A.I. frustratingly insistent

[Man of Culture]

I've played thousands of hours of Total War and dumped 700 of that into Warhammer 2, and I think the most frustrating crap I've dealt with is the seemingly endless loop of 20 stack rotations the A.I. constantly sends against you. Mostly just the Empire it seems. It seems like they still haven't done anything to curb the snowball that is the Empire. They confederate lightning fast and they constantly spam Volkmar and Boris and Karl on me in waves with 20 stacks with like 4 or more artillery and just won't let me progress. And god forbid I get a setback because then they just slowly eat away at whatever I capture. I mean I can kill all three of them and in the span of 2 or 3 turns they're RIGHT BACK with full armies. I just can't catch a break against them at all. It's like the game wants me to have to deal with a late game Empire rolling with 20 armies instead of being able to hurt them early.

/rant

[l_pha]

It's not just the Empire it's every ai controlled race. They will just keep sending endless wave after wave at you even if they only have 1 city. It's best to avoid wars and sue for peace early to mid game. Then declare war and steamroll everyone once you can get your late game doomstacks unless you want to have to continuously fight tedious defensive battles.

[Barser]

Going for the empire is not easy as Rakarth. But the game teases you to do that, so I thought wth I will do it. The empire was not really a problem to deal with, but as soon as I finished them off, a lot of other minor empire factions/Norscan clans/HE faction declared war on me.
So it turned more into a defense for a while.
I dont mind. No fun in just bullying the AI the whole game as my last WE campaign.

[Man of Culture]

Yeah I got declared on by them early for some reason. I was keeping to my own by killing off Bretonia, whom the Empire was actually at war with, and out of nowhere after they died off the Empire was like "Well eff you guys" and declared on me and since then I was at war constantly with HE's and Empire on both fronts. I literally spent 100 turns with three provinces in a desperate defense against rebellions and repeated 20 stacks landing in my territory. The freakin' chaos hordes actually bailed me out of the Empire issue by just existing. I killed off Karl and Boris and Volkmar so many times they just rolled them up from the back and I finished off what was left of the chaos armies when they finally got to me.

[Barser]

Sounds like you had your hands full haha. The empire is good at throwing stacks at you thats for sure, and usually they are quite powerful stacks.

[8-The-General-8]

Wow! ^^^

That's definitely the game at it's best then.

[sentry]

Unit caps helps a lot with the proliferation of doomstacks when the AI & player snowball. I know it's pretty controversial but the campaign just doesn't play the same when armies are forced to be balanced, for both AI and the player. Doomstacks still exist but they're just significantly more rare and they only really become prevalent very, very late into the game. I use Vaculty's faction-wide caps, but I've also tried TT caps and those are pretty good too. The difference with faction-wide caps is that the AI is actually capable of composing its armies under faction caps, as they do so with TK. As the player, you can't really cheese through a campaign or manipulate the auto-resolve when caps are present. You'll always have low tier armies until 150+ turns in.

The origins of the snowball effect is just way more complicated. Proving Grounds was a really good step in the right direction but it was kind of too extreme, and is probably why CA is incrementally pushing the changes from it into vanilla. I don't think any one mod can turn the campaign into something where a few key battles can tip the scales. TW:WH is just fundamentally designed to be more arcade-style where you kind of just get to a point where your doomstacks are too much for the AI and can tick 10 auto-resolves in a row until you are victorious. To be honest, most Total War games are like that. Three Kingdoms seems to be where they really experimented with a new meta where you have way fewer actors on the field and merging of factions is rarer and more significant. I'd recommend trying the campaign with No Confederation and possibly 100% No AI Cheats, and then just making it harder by boosting the chaos invasion for ME or by using additional mods for Vortex to tune the difficulty.

TLDR:
* Doomstacks make the campaign pretty silly. You can significantly delay them with unit caps mods, and since they apply to you too it arguably makes the game slightly more challenging for three reasons. 1- it's harder to cheese when most of your armies have balanced compositions and fewer elite units. 2- the AI is noticeably better at managing balanced armies 3- the AI is also better at effectively utilizing lots of low tier armies on the field; this can be troublesome for most players.
* Proving Grounds CA's experiment at making the balance of power more fragile, so snowballs can reversed more quickly. But it was still pretty rough around the edges. I don't think you can get rid of snowballs with mods. But if you install stuff like "No Confederation Cheats" you can make it so the smaller factions stick around for far longer and the snowball effect is more delayed.

