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madmac posted:The AI will offer surrender now, and the expansion has a "Seals of Power" feature that allows you to win the game without literally owning the entire map. Excellent thank you. That alone, well and the cheap price, is enough for me to buy it as soon as its released.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:19
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Delacroix posted:Even if moving armies during a battle on the map is something the devs wants to avoid, being able to do empire management would be nice. The option to change city build queues, research items, strategic spells, create magic items or even plan automoves for the next turn could reduce some of tedium.
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Sep 14, 2014 17:44
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a!n posted:This is why I only play 1v1 with friends. We just can't stand simultaneous turns. Pretty much. It's been a problem since the dawn of multiplayer in this style of TBS game. If you want to support a lot of players in a turn based strategy game, you've got to either find a way to make turns really short, or have a truly simultaneous "orders queue" system like Dominions, Stars!, Combat Mission, Frozen Synapse, etc. And neither of those things really jive with the style that AoW is going for.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:36
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Even the older Age of Wonders games multiplayer scene almost entirely endured as play by email games, honestly. I'm sure you can find some diehards posting turns in obscure forums for Shadow Magic to this day. Of course, that way you're just trading the ability to be super-careful with your moves and AI battles for having all your human fights automated, but it at least allowed for much longer games. I can't remember anymore how active multiplayer worked in those games but I think it was basically the same as now, auto-calc all day.
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Sep 14, 2014 20:49
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madmac posted:Even the older Age of Wonders games multiplayer scene almost entirely endured as play by email games, honestly. I'm sure you can find some diehards posting turns in obscure forums for Shadow Magic to this day. Never played PBEM with this kind of game. How are tactical battles between players handled? Do they just schedule a time and play a few turns during which battle is likely to occur?
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Sep 14, 2014 21:04
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madmac posted:Even the older Age of Wonders games multiplayer scene almost entirely endured as play by email games, honestly. I'm sure you can find some diehards posting turns in obscure forums for Shadow Magic to this day. Didn't shadow magic work almost exactly like AoW3? I remember playing it with friends just before 3 released and was amazed at how effectively implemented multiplayer was for a game so old. I think it also dragged players in to spectate battles, which was fine with just two people playing with relatively few battles. The only reason this has really become an issue with AoW3 is that the game is so very good and popular, and decent internet access and steam and voicechat and the like exist now, so more people want to play together. This is a good thing! It does really bring that one issue of battles in simultaneous turns to the front, though. edit: Now that I think about it, Master of Orion 2 had multiplayer with simultaneous turns by default, and that is even more dated. I think what moo2 did was if multiple enemy groups ended up in the same space they would fight a series of battles, in the order they arrived in. Then again I think the MOO series was built from the start so that even single player games functioned under this kind of simultaneous system. Carnalfex fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Sep 14, 2014 |
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Sep 14, 2014 21:06
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a!n posted:Never played PBEM with this kind of game. How are tactical battles between players handled? Do they just schedule a time and play a few turns during which battle is likely to occur? I never actually did PBEM, but my understanding is that everyone played a turn and emailed it in a loop. You could play normal tactical battles vs the AI, but player fights all had to be auto-resolved. I believe the devs are working on it for this game in a "someday maybe ever possibly" sort of way. quote:Didn't shadow magic work almost exactly like AoW3? I remember playing it with friends just before 3 released and was amazed at how effectively implemented multiplayer was for a game so old. I think it also dragged players in to spectate battles, which was fine with just two people playing with relatively few battles. I think it was basically identical, yeah. I can recall choosing to fight out a tactical battle vs one of my friends and having the third player snigger at me watching I lost four stacks to his one. (Stupid lovely Tier 1 Draconians)
