My provinces keep getting the waterloo treatment

[CaptainGimpy]

How do you defend all your provinces from attacks? If I keep all my guys in one province, the AI will just go around that province and attack anything without units in it. If I seperate my units, the AI will gang up on one province. Every game I've played it has resorted to me playing a neverending game of 'chase the AI around your kingdom' until I give up and quit. How do I divide my forces so that I can defend my provinces while still being able to advance into enemy territory? I'm playing as Kailasa by the way.

[dirtywick]

Province defense helps, it gives you free units that will defend a province, although you can't script them to do anything or set their formations. It's on the same window as the province info near the income and all that, just click on the defense and raise it appropriately.

Another thing is to keep moderate armies in the middle of your empire to cut the AI off if you're having trouble keeping them out of your empire and supplement where you think they'll strike with that army and some PD. Or you can siege one of their castles, sometimes they'll pull back to get you off their castle.

[CaptainGimpy]

Also, while you're here how do I get over oceans? There's no option for building boats and none of my monkeys can breathe underwater.

[dirtywick]

Well, there's a few ways. Some commander units have an ability to sail, in fact there's a mercenary that can do it if you're lucky to find him available to hire. You can recruit amphibious units (right click on a unit to see it's stats, if there's a frog or fish thing there it can go underwater) from provinces you conquer, like Itchyids or Shamblers are somewhat common. There are also items you can forge, usually through water or air paths, that can let your commanders breathe underwater and even lead units underwater. There's also summons you can use, like Sea Dogs that can go underwater. From there, just conquer your way across the ocean.

[void]

you can go with a forged pocket ship, yay it's in the forge magic item, or you may just took a long travel on land. so far there's no "seperated island" w/o a path on land to get on.

[curtadams]

The most valuable trick is that the AI responds to what your strength was in the *previous* turn. So if you move from province A to province B you will often catch a defeatable force moving into B. The Dom2 AI was ridiculously easy to fool - it's better now but still often beatable. I do find that AI is prone to gang up on you and that's hard to deal with. I just barely won a game when 3 AIs jumped me. A high independent setting and lots of mountains help.

Another trick is that the AI is incredibly defensive about its home province. If you can get an army on it, all units in adjacent provinces will attack you every turn. That pretty much locks down an AI; you'll still have to deal with armies already in your territory but you usually won't see more. Of course the army must be very strong and if you can't keep an adjacent province any retreaters die.

As mentioned above, PD helps a lot. A large army seems to discourage the AI from attacking you but it's not perfect.

[Cainehill]

Actually the AI is pretty stupid right now, and _doesn't_ seem to respond to strength the previous turn. One of my MP games, Pythium's player went AI real early - I've kept the same army, with the same 31 PD, in the same province, and chewed up 3 attacks from Pythium's best troops. Things like 70 troops attacked, 56 dead, 0 friendly casualties (because the PD kept things from getting near my elite, armored, demonic, longbow samuraiwomen).

This happened three times in a row in one province (I'm staying there partly because I have a temple built), while a second province also slaughtered 2 attacks, lost to the third because I moved my demon archers out to cut off an army / province.