I`ve been thinking about A.I. cheating on high difficulty levels. Made me ponder a problem: if the enemy A.I. cheats, does friendly A.I. cheat as well? Should it? Does it? What is fair?
Things like this reinforce my notion that if you can eliminate arbitrary A.I. bonuses from difficulty equations, things would be ideal.
Heres the AI cheats for skirmish. They apply to both allies and enemies:
DifficultyHandicaps = { # Easy { GoldMultiplier = 0.75, ExpMultiplier = 0.75, StartingGold = 0.5, MinPoints = 0, #the range of points the AI can spend on an achievement item MaxPoints = 150, }, # Normal { MinPoints = 150, MaxPoints = 300, }, # Hard { GoldMultiplier = 1.5, ExpMultiplier = 1.5, StartingGold = 2.0, MinPoints = 300, MaxPoints = 450, }, # Nightmare { GoldMultiplier = 2.0, ExpMultiplier = 2.0, StartingGold = 4.0, MinPoints = 450, MaxPoints = 10000, }, },
For tournaments the following additional multipliers apply to your allies only:
# Player & ally experience multiplier for tournament difficulty levels SPExperienceMult = { 1, # Nightmare 1, # Hard 1.5, # Normal 2, # Easy }, # Player & ally gold multiplier for tournament difficulty levels SPGoldMult = { 1, # Nightmare 1, # Hard 1.5, # Normal 2, # Easy },
Table of your allies vs enemies in tournament mode:
# On Easy -> Player team mates are nightmare; Enemy are easy # On Normal -> Player team mates are hard; Enemy are normal # On Hard -> Player team mates are normal; Enemy are hard # On Nightmare -> Player team mates are normal; Enemy are nightmare
Other changes:
Also in a tournament the Normal and Easy AI have their plan depth restricted which seems to make them more stupid. Also the Easy AI has a couple of AI sensors disabled in tournament mode, these are the 'Near Enemy Defense' and 'Demigod injured' sensors that make the AI run away.
Personally I dont mind if the AI cheats although it this case there is some complaint about the normal AI for allies in tournament mode when playing on hard.
Good info thar sir
In which file you got this from?
Its in the dgdata.zip under the lua folder. Game.lua contains most of it... but some specficis are in several AI files.
So just to be clear, if I edit that lua file I can get rid of the stupid multiplier you get in normal? I was expecting normal to be just that, normal (ie. no advantage or disadvantage)
Thanks for the info. Quite enlightening. I really hope they implement a disable cheats/handicaps toggle so we can play a pure difficulty level, against only superior tactics & teamwork rather than superior numbers. It`d be a great option.
There is on normal tournament level. You get Hard AI allies.
If you know how to do mods they yes you can change these multipliers. But remember currently if you mod the game you will need to remove it to play online.
Yes it should be possible to do a mod to change the cheats/handicaps. Again the annoying thing currently is that if we did such a mod then you would need to disable it every time you went online for mp.
At the moment if you play you and two normal AIs vs 3 normal AIs in straight skimish this should give you a feel for AI ability. In tournaments they are messed around with.
Me and my friend played against Hard AI on exile yesterday and they became almost invincible at level 20. It felt like they had a bonus on top of their super artifact gear they could have gotten with gold bonuses. At one point me (as regulus) and my friend (as beast) stood near our chrystal and kept pounding one enemy regulus. He regenerated faster than we could kill him and just refused to die. We manage to kill their Rook sometimes but not that Regulus who is supposed to be squishy.
Anyway, since we played on exile and couldnt capture their portals, we decided to just destroy their citadel by ourselves. It went down in 10-15 seconds by the beasts hand as I killed their creeps next to him.
I wished I had taken a screenshot because we both dealt over 1 million damage during that game.
Most of the AIs become almost invincibile at 20 when playing on Hard. You can pound on them forever and most shots either miss or most damage is regenerated so youre forced to pound on them for a long time and ofcourse when they get low on health they just run back to base crystal to go back to full.
and they ALWAYS have the boots speed buff. I swear one game the computer never had it off. They were always the speed boost fast.
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