Windows Rome II Total War

Greetings!

 

I'm still not convinced by even that kind appreciation form Kotaku that TW Attila can redeem creative from the sins of Rome 2's launch. It's true that it improved drastically after over a year of patching and largely improved with the free Emperor edition update, as well as the Caesar in Gaul DLC, which worked very well due to a more of focused map and other gameplay changes.

Attila is still getting very Mixed reviews on steam, despite an 80% metacrictic overall and even at it's recent sale price of 10 quid, some of the comments made about it are very off putting. Maybe the Age of Charlemagne’ is to Attilia what Caesar in Gaul was to Rome 2?

 

Greetings!

 

I had a go on Rome 2 last night, been a fair while since I played it. Definitely much improved, even since the Emperor edition, which itself has now been patched a few times. However I still find it way more playable with mods, like the Radius mods for example.
Sadly, CA just made too many core mistakes in the grand campaign, most of which are address via the popular mods.

And the Battle AI oh the battle AI, An example being, I was ambushed in a 'force march stance', by a full stack and another full stack of their re-reinforcements. So my units were stretched out in a long column from the get go, I only just managed to get my units into some form of defensive line when the enemy smashed into my units. The enemy stack 1 out numbered me 1800 to 1150, with another 1500 of their number in re-enforcement coming my way from the edge of the battle map. Bear in mind Auto resolve says I have no chance to win!

With the help of repeat charges into the rear of my enemy, while my legionaries held the line, I managed to all but wipe out the first stack, loosing I reckon a few hundred men. I re-organised my line, managing to get my ballista into a semi fire position to a valley on this very hilly map and then nothing... no one comes my way, with 1 squad of enemies at the top of the opposite hill. So I waited assuming they were forming up for a flank or charge. Nothing. To get a better view, I sent a squad of Equities to the top of the hill and find every single enemy unit, clumped into one big mass not moving. They don't even bother to chase my Equities who are now in spitting distance.
They still outnumbered me nearly 2 to 1, I had no Spear Auxiliary so would have been vulnerable to their 4 units worth of shock cavalry and my ballista would have only been useful for a limed time as the enemy ran down into the valley, once up the other side, it would be too close to my own legionaries. So I just waited out the timer, as the attacker the onus is on them to defeat me to get the win.

To me, that utterly ruins the immersion and is either a bug or bad AI coding, even after all this time that the AI still don't behave as broadly expected.
Unless Attila has addressed the crappy battle AI from Rome 2 then i'm still off put. I can never quite shake the feeling that I could be playing the much more mechanically sound Shogun 2 and Fall of the Samurai and the only reason I put up with the crap from Rome 2 is because I like the setting so much!

Although, given my love of the series overall, I may well just bite the bullet when I next see it on a sub 10 quid option.

Is the Attila AI any good, or at least not crap?