This is also known as cheating. Sure, it doesn't type in porntipsguzzardo (points to whoever gets it), maybe it doesn't have unlimited LoS, but the very fact that it pays less for everything and starts with massive bonuses is cheating. Rather than rely on the AI using good strategy and tactics to out-play the human player, it relies on endowing the AI with bonuses of all sorts to compensate for its lacking performance in those areas.

You could call it a handicap, but it really is just cheating. The AI is not playing by the same rules you are in an attempt to level the playing field (because you are a better strategist) or to provide a masochistic experience to those who enjoy such things

For example, Stardock prides itself on its ability to program good AIs without resorting to making them cheat. Take GC2 for example - the AI through the Tough difficulty setting plays by exactly the same rules as the player does, and plays quite well. Bump it up above Tough, though, and it starts to bend the rules - it pays less, builds faster, and so on. That is what "cheating AI" means. 

When the AI is playing the game by a different set of rules then everybody else, the AI is cheating. That's the way the term is always used when it comes to AI, since the AI can't cheat by using things like hacks. You're describing the same thing in something like a tournamnet, where it's just called a handicap instead. Same thing, different terminology.

The test of an AI is how challenging it can be while playing under the same rules as the player.

When the AI is good to begin with, cheating helps it be better, yes. But a bad AI given cheating help is still bad.

AoW2 suffered from that. The AI wasn't very smart about how it would do things like forming up stacks. In the early game, its cheating advantage and the general fact that it started off with more terrain then the player made things challenging. You had to compete against superior forces to gain ground.

But the AI's fatal flaw is that it liked to use mixed stacks. Some high tier, some low tier units combined. Anybody good at AoW2 knows that due to the stack limit, top tier units are ALWAYS better for offense once you can build them. A hero and 7 top tier units will destroy any stack that isn't comprised the same way, and with the proper use of spells will destroy several weaker stacks at the same time.

So the player churns out one stack that the AI simply cannot defeat despite it's advantages, because the AI is simply playing the game wrong. All the cheating in the world (and at the highest difficulties it cheats substantially) and all th extra units it gets can't make up for its inability to make a decent stack.

Eventually you break the AI's main force, and then it retreats into defensive mode at every city it owns, stops being able to attack you, and you enter the mopup phase.

A good AI on the other hand would need less cheating, because it's better at using the advantages it has.

See, indirectly this is my point. According to BoogiePac, at least my take on it, is that you Will NOT have to re-upgrade your improvements, as it will do so automatically. Of course, only higher level cities have access to the High-End buildings, therefore it takes a combination of upgrading your Overall city to a new level, as well as research in civilization techs, in order to get the best building capacity. Of course, once you achieve that, the buildings will upgrade on their own.

I believe that is the intent of the post, and I think this was essentially what you were saying??? gah, well at least once I start playing the beta I'll know what we currently have.

@Shurdus:

The teching AI would have better but fewer soldiers with more impressive equipment.

The questing AI would have more heroes with better gear but fewer troops.

Who would win would depend on who did better with their strategy.

Some thoughts...

• Man does that map make me miss MoM. I just found out about this game while checking the MoM wiki.
• If this is a post apocalyptic world unlimited growth seems counter-intuitive. Soft food and/or population limits seem sensible. Particularly with a dynastic system in place population growth tracking seems like a no-brainer.
• I'm not keen on these "snake-cities." There was mention made of espionage options. I'd suggest cities with too high a ratio of outerwall to total area count as 'leaky' and are more subject to espionage and have generally weaker defenses.
• Likewise cities should need a zone-of-control to feed their population, with different terrain types providing different levels of production. So like in MoM you might build a mountain city knowing it's never going to support itself, but it's worth building because of local resources such as Adamantine mines or a Mana node. That city then siphons off the global food pool.
• Population growth should slow to a crawl or halt when the food pool plateaus, then the players need to either conquer more farmland or cast a growth spell. Again similar to how in MoM a couple of halfling cities would serve as your breadbasket that powered the conquest machine of other high production/high bonus cities.
• I do wonder what this city-spam limiter is. If cities need large ZoC to feed themselves, and are limited in their ability to grow by the simple lack of bodies in this wasteland that seems adequate. So for example suppose you have a 'population recruitment pool' of size X. Then each turn (or year or whenever growth is handled) that population is divvied out amoungst your available cities according to how attractive each one is. So if you have too many cities the growth will slow to a crawl.
• For that matter if you want to be really realistic before the last 100 years almost all cities were mortality sinks. That is they killed more people (through disease, starvation, crime, etc) than were born in them and maintained their populations through a steady supply of suckers coming to the big city in search of a better life. So maybe size 1,2, and maybe 3 towns are population producers that add people to the population pool, size 3 and/or 4 are population neutral, and size 5 cities are steady drain on the pop pool making it impossible to grow all your cities to full size. Realistic and game balancing in one easy shot.

Oh. And Hi all.

Given the apparent decision to have buckets of mundane research, perhaps the plan includes ways to improve outposts, perhaps by enabling us to send a second pioneer to install upgrades or somesuch.

I was thinking along the same lines. I would like to see limits on the number of large cities and make smaller ones more important to overall growth and expansion.

For an example, you are allowed 2 large, 5 medium and unlimited small cities/towns. Large cities can have nearly unlimited number of tiles, but are 'controlled' by available land, and possibly other factors. Mediums would be restricted to (1/3) of your large city size. Small would then be (1/3) of that number. You would never have hard-caps on growth but 'natural' restrictions would be in place to curb sprawl. Some ideas are:

*More unbuildable land which makes location selection more important especially for large cities.

*More turns to build or make upgrades take time (not be immediate).

*Restrict specialization (eg an all farm town) to small cities and force larger ones to remain balanced in their building. (This makes the smaller towns more valuable if a player wants to specialize. Enable a small specialized town to produce that 'good' faster than the big city.)

If there was interest, I'm sure this could be fleshed out more. I like the idea of making each town/city their own. Usually players max out each city as there is never incentive (or restrictions) to keep cities smaller.

Any thoughts?

But some of us like it that way.  I say let it be a toggle. I perfer 'city spam' and building up my cities but I can understand why some don't so a toggle would be really nice much like in the Civ games where you let the city manager take over. Personally I never use the city manager because a good portion of the fun of the game was building the cities but others made great use of this.

Excellent idea, in fact much better than mine!

Having techs to improve upon Outposts makes perfect sense, and would keep Pioneers from overshadowing city-building in the opening turns of the game.

One other addition would be to have Pioneer units gain some sort of other ability from certain techs. Something like "Build Watchtower" in the Warfare line, "Build Magic Beacon" (allowing you to summon creatures at that location instead of your Sov's), or even "Build Trade Depot" for selling items to adventurers.

Also specail bulding for orks, goblins, trolls are

troll hunters hut

ork and gobling pig farms

butchers hut for orks

smoke house for goblins

Dwarf goat farms

cave forest pop up by goblin invertors hut and can be built anywhere.

Is there a list of city improvements available and what they actually do? So I don't waste time researching, e.g., Construction for the important sounding construction yard (which I assumed to be a production boost, but no, it adds 20% to my materials generation. That would be great at around Turn 20 when materials can be a bottleneck. By Turn 200, one has thousands of materials and nowhere to use them. Need more materials? Don't think so.). And is the Missionary Hall actually useful? Increases influence. Nice!!! Wait a minute, by how much and what does influence do again? The game has great potential and an equally great absence of useful information.