In spite of some really annoying technical issues forcing me to play on the cloth map only due to awful fps, I've completed several games (win and lose) on various difficulty settings, so I thought I'd share a few very important points for the more experienced gamers out there looking for a challenge
1) There are TWO difficulty settings in Elemental, one controls, I believe, map difficulty, the other controls AI difficulty
I can't actually confirm the first, because the first difficulty setting doesn't have a tooltip
2) AI difficulty is set PER AI
If you bump the difficulty on the factions screen up to 'Ridiculous' but don't do it for each AI, you're playing vs one Ridiculous AI and a bunch of Normals!
So, before you believe the AI is totally incompetent, be sure to adjust both difficulty levels.
3) On a medium size world, 4 AI is TOO FEW
With four AI present, you will have huge tracts of open space. The AI does a decent job of expanding, but not that good, so you're given too much free room to build up. Add more AI players to get closer borders, and thus, more early to mid game conflict (or at least, force Diplomacy research!).
Be sure to fill up the map until you start experiencing early contact/conflict, or you may be in for a long and boring game, instead of one where you need to use a mix of might and diplomacy to survive.
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By adding a few more AI civs to a standard size map and bumping all AIs and map difficulty to Ridiculous, I lost four games in a row. In the last one, the AI expanded around my main city grabbing nearby resources, decided I was too weak, declared war, and squished me. This is with me using a cheesily built custom hero that was 100% into fast movement/combat stats with all other stats and irrelevant weaknesses taken to aim for maximum early game AI blitzing.
Now with that said, the AI still needs plenty of work. To experiment, I dropped down to Normal 'Map', Hard AI (difficulty goes Normal, Challenging, Hard, Extreme, Ridiculous), and was still able to plow through the entire game - I believe because I didn't add enough extra AI civs - by the time I made contact, I was stronger than the AI, and consequently, it never declared war. This is a problem, because without at least trying to wage partial war against me (or even team up with another AI against me), it let me grow out of control. As a result I was able to finish each win condition to check them out with no opposition. I _never_ had to use Tactical Battle, and I didn't research a single Tactical Spell. I won the entire game with instant autoresolve. Very boring.
There is another serious AI issue - at the very very end of that Hard test game, almost seven hundred turns in, two of the AIs still had not made contact with each other! The AI did a pretty good job of filling out the map and expanding, but it did not continue to scout around the map. There were two other civs in the game before I wiped them out, but they too had issues with full map exploration. Here's a pic of the two AIs having not met each other:
And here's the world map, you can see they were *close* to each other, but after hundreds of turns, there's no reason they shouldn't have met
I think that part of the problem *may* be that the AI can't cope well with the raving hordes of monsters that get unleashed with high levels of adventuring research. I'll make a separate post about that, as the respawning is completely absurd
This is another area where the lack of documentation/in-game prompting may be causing them some bad PR (I don't understand why that first difficulty setting doesn't have a tooltip, and the factions screen is VERY important for setting up the game world, but also unintuitive - I know some people have actually accidentally removed AI from the game!
In any case, be sure to tinker with the AI settings before you go declaring it completely braindead. It has some problems, but you can in fact create a challenging game of Elemental, as long as you configure it correctly first!
edit: Based on this abuse https://forums.stardock.com/392812
I would strongly recommend you do not set the WORLD Difficulty above Normal right now. It's screwing over the AI disproportionately. Ironically, the game is being 'fair' about this, but I don't think the intent of higher world difficulty was half the AIs dying to ravening bladder beasts in the first fifty turns.
Yeah that's the thing about 4x games, you have 1 bad game or 1 bad game setup and you think the whole game sucks but after messing with map size and number of enemies you can find the sweet spot to suit your playing style.
I would also like to point out to those who haven't opened up the difficulty XML that the AI on normal difficutly is only using 75% of it's intellegence. This is done I believe to simulate humans making mistakes. If you want the AI to use it's full ability the difficulty has to be Challenging or above. The only advantage the AI gets on Challenging is double the starting funds but other then that the AI is basically equal to the player only now it's not gimped in it's decisions.
However alot of the AI effectiveness still depends on what random resorces spawn next to the AI and other variables and I agree the AI still needs some work, especially with pathfinding. Like I'll send a unit out of my city that has a road but it won't exit on the road thus slowing the unit down for a turn or 2. I have to manually select the road tile to exit on rather then my desitination. Little things like that could also affect the AI's responce time as well, unless the AI knows to exit on the road first before arriving to the destination but I doubt that cause your units don't do it automatically either.
yeah, i can see why some factions may have not met each other at the end of the game, since the hordes get bigger and scouting becomes impossible with your original sized scouting parties. the other reason is that you are not allowed to explore out the map. i mean if you step foot on someone else's land you immediately get a message to get out. the only way to really explore is to declare war in order to pass by for exploration. now im sure there's maybe a treaty you can research and offer in order to walk on other people's land, and maybe trade units can go though? idk.
It's called a "non-aggression pact".
