Top 5 Total War Cheating AI 

"Sassanids take no attrition when walking through snow regions" Sassanids: oh we just pretend its white sand and problem solved, but don't tell anybody.

TOP 5 ROASTS WHEN DOING DIPLOMACY WITH LORDS.

Emperor Karl Franz “I see you are about to destroy my faction” “It would be a shame if I were too...” “CONFEDERATE!”

When you are an one-province minor in Rome 2 and attack one fellow minor, but he can muster 2,5 stacks and you're broke with one stack... 👍

Cheating AI in strategy games is just a way of managing difficulty without having to actually build an AI competent at the game.

Personally I found the AIs ability to know exactly where every single army on the map was to be one of the most annoying cheats they got. When playing as a Horde faction in Attila and WH it got ridiculously obvious that the AI knew where my weaker armies were and what the best rout to force march around my larger armies to get to them was.

AI: gets cheats Me: slowly opens the steam workshop

Another mechanic I've seen the WH2 AI ignore outright is Under Cities. When the player is against Skaven, he has to scout out ruins to find them. When the player is a Skaven though? Not only does the AI know what ruins belong to the player, it knows if the ruins have walls or not. That's some bullshit and completely messes up a core Skaven mechanic.

Number one gotta be immunity to Realm Divide in Shogun 2

"Cheat wherever you can. A.I.s are handicapped. They need to cheat from time to time if they're going to close the gap... Never get caught cheating. Nothing ruins the illusion of a good A.I. like seeing how they're cheating." - Jonny Ebert, lead designer of Dawn of War 2 on video game A.I. Always remember this quote when talking about AI. Cheating AI needs to be far more subtle.

Top AI annoyance? No fog of war ensuring that the second you leave a border undefended someone will declare war on you and hop from province to province sacking and raiding untill you squash them. Knowing your exact move range, the AI will exploit this to raid and sack your provinces but always ensuring you are just outside of attack range, essentially kiting your army so step 1 can happen on another front. Ridiculous armies, The AI with 3 minor provinces can field 3 elite armies, every turn, while you struggle with upkeep for one elite army with half the map under your control. This is all total war warhammer mind you.

In Rome 1, don't forget that the AI's can give themselves free armies and generals inside the fog of war on the campaign map. Turning off fog of war using cheats disables this. Fortunately the free armies they get are usually full of trash units.

I really love in Rome 2 how a nation can have one settlement and 3 full 20 stack armies while I care barely maintain 2.5 with a small empire that I have to defend. It is also really cool in warhammer 2 when random armies appear out of nowhere. Super fair.

Top 5 Mercenary Units in Total War. Still gonna try and add this :>

I've also - frequently - seen factions confederate several times within as many turns. e.g. the last session of the game that I played a week or two ago, I saw Lothern confederate with Tiranoc one turn, then confederate with Yvresse the very next turn! No forced five turn cooldown or anything. Such bullshit. Still a good game though.

The AI also gets to confederate every turn if they want (in TW: W2), whereas the player has to wait 8 turns between confederation attempts while suffering huge penalties the entire time.

"Sassanids frolicking in the snow" lmao, thanks for that image

I remember my first time playing Rome 2, I ignored politics and just conquered, big surprize when 75 % of my empire and 5 of my elite armies rebeled, good f*cking times

Me playing Rome Total War: wow, I wonder how amazing the AIs of the future are going to be. I bet they will be able to control their empires sooo much better we will need cheats to win. Me seeing new total war games:

Legend : Presents the Attila TW AI with no attrition, full army regeneration ... Also Legend : "Now let's move on to the biggest buffed AI in all TW" Me : "Wait WHAT ??? This is only the second one ??"

This makes me think of EU4 where a valid strategy to remove a major threat was to beat them down into bankruptcy until they issued an update effectively making the ai immune to bankruptcy

Imagine playing against an AI opponent in chess where everytime you take a piece from the opponent it respawns in 5 turns, the opponent can make a move that leaves their king in check so long as simultaneously spawn a pawn to block the line of attack will block the check, the opponent's pawns can move backwards, and after their pawn makes six moves in any direction it automatically gets promoted to a queen.

I just had a freakin super cheat in Warhammer2, I was besieging a settlement with a garrisoned lord and just before the city was about to fall, the lord escaped!! Garrisoned lords cannot leave the settlement while it's under siege for the player!!

When you assassinate a general in an enemy army, but the AI magically replaces him the very next turn. This seems to be prevalent in all Total Wars

Me: *about to go to sleep. LegendofTotalWar: *uploads top 5 video. Me: I don't need sleep I need answers

It's kinda boring watching a lot of these WH campaigns now, knowing the endgame is going to be fighting wave after wave of either dwarves, empire or lizardmen. Like, when's the last time you've seen Malekith in Lothern? Or say, Throgg in Altdorf? The 'evil' AI factions really need some buffs.

