Ridiculous

[chals]

Because the elite won't have any expertise with naval stuff, and neither would any of their forebears. ships are things that other countries have always built. why would they even care:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGyJOX5wFFg

Hire a english naval engener & his crew to teach you + 20 teack lvls - get over with it.

 

[Ricox]

Play a whole game. The further you go, the further the AI will lag behind. The reason is a combination of its incompetence (using minting to support itself instead of simply having a smaller military and reducing spending) and the player's ability to game for tech advantages such as always having good tech advisers and adjusting your sliders to negate tech penalties.

By the end of the game, you can be at least 20 techs ahead of most of the other western AI states, no matter how big you are.

Concentrating on one and switching is also inefficient since the more you concentrate on one, the "more ahead of your time" you'll be with that tech and thus get penalties for research. Concentrating on a few (preferably land and either government or navy) and then turning up others (production and trade) when you need them makes you less likely to be researching things that will give you penalties.

Uhm, you probably misunderstood me. It was meant that you put all of your investment money into 1 tech, then when it levels up - you check whenever to switch to another tech or continue with the one you're researching already, not to gain 10 levels without switching to any other tech.

 

[unmerged(463662)]

Uhm, you probably misunderstood me. It was meant that you put all of your investment money into 1 tech, then when it levels up - you check whenever to switch to another tech or continue with the one you're researching already, not to gain 10 levels without switching to any other tech.

It's not difficult to get ahead of time penalties in most of the tech groups.

 

[Ricox]

It's not difficult to get ahead of time penalties in most of the tech groups.

I'm not sure what has that to do with anything I'm trying to explain to him. He thinks the method I said is enormously overresearching in a single tech that takes it to way higher levels than the rest of techs and keep doing it. The method I specified was what the AI does - spend all of its investment money into 1 tech, then switch over to another tech when it's leveled up (or continue investing in the same tech if needed), of course also some goes to minting (but that is irrevelant).

 

[Maraxus]

@Inflation: With my Sibiri Horde, I'm world leader in inflation. Although at the moment, I finally have cores in my realm and loose a steady 0.20 inflation a year for not minting at all, so it's just like 100 years and I'll be back at 0.

@OP: I can totally feel with this, never had to much problems with the Emperor, but I feel the same hate for France. It happened a few times before: I play a nice little game, everything is fun and then France declares his war of utter hatred. For whatever cassus Beli they find but they do not really care about that one. France just keep going on and on without reason or sense, I can offer them anything, they just want to continue. I kill their armies, drive war exhaustion up but they keep coming in countless masses. slowly my own manpower goes down, my war exhaustion goes up and after a few years I break. And France just keeps going on and on destroying me utterly, and won't stop even for the best 100 point defeat offers from me, they want nothing of this war, except death for me, so they conquer everything, drive war exhaustion up to the maximum and ruin my economy (besieged/occupied provinces earn no money) and wait some time until all my other neighbors have realized that I'm easy prey and have declared war on me, too, and then they give me a peace that hurts me well even thought they get mostly nothing from it and then, the mass of rebels that spawns everywhere and all the other wars I have now eat up my maimed remains.
Jerks.

In fact, even if everything else about stability and tech is frustrating when playing hordes, one great thing is, that the AI is very reasonable: They want land, or sometimes money and when they have chances to get it, they fight on and if it looks bad, they try to get the best peace deal out of it.

 

[Viperswhip]

The AI in the game is great in some ways, managing wars, especially if they have plenty of units, deciding to attack or not to attack a particular stack and so on.

It is good in other ways, pretty decent at managing their economy and research, good players will beat it, but that's gaming.

Then it is also abysmally poor in other ways. I like to play for a while as a nation, then save and load up other nations from that save to see how the AI is really doing. How about EVERY country having 5 magistrates sitting there while they have 1 or two star great men? Now, playing as Biz you are pretty lucky if you start with a 3 star, or even have 3 choices to start, but over the next 20 years or so, you can hire yourself a full crew of 4-5 stars. The AI SUCKS at that. It obviously does not know how to manage magistrates.

In one game I remember the Horde did not even have 5 merchants in its own CoT, and had all 5 merchants sitting along with 5 of everything else (only 2 spies though).

Bottom line, the reason why you see people saying that Navarra is easy to win with is because, other than some completely random luck on Aragon's starting mission, you should have no problem beating the AI if you are familiar with all points of the game. How about joining Castille in a war on Morocco and grabbing a province to produce Charge Cavalry. You will be 50 years ahead of Aragons cavalry then. The AI does not even use the best units available to it most of the time, despite it only takes about 3 months for the morale to tick back up to 100.

So, what's ridiculous is blaming the game for running into too much trouble when it is very handicapped in a lot of ways.