As I mentioned elsewhere, I've made a Ninja/Ronin tree from a stripped down version of the Japanese mod. After much play testing and rebalancing of various unit factors, it's working well and is very addictive. The thing is, the CPU AI teams seem to choose the highest unit up a tree, so to speak, which isn't always best.
For example, I have ronin (swordsmen), a few of whom can transform into ninjas. Swordsmen are fast, fairly well armoured, and do a lot of damage. Ninjas are faster, do a great deal of damage very quickly, but are weakly armoured and so can be mobbed and killed quite easily. Before dying – as a tactic a human player may enjoy using – they can transform into a daemon to confuse enemies. Daemons do little damage and don't last very long when attacked, but they do draw away attackers from another ninja so that mayhem can ensue. But here's the problem;
As the daemon unit is at the top of the swordsman/ninja/daemon tree, the AI 'promotes' swordsmen » ninjas » daemons in the home village before any fighting has even begun. This leaves useless AI daemons lurching around, whereas removing the daemon morph option causes them to promote just to ninja and the fun begins. I'd rather have the ninja/daemon morph if I can.
Is this standard behaviour, and should it be..? (And is it in the coming GAE 4?)