[Man of Culture]

I play the vanilla campaign on Very Hard with battles set to Hard. I feel like that gives me a decent variety of units they send at me but doesn't give them too powerful a buff in the battles. I did a few runs with Very Hard battle difficulty but the amount of buffs they give to units like clanrats or spearmen is just too stupid. I don't think a Greatsword unit or a Har Ganeth executioner should take 20 minutes to whittle down a fodder unit.

I don't really need to cheese armies too much because that's not how i play the game anyway. I don't just build 20 stacks of archers or whatever kids do these days. I actually make compositions based on what I want that leader to have and I like to sort of invest partially in the role play.

I agree. I just don't agree with how CA is choosing to balance the game. It could all be fixed with better diplomatic options. It's fine that these races build powerful armies, it's natural and makes sense, but I don't agree with how single minded they are. The empire was literally at war with 5 other factions but they only sent their entire forces after me for the past 100 turns. They waged such war on me that they literally threw their own land away to chaos and scaven. That doesn't make any sense. Right now the diplomacy is just "I hate you because of these numbers.". It needs to be "I hate you because of these numbers, but, I see that you're low on the strength rating and I've lost 1 settlement to you in 20 turns whereas these chaos people have destroyed 3 provinces and are flooding my land with doom stacks so maybe I only need to send my agents at you and keep one army near you to make sure you aren't getting uppity."

You know. Sensible things. So I can cheese the vanilla A.I. over the course of 150 turns so that their single-mindedness gets them killed but that's not respecting my time and doesn't make the game harder it just makes it artificially longer. Instead of tuning HOW many doomstacks and HOW SOON they get rolling just adjust HOW the A.I. uses its resources and make diplomacy make sense. If humans threw away 20,000 lives in pursuit of my meager lands and I haven't made a single attack on their settlements that should not mean my relations with them are -350. It shouldn't mean black and white that they despise me and will not stop until I'm purged from the lands. They should simply agree that I'm not worth their time and do something else.

And if you think about it that's balance enough. If I'm low on the totem pole I don't the forces to take their land and defend it from a pushback anyway. So it isn't like I"d be able to just run rampant on them because they're being passive. Sometime passive works. Look at Escape from Tarkov. Not a game most of you are familiar with but it's a first person shooter that has both A.I. and PVP elements in short 50 minute sessions in a map. They had major issues making the A.I. dangerous but fair. They used to tweak their auto-aim, their movement behavior, their equipment and they just couldn't figure it out. If they made them too weak they got farmed, if they made them too powerful it wasn't fair to anyone new or veteran, so they tuned their behaviors. They tuned their aiming down but made them run away more than attack. You used to be able to bait them into coming right into you and it made them very predictable. Now if you shoot one they tend to run away 80% of the time to find hard cover and they'll stay there. So that makes YOU have to go find THEM. It added difficulty to them without making them unfair.

The same needs to be applied to the A.I. in Total War. Instead of tuning down the rate at which they choose certain units for their armies just tune the behavior of the factions. If they're strong but making no progress they should decide to use that strength where it'll get them the most bang for the buck. Like you know... Fighting the dwarves who are similar in power so at least maybe it'll be a give/take situation or a slow grind down of one faction and let me do something other than chevron up my meager forces and look at the same island for 10 hours.

[Sacrifice]

Its strange that people are being attacked by Norscan clans, I found when i started and moved to attack bretonnia and the empire, they all allied with me as they hate britonnia and the empire. The High Elves did attack me in endless boats as i sacked the empire land but I managed to hold them off until I could raise an army to start moving to them also. It does become a slog, but thats fun, stream rolling on campaign is boring, I play VH/VH with the SFO mod.

[Man of Culture]

Originally posted by Sacrifice:

Its strange that people are being attacked by Norscan clans, I found when i started and moved to attack bretonnia and the empire, they all allied with me as they hate britonnia and the empire. The High Elves did attack me in endless boats as i sacked the empire land but I managed to hold them off until I could raise an army to start moving to them also. It does become a slog, but thats fun, stream rolling on campaign is boring, I play VH/VH with the SFO mod.

I don't think a 'slog' is what you should define as 'fun', but to each his own. I prefer the challenge of overcoming an obstacle in my way but that obstacle shouldn't have to be overcome 600 times just to do one objective. A game that stops respecting the time of the player isn't one I want to play much of. Which is why as of late I haven't played Warhammer 2 as much because each campaign, while fun, eventually bogs down to a slow grind against an opponent that can take 200 turns to overcome. It's boring. I"m not saying I want the A.I. to just roll over but I shouldn't have to smash Volkmar, Karl and Boris into the dirt every 5 turns just to add 'difficulty'. If I beat them I beat them. I deserve the reward for beating three Legendary Lords. But that reward isn't there because you're spending time restoring your losses and building up the city you just took only to have those same three legendary lords with the same elite filled armies attacking you back. It's asinine.