Rome 2 ai always stopping right outside maximum army movement range so you can never attack them until they take a settlement

Suggestion: Top 5 Most Destructive Units/Abilities (naval bombardment in fall of samurai, explosive rounds in cannons on empire, warhammer stuff, that sort of thing)

In warhammer the AI only wait 1 turn for any unit. I was about to attack Teclis army full of shaft in the turtle island but was short and had to wait the turn. he was recruiting then. Next turn he had 2 sun dragons and a moon dragon

Im currently playing a Empire campaign where the dwarves got wiped out by the greenskins, casual 50 settlement Grimgor on my doorstep by the time Chaos decided to show up. Very interesting campaign all in all.

I hate when difficulty is incresed with cheats instead of AI be actually better.

17:49 Dude I was genuinely glad to hear you say that about TW: WH2. The theme and pacing of the game and your play style has been so fun to watch. I"m super happy to hear you cheer it on a bit. 😸

Me:taking all the attrition Sassanids:skipping through the snow regions whistling a tune

One that my friend and I kept seeing in Total Warhammer 2 was full movement after razing settlements, including going into marching stance to get centimeters out of your own attack range. All of my cities torn to pieces by Grimgor because he has more campaign movement speed than I do.

In Rome 2 I remember my greatest Diplomatic achievement in a Hard/Hard Carthage campaign as Barcids, was assassinating one of my best generals that belonged to another party that was giving me hell from turn 1. He had all the worst traits like zealot and disloyal and I just could not get them to calm down. So I killed him and put down the succession immediately since they were stuck on islands and couldn't get inland before I had a full fleet and land army ready to take back the provinces. After that bastard was dead and gone. I managed to keep the other parties from successions for the rest of my campaign but had I let that guy live he would of cause a full blown Civil war in my massive Carthage Empire while I was fighting in the middle East and Black Sea

Its always fun when playing empire total war and firelock armed citizenry manage to beat cavalry in melee because of ai cheats

shogun 2 should be higher on the list, the ai constantly cheats with agents and their succes chance and the game doesn't tell you about it just like in medieval 2

By Grungni's Beard!!! Cheating Dwarves?!!! I swear there's gonna be a page just for longlegs like you in the great book of grudges.

Playing TWWH, I manage to get a lot of campaign movement buffs which has me zooming across the land, but apparently all the sudden the AI also has huge amounts of campaign movement buffs and are able to outrun my extra 60% campaign movement buffs (not exact), even so much as going around 1.2x further than I can, they're not even force marching, and have 0 heroes in their stack that could possibly grant this amount of buffs, not to mention it was only turn 50.

There is something Legend missed about Shogun2 AI. It had the ability to upgrade units from Ashigaru to Samurai and afaik it only worked for Yari and Bow. Due to this their starting armies been way stronger than the once the player got.

For Attila you forgot that you have to kill Attila repeatedly to actually kill him.

Legend is going to begin a live stream soon and declare this video as a “failure” after only releasing it for about an hour.

A lot of possible AI techniques are described in Russell and Norvig. Having a functional AI that can take incomplete information into account, prioritise whether to move through or encamp to avoid attrition, and optimise build orders and recruitment are definitely possible. It is just difficult to make such an AI process the decision-making search fast enough. So usually we use heuristics to simplify the problem and reduce the search space, but these cheats are just easy ways to do so and while plainly ignoring the game mechanics that apply to the player.

Well the shogun 2 AI needs every cheat it can get, because you can basically win every battle with the most basic units. I used to have 1/2 stack of horse archers followed by a stack of infantry army (ashigaru + archers). Attacking with the horse army first, retreating and then just wiping the enemy stack with 0 loses.

I would be very interested to see you rank every TW:W2 legendary lord that youve played a lot with from easiest to hardest

Huns made me give up on Attila, everytime i managed to fight them off they came back instantly, it was just stupid. Plus they always Razed the settlements and it was HUGE the amount of commitment you had to put to improve one, so the fact they could instantly destroy it all was insane.

The AI in TWW 2 gets a huge boost for Magic as well. Single spells wipe out entire elite units while your magic may (if you're lucky) take out half a stack

TBH that's why I love Shogun so much, it's your much smaller force going toe to toe with much larger forces. That added with that quicker breaking of units just makes it a joy to win those battles using strategy while other Total Wars feel dry.

When i play empire nobody will ever confederate with me but it feels like everyone else confederates every 5 turns. They can also have massive stacks that are impossible to afford with their single settlement.

