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I found if you just had some armies picking off Norsca armies to keep the overall threat level low that it never became a threat, just a constant source of exp and gear and half stack armies of trash. If you aren't pro-active with going out into the wastes early then they build up into something real nasty.
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May 3, 2022 10:16
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TOOT BOOT posted:The post about the AI rolling in and winning on turn 161 of your campaign kinda ties in a discussion in the 4X thread about why AI in strategy games is usually pretty bad. Part of the answer is that making an AI that can play a complex game is very hard and that post is basically the other half: players say they want good AI but actually losing to an AI after 15 hours feels like poo poo most of the time. So it ends up as a very low development priority. AI can excel in quite a few other types of games too, but for decisionmaking specifically that is about right. For example it will do much better beating humans in games that require precision like shooters, or games that allow for tons of actions per minute like RTS games.
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May 3, 2022 11:40
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Developers will almost always prioritise "cool, flashy feature" over "can the AI use this feature?" Not a slam on developers, it's just much easier to market cool flashy features, while pushing the power of your AI is really hard. I think Shogun 2 was the last time I really saw a game try to market seriously from that angle, and they only could because players were already familiar with the state of their previous game's AIs.
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May 3, 2022 12:02
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I mean hell we see complaints ITT all the time about the AI playing smart when it avoids most land battles it doesn't have a decisive advantage in, or dances just out of range of your armies. That is 100% the kind of 'smart' play that players hate actually playing against.
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May 3, 2022 14:40
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Zore posted:I mean hell we see complaints ITT all the time about the AI playing smart when it avoids most land battles it doesn't have a decisive advantage in, or dances just out of range of your armies. That is 100% the kind of 'smart' play that players hate actually playing against. And we still see people modding out Agents because being used how they're intended drives people up the wall. Personally I just morph into a Skaven whenever I play the game and just scum the hell out of the AI with bait armies, bait settlements, block march agent actions, force multiplication using hidden armies and just general ambush forever.
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May 3, 2022 15:06
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All I want is for the AI to be challenging and intelligent, but also it's never allowed to inconvenience me in any way. It should be menacing and overwhelmingly strong but always lose to me, like the bad guy in a children's cartoon.
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May 3, 2022 17:58
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Being honest, I think what I mostly want from games like this is to never lose a territory without a fight I have a chance of winning, and to have offensive fights that are challenging, I usually win, and I get a reasonable reward for winning. AI is part of that. I think the AI - at least on normal difficulty - can't have an equal chance of winning to the player. After all, there are like 150 factions, if you only have a one-in-150 chance of winning a campaign you'd have very few players.
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May 3, 2022 18:08
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There is an immense difference between regular AI cheating and the AI having a chance to just win the game because it happened to get 4 souls in a row.
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May 3, 2022 18:09
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I tried to play a nurgle campaign and I wanted to tear my eyes out by turn 15. Dear lord these boi's are slow.
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May 3, 2022 18:28
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dogstile posted:I tried to play a nurgle campaign and I wanted to tear my eyes out by turn 15. We’re coming to beat you up, you stay right there, we’ll get to your house ear-late next week and when we do you’ll feel really sorry you said… eh, whatever.
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May 3, 2022 18:49
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TOOT BOOT posted:The post about the AI rolling in and winning on turn 161 of your campaign kinda ties in a discussion in the 4X thread about why AI in strategy games is usually pretty bad. Part of the answer is that making an AI that can play a complex game is very hard and that post is basically the other half: players say they want good AI but actually losing to an AI after 15 hours feels like poo poo most of the time. So it ends up as a very low development priority. An additional part of the problem is a lot of people claim they want the AI to play like a human which is weird, just go play pvp if you want that. Unfortunately a lot of devs get stuck in that trap as well. The AI should be playing by different rulesets so that it can be an interesting challenge, but you need to fully embrace that, and it's not easy.
