lack of AI Aggressivness

[com-intern]

Hi all,

I've been doing my first play through of the grand-campaign as the Axis and am now in 1943. I've felt that the AI has become increasingly passive as the war has continued. Up through Summer of '42 the AI was attacking my forces and generally being more active. However, that summer I manage to destroy a large pocketed force at Leningrad (capturing the city) and in the South between Cherkassy and Nikolaev. All told this was around 1.3 million men captured.

Since then the AI has continually tried to create defence-in-depth wherever my Panzers go but it has not attacked me in literally months. Essentially allowing me full initiative even while most of my line is being held very thinly by individual infantry regiments with no reserve.


My feeling is that the AI realizes they have lost too many men and as a result are playing very defensively, but as a result never tries to launch an attack even though they should still be able to generate some local superiority. This creates a self fulfilling prophecy in many ways because without trying to attack they are ceding full initiative to me and I can concentrate my Panzers with no need to hold a reserve. Allowing again and again to launch successful attacks creating even more casualties.


Fundamentally I'm wondering if there is a way to improve AI aggressiveness or if better offensive AI will be in the making for WITE2 (or possibly in WITW currently). When reading about playing against the AI I see many recommendations to increase the stats of the AI but when the AI is being active it is a good challenge for me and I would not want to increase the AI resilience if I would still see similar lack of AI action. Because my fundamental problem is that the AI is sitting around with many forces but is not using them to impact my ability to have full initiative.

[eskuche]

Most people’s response will be to get into PvP
In lieu of that I think developers’ recommendation is to increase enemy morale.

[countrboy]

Played a couple of games against the AI and always found that it stopped attacking around 43 onwards, which kinda took the fun out of it. As suggested, the best solution is to play PBEM or a server game.

[com-intern]

Will increasing the morale increase the likelihood of the AI attacking? Because as countrboy said I'm running into this issue where the AI will not attack - not even to recover a pocket and that is taking quite a bit of fun out of it. If increasing the AI difficulty simply makes it harder for me to attack then really all it is doing is making it more of a slog than it currently is. And again my suspicion is that the AI is doing some calculation that it has insufficient force across the front compared to me, but literally all of my panzers and mechanized troops are fighting outside Baku which should give them some capability to at least attempt to relive pressure anywhere else on the front.

PvP is maybe something I will try with WITE2 but currently I don't have the time for it. Since quarantine I've only gotten more work - which I am thankful for - but makes much of my game playing a forced single-player affair.

[Sammy5IsAlive]

My impression is that a major issue with the AI in the 41-45 campaign is that it doesn't seem to have any coherent approach to building the 'Red Army 2.0' that is required to shift the initiative.

I think that if you avoid exploiting the occasional AI idiosyncrasies it can be a semi-competitive Soviet opponent through 41 and into 42 with the harshest blizzard settings before it breaks down. Similarly the Axis AI can be competitive on the defensive if you use one of the later campaign dates. If you want to practice managing the Axis defensively in the late war the Soviet AI with some game rule boosts will be an active opponent in that period.

I'm in a similar position to you in terms of having the free time to play PvP. One thing I've found enjoyable is playing the smaller scenarios against myself.

[Karri]

I've played around with the editor, and the AI is pretty much coded to only attack on certain odds. Once you stack enough CV in level 3 forts the AI won't attack even if it has a 50 million man army.

[com-intern]

ORIGINAL: Karri

I've played around with the editor, and the AI is pretty much coded to only attack on certain odds. Once you stack enough CV in level 3 forts the AI won't attack even if it has a 50 million man army.

That is unfortunate. There is no way to mess with AI values correct?

It does speak to my assumption (I previously finished the 41-45 campaign as Soviet) that the AI might actually be trying to play the game as well... a game. Rather than playing it as a historical piece. I noticed the German forces largely stopping any offensive attacks by late '43. Although the Germans would still counter-attack to prevent pockets from forming. I've felt in both this current game and in my game as the Soviets that the AI would be much better served if it were to be making attacks more aggressively even if the odds were not totally in its favor.

I also have a minor collection of Glantz books and something that sticks out there compared to WITE is that historically both forces were far more prone to launch attacks against poor odds.


Edit:

And yes Sammy I was having quite the game up into '42 using full Blizzard but after my victories in the summer/fall of '42 its almost as if the AI left the house.

[4key]

In the editor "Attack Stance" and "AI Usage" can be modified for the '41 Campaign. Pages 18 and 88 of the editor manual discuss it; I've found each start year increases the value of AI aggressiveness, but campaign '42 is set to use campaign AI and nullifies its attack stance (making it the same as '41).