I've spent something around 800 hours playing Total War Rome 2 and I NEVER cared about securing loyalty or anything. My strat was to use only generals from my family. That's it. If any family revolts, they have no skilled general with highly experienced army (usually my armies were on level 5 or 6 without champion and Max level with champion. My generals were also usually high level) so they have to train a new one. You just come in, slap them and win, easy

This video was going to be a Dwarf rant from the very beginning. And I love it :D Roast the stunties!

Love your videos, mate. Keep up the good work! :) And don't forget those sexy thumbnails.

Top 5 Weakest Lores of Magic in Warhammer

Have you considered that the players faction has something to do with which ai gets these buffs?

Nice video, but I'm surprised that from 11:43 to the end the camera just stays on this last defenders and dwarf armies. I think it would have been better to at least show screenshots of the empire provinces, or dwarf realms while talking about them. Nevertheless thanks for the vid!

„Know How“ - Oh you mean the blessing and the guidance of Jeff

Finally we got top-5 video and this seems to be a really good one Keep them up, man! p.s. We remember you saying about top doomstack video ;)

Oh wow im early for a change. Love your content!!! And i don't even play the game lmaop

Yeah, on that subject of Rome: Total War, I remember I did a custom battle once against the hardest AI, and my units started routing virtually the instant the lines met.

Naggarond is starting to become new dawi. I'm now almost used to seeing 60+ settlements with them by turn 120

Hahahahhahaha i just waited for the nmr 1 spot to be Warhammer 2. Classic Dwarfs turn 3 karak barr confederation. But the bigest grudge i have for the ai are the lizzardmen and their cheat stacks. After turn 60 they just start confederating all of lustria and start steamrolling. They have all the legendary lords ( Tehanuin Tiqtaqto Gor-rok ) and doomstacks of blessed dinos. Be prepared to get some anti larged spray or never establish new world colonies. Keep up the good work legend. Love from Syberia

Only bretonnia in hand of player can unite faster then AI

I had a game in warhammer total war where I was dominating as clan skyre (legendary difficulty). From turn 60-70. The empire confederated with an elector count each turn. Now, it's turn 72 and they contain the entire empire when just 10 turns earlier they only controlled middleland/reikland/solland.

@legend. For Shogun 2, the ai gets .5x +/- clan estates for every difficulty away from normal, if I recall it's +1 for legendary for a total of 3x or 3600 clan estates. However if you mod the clan estates down to 0, they also get 0 on legendary.

You should do the top 5 most historically accurate factions in total war!!

Notice anything funny about this list and the direction of the AI.

I would love to see top mercenary units in total war. Felt so cool to have unique units to consider your special forces so to speak

My review of Warhammer 2: -The next Total War game is a direct and immediate sequel to Warhammer and they're planning on making a third… -Ooooh, will it never end?...:( suggestions: -Top 5 introductions/cut-scenes -Top 5 historical battles(not most difficult)

Just watch Legend's live streams for a top 5 ways of Breaking the AI for easy victories against ridiculous odds.

I remember, when i played rome total war. IT was genius. I loved it. But, i remember the frustration when i bought rome II total war, and some minor faction threw full stack army at me every turn. And they had only one province. I kept killing the troops, and there was more and more of them. That totally ruined my opinion about total war.

warhammer 2: shits out an army in 4 turns troy: *shits out an army in 2 turns*

I feel sometimes TWII AI also have damage output/resistance buffs instead of attack/defence buffs like in other games. I tested in some custom battles, you kill lesser units with your ranged or atillery units in harder battle difficulty.

*Top 5 ...* "You mean all?"

Oh man, in my last campaign (playing az Ikit), the greenskins killed the dwars and i was so happy. Then Karl came, and rekt everyone, ending up having almost 100 settlements on turn 90.

The way to disembowel empire is to vassalize it's potential confederations. Not allowing it till chaos invasion to be brought to the Fold gives you a chance to take reikland giving you a slight edge but it's very hard to do timing is so clunky and based on hard luck but it's most effective. Though this is a vampire counts campaign with so many armies ramping my strength rank allowing me to vassalize probably only bretonia can do the same doubt greenskins or others can ramp up so many lords to meet the seemingly needed strength rank to vassalize multiple empire province. Tldr: divide and conquer the same goes with dwarves but they'll confed automatically someone else when you take silver road province.

-Ikko Ikki ravaging the land, declaring themselves Shogun. AI: I sleep Me, barely managing to hold onto Kyushu AI: Real shit??!!