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May 3, 2022 19:03
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dogstile posted:I tried to play a nurgle campaign and I wanted to tear my eyes out by turn 15. Khorne warriors are exactly one speed faster than a plaguebearer.
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May 3, 2022 19:13
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Mercrom posted:There is an immense difference between regular AI cheating and the AI having a chance to just win the game because it happened to get 4 souls in a row. Honestly without that pressure stuff like Slaanesh's bargain becomes a lot less interesting.
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May 3, 2022 19:14
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Nurgle will be a huge benefiter from auto-resolve changes in 1.2, having to manually fight every single slow grind so you don't lose half your army to a 6 unit garrison sure seems like a way to pad out the game time, if you can auto resolve without losing units and just use a plague to heal to full immediately after the battle it'll be smooth sailing.
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May 3, 2022 20:06
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Insurrectionist posted:It's interesting to hear about Space Marine domination because when I played Fantasy back around 2000 - 2008, we had about 10 - 12 regular players and a couple occasionals, and there was almost no army overlap at all. Personally I played Vampire Counts and Dark Elves (mr edge here), my best friends played Bret/Lizards and Beastmen/High Elves. We had the Skaven player, the Tomb Kings player, the Empire player, a second guy playing HE, the Warriors of Chaos player, the Dwarf player, etc. I think only HE, Lizardmen and Vampire counts was played by more than one person, and in all three cases one of the players picked it up as their secondary army. Space Marines have always predominated in 40k. The game originally blew up in popularity because of the RTB01 plastic boxed set and they've been the poster boys ever since.
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May 3, 2022 21:14
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Tying the autoresolve modifiers to battle difficulty instead of campaign difficulty just makes so much more sense.
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May 3, 2022 22:15
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ZeusJupitar posted:Space Marines have always predominated in 40k. The game originally blew up in popularity because of the RTB01 plastic boxed set and they've been the poster boys ever since. The Imperium in general, so much of the care and attention is into differentiating all the factions in the Imperium, the Guard, the Mechanicus, the Sisters of Battle. Like I like all of these things but I can also recgonize they are the only factions GW even pretends to care about.
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May 3, 2022 22:45
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Ravenfood posted:Tying the autoresolve modifiers to battle difficulty instead of campaign difficulty just makes so much more sense. Agreed. I like mixing up the difficulty sliders because I like the idea of a lot of 'mother of all battles' type fights you can actually win instead of having to settle for either snowballing way too easily too fast or getting shut down too hard and needing to constantly minmax and cheese just to get anywhere.
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May 3, 2022 22:55
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Kanos posted:Even when I played 40k back in the late 90s and early 2000s across multiple game stores, the amount of Space Marine players to every other faction players was something like 5 to 1. It's absolutely a self-perpetuating cycle - marines are popular in part because they're pushed - but even outside of 40k itself, the prevalence of Big Badass Awesome Space Marine Dudes across like every form of media from movies to video games suggests that people really, really like Big Badass Awesome Space Marine Dudes in general. Sure, but particularly for video games that's going to be popular because for all intents and purposes they practically haven't even attempted anything else. It's either been Imperium (typically Space Marines) or some all-inclusive strategy game. The main exceptions would be Fire Warrior... in which you're still effectively playing a space marine... and Dakka Squadron, which is (from what I've heard and seen) a fairly fun but rather repetitive arcade plane shooter. Like, instead of Space Marine (the game) you can't tell me that a game where you're playing an Ork rising from just a Boy at the beginning of the game to a Warboss at the end, with the character visibly growing larger as it progresses (via customizable upgrades/skill trees/whatever) or some hyper acrobatic combat game (think DMC or the like) for an Eldar wouldn't sell insanely well themselves. Because I can point to similar examples of both those types of games (one's even mentioned there) that HAVE sold incredibly well. And that's just off-the-cuff suggestions for single character first/third person games So sure, the space marine concept is incredibly popular, but a WELL-MADE game set in the 40k franchise for any of the factions would also be incredibly popular. And while there's more variety of 40k video games in the pipeline at the moment than in the past, they're basically all Imperium. Which means anyone new they draw in to the actual tabletop game is far more likely to be interested in those factions (probably Space Marines, as most of the games are that). To say there are plenty of options for interesting game concepts for every race once you move into the realm of squad or greater sized games would be a massive understatement (say, reverse base survival with you as Tyranids?). Hell, even if it's just a X-Com-like such as Mechanicus or the upcoming Daemonhunter, simply replacing said group with "insert major alien race here" they'd STILL sell incredibly well.