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Sep 14, 2014 21:12
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It's an objective fact that having simultaneous manual battles in multiplayer would improve the game 100x Please support it here http://ageofwonders.com/forums/topic/suggestions-and-ideas-for-implementing-simultaneous-manual-combat-into-mp/
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Sep 15, 2014 00:38
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While I'm on a slight nostalgia trip, I feel like taking a moment to rant about SM Draconians, because gently caress those guys. You people who started playing with 3 don't know how good you have it with your cool, fast healing Draconians that just go around, being good and stuff. You see Draconians in AoW2 were the worst, and also the best, which is why they were the worst. Bluntly put, they had (arguably) the best Tier 4 unit in the game, and that's the only reason you ever played them, so you could fart around with garbage units for a couple hours and hope you weren't too far behind by the time you teched up to Dragons. Every loving time, like some kind of scam. "This time it will be fun to play Draconians!" you lied to yourself, cheerfully. (It never was.) Anyways lets start at the beginning, with Hatchlings. Like AoW 3 Draconians, they literally send babies into battle, because Draconians are horrible monsters and even worse parents. Hatchlings were pretty much terrible, but also ranged, and therefore the best unit you had up until like Tier 3. Seriously, it took me forever to accept this because no one wants to win a game by waging war with infants, but that's what incompetents Draconians were. Their best fighters were poison spitting toddlers. Hatchlings did have one crippling weakness, and that was their damnedest tendency to grow up and become useless (Tier 1, not ranged) adults instead of mildly dangerous babies. Not only were your cities cranking out child warriors nonstop to fuel your diaper clad war machine, but you needed constant turn over of freshly born hatchlings to take over for the legions of the dead or adolescent. (As good as dead.) Next up, you had the Charger. The Charger was pretty much the same as he is in AoW 3, except that in SM, the small damage boost Pike units had did nothing to offset their horrible stats, so you didn't build them ever. The Charger was no exception, except for the fact that he was the only melee unit you had period until Tier 2 so hahahahahaha gently caress Draconians. Also a Tier 1 barracks unit, you had the Flamer. The Flamer was sort of similar to his AoW 3 counterpart, except instead of being a deadly ranged aoe bomber, he just lazily breathed out a small cone of fire up to a maximum of three times per battle. He was also your slowest Tier 1 unit, had 10 HPs, and smelled bad. In all my time playing SM, I don't think I've ever experienced the rush of having a Flamer waddle all the way up to the front lines alive and use his stupid breath attack that also didn't do enough damage to kill anything in one hit ever. Mostly they just specialized in dying quickly and messily. You could kind of almost use them as a garrison unit to discourage bunching up on doors, but that was it. The second any Flamer stepped out of town he would immediately be struck with an arrow from four times his effective range and die instantly. Now at this point, building your stacks of Hatchlings that aren't even good, I know what you're thinking. "But MadMac" you say, foolishly, "Why not just quick tech to Tier 2 and build better units?" Oh you fools, you dammed fools, it doesn't get any better. Building a Warhall unlocked two more units, both Tier 2. The Slither and the Crusher. Spoiler, they both sucked. The Slither was the more heartbreaking of the two, because you could tell he tried so hard. He was fast! He had concealment and could climb walls! He could use either melee or ranged attacks! Well, that was true. You could use Slithers as scouts and they were kinda ok in that role. You know what their primary attack was, though? Fricken Spit Poison. For all his fancy James Bond tuxes and never stirred martini's, you were still paying as much as two hatchlings for a guy who did as much damage as one hatchling, and worst of all you liked it. Next up for me to mock is the Crusher. Oh, the Crusher. Not in AoW 3 at all, oh no. He wasn't even good enough to whip together a decent version of. You see, every other race at Tier 2 got a Cav unit, a fast, fairly tough, hard hitting melee unit that you could lean on as the backbone of your military until Tier 3. Draconians got the Crusher, a sad sack steriod user who was too bulked up to move any faster then minimum speed and too clumsy to throw a decent punch. Nope, all he had was an above average HP pool (20) and Wall Crushing, allowing him to slowly crawl up to walls and break them down maybe if there weren't too many arrows in him by then. The Crusher was pretty much worse then Cav in any kind of real fight, worse in sieges because Cav had the speed and hitting power to choose a door and break it quickly, and just all in all worse at