Surprisingly challenging A.I

[KarlXII]

I have just started my first campaign (Colonel) and lost the war in the second scenario of the Low Countries. I regard myself as a veteran Panzer General II player and average strategy player.

For you potential buyers out there, this is for you.

I am a bit surprised - in a positive meaning - of the A.I I´ve seen so far. Remember, I´ve only played two scenarios in the campaign. Poland and the Low Countries.

This is my perceptions:

- The A.I is extremely good at picking weak targets. It even almost sacrifice itself to be able to smash a troop crossing a river or which is in tranport mode. It even bypasses several of your units to be able to reach the weak, slowmoving artilleries you´re moving in from behind. This make the A.I very, very dangerous since it could easily destroy weak units you retreat with. This of course, is only possible if the A.I can see you by aircraft or recon vehicles.

The good thing about the A.I is that it does not spread its attacks but mostly tries to gather on one selected target to destroy it. Just like a player does.

- The A.I defends its victory hexes vigourously with whatever it got. Anti-Air, Anti-tank...it doesn´t matter it tries to retake the victory location by any unit or preventing you from occupying the hex. This means you have to destroy every single unit around every city you take which both slow you down and inflict you lossess.

- The same goes for the use of it´s aircraft. It really tries to hit the weak targets.

There is one thing I wonder about the A.I though. It seems there are an invisible zone around V.P cities that makes the A.I not let go of its support units to move it forward to defend other threatened cities. It´s like they begin to react only when you are within a certain range from it. That´s not good since the initiative will then always be in your hand on when and where to attack. I´ve only seen tanks or other tracked vehicles being used as some sort of allround force. But never artillery or infantry trying to backup threatened areas. Is that by design or does it gets better ?

Another thing is that the A.I. more often than not moves out from his VictoryPoint hex just to take an easy hit on something and leaves the city unguarded and give up a good entrenchment level. I hope that will looked over in an upcoming patch. It could be reasonable in some circumstances but mostly not.

My summary with my few 8 hours with the game is that the A.I seems tougher and better than I remember Panzer General 1 or 2 ever was.

So congratulations to the developers of this game and I hope the A.I will be even more improved in upcoming patches.

[GlobalExplorer]

I don't see much difference between AI in PC and PG. They behave more or less the same, which is already a partial success for the developer because it could have been worse.

I also thought the first scenarios felt a bit harder, but imo this is only because at release PC is somewhat less balanced than PG. The AI is able to throw even more tanks, airplanes, battleships at the player than PG, and of course this makes decisive victory more challenging.