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May 3, 2022 23:27
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Instead of changing stats they should have capped the AI with moves per second so on the harder difficulty the AI is micro managing like mad but on normal it's limited to a sane level. This would be a great way to encourage players to check out MP by challenging the AI and getting their micro up to par.
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May 3, 2022 23:33
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Lord Koth posted:Like, instead of Space Marine (the game) you can't tell me that a game where you're playing an Ork rising from just a Boy at the beginning of the game to a Warboss at the end, with the character visibly growing larger as it progresses (via customizable upgrades/skill trees/whatever) or some hyper acrobatic combat game (think DMC or the like) for an Eldar wouldn't sell insanely well themselves. I have some good news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH8P51kcOqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn26EDPvbF8 theres a free demo on steam right now too
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May 3, 2022 23:42
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AnEdgelord posted:I have some good news Dude, nice. Thanks for the heads up, Orkkin is good stuff
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May 4, 2022 01:01
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That demo kicks rear end
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May 4, 2022 01:52
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Arghy posted:Instead of changing stats they should have capped the AI with moves per second so on the harder difficulty the AI is micro managing like mad but on normal it's limited to a sane level. This would be a great way to encourage players to check out MP by challenging the AI and getting their micro up to par. This is a really good idea if it were feasible. It's always annoying how the AI is constrained from doing a truly dynamic difficulty. All you can really do is handicap/overcharge economy or base stats which feels unsatisfactory. Even on easy/easy the AI will do "optimal" maneuvers and micro, with the only real difference being fewer forces that are weaker. But it would be more fun to have the opposite extreme-forces that were deadly but inattentive and careless, encouraging the player to perform feints and capitalize on misplays as well as varying AI behavior by individual faction to make the fights feel less samey even if the race is the same. What we have right now feels like the AI of a NES football game that just tries to mirror whatever strategy or moves you do making it laughably predictable and repetitive.
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May 4, 2022 02:09
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Twigand Berries posted:Khorne warriors are exactly one speed faster than a plaguebearer. Khorne warriors are mostly playing catchup on skarbrand.
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May 4, 2022 02:41
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It could be done by giving each unit a threat level so the AI knows for instance that powder units are more dangerous than crossbow units so it'd try to counter them by dragging units through formations and allocating mobile units to shutting it down. You'd also want to change up the difficulty too because once you got used to and comfortable with an AI level you'd switch it up a notch and play another level. It'd be a true challenge for those high tier players who don't pause when there's 20 individual units acting and reacting on their own. I'd love to see dynamic AI armies that basically took a look at yours and designed a counter. If you doom stacked it'd either counter doom stack you or make multiple attrition armies and throw them at you individually so it wouldn't have army losses. I'm sure some of the good players could help the devs design counters for each race against other races doom stacks.
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May 4, 2022 08:55
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Arghy posted:It could be done by giving each unit a threat level so the AI knows for instance that this is not how that works. this is not how anything works.
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May 4, 2022 09:00
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Arghy posted:It could be done by giving each unit a threat level so the AI knows for instance that Only if Heavy Infantry gets Taunt and Skirmishers can use Disengage to drop aggro. 
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May 4, 2022 09:11
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Cease to Hope posted:this is not how that works. this is not how anything works. It's not impossible to have flags that say, hey don't charge cav into halberds unless you have no other choice while also having, hey gobbos halberds are a juicy target. If the AI is now issuing X amount of orders a minute it could order units into favorable fights while pulling units out of unfavorable fights. Granted it'd be a huge amount of work but it's very much within reach of current coding.