Non aggression pacts allow free border travel, so it is possible that if two AI civs were hostile and a third was behind them, they never made contact
In this case though, those other 'blocking' civs were killed (by me), and I wasn't attacking the other two, so there's no reason (other than the absurd rampaging hordes of monsters) that they couldn't have met up. By the end I was just hitting 'next turn', waiting to finish the spell of mastery research, since I was completing each of the win conditions in that game - they had plenty of unopposed time to tech up/explore, and they did not do so.
But yeah, adding more AI civs helps mitigate that somewhat, and causes more early contact/conflict. It's possible the AI isn't being diplomatically intelligent with one another, but I need to play a few more games with 6-8 civs to see how they play out, I'm still fooling with the map/AI difficulties trying to find a good balance.
I don't think the AI is quite where it needs to be, but it's definitely not 'playing dead' on the higher difficulties.
Another issue Ive had with the AI is that they dont use there sovereign wisely. For example, I declared war on one of the AI that had like, 5 settlements. I took the first one without too much trouble (I'd suprised him) and he sent like, a ton of enemies at me that would've been hard to defeat (I saw them coming) but! he left his soveriegn in my new cities influence, so I just walked up and killed him and his entire empire collapsed.
Is there an option for 'complete kills' where the entire empire doesnt just basically vanish once you kill their leader?
But yes, overall, the AI is just too easy imho
One other thing- there needs to be a TOUGH difficulty level that has no AI bonuses or penalties.
Right now normal has gimped AI, and challenging has *2 starting gold.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the sovereign behavior right now. I was worried about this the instant they talked about in-game 'avatars', as they have huge balance issues
One possibility would be that death causes banishment + essence loss, instead of simply dropping a single point of essence and putting you in the nearest city (a piddly loss, even early game). Losing your sovereign for some turns (possibly increasing with each death) would discouraging sovereign zerging.
The 'total empire defeat' being tied to your sovereign just seems like a bad idea, especially with the AI.
After a day of reading hundreds of nasty forum posts throughout the webs, it's great to see someone using their time to do something nice for others....thanks Mtrisis!
ps. Working on resolving those annoying tech issues as we speak...thanks for holding in there
Thanks for the tips. I have also taken to winning game after game by ignoring magic altogether and using auto-resolve. There are some serious balance and AI issues that need to be beaten into submission.
Banishment is a pretty good idea, it could be explained that the leader needs time to cast a certain spell to break a seal or some other fantasy explanation that fits in the universe.
Is a piddly stack of starting gold the only bonus the Challenging AI gets?
One thing I've never liked about stardock games is how you immediately take control of all of a city/planet's influence when you capture it. They need to take a page from civ4's book and track each player's influence in a city separately, forcing you to start at the minimum value when you freshly capture a city but letting the original owner get all the influence back if he retakes it. I hated a lot of things about conquest in civ4 (revolt times, building destruction) but they got that part right.
People like me, who enjoy the game, are playing it - instead of posting on the forums all the day.
So don't jump to conclusions if there are more bad posts then good ones
That's true. It makes conquest a bit too powerful for expansion imo. On the other hand it's not too unrealistic that a city keeps its influence on its surroundings if its owner changes by whatever means.
The worlds been destroyed, you finally find a place to settle, with a decent home and food, Your protection from the environment is a few - a few dozen soldiers that spend hours and hours a day holding nature at bay.
There is some sovereign that rules the city, no one really cares about him outside of the fact he protects you and yours with his soldiers.
One day, You hear some fighting, you assume its just nature, then a herald calls out.
"THIS CITY IS NOW UNDER THE CONTROL OF A NEW SOVEREIGN, Your city will still be protected, and your life will not change in any way form or fashion"
I totally understand rebellions in Civ4, but when we are talking about citys that represent tens of thousands of people, and thrown together towns that barely count as a village but are the new biggest cities in the world.
Iunno it seems fitting to me. There is not much "nationality" its just..people trying to survive and happy to be alive. As long as you aren't oppressing them, why should they care.
What I would like to see (which I would never EVER do, because I'm not all that great at strategy games ) is an option to have all the AI's teamed from the beginning. So it's basically a 1vs2, 1vs3, etc. for the WHOLE game. Now THAT would be hard, and would add a ginormous amount of difficulty to the current AI. Obviously a diplomatic victory would be out of the question ...
Good review with screen shots and everything... I have also noticed the lack of a tooltip on several items and it can be extremely frustrating.
Has anyone tried Ridiculous AI with the world difficulty set to easy? Maybe the AI is just getting mobbed by NPC's too quick? I notice factions die within the first 30 turns a lot on ridiculous/ridiculous. I'll try it later when I get home. Might add an interesting dynamic if you don't get uber leveled armies so quick from NPC hordes.
I played a game through on Normal/Hard and won easily, but I think I had too few AI in the game (4). I'm still fooling with the difficulty level, but yeah, given the monster behavior, leaving world difficulty at Normal (or even dropping it to Easy) and upping AI difficulty to at least Challenging is a good idea if you're even remotely experienced as a TBS player.
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