[HJ]

Originally posted by Wendigo:
I disagree, the AI will charge with its heavy cavalry towards your pikemen formation, while heavy punished by missile fire & while exposing its flank to your own heavy cavalry...that doesn't strike me as bright. More often than not the opposing commander will also be leading that Heavy cavalry unit instead of staying in the back.

I said "as far as the AIs go", not when compared to Napoleon or Alexander the Great. Very few games have anything comparable to TW AI. The AI is exploitable, for sure, but it can perform really well. If you see another game with the AI that can perform flanking and combined arms attacks, let me know.

I consider Dom's scripting powerful enough to not really miss the full control of other games, you basically replace battlefield maneuvering with mage power & special units. If any, with more variables to account for I consider Dom AI more difficult to program, with TW it's just a matter of 'do not fight X with Y in terrain Z' (and it doesn't even do that).

And all the calculations are done in real time. (I'm not a RTS fan, I'm just saying why it isn't comparable). And what other variables might those be, btw? I mean, since there is no terrain, no formations, no charge bonuses, no accurate targeting? As I said, if given tactical control over the battles, then we would be able to somewhat compare the two. This way, it's like letting AI control your units in TW. I don't know about you, but I would be pulling my (remaining) hair out. And I do that in Dominions as well.

But then, if you autoresolve you have no tactical AI at all.

Just comparing the numbers, right? Nothing you can do about it? You just see the end result? True

Maybe you did not understand my (hypothetic) example: the turns are supposed to be simultaneous but they are not, when playing its turn in the strategic map in Shogun:TW the AI does so with the knowledge of the orders you just issued, so it has full knowledge of where your armies are moving.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the TW games & consider them revolutionary, but that was certainly not because of the AI, but because of the great atmosphear, the powerful tactical engine that allows for all those battlefield maneuvers with huge armies, the historical settings...

They are not supposed to be simultaneous, and they are not. You take this into acount when making moves that it's IGO-UGO (sort of), and not simultaneous.

I also liked them because of all those things, but I also find them to put up a decent challenge. More so than vast majority of other games. Since you're talking about Shogun, may I suggest trying out MTW if you can find it on sale (I guess it's really cheap now) if you haven't already? Although it lost a good deal of atmosphere that STW had, some other things are greatly improved nevertheless.