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May 4, 2022 09:22
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It kind of does this to an extent-if you have cavalry it will try to intercept them with spear units. AI missile units prioritize targets with no shields and low armor.
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May 4, 2022 13:26
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I usually forget to use cavalry in certain ranged-heavy fights, and they always end up being slowly poked to death by lovely spearmen no matter where they are on the map.
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May 4, 2022 13:32
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I think the future of AI is millions of nimble fingered children strapped to computers rent a family in Costa Rica to be your video game opponents
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May 4, 2022 13:37
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jokes posted:I usually forget to use cavalry in certain ranged-heavy fights, and they always end up being slowly poked to death by lovely spearmen no matter where they are on the map. AI is pretty good at putting them exactly between your cavalry and the units you are trying to crush. Honestly the best use I've had with light cavalry is wiping out routing units (which any fast unit is capable of doing) and culling ranged units after their infantry get engaged with yours in melee and they don't have any free spear units around to block you. AI are infuriatingly good with Chariots to the point I swear they must be using them in some kind of FPS mode. Which is something I absolutely want. Let me use Chariots, particularly single entity models, in a FPS mode that lets me just manually steer them and go all demolition derby on clumps of enemies.
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May 4, 2022 13:39
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Panfilo posted:AI is pretty good at putting them exactly between your cavalry and the units you are trying to crush. Honestly the best use I've had with light cavalry is wiping out routing units (which any fast unit is capable of doing) and culling ranged units after their infantry get engaged with yours in melee and they don't have any free spear units around to block you. chariots as wind spell
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May 4, 2022 13:40
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Steerable magic would be very excellent. They already let you steer doomdivers
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May 4, 2022 13:47
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I don't think we can blame poor AI for all the game's issues - e.g. chasing down armies playing keepaway isn't just an issue of perfect AI knowing exact movement ranges for everything, but also because moving on the campaign map is a relatively "flat" mechanic with few ways to change how other armies move (Block Army agent actions, ambush stance, maybe some commandments?) - often limited further by random chance or hero caps
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May 4, 2022 14:23
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The way roads aren't loving crucial for rapid movement always bothered me. Like, the idea that whole armies can go traipsing around the countryside without a care in the world for supply trains just makes the idea of border forts or garrisons worthless. But also the AI might melt if you had to actually maintain a supply train or stay on roads for any kind of reasonable overland travel so probably not worth it.
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May 4, 2022 15:00
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Zore posted:I mean hell we see complaints ITT all the time about the AI playing smart when it avoids most land battles it doesn't have a decisive advantage in, or dances just out of range of your armies. That is 100% the kind of 'smart' play that players hate actually playing against. the problem is that a lot of the strategy layer game mechanics are just bad, but they're bearable when the ai is too stupid to make you engage sincerely with them
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May 4, 2022 15:55
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Ravenfood posted:The way roads aren't loving crucial for rapid movement always bothered me. Like, the idea that whole armies can go traipsing around the countryside without a care in the world for supply trains just makes the idea of border forts or garrisons worthless. You could pretty trivially just make it so you get a huge move bonus while sticking to roads and an increasingly debilitating movement penalty for harsher and harsher terrain(with the definition of "harsh" somewhat dependent on faction, i.e. humans and dwarfs would have trouble moving through heavy forests but wood elves and beastmen would not). They kinda sorta try to do the "roads = move bonus" thing for some factions but it's not passive; it costs a precious building slot that almost no one will ever bother with because it's absolutely not worth giving up a precious slot for 30% movement in this region only, especially since most factions are already paying a one slot tax on all of their minors for defenses. Kanos fucked around with this message at 16:06 on May 4, 2022 |
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May 4, 2022 16:04
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Let me distribute populations (pops) to military, economy, culture, and infrastructure. Having to build up settlements is really dumb.
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May 4, 2022 16:05
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