life. You'd end up building them anyways just because you were desperate for melee units, and they would never live up to even your lowered expectations for them. Eventually, finally you have persevered to Tier 3, or lost the game. One of these is more likely then the other. Congratulations! You have one good unit and one that's just...eh. Also Hydras which are kinda awesome but you'll never build them in numbers because what you desperately need at this point is map control and they're slow. (And that I won't talk about much because it doesn't fit my thesis.) So first up, you have Elders. You will love Elders, not because they are great, but because they are ranged and better then Hatchlings. Finally, the day of child soldiers has come and gone, passing the mantel on to the geriatrics. WTF Draconians. Elders are ok. They shoot magic bolts and have leadership skills they'll never use except on each other because the rest of your armies are flying from here on out and there's nobody around to listen to these geezers yack except the other geezers that helping them protect the stupid town long enough for you to get some drat dragons already. Also they have a weirdly massive amount of HPs (20) for a ranged support unit so I dunno they're all retired Crushers or something I guess. You also have Flyers! Flyers are legit good! I mean, not as good as they were in vanilla AoW 2 but they're not poo poo and that's a very special feeling for a new Draconian player, that sudden thrill of building a pretty good unit for the first time ever. You're probably way behind at this point though, so try not to make too many of these guys and press on to Red Dragons, the only reason you were ever playing this stupid race in the first place. Red Dragons are hella good, what do you want me to say? They're even better in SM because the Hydra Pool gives all your dudes regen, Dragons included. So you have a crazy powerful fire-spitting flying unit that auto heals up to full at the end of each turn. Try to enjoy this brief shining moment you stubborn bastard, because when it's all over and the game is finished, you and I both know it wasn't really worth it. So yeah, AoW 3 Draconians are so much better. Seriously, so much better people who aren't masochists actually play them. madmac fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 00:43
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I may be misremembering, but didn't AoW2 draconians (not shadow magic) all or mostly have flying? Or maybe just their heroes. I remember that made them ludicrously powerful, which may be what their terrible units were balanced for, which wasn't compensated for in shadow magic when very few of their units flew.
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Sep 15, 2014 00:59
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GrandpaPants posted:I may be misremembering, but didn't AoW2 draconians (not shadow magic) all or mostly have flying? Or maybe just their heroes. I remember that made them ludicrously powerful, which may be what their terrible units were balanced for, which wasn't compensated for in shadow magic when very few of their units flew. Sorta. In vanilla AoW2 Draconian heroes had flying, which was indeed ludicrously powerful. In SM they got downgraded to floating, which in combination with the stat penalties they had made their heroes actually kind of weak overall.
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Sep 15, 2014 01:02
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I seem to remember flamers being REALLY good at holding out inside forts. Like, if the enemy was dumb enough to just charge your gates you could have 1/2 flamers soften up their entire army and then finish them off with a righteous fury/hellfire/cosmic spray. Their low DEF made their units very weak until you hit T3 though, or if you had crazy good luck with charger damage attacks. They were a race I wanted to get into but couldn't (until 3 at least). Halflings, Nomads, and Shadow Demons were my go-tos for that game.
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Sep 15, 2014 03:48
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Arrrthritis posted:I seem to remember flamers being REALLY good at holding out inside forts. Like, if the enemy was dumb enough to just charge your gates you could have 1/2 flamers soften up their entire army and then finish them off with a righteous fury/hellfire/cosmic spray. Their low DEF made their units very weak until you hit T3 though, or if you had crazy good luck with charger damage attacks. It was the only thing Flamers were good for, but I seem to remember even the AI not being dumb enough to fall for it a lot of the time. As far as I can recall, I remember playing a lot of Elves/Tigrans/Nomads back in the day. I like my races fast. My bitter love/hate relationship with Draconians aside, I'd probably put Syrons/Demons as my least favorite, I could never get into either of them. Archons, Dwarves, Frostlings, and Haflings were also fun. Orcs were boring in AoW2 but got a lot more interesting in Shadow Magic. Dark Elves were weird...I liked their low tier units but hated most of their Tier 3/4 lineup.