[sentry]

Originally posted by The Merovingian:

I play the vanilla campaign on Very Hard with battles set to Hard. I feel like that gives me a decent variety of units they send at me but doesn't give them too powerful a buff in the battles. I did a few runs with Very Hard battle difficulty but the amount of buffs they give to units like clanrats or spearmen is just too stupid. I don't think a Greatsword unit or a Har Ganeth executioner should take 20 minutes to whittle down a fodder unit.

I don't really need to cheese armies too much because that's not how i play the game anyway. I don't just build 20 stacks of archers or whatever kids do these days. I actually make compositions based on what I want that leader to have and I like to sort of invest partially in the role play.

I agree. I just don't agree with how CA is choosing to balance the game. It could all be fixed with better diplomatic options. It's fine that these races build powerful armies, it's natural and makes sense, but I don't agree with how single minded they are. The empire was literally at war with 5 other factions but they only sent their entire forces after me for the past 100 turns. They waged such war on me that they literally threw their own land away to chaos and scaven. That doesn't make any sense. Right now the diplomacy is just "I hate you because of these numbers.". It needs to be "I hate you because of these numbers, but, I see that you're low on the strength rating and I've lost 1 settlement to you in 20 turns whereas these chaos people have destroyed 3 provinces and are flooding my land with doom stacks so maybe I only need to send my agents at you and keep one army near you to make sure you aren't getting uppity."

You know. Sensible things. So I can cheese the vanilla A.I. over the course of 150 turns so that their single-mindedness gets them killed but that's not respecting my time and doesn't make the game harder it just makes it artificially longer. Instead of tuning HOW many doomstacks and HOW SOON they get rolling just adjust HOW the A.I. uses its resources and make diplomacy make sense. If humans threw away 20,000 lives in pursuit of my meager lands and I haven't made a single attack on their settlements that should not mean my relations with them are -350. It shouldn't mean black and white that they despise me and will not stop until I'm purged from the lands. They should simply agree that I'm not worth their time and do something else.

And if you think about it that's balance enough. If I'm low on the totem pole I don't the forces to take their land and defend it from a pushback anyway. So it isn't like I"d be able to just run rampant on them because they're being passive. Sometime passive works. Look at Escape from Tarkov. Not a game most of you are familiar with but it's a first person shooter that has both A.I. and PVP elements in short 50 minute sessions in a map. They had major issues making the A.I. dangerous but fair. They used to tweak their auto-aim, their movement behavior, their equipment and they just couldn't figure it out. If they made them too weak they got farmed, if they made them too powerful it wasn't fair to anyone new or veteran, so they tuned their behaviors. They tuned their aiming down but made them run away more than attack. You used to be able to bait them into coming right into you and it made them very predictable. Now if you shoot one they tend to run away 80% of the time to find hard cover and they'll stay there. So that makes YOU have to go find THEM. It added difficulty to them without making them unfair.

The same needs to be applied to the A.I. in Total War. Instead of tuning down the rate at which they choose certain units for their armies just tune the behavior of the factions. If they're strong but making no progress they should decide to use that strength where it'll get them the most bang for the buck. Like you know... Fighting the dwarves who are similar in power so at least maybe it'll be a give/take situation or a slow grind down of one faction and let me do something other than chevron up my meager forces and look at the same island for 10 hours.

I get this. I've watched my buddies play Tarkov. The scavs are for most the part believable and immersive. You want the TW faction AI to also be believable and immersive (I do too, a lot). This is just a defect with Total War as a whole. TK and Troy are basically CA's first real experiments with more sophisticated AI. Until then AI factions have rarely felt believable, or if they played that way it was usually incidental or lucky in a fashion.

My point was more that, aside from waiting for TW:WH3 we kind of just have to accept TW:WH2 for what it is. The AI - tactically - is decent, with some exceptions like siege battles. Strategically, the AI is lackluster and more often than not factions don't play the way you'd expect them to. The difficulty settings aside from the Chaos size are purely artificial; they give the AI bonuses to compensate for logical deficiency.

I stopped playing on anything but normal years ago. I, personally, couldn't stand how ridiculous campaigns became when the AI had essentially infinite money and focused on you - the player- exclusively. In my opinion, artificial difficulty is never a good option and it's always better to seek higher challenge in other ways, like no save scum, extreme Chaos invasion, unit caps... while we wait for a sequel that actually makes noticeable improvements to the AI. I've been playing Skyrim a lot this year it's pretty much the same deal. The difficulty slider a terrible option for making the game more challenging because it just boosts raw stats (sound familiar?). I think it's always better to use mods to tweak the gameplay meta as much as possible.

