Total War: WARHAMMER II

Total War: WARHAMMER II

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AI Recruitment Overhaul - More Army Variation
   
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Tags: mod, Campaign
File Size
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1.121 MB
Mar 8, 2021 @ 12:57pm
Aug 4, 2021 @ 1:20pm
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AI Recruitment Overhaul - More Army Variation

In 1 collection by Jadawin
Jadawin's Game Overhaul
30 items
Description
TWW2 is no longer getting patches or DLC, so my mods are also considered final and will not receive any more updates. Therefore I disabled comments on all of them to avoid constantly getting notifications for the same dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times already. Any comments or announcements I might make in the future will be posted under my collection here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1766089433

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The AI creates pretty decent armies nowadays but CA gave only two army templates to most factions, so many armies feel kind of the same. I made new templates and completely new unit groups to tell the AI more specifically which units to recruit, so that they make up to 12 different armies per race. Some will be balanced with different unit types, others will have a strong focus on cavalry, monsters or flying units.

At least that was the plan. I think I have achieved some success, although the result is not as different from vanilla as I had expected it to be. I've put more time into this mod than any other, but had to start over several times because the result was much worse than Vanilla. Now I think it finally does not make any armies that are worse than Vanilla, and occasionally they are better and more interesting.

Turns out that there is a LOT of uncontrollable randomness in AI recruitment. This randomness makes the Vanilla AI create already relatively diverse armies out of only two templates. They sometimes even look thematic but it's just an accident. Unfortunately the randomness also prevents the creation of very specific armies where you tell the AI exactly what kind of unit to recruit in which numbers.


Features:

Some AI armies will have a strong focus on one or two unit classes and not be 'balanced', for example they have a large number of cavalry, or monsters, or flying units etc - this is intentional.

Therefore armies of the same faction can vary wildly in overall strength and cost - this is again intended.

When similar unit types of different tiers are available, the AI will prefer the better unit, but only modestly - it is intended that the AI still also uses cheaper units even if it could make all-elite stacks.


Limitations:

DOES NOT RECRUIT CUSTOM UNITS FROM UNIT MODS unless their creator specifically adds support for this mod.

Still produces tons of crap armies, same as Vanilla. Small factions that have only a few settlements, cannot create great armies.

Even large factions often create crappy armies (but also good ones) because they start recruiting in a province with no good recruitment buildings.

In general the AI can only recruit what it has the buildings for, so how well they outfit their provinces limits how well they can recruit. But AI province building is actually pretty decent these days.

When you see armies that have ten artillery pieces or a dozen direwolves, that is not intended - but it happens in Vanilla just as often. It just means the AI had no other recruitment options in the province where it made the army.

Last of all the goal here was not to make armies that are as hard to beat as possible - it's about variation and sometimes getting a surprise. To make battles harder, check out other mods in my workshop.