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Sep 15, 2014 05:28
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WYA posted:It's an objective fact that having simultaneous manual battles in multiplayer would improve the game 100x Yeah, it is hard enough to get a game going with lackluster or non existent multiplayer lobbies / matchmaking / friends list invites, having the game actively punish you for getting a game started with friends (or strangers) is pretty lame. I guess a lot of players just compstomp alone forever? At least the devs seem to assume that is the case? I guess automatch would be pretty much impossible since you can't join a game in progress. Still, Civ 5 had similar issues with multiplayer and it took years and two big expansion packs to get to be fairly playable in multiplayer. So with some time and effort things could improve if there is desire and support for change.
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Sep 15, 2014 06:08
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madmac posted:Dark Elves were weird...I liked their low tier units but hated most of their Tier 3/4 lineup. Incarnates were the funnest T4 unit in Shadow Magic by far. Slowly amassing entire stacks of possessed heroes was the best. Particularly when it was the AI's ridiculous heroes which were all like 10 levels higher than yours thanks to their AI bonuses. As for T3, the Succubus was indeed kinda poopy but Shades and Spider Queens were decent enough.
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Sep 15, 2014 11:36
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Carnalfex posted:Yeah, it is hard enough to get a game going with lackluster or non existent multiplayer lobbies / matchmaking / friends list invites, having the game actively punish you for getting a game started with friends (or strangers) is pretty lame. I guess a lot of players just compstomp alone forever? At least the devs seem to assume that is the case? I guess automatch would be pretty much impossible since you can't join a game in progress. As mentioned, the way most players of the old games did it was PBEM style. So they got manual combat against the AI but auto against other players, and they could take their time to pass turns around. This is one of the reasons early on I was asking about nice extras for managing when turns came up. Some alternating turn games will do something like, when you submit your turn, the game will auto-minimize, and when your turn comes back around the taskbar will flash to let you know. I think 1v1 works pretty well in this game, generally you just do auto-combat against the AI always and manual against the other player always.
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Sep 15, 2014 15:48
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WYA posted:It's an objective fact that having simultaneous manual battles in multiplayer would improve the game 100x Splicer fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 20:00
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Splicer posted:Is there a thread for allowing empire management during combat instead? The gameplay changes being discussed in that thread seem a bit drastic for my tastes. Allowing empire management during combat wouldn't really be a big deal, because it takes up so little of the turn time. Allowing armies to move and empire management during combat would speed up the game significantly and allowing multiple combats at once would speed things up hugely.
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Sep 15, 2014 20:23
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Splicer posted:Is there a thread for allowing empire management during combat instead? The gameplay changes being discussed in that thread seem a bit drastic for my tastes. Ignore everyone in the thread that talks about needing to lock a 50 tile radius or something bizarre. There are a lot of people that have trouble wrapping their heads around the point of the thread. One guy's brain just completely exploded and he starts ranting about quantum mechanics. The core idea is just to let people keep playing during someone else's combat. That is all!
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Sep 15, 2014 22:25
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Carnalfex posted:Ignore everyone in the thread that talks about needing to lock a 50 tile radius or something bizarre. There are a lot of people that have trouble wrapping their heads around the point of the thread. One guy's brain just completely exploded and he starts ranting about quantum mechanics. And there are some huge legitimate issues with that. Simultaneous turns is already a clusterfuck of 'who can click faster', there are a ton of scenarios that pop up even in normal play where someone being able to move while other people are in combat would fundamentally break a lot of stuff. And that isn't even getting into the issues with queuing.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:40
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Maybe making it so a engaging in a battle depletes all movement points and making tactical battles resolve at the end of the turn when all players have pressed end turn would make for a more fluid experience? The following turn would only start when every tactical battle is done. It's just an idea and could negatively affect map movement, but yeah. The other solution would be to merge tactical and strategic maps somehow, which might be an idea for a future game. a!n fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 22:51
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a!n posted:Maybe making it so a engaging in a battle depletes all movement points and making tactical battles resolve at the end of the turn when all players have pressed end turn would make for a more fluid experience? The following turn would only start when every tactical battle is done. It's just an idea and could negatively affect map movement, but yeah. The expansion releasing in 3 days has a minor specialization that lets the attacker retreat from battles without losing movement points. I think it is safe to say Triumph really isn't going in that direction any time soon.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:55
