Ekaton
Posts: 254
Joined: 9/30/2013
From: The War Room
Status: offline
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I really like this game, there aren't many good real-time games that offer a more realistic and in-depth experience.
I've noticed that one of the selling points of AB is its AI. So far I've only played custom battles of various sizes, always against a much stronger opponent, and I have several points to make:
1. The AI does a decent job on the defense. Its units are deployed really well - I was especially pleased to see how well it uses forests to hide its tanks which opened fire from the flank on my unsuspecting tanks traversing a plain.
2. On the offensive, however, it performs far worse:
- The artillery strikes are very well placed and shattered my static forces more than once, but are not timed properly at all - smoke starts popping from the beginning of my scenario, way before the advance group arrives (it took the first enemy tanks more than 20 mins to arrive), which could be a distraction, except for the fact that the artillery smoke support actually got less effective just prior and during the enemy assault itself. This is a minor issue as overall the artillery was quite effective.
- Far more profoundly, however, I've noticed that the enemy tank groups are too far apart and don't concentrate fire properly. It's all too easy to set up your tanks on a hill overlooking the road where the forest ends, the tanks which passed the forest road would only then be visible to my units and vice versa. The result is predictable - a whole group of tanks on the hill will start shooting at a single Soviet tank the moment it exits the forest, following the road. No enemies attempted to drive through the forest to attack me from multiple spots at the same time, covered by the trees - they all followed the road to their doom. It could be understandable if one unit tried this, not knowing about my trap, with the next company attempting to do something different, but in larger scenarios, there is a company after company doing the exact same thing. To sum up, the enemy forces never arrive in any significant number, and their moves are never coordinated in any meaningful way, making it all too easy to achieve a very local superiority of fire with 5 tanks vs just one or two enemy tanks at any one time.
- Suicidal mechanized infantry - Soviet forces that contain both armoured and mechanised units don't minimize the risk faced by the weak armoured cars - instead of attacking tanks with tanks, they will push dozens of armoured cars and infantry against my tanks, resulting in a massive slaughter. At times tanks would attack somewhere else (which would make the mechanised attack understandable as a decoy, although usually overly costly and even reckless, resulting in unnecessary losses), but more often than that, the tanks would attack alongside the armoured cars, and often would not be present in the first wave (arriving a few minutes after I was able to destroy a dozen or so defenceless BRDMs).
- Infantry AI seems to be too careless - it would often attack much stronger entrenched mechanised infantry, resulting in a predictable slaughter. On occasion, it would repeat the attack, with the same result, fully knowing the size of my forces in the area and the overwhelming odds.
So there you go. I was, at times, really impressed by the AI, but the lack of any coordination, especially when there are multiple obstacles along the way like forests or water, means that the enemy never arrives in overwhelming numbers, even when he has as many as 10 times more tanks than I do. It's way too easy on the defensive.
< Message edited by Ekaton -- 12/1/2018 11:01:18 AM >
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