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Grognot -> RE: Current difficulty? (3/19/2010 8:02:17 AM)
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A friend and I are playing against five 'hard' AIs, with us as Austria and Prussia. Observations iin this 1.07.01 game include:
- Russia DOW's Sweden and didn't even enter Finland, let alone Sweden. Instant lapse.
- Russia is nominally at war with Turkey, with no forces anywhere near, and with its army mostly in St. Pete.
- Turkey DOW'd Egypt, sent only a single feudal corps into the Sinai, ran into my in-your-face defense w/ one Egyptian corps, and let the war lapse by running back across the border. Hello, Austrian Egypt... and even during the present Austrian-Turkish war, the Turkish fleet has made no attempt to land anybody... anywhere at all. The Turkish transport fleet *did* make an unescorted trip to deliver a massive force of zero corps to a port in Palestine, where there were also exactly zero Turkish factors anywhere near that could be picked up. This got them blockaded and annihilated when the Egyptian corps dropped a one-factor garrison there.
- Turkey has frequently had long depot chains to nowhere, and even with the extra money from 'hard' is having trouble managing its finances resulting in starvation.
- Turkey is nominally at war with Austria, but has made no attempt to invade other than a tentative solo one-area advance with the Syrian corps... which ran away when confronted. The Austrian forces near them have mostly been patiently waiting, not rampaging, and the majority of Austrian forces are much closer to the French.
- Likewise, Turkey is at war with Russia, but Turkey appears to make no attempt to actually wage war on them, nor to declare a peace. Russia and Turkey are acting like a non-existent white peace is in effect.
- Great Britain's fleet has spent the majority of its time hanging around off Stockholm. Ditto for the British troops. Never mind that Great Britain is at war with nobody but France and Turkey, neither of whom poses an obvious threat to Sweden under most circumstances. Must be the blondes.
- France's fleet is content to let itself be blockaded even with massive odds in its favor and the near-certainty of capturing Admiral Nelson, who tends to be on tiny stacks.
- France's Napoleon is often found managing the home front, leading a small rear guard at Paris, while Ney was given the I and IV Corps. When attacked by an Austrian stack of a few corps under Charles (not all, the rest were glaring at the Turks), Ney -- not exactly a leader with high strategic rating, and with the advantage of defending against a river crossing -- well, Ney chose "withdraw" and failed, resulting in the near-total destruction of the previously full-strength I Corps with precisely zero losses to Austria. There *is* a dangerous-looking French Stack of Doom, but Napoleon is nowhere near.
- France has managed to lose all its minors in the first few months by landing in instability.
- France has pointlessly sacrificed PP by attempting to illegally declare war on a minor when there were British corps in French national provinces.
- I have seen exactly zero attempts by the French AI to really exploit the double-move potential, e.g. by attacking two stacks in a row with the same Stack of Doom or the like.
- Spain DOW'd Algeria, and let the war immediately lapse.
Quite a few of these strike me as significant regressions. The Russians used to march a single corps into Finland (but not the capital) to prevent that war from lapsing, the British fleet tended to be blockading the French fleet in appropriate strength rather than hanging out with the Swedes, the Turks used to move in force on Egypt, and so forth.
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