I had a campaign mode that lasted many turns, thanks to the RTS mode not crashing (maybe because of 2v2?), so I was able to play and watch the AI at work. It is much, much better. Good job, Larian. It uses cards, it gets different upgrades in different orders. I actually saw one wait until the 9th turn or so to get the Grenadier upgrade that it used to get on turn 1 or 2.
It also forms armies much better, and while it still occasionally sends suicidal forays pf single units into heavily populated territories, it now forms groups and responds to enemy movements better. I had taken Starlington, had built a war factory and was planning to use it as a staging ground for and invasion of Hawksbury, but the enemy added additional units, and this is important: without taking any existing units away. That raised the Entrenchment there to an uncomfortable 80%, so I didn't feel comfortable invading.
Then I got a break. There was a major battle in Herbosos, in which the enemy suffered massive casualties, but my ally did as well. I sent my invasion fleet to there instead to reinforce the position, and to use as a stage to invade either Stormbridge or Frostberg (I chose Stormbridge because both had equal forces and it was closer to an enemy capital.
The AI actually was smart and reinforced both countries with troops as I invaded, and the other enemy AI invaded a poorly defended country near by Capital with a weak Transport + Grenadier force.
I won that big RTS battle pretty well, but had to quit the game during the second one because it was suffering from extreme lag, and consuming 1.3 GB of my 4 GB of RAM all on its own. I suspect that this was in large part because the AI was creating a bajillion tiny-supply units. There were streams of mostly Troopers pouring constantly from the red base in a 2v2. I suppose I might theoretically have held the assault off, I had Devastators, Shamans, and money, but the lag completely sapped my will to play. Well, that's not true, it only mostly sapped my will to play. The fact that the map was the terrible, terrible, Falcon's Rocks sapped the rest of it.
So with that nitpick aside, I really, really like the improvement to the Campaign AI. This is going to be fun to play against (once it doesn't crash so much and I can save progress because wow campaigns take longer than I have patience to play all at once), so great job, Larian!
