i ve been playing empire recently but the AI is really doing its best to ruin my fun.
playing as prussia mostly on very hard, for starters because i have a prussian family background and secondary because with the naval invasion bug everyone s talking about i decided to focus on good old fashioned land warfare.
but so far most outta my prussian games had to be abandoned around 1720-1730 because of the sheer lack of challenge and easyness to take whole europe by storm.
only 1 game actually played out "very hard" because i got into a 4 front war with austria, bavaria, poland and hannover at once - leading to my end in 1716, but at least it was tons of fun fighting for survival with berlin switching owners 6 times before they beat all my military and captured my last region.
otherwise the AI has been dumb as shit so far. especially poland. does CA have something against poles ? their AI regularly sends SINGLE units (sometimes even a single cannon unit) against my regions guarded by 6+ line infantry. often 3-4 times a turn.
other factions at least manage to fight with proper armies, at least sometimes.
most hilarious moment in one campaign was that i ended up making poland-lithuania a protectorate and giving them all the territories back that i conquered from them. i wanted basically a strong poland to guard my east and help me against austria later on.
and they thankfully took back those regions.... except for actual poland (warsaw) ???
i was trying to gift it to them, heck even aided by a further 3000 bucks bonus payment, yet they still refused to take their former capital back over and over.
a few years later the warsaw neither me nor poland wanted ended up in austrian hands as i didnt bother properly defending it. heck, actually i wanted exactly that because maybe then my polish allies would finally take it back by force when it wasnt working as a gift before...... and as expected since i was beating the austrians in prague and before vienna .... the poles marched their troops, 3 armies each with 4-8 units in the region around warsaw - which according to my spies was garrisoned by only 4 austrian units. i thought next turn finally poland would get its capital back ... but no - 10 turns later the same 3 armies were still standing in the same places, not having moved an inch, not having engaged in combat once, not even trying to siege warsaw. they did absolutely nothing despite having 3-4:1 numbers vs. the warsaw garrison, and despite them not being in another war that could divert attention for them.
...
i dunno, i remember the MTW2 AI wasnt great either, but empire has seriously hit a new low for me personally. which is pretty bad, considering i d love to enjoy the rest of the game, but its hard to keep playing when nobody stands a chance against you.
same happened in MTW2 too, but not quite as fast as in empire unless my memory s playing tricks to me.
do Darth Mod and Imperial Splendour (or other mods) provide at least SOME challenge or is E:TW a lost cause for now ?
