I don't really like how the strategy AI focuses so much on protecting their capital. It makes it one tough nut to crack but I feel that they use too few forces to actually fight you in the rest of the map and just hoard troops in their capital.
Update:
I just finished off a campaign to fully test this overhaul of the strat map AI and I feel the strat AI is a big step back from earlier betas. In addition to the capital hoarding problem the AI has started to feel more like a roadblock to victory than an actual opponent out to win.
While before I felt that it tried flanking with transports/air units a bit too much, at least it did it. I have never seen an AI attempt to flank once in the campaign I just played. Also it defends provinces worse. Rather then keeping a few units in the backfield to defend against flanking and keeping most of it's forces on the fronts it seems to evenly spread its units across all of it's provinces (except for the capitol which has TONS of units). This means it is really easy to advance as if you have at least around 7-10 units (depending on type) you can usually sweep aside the enemies 2-3 units with almost no casualties. The AI rarely attacks in force at all. It has always tended to attack with less forces than the player but now it rarely ever uses more than 1-2 units in an attack. It also doesn't seem to take my forces into account at all (2 troopers attacking a group of 5 hunters 3 armors and 1 bomber balloon) which only seems to serve to drain their gold while my units take no casualties.
An example from my recent campaign (Medium Difficulty, Little Rivellon, 2 vs 2, I switched spot 2 and 3's factions so I was allied with slot 2 against 3 and 4). I spent the first 2 turns expanding and then the next 3 turns building up 3 groups of units. After that my 3 main groups of units slowly moved up 1 space a turn wiping out the enemies token resistance with almost no casualties. I put 2 troopers in every land behind my main 3 armies and used the rest of my gold to reinforce my 3 main armies. Very soon I had their capitol surrounded (with 15+ units in it). Now THAT was finally a tough fight and took out most of my forces to take but my economy was just so much bigger because he didn't really contest the rest of my expansion that he couldn't compete. After 3 more turns of reorganizing and reinforcing my depleted armies I repeated this trick against the remaining AI. The entire campaign took around a little over 20 turns and I never lost a single battle (and never took serious casualties except at the capitals) despite auto-resolving all but 1 RTS fight.
I don't consider myself a pro player either and actually used a fairly basic strategy (get a big mass of units and send them screaming towards the enemy capital), but that was entirely too easy. It felt a bit tougher in earlier betas where the enemy would actually attack you with more than 1-2 units at a time and actually had kept units in territories that weren't capitals as well as flank.
On another note I think that the casualties from the RTS map is bugged. I don't remember my exact force composition but I know I had 4 armors. It was a big fight where the entire population as depleted and at the end of it I had an extremely tiny army (that only had 1-2 armor units in it despite the fact that I had easily produced 40+ of them during the battle). As such I expected when I got to the post battle casualties I would lose at least 3 (if not all 4) and instead all of them survived (in fact my entire force survived). When I looked at the built/lost statistics to see what was going on they displayed a 0 in both stats for all of my units.
Edit - My thoughts after I finished a whole campaign.
Last edited by Ravenhoff; 04/08/13 08:52 AM.
