Empire Total War II: The AI

So, more thoughts on Empire Total War.

The Total War series greatest failure has always, always, always been its AI. Frankly the AI in Medieval Total War II and Rome Total War never really impressed me. Shogun Total War struck me as hard, but I was a little kid so I can’t really comment. Empire Total War has the same problem that previous total war games have: Bad AI.

Oh sure, the AI can be annoying. In fact the Mughals really did a good job harassing me on account of my weak navy. But once I got a strong navy they kinda… stopped doing that. The Mughals, in their existence, only attacked me once. In twenty years, something like 40+ turns, while I conquered province after province I a slow and steady advance, they only attacked once. I crushed their attack quickly. The real time battles are equally frustrating. It often seems no matter how badly I play I still win. Honestly I don’t mess around with the real time battles too much, but basically if I have about the same soldiers at the enemy, I win. Sure, I do think I beat the Mughals on account of my superior forces in terms of quality, and a well placed charge or flanking attack, but then I played some skirmishes with some various forces and every time I won easily. It wasn’t even difficult… the enemy advanced and I killed them with musket fire and flanking attacks. I don’t think I even played very good, I just kinda messed around.

Having said all this the game has an awesome campaign map. I think they should probably really focus on hammering out the AI, making it equal to games like Civ 4 (the AI is HARD to beat in the game). I don’t even need good real-time battle AI (it’s fun, but time consuming, especially since it’s so easy now to get huge armies). I just want to know what the Mughals did with all their money… I cannot imagine that in the early game I had more money than them, especially with their blockades. Yet they didn’t seem to build many soldiers and my 3 armies slowly conquered their entire empire without a single defeat. Seriously, I think I lost like… 3 battles, all naval, and only 1 against the Mughals (the others were pirates). It was really… really weird.

In other news, I have new speakers, M-3 Audio. Awesome things.