Top 5 best UI in the Total War games, which ones have a more organized interface.

one cheat you haven´t touched is that the ai got those regiments of renown, even though you, the player, can´t recruit any because you haven´t bought that specific dlc for ~20€

I think the unlimited ammo for ranged units in rome 1 is also worth mentioning, it can be a really pain in the ass in some situations

I got 1k+ time on both tw:warhammers and you're very right about the greenskins. That being said I now have a mortal empires campaign going as Karl Franz where somehow the dwarfs, karak kadrin AND clan angrund got whiped out by a unstoppable amount of greenskins, every time I get vision on them theres atleast 4-5 stacks together with some of them having waagh's following aswell. I managed to unite all my provinces but now im stuck between a giant sea of greenskins and and the chaos invasion from the north, quite a exciting campaign and this might be the first time I have to send you a savegame !

I cant remember which it was but i was playing rome 2 i was at rome and for me i was holding this pne settlement that was making the germanic confed very angry and i held that thing for 5 turns town was hella defendable and then HI 4 STACKS OF 20 UNITS

Try playing as Huntsmarshal's Expedition in WH2 on legendary difficulty. Things get ridiculous once you have level 4 or 5 hosilities

Actually I believe the experience gain was introduced in Thrones of Britannia this anecdotal experience but I conquered the map twice and at the end game I was constantly fighting Irishmen trained by birth on spartan ways on legendary and their infinite full gold experience armies.

Okay, that snow-attrition resistance has to be the biggest steaming pile of bovine excrement I've heard of in Total War, other than "A.I. Scrying--Sense Player Crying."

: Legend of total war here me: aaaaa

Love how they dont have to worry diplo relations to confederate.

With mods (in particular SFO I believe), AI Dwarves are total pushovers. By turn 40 they are usually eliminated by Greenskins, who then merrily proceed to invade the Empire with 7 full stacks.

Nice! Used my Total War video submission! Thank you! However, I disagree with Empire, mine are usually weakened or exterminated by undead (please see the save your disaster battle/campaign of Chaos I sent). Dwarves or Orcs seem to be a 50-50 chance, but whoever dominates takes a lot of land. Elves are usually the biggest confederators and most likely to dominate. It's insane. Undead/pirates sometimes can persist or expand because their corruption and recruitment is an advantage.

I low key found a strategy to slow down the agressive confederations from the empire, high elves and dwarfs, but it doesn't work for every faction. Being military allies (or even better, vassalizing) with a strong faction of those races slow down a lot their confederation speed. They still confederate with the minor faction, but it takes longer for them to confederate with the major factions of their race. I made an alliance with Nagarythe as the Exiles of Nehek early on and it was soooo much better than declaring war at them. Lothern was not able to confederate with them so fast. Also I was able make them a vassal (don't ask me how), and by doing that Lothern was never able to confederate with the other elven major factions that were still alive, like the Order of Loremasters, because they were not big and powerfull enought. Similar things happened when I played as the Wood Elves and made allies with all the dwarf minor and major factions I saw on the map. They stayed fragmented until late campaign. That doesn't work for a lot of factions tho. The dark elves will never be able to make Nagarythe as an ally, so Lothern will always confederate and start making doomstacks of phoenix and dragons lol. As Greenskins and Vampire Counts you'll never be an ally of the dwarfs or the empire. As the skaven, the only factions that would like you are the ones that can't confederate or get rekt by other ai anyways.

Top 5 doomstacks coming soon?

Legend what is the strongest faction in each total war game starting from Shogun1 and ending with three kingdoms in your opinion.

I quite liked this video, it really gets down to the mechanics of total war's difficulty design

So your telling me that the first total war game I bought. Cheats the most.

Another big problem in regards to warhammer 2 is the dwarves and empire will always end up allying with each other (along with other factions). Meaning you will literally be up against like 20 full stack armys to your three stacks

Feel like the dwarfs in warhammer really depend on the difficulty . I know a lot of wierd stuff happens down the turn in every game . But i´ve seen them quite often getting wrecked too , like the flatnoses wipeing clan anground , or the bloody spears takeing the dwarf capital ( yep that happend )

On my first Mortal empire campaign (which i started two months ago) the dwarves were entirely wiped out by Black Crag and the tomb kings dominated just about everything south of Sartosa. The empire was doing just fine, of course. Overall I was pretty surprised.

Top 10 unit that are shit in single player but are absolutelly beastly in multi?

Top 5 regular lords Top 5 heros Top 5 items in warhammer Top 5 mods Top 5 mod makers Top 5 features warhammer 3/Troy need to add or remove

Are the confed buffs stronger on higher difficulties? On Normal Karaz a Karak usually doesn't go nuts with the confederations until ~turn 100.

Shogun 2 does one other thing you didn't mention, it upgrades ashigaru troops to samurai for free. If you want to test that you can go into a single town faction and fight them. You'll notice they have samurai units they cant' actually train. When you get their town you'll see they don't have any way to actually train those units. It's because they just flat out get upgraded from the low tier units to samurai for free as long as you don't have eyes on the army.