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a!n posted:Maybe making it so a engaging in a battle depletes all movement points and making tactical battles resolve at the end of the turn when all players have pressed end turn would make for a more fluid experience? The following turn would only start when every tactical battle is done. It's just an idea and could negatively affect map movement, but yeah. Battles depleting all movement points would lead to hilarious exploits where players would attempt to suicide a single tier 1 unit into the enemy stack to paralyze them for the rest of the turn. If you somehow attempt to make an exception for the defender, you're right back where you started, only with even more complexity.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:56
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a!n posted:Maybe making it so a engaging in a battle depletes all movement points and making tactical battles resolve at the end of the turn when all players have pressed end turn would make for a more fluid experience? The following turn would only start when every tactical battle is done. It's just an idea and could negatively affect map movement, but yeah. Carnalfex posted:Ignore everyone in the thread that talks about needing to lock a 50 tile radius or something bizarre. There are a lot of people that have trouble wrapping their heads around the point of the thread. One guy's brain just completely exploded and he starts ranting about quantum mechanics. "Let people do non-map-altering stuff while manual combat is going on" is a much more feasible option, especially since one of the issues that AoW has always had is how much empire management you have to do per turn, especially towards the end of the game. Being able to do my chores (queueing up build orders, checking on units, having a good hard think about my spell choices) while waiting for combat to end would kill two birds with one stone. e: left out a few words. Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 23:14
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Splicer posted:Even if exploits like Slashrat's weren't possible, this would be a major change to how the game plays, both from how AoW3 plays now and how AoW has played historically. I just can't see simultaneous combat (which is what that thread is about) being Hell, just having time to go through my 17 event pop-ups while someone else was fighting would be a huge time-saver and keep me reasonably busy.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:22
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a!n posted:Maybe making it so a engaging in a battle depletes all movement points and making tactical battles resolve at the end of the turn when all players have pressed end turn would make for a more fluid experience? The following turn would only start when every tactical battle is done. It's just an idea and could negatively affect map movement, but yeah. Endless legend actually does this, army combat is resolved through tactical fights on the world map, with nearby armies gradually funnelled through reinforcement points to avoid occupying the entire combat area.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:37
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How is Endless Legend anyway?
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Sep 16, 2014 01:04
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Ojetor posted:Incarnates were the funnest T4 unit in Shadow Magic by far. Slowly amassing entire stacks of possessed heroes was the best. Particularly when it was the AI's ridiculous heroes which were all like 10 levels higher than yours thanks to their AI bonuses. As for T3, the Succubus was indeed kinda poopy but Shades and Spider Queens were decent enough. Physical immunity was the best thing too, incarnates could kill an entire enemy army without even having to do anything - possess a unit, killed by their friends, next unit, etc etc. Dark Elves were easily the most powerful race in the game. I loved both them and Archons/High Men. Kinda sad that they're two of the ones that are gone.
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Sep 16, 2014 01:19
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Splicer posted:"Let people do non-map-altering stuff while manual combat is going on" is a much more feasible option, especially since one of the issues that AoW has always had is how much empire management you have to do per turn, especially towards the end of the game. Being able to do my chores (queueing up build orders, checking on units, having a good hard think about my spell choices) while waiting for combat to end would kill two birds with one stone. That would help a little, but if people actually want to manually fight battles (They should! It is fun! It is a huge and well made part of the game!) you are going to end up without much difference. The "exploits" and "problems" people keep bringing up are entirely either a: part of the game already (such as people sneaking up on you or clicking faster, a major contention in the official forum thread) or b: a creation of their own design due to whatever alternative implementation they put forward that does not involve simply letting people play (which is what slashrat mentioned regarding someone else's idea). Unless I have missed something major, from a gameplay perspective the only stumbling block to having everyone not involved in a combat continue with their turns are actions that would specifically interact with that combat. That is limited to a couple of strategic nuke spells, and moving another army so that it would start a fight with those already busy (including moving into another nearby army or city that a busy army would be pulled to assist). Everything else would behave *exactly* as it currently does in simultaneous turns right now. You might argue other aspects of sim. turn multiplayer can cause issues, like people clicking faster and thus moving when you did not expect it, but those are totally different issues.
