Auto-resolving became a crapshoot when besieging Greek or rebel cities with a superior force in numbers AND general AND EVEN weapons would give me a " While my game have always had a higher win than lose ratio, ever since I've been fighting most of my battles, I've rarely ever lost. Only twice has the enemy hurled his general at me, both in my campaigns as Epirus (my custom added faction): Hanno, Shofet of Carthage, charged against my Thessalian cavalry on my far left flank, and would have succeeded in doing some serious damage if Pyrrhus weren't handy nearby. Lucius Aemilius charged my Phalanx center, but only after Velites hit them, and Hastati were following behind Aemilius. A bit stupid, but substantially better than cavalry alone. I wonder then, am I a good commander, or is the computer, even with the improvements of BI 1.6, blazingly abysmally incompetent? To support my claims of good leadership, I've fought two RTW multiplayer battles against my friend and won. He's the kind of RTS player who always crushes me in Warhammer 40,000, Age of Empires II, Rise of Nations, and sometimes in Starcraft, though we've fought countless stalemates there. The first battle I was Parthia and he was Sparta (Greece actually, but he only chose Spartan Hoplites and Cretan Archers and Rhodian Slingers). I had a typical array of Persian Horse Archers, Archers, Slingers, Eastern Infantry, Hillmen, and a few cataphracts, not too many, and I crushed him! Even though my victory was Pyrrhic, it was still an amazing display of tactical ability on my part, as more than once his Spartans were chasing my routing units en masse (and this was before RTW 1.5, so Spartans had 3hp)
I recognize the gripe over RTW AI incompetence, but I'm using RTR Platinum with Barbarian Invasion 1.6 and I've never encountered an enemy that was abysmally stupid tactically or hurled their generals constantly against heavy infantry or spears.
The second battle I was Pontus and he was Macedon, and while our Phalanx was engaged, my Cappadocian Cavalry sped off behind his lines, routed his Companions, and dissolved his Phalanx in less than 10 minutes. He got pissed and left. Crushing Victory for me.
So my command skill is quite good, and while I'm a stickler for strict formation, I know how to operate individual units on special moves (such as using Cavalry as arms, etc), but is the computer really blazingly incompetent or am I just too good for it that it needs some extra balancing against me?
in addition, I always play my battles Very Hard