This post is to keep you informed on how the development of the mod is going for WH2. I'll update it regularly when I can.

UPDATE 05/03
The Advanced AI mod for WH2 can be divided into different areas of work, each will be a part of a whole.

1) AI budget and income management --> DONE
For the AI to be efficient at building, recruiting or campaigning, it has to learn how to manage its economy efficiently. In vanilla the AI keeps lots of money under its bed to ensure it will never go bankrupt. In the mod the AI will be better at spending its money, whether it is budget allocation or income management while avoiding bankruptcy.

2) AI province/horde management --> DONE
The core of the mod, now the AI knows what to build, when to build it and where to build it. This is very important because buildings are everything in this game, without them there is no economy, no armies and no empires. It's useless to tweak the AI recruitment or its budget management if its build order is bad. It's sad that the AI builds pretty much randomly in vanilla so I have to revamp the entire building system for the AI to maximize its efficiency. This represents a massive amount of work, half the work on the mod actually.

3) AI unit recruitment --> DONE
I haven't started working on it yet but I have so much experience with this so it won't take that much time to do. That being said, I still have to do it from scratch for all the new races in WH2 but I won't have to test them as much as I did for the Old World races because I will use the same values and the same system (different from vanilla). It will even be optimized from what I did in WH1.

4) AI skill selection --> DONE
In vanilla whenever the AI has a skill point, it will randomly put it in any available skill leading to very bad character development. High level AI Lords are so badly built that you can easily dispatch them with a low level Lord of your own. In addition, didn't you sigh a lot when you confederated a LL and you saw how bad he/she was with no possibily to get them better? Now the AI will pick up the character skills based on three categories:
- category 1: must have skills, mainly skills unlocked at a specific level and spells/abilities so the AI will pick them up when available.
- category 2: all skills that are not in categories 1 or 3, so mostly yellow and red skills. So whatever skill is picked up it will always be a useful one.
- category 3: useless skills for AI, like blue skills that are redundant with AI cheats (and thus not needed) or very useless skills like Indomitable, or mostly all skills the AI can't take advantage of like the very specific ones.
Needless to say that this area will require a huge amount of work because it has to be done for each Lord and Hero in the game!

5) AI usage of spells and abilities in battle --> DONE
I managed to drastically improve the AI usage of spells and abilities in battle in WH1 and now I have to do it for all the new spells and abilities that the AI uses badly or doesn't use at all in WH2. It will take a bit of time but not that much as I have a good understanding of how the heuristics work now.

6) AI unit roles in battle --> DONE
I managed to change how the AI uses some units on the battlefield like most Lords and Heroes, but also Lizardmen dinos, HE Lothern units, DE Shades, Flying monsters, Miners with charges; Flame Canon, most of monstrous infantry, some cav and Free Company. The list of changes is too heavy but the point is that the AI is using them better now.

7) AI strategic decision tweaks --> DONE
I had done it for WH1 and now I just have to tweak it for WH2. The AI will be more aggressive when at war and more focused on where to expand.

8) AI personalities tweak --> DONE
I'll have to remove the stupid avoid and anti player traits from all AI personalities, fix some inconsistencies and improve small things here and there.

9) AI better horde handling --> DONE
I took my values from WH1, the AI now knows how to play better with hordes.

10) AI cheats rebalanced --> DONE
Minor changes here, only for two visible cheats (all the other cheats are unchanged):
- The upkeep reduction bonus the AI gets on H/VH/L has been increased by 5%. It's a small bonus to allow the AI to handle higher tier units because it will get access to them sooner in my mod due to much better build orders. That won't make the AI recruit more units as it is a compensation.
- The public order bonus has been decreased by 2 for each difficulty level so it was +6 on Hard and it's now +4 instead. That bonus is needed for the AI especially when it has to deal with corruption (the AI doesn't see corruption at all) but CA buffed it a bit too much, now it's better.

11) AI campaign balance --> DONE
Some factions when played by AI will receive a small buff to compensate for their situations as the AI has trouble playing with them. From what I'm seeing so far, those factions could be Bretonnia and Empire because they're as weak as they were in WH1, and also Dwarfs and Skaven because CA's terrible autoresolver works against them.

12) AI diplomacy --> DONE
Some minor but necessary changes here. The AI bonus to confederate has been reduced and it is now SLIGHTLY easier to sign trade agreements with neutral factions (you should be able to sign trade agreements without having a non aggression pact now). Also the Empire factions now all share a +10 affinity like the bretonnians. Still the ones that get the distrust the Empire trait at the beginning will have -15 aversion so beware of those.

13) Improved Chaos Invasion --> DONE as a submod
In vanilla, Chaos armies go straight to the player and don't spawn with any DLC units, making them unbalanced and repetitive. Besides Chaos Lords and their armies were supposed to be a challenge when the event started around turns 70-80. Now it's just a joke with small armies and low level characters. This will require heavy scripting and a lot of work.

14) Advanced AI Hardcore Edition --> DONE as a submod
A Steam player who goes by the name of CNorris asked me for a hardcore version of the mod because he can beat the vanilla game at Legendary difficulty without looking at the screen.

15) Agent Limiter mod --> DONE as a submod
Now that the AI is truly capable of building its provinces, it will also have access to numerous Heroes because CA allows to have too many per province imo. With my mod it's not rare to see AI armies with 8+ Heroes after 100 turns. This will limit the number of Heroes available per province so you can still have as much as you want but you'll need to build more for it, while keeping the asymetrical aspect of the game. In effect the bigger your empire the more Heroes you'll have which is only logical.

16) Full support for Cataph The Southern Realms and Kraka Drak --> DONE as a submod
Full support for the AI to use the new buildings, units, skills and abilities included in those mods. The mods won't be included however so you'll have to subscibe to them separately if you want to use them.


FINAL TESTING --> IN PROGRESS

ETA --> depends on the final testing