Avoiding end game tier 4 spam

[Aleksei]

I am using empire building mod that reduces it somewhat. But what are "best" map options when doing big maps to avoid game turning hellhole of every AI faction spamming only tier4 units everywhere (big problem of whole this genre, because it makes all other units redundant).

[StarFishon]

game progress slow\very slow, start with settlers, medium army size, continents, water over 50%(put it on 60-65%).

if the AI can spam T4 in those setting you are playing to slow for the difficulty you are playing.

remember that lord play the best AOW3 AI can,but with low bonus(the only differences between lord and king\emperor), if you want slow game lord is enough for your challenge.

[Aleksei]

What you recomend on resources nodes, towns and other those settings. Also its not that you cannot handle tier 4 spam but just that it makes game extreamly tedious and takes all fun out of it.

[StarFishon]

you right only t4 is boring.

resources average...
** game progress slow\very slow, start with settlers, medium army size, continents, water over 50%(put it on 60-65%).

[Johnny 5]

you can also get rid of independent cities. why? because some of them are big which give lots of resources which speed up the game.
i wish there was an option to set the starting size of independent cities.

you can start with no skills too.

be careful how slow you make it that can be boring too.

[StarFishon]

maybe few cities and not building of new cities :) i played a lot without the option to build cities, make every city high value.

[BBB]

I don't know if you guys are aware but the AI is hard coded to have no more than 20% of an army as T4 units. Infact I think that coding applies to all units, so it won't spam Knight only armies. I'll have to check, but it was definitely put in for T4 units.

With Emperor bonuses however it will have many armies.

Anyway, if you want to limit unit "spam2 then you need to limit either the economy or the actual production capacity.

1st of all, get the extended settings mod.

2nd, limit resource sites (set them to few) and set research and growth etc to very slow (so the "early" game is extended).

Be aware however that Emperor AI will still get big bonuses so this may hurt you more than it does them.

3rd, don't set defenders or roamers to super strong, because you can deal with it but the ai can't.

4th, limit how many cities are on the map (set them to few), and disable settling of new cities.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

BBB is quite right that the AI won't spam tier 4s (anymore), but note that the ratio concerns the overal army. A given stack might still have 5 tier 4 units, but if you add up all units you'll see that AI armies consist of mostly tier 3s with some tier 1, 2 and 4s filling out the ranks.

Incidentally, a player should do the same. Most tier 4 units are either not very good when massed without support (Shrine of Smiting, to a lesser extent Juggernaut) or impossible to spam. (Horned God.)

A warlord could spam manticore riders and do pretty well because of their strategic and tactical speed, but they'll still take more damage than combined-armed forces with some good defenders like Phalanxes and Warbreeds mixed in, and preferably some elemental damage as well to deal with high defence/physical resistant enemies.

More importantly, building an army of tier 2-3 units tends to be more cost effective. Tier 4s are great at concentrating strength, which can help a lot when fighting some hard-to-crack target, but if you're fighting on a wide front it can be more helpful to just have 2 or 3 stacks of lower tier units instead of 1 tier 4.

Particularly if you manage to stack mystic city upgrades, racial governance bonuses and alignment based spells, low tier units become much more effective. (Manticores would also benefit, sure, but not as much. That said, if you do want to go for manticore spam, Shadowborn specialisation can be great to give them life-stealing and mitigate the healing problem.)

All that said, if you let a game go on for too long, it can get pretty tedious even if the AI doesn't spam tier 4 units. Fighting 20 siege battles can get a bit much even if there's a bunch of different units to fight. (I sure wish there were some variety in siege maps.)

So overal, my advice would be not to let games stretch too far past turn 100. One good way of doing this is to enable the Seals victory, but set the number of required charges to max. That way, there will be a lot of large scale battles fought over seals, since the AI will actively attack and defend them, and there's a hard time limit on how long the battle will go on.

Edit: Oh, and tweaking map settings can indeed help too. Another idea to increase opponent variety is to increase the amount of Dwellings but disable city founding and lower the number of cities. That will also cut down on siege battles.

[Aleksei]

How sure are you about 20% hardcap? Last time I played i had 4-5 heros limit if I remember right. AI came with 2-3 full stacks of juggernauts at me.

[StarFishon]

i dont think its true per stack, saw lots of time 3-4 t4 per stack... but maybe as all army calculating AI have only 20% tier 4, their are times t4 spamming wont work good for you.
if we take full army attack 3 stacks, its will go best with 2-4 heroes,4-8 T2 support,4-6 T3, 4-6 T4.

[BBB]

I think it is must bbe army wide then.