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Sep 16, 2014 01:30
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Thyrork posted:How is Endless Legend anyway? It's an interesting blend 4X mechanics that comes together rather well. It has hexes, tile output and resources like civ but it has tactical combat and seasons. Each race only has a few unit designs (there are minor races to assimilate) but you're supposed to gear them up like fallen enchantress. Tech tree is grouped into circles where you only need a few to progress to the next era. Graphic wise it's a really vibrant game, tiles changing between new seasons is great eyecandy. The UI could use extra polish though, a city screen would be nice. Overall EL will probably get unfavourable comparisons to civ (like AoW3) despite the latter having a tactical complexity of a pool noodle. On that note I feel like it would be thematically fitting to have sun sacrifice to ignore winter in your domain or be able to inflict weather events like frog rains in EL. That might be the side-effects of dominions on my brain however. 
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Sep 16, 2014 01:34
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AI still seems wayyyy too easy in the beta patch! I'm not even good at 4X (I have lost like 8 heroes to dinky independents that i was "very likely" to win against) but they are complete pushovers. It's like they don't bother to... do anything? They seem to just sit there and barely produce anything. It's a shame because I want to like this game but it's giving me nothing to work with, you know? Edit: If I am massing an army next to their city - literally right next to it - they really should attack me, shouldn't they? At least give me a bloody nose before the other part of my army arrives that'll make me completely unstoppable? Their territory is completely full of independents, even. It makes me suspect that they are contantly frozen with indecision and the only reason they have any high level heroes at all (and no >1 tier units to speak of) is because of some weird behind-the-scenes cheating. Space Hamlet fucked around with this message at 09:08 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 08:54
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If they attack you from a city, it'll be regular combat instead of a siege, the latter being significantly easier to defend. In my experience the AI does a solid job defending itself, but never gets around to attacking me, which is what the patch is going to address (haven't played the beta). Maybe try upping the difficulty? Also heroes get experience even when not in combat. At least I get levels for no apparent reason pretty regularly.
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Sep 16, 2014 09:11
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Space Hamlet posted:Edit: If I am massing an army next to their city - literally right next to it - they really should attack me, shouldn't they? At least give me a bloody nose before the other part of my army arrives that'll make me completely unstoppable? Their territory is completely full of independents, even. It makes me suspect that they are contantly frozen with indecision and the only reason they have any high level heroes at all (and no >1 tier units to speak of) is because of some weird behind-the-scenes cheating. Yes, it should. Did you start a new game with the patch, or is it a save from before the patch? Old saves work in the patch, but are glitchy and don't work very well... Anyways, what you're describing sounds like either pre-patch AI, low difficulty AI or simply broken AI. I PM'd you my work email address, if you could email me a save I'd love to check it out!
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Sep 16, 2014 10:31
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Kajeesus posted:If they attack you from a city, it'll be regular combat instead of a siege, the latter being significantly easier to defend. In my experience the AI does a solid job defending itself, but never gets around to attacking me, which is what the patch is going to address (haven't played the beta). Maybe try upping the difficulty? We're talking about a closely matched battle in the open versus one they have no chance of winning in their city. I think their math is a little off. They're better at picking off scouts, but they're still terrified of anything resembling a real army and reserve a disproportionate number of troops for defending cities which aren't under any threat. It takes them a long time to attack since their roaming armies are pretty small compared to that of a real player. Right now I'm running an experiment where I set my throne city to loop production of T1 units, I accept the first hero, and I accept friendly proposals from the AI. Besides that, I skip every turn. Right now it's turn 56 and I have a level 2 leader and hero, 17 T1 units, and the starting T2 cavalry. Also, two allies. It's turn 56. Even money says I win an allied victory. Edit: Gerblyn posted:Yes, it should. Hi! That game is over (I sent alliance proposals to the other 2 AI after conquering the first one and we all won together), so I don't think I'll be able to show you that. I'll try and find a similar situation and send you something, though. It was a new game, and I definitely opted into the beta patch according to Steam- main menu says build 13032. Space Hamlet fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 10:45
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Great! Also, what level AIs are you running?
