's territory and take it all while they focus on harassing my underbelly, but the sheer timidity of their forces just made it an utterly unenjoyable experience.

Some switch was flipped in the ai scripts between WH2 and WH3 that caused the AI to go from aggressive to passive-aggressive. and I'm not a fan. In WH2, the enemy had massive cheats, but at least they'd come out for a scrap. Trying to pin down the AI in this game is just frustrating - especially for factions without heroes that can block armies.

[KoboldUtopian]

That does seem like too much. But are you all not finishing off enemies?

[Zeriel00]

This is HUGE and has the potential to ruin the game for sure. It basically removes the strategy aspect of the game.

[Nyarlathotep]

I take the statements of SFO mod team as true from their obvious love for the franchise,because I use the mod for ages and due to their attitude that they are super helpful and quick to respond to questions in the steam mod comment section.

Also I say that I take because I started a little pause until the Khorne DLC so I stopped playing two weeks or so before the 5.2.

This will make playing tedious because it will just be more doing the same pattern for x times more due to a nonsense amount of out of thin air armies. I play Legendary and I guess it will be worse for less experienced players or players with a limited amount of play time regardless of their experience with the game.

So fix this YESTERDAY. Just tomorrow or quick is inadequate.

[StrangestEcho]

Malakai's Legendary campaign is fun with the AI buffs. Had to cheese the first couple major settlement sieges a little with Rune of Wrath. Moulder had four armies on turn five and abused force march, so it took me a few extra turns to wipe him out and I lost Lair of the Troll King.

Some of the weaker races/factions are going to be a struggle though.

[huey30]

Hard to say without testing it first

[Mazisky]

Originally posted by huey30:

Hard to say without testing it first

Yes, I haven't tested it personally.

But I happened to see that comment from the popular modder and thought it was an interesting find to discuss

[dulany67]

Have not played it yet, so no opinion. But it does sound like they may have adjusted too far in the other direction, as they tend to do in WH3.

[Fluffy Newfoundland]

Haven't give it a go yet, but if it's true, then the campaign's just unplayable then ? I tend to play in VH/VH with all unit bonus maxed for units. It all of it is true, then, as Chaos or faction with low income, isn't the campaign unwinnable against Order faction ?

Kislev was already a chore before, but now, the Ice Court and Nuln must just be impossible to win against.

[Sarumoon]

"So if you want to win a war you need to wipe out the enemy."



Yes. This is how you win a war. Specially a Total War.

[zefyris]

It's honnestly excellent. This has really fixed both the snowballing that was possible as soon as you defeated an enemy army, fixed the difficulty mid game /late game, and fixed the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ army compositions that were too weak and too repetitive.

I've tried some beginning of campaigns in Legendary and done 2 campaigns in VH/VH (Belegar and Ikit), and it's just so, so cool to really have to be warry of what the opponent is going to bring back at your next fight. There are sooooo many different units that you would almost never see in the enemy's armies. The AI now properly will build at least one building of each type in their empire and in VH / legendary so with the buffs they get in global recruitement you never ever see full armies made of 1 or 2 units types, unless it's the very very beginning of the game; and they don't run around past turn 40-50 with t1-t2 armies anymore, it's proper t3-t5 super varied mixes of units.

Also because the AI's armies have way higher quality in average, this also solved the "AI always run away from your armies" problem, since it sees your armies as generally challengeable with whatever it put together, so they come for you a lot more now fro mwhat I've seen.

I'm a big fan of the changes so far honnestly. This solved so many problems at once that the game had. Legendary is super harsh so it's REALLY "legendary". I would advise against playing above VH unless you want to challenge yourself heavily and are ready to lose the campaign. Special mention to my attempt in legendary Karak Kadrin. I don't know if I was particularly unlucky with the timing from my enemies, but that was brutal AF.

Those changes weren't even in the top 5 of the highlights from the 5.2 patch, yet it does so much to make the game more interesting at higher difficulty, it's just nuts.

[sentry]

This is probably a bug if true. The patch notes don't line up with essentially removing global recruitment times across all difficulties. Here is the below snippet from the notes:

Added Global recruitment duration reductions
Very Hard: -1 global recruitment duration

Legendary: -2 global recruitment duration

This effectively makes global recruitment as fast as the local recruitment, on legendary mode only

[zefyris]

^note that even in VH, early stuff that takes 1 turn to recruit local is now one turn for them in global. You really have to take this in account because this means that cutting the local source of a recruiting enemy (by capturing the local settlement) does NOT actually cancel all the troops being recruited (unless it was the only source for that unit obviously), so you have to remember that the enemy's army will still get bigger even if you do that.

I haven't played below VH since the patch, but I'd say that we would have heard a lot of complaints if the turn reduction was also a thing in Hard and below, so that part is most probably a mistake from the moder.