[Shaman King]

The problem is 1 ai si controlling all the map while user is controlling 1faction. Soo. But mby im wrong i dont know. Its like in a two teams game its easy go for ai but in a game consisting of many factions all wanting to survive. I would like to know if the ai has separatists or its just 1 ai dude controlling all factions beside human

[Eternal President Uncle Slam]

Humans feel like they cheat super hard. Anytime I bring them down to one final city they confederate with another human faction and immediately start puking out 20 stacks of elite units out of their new city. I have learned to never beeline to Altdorf as chaos or beastmen because Karl will 100% confederate another faction if he loses his starting province. Got to kill every other human faction before finishing off Karl.

[Big Moustache]

Originally posted by The Merovingian:

Originally posted by Sacrifice:

Its strange that people are being attacked by Norscan clans, I found when i started and moved to attack bretonnia and the empire, they all allied with me as they hate britonnia and the empire. The High Elves did attack me in endless boats as i sacked the empire land but I managed to hold them off until I could raise an army to start moving to them also. It does become a slog, but thats fun, stream rolling on campaign is boring, I play VH/VH with the SFO mod.

I don't think a 'slog' is what you should define as 'fun', but to each his own. I prefer the challenge of overcoming an obstacle in my way but that obstacle shouldn't have to be overcome 600 times just to do one objective. A game that stops respecting the time of the player isn't one I want to play much of. Which is why as of late I haven't played Warhammer 2 as much because each campaign, while fun, eventually bogs down to a slow grind against an opponent that can take 200 turns to overcome. It's boring. I"m not saying I want the A.I. to just roll over but I shouldn't have to smash Volkmar, Karl and Boris into the dirt every 5 turns just to add 'difficulty'. If I beat them I beat them. I deserve the reward for beating three Legendary Lords. But that reward isn't there because you're spending time restoring your losses and building up the city you just took only to have those same three legendary lords with the same elite filled armies attacking you back. It's asinine.

/flashing text YOU LOSE /flashing text
/flashing text INSERT COIN /flashing text
Sorry i could not resist this one 🤐 Do not expect too much sympathy, this is what makes the game FUN!! (sarcasm)

[Empukris]

Yeah that is pretty much what an ordertide is except it is far worse than what you are describing. Imagine 4 races (empire, dwarf, brettonia, high elf) keep sending high end stack your way endlessly fill in with gold rank and legendary lords.

It is game over, you can create a doomstack on your own that can kill 3 stacks at once but the wave is endless and by the time you know the replenishment cant even keep up. You start to lose your doomstack one after the other. Thats when the game no longer fun for me, it is just tiring.

Unfortunately the startegy for higher difficulty in this game is to win the game before the AI can do this. The good news is the ordertide is kind of fixed for now as morathi counter high elf, undead counter the empire, greenskin counter the dwarf, brettonia counter by norsca. But if you have the opportunity to kill one of this 4 races early, i will take it everytime. Save yourself the furstration and kill those races early to save the problem later, especially the dwarf and the empire.

[JODEGAFUN]

Originally posted by The Merovingian:

I've played thousands of hours of Total War and dumped 700 of that into Warhammer 2, and I think the most frustrating crap I've dealt with is the seemingly endless loop of 20 stack rotations the A.I. constantly sends against you. Mostly just the Empire it seems. It seems like they still haven't done anything to curb the snowball that is the Empire. They confederate lightning fast and they constantly spam Volkmar and Boris and Karl on me in waves with 20 stacks with like 4 or more artillery and just won't let me progress. And god forbid I get a setback because then they just slowly eat away at whatever I capture. I mean I can kill all three of them and in the span of 2 or 3 turns they're RIGHT BACK with full armies. I just can't catch a break against them at all. It's like the game wants me to have to deal with a late game Empire rolling with 20 armies instead of being able to hurt them early.

/rant

The problem is that the only real opponent the Empire has early game are the VC, and as Ai vs Ai it is the most trash oponent you can have. The VC autosolve is incredible bad aiganst VC, if you play yourself it force to fight battles where you start with 2/1 more power than the enemie while autosolve say you should lose because your enemie field a full stack of spearmen/archers.
Result: most of the time VC got vrecked sooner ore later (only if Reikland is killed early, they survive).
Even worser, if they kick Vlad(and get his trait -4 wound time), Volkmar, Karl, Gelt and Boris come back in one turn, that means every stack is leaded by one of them and it does not matter if you kick them for the Ai.