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Sep 16, 2014 10:48
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The game I legitimately won was set to Normal, the wacky experiment I'm running is set to Emperor. Because I'm terrible at this game I bet I'd have a hard time beating the Emperor AI genuinely, but I can still see that the behavior seems a little off - the AI I encountered is not appropriate even for a normal mode, IMO. Edit: I was defeated in turn 73 by one of my former allies! I admit this is a difficult experiment to draw conclusions from - it's not unreasonable for the AI to decide that i'm not a threat nor a worthy target and just let the alliance sit, and maybe that's exactly what it did. Food for thought, anyway. I don't think this is exactly the behavior of a super-aggressive AI, at any rate. I'll run another game tomorrow and try to send you a useful save, devgoon. Space Hamlet fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 10:51
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I tried the beta patch as well and I can't really say the emperor ai was a big challenge. It seemed slightly more aggressive than before since it was willing to swat down unescorted spy drones, but it definitely never concentrated its armies into a planned attack on a particular area. Their economy was slightly slower than mine as well so they certainly weren't powerful enough to win without concentrating their armies. They maintained very large garrisons and had a few roaming parties that looked ok, especially by about turn 50 or so, but when I grouped my armies, pulled the garrisons, and switched all my cities to producing units to reinforce the grouped army, it was extremely easy to reach the sort of local superiority that made the ai totally unwilling to leave their cities, which makes it very easy to just pick them off one by one and take as long as you need to reinforcing. They did do their old strategy of capturing a valueless undefended outpost while I was doing that. I have no idea what's going on under the hood, but what the ai's routine feels like on my end is to roam at random, and attack any easy prey found while doing so, but if you spot an army better than yours then run for it and join the garrison. What they would really need to do to be competitive is to consider bringing in all available reinforcements to beat that army, and if they can do something like that proactively with an eye to taking some territory, even if it's very well defended, then that's even better. If that behavior exists I think it needs to happen earlier and more distinctly. I understand why the ai prefers defensive siege combat so much and why they maintain such large garrisons, but I think to me an ai that takes field combat even when it's a bit risky and leaves itself vulnerable to sneak attacks in favor of switching its garrisons to offensive mode would be much more fun strategically. Also I don't have an autosave because I was running the do nothing but build irregulars and accept offers test with space hamlet, and was defeated on turn 102. Oh yeah, I was also really hoping to see a tiny map setting this patch since the small map is still much larger than I would usually play a 4x on. It's a fine map setting but it doesn't feel small enough to be the very smallest option. Adrian Owlsley fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 11:42
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Thanks guys, if you have saves from mid game where the AI seemes to be doing particularly dumb things, it would be appreciated! I'm not sure what's happening tbqh, on the main forums we're having reports of people having to tone down the difficulty from emperor to kind because it's so hard. It's possible you guys are setting up your games in ways that doesn't favour how the AI plays I guess? Without seeing what you mean in game itself, it's very hard to say 
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Sep 16, 2014 12:06
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To me it doesn't seem like the ai does anything you could really call dumb or bugged. They react about appropriately to local situations, especially with the new changes, but the big picture doesn't seem to quite be there for them. For example they're right to retreat when they see your army is better then theirs but then they don't seem to take the next steps that would let them ever retake the initiative, like switching everything to unit production and pulling garrisons to the area for an even field battle. Their strategy seems to invariably be a slow, meandering rollout which can work but only if they have an economy advantage, and if they lose that at any point they can tend to kind of take their ball and freeze up paying big for garrisons they're not using except as a deterrent. I didn't see anything remarkable so I don't think a save would show anything that doesn't happen in most games. The settings I used were just a 1 on 1 on a small map with everything default.
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Sep 16, 2014 12:48
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Gerblyn posted:Thanks guys, if you have saves from mid game where the AI seemes to be doing particularly dumb things, it would be appreciated! Turning city founding off has been mentioned here quite a bit. That setting alone kind of neuters the AI.
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Sep 16, 2014 13:45
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