[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by HJ:
I've seen plenty of AI priests. Who else would build a temple in every province otherwise?

After some prolonged games some points seem to be ok as far as I was able to tell. There are enough mages, commanders have items and gems on them, when the AI has enough troops it sticks them on the border, etc.

However, there are some points that still stick out. The main one is the lack of forts beyond the starting one, which leads to the lack of national units. There are heavy units in those armies (a lot of militia too, but they are there), but they are indie heavy infantry and cavalry, and not national ones. It's kinda odd when you fight IF Ulm and its whole army is brown and not black in color, and not a single templar in sight. This leads to the lack of supply and starving armies as well, since they recruit a lot of cheap units that then require a lot of supply. So this is all interlinked - no forts->reliance on indie militia->cheap units->numerous armies->big supply requirements->starvation due to no supplies->no forts. And they even take cheap forts (usually mausoleums), so it's not like they have to have tons of money to build them. They certainly have no problems with building temples everywhere. Labs are there, but I haven't seen one in provinces that give access to indie mages yet.

The AI gets forts sometimes (events, sites, conquests) and likes to have them, but I do not think it builds them. As you say it would probably do much good if the AI knew where to build forts and saved money to do it when not in war. I suspect that this is the change that would improve tha AI the most. I hope something can be done about it without too much complications. Currently the AI is somewhat based upon each individual commander. Together they work as an ant hill, but the ant hill itself has few goals. To add a queen to the hive mind will probably not be easy (and I suspect that a queen is needed to decide where to build a castle).

Another thing is gem income, which seems to be rather low. Also, it does seem that the AI empowers its pretenders, but I don't know whether it does that to his mages as well, both to make them stronger in their starting paths and to diversify them. If they don't diversify or empower, they cannot do searching very well, and I don't know how the AI handles the site-searching spells and whether it uses them at all. This would also be linked to alchemy - I don't know how the AI handles conVersion of gems, and whether it does that at all, and this would help with empowerment and diversification. Those things are very hard to tell, especially in game that takes so long to get to later stages and hence get a good sample size for judgement, but low gem income is readily observable in score graphs.

The AI empowers mages. I have come across a mystic with 7 astral that doomed my poor tartatian titans when I stormed the Arcoscephalian home.

I'm not sure to what extent the AI uses search spells. It generally prefers normal search i believe.