Best KOEI "officer mode" game?

[LordBlade]

Which of all of KOEI's strategy games do you guys feel does the best job of incorporating a good "officer mode", while still keeping a decent overall game balance?

RoTK 7 & 8 were good. I found 7 to be not bad (as the AI seemed to be able to do stuff as officers and not just sit in towns doing nothing). Though battles in that game were so broken when you could basically just let an enemy siege you and you could cheese the crap out of them from the walls.

I found 8 to be a bit better in some of the officer options, but the AI tended to be hit or miss at times with developing.

RoTK 10 I enjoyed some of the features, but I found that the AI was simply brainless when it came to developing towns. I'd often end up conquering a map full of barely developed towns as the AI never seemed to get anything done.

With Ascension... meh... I'm getting the problem of the AI being set to insane warmonger mode constantly, where they won't stop attacking everyone and everything. And they also suffer from being terrible at kingdom management. I get assigned a castle, by myself, and my lord is too focused on sending everyone out to attack constantly to actually let me have any underlings.

I've tried setting the aggression down, and tried AI on different settings. Tried making troop recovery slow, hoping that might stop them, but then they just send half filled armies out constantly. It's insane.

[Nox]

I Highly recommend using the editor to balance out things. FYI the ai dose not have a none passive way to gain wood or iron so I recommend giving them a bit via the editor I found that fixs alot of issues.

As for officer play do yourself a favor and edit your merit to whatever level you feel is right for you. This way you can ask for the lord for new castles, people etc.

I mean not sure what you are expecting AI goal is to expand in most cases. Its eat or be eaten.

[LordBlade]

Originally posted by Nox:

As for officer play do yourself a favor and edit your merit to whatever level you feel is right for you. This way you can ask for the lord for new castles, people etc.

Yeah, that would work once you're a lord or whatever rank that lets you do that. It's just frustrating that the AI is too dumb to assign you people.
I never really had that issue in the RoTK games. I'd get put in charge of a city and have a bunch of people thrown under me.

I mean not sure what you are expecting AI goal is to expand in most cases. Its eat or be eaten.

I mean, it's not that I would expect the AI to stop expanding altogether. But there's pretty much no downtime. They AI is constantly sending troops out across the map, with armies getting smaller and smaller. You'd figure the AI would take time to build up its forces, instead of just leaving everything undefended as everyone roams the map looking for conquest.