We did a lot of work on the AI this week (and by we, I mean Brad) and made some significant changes. I even had to ask Brad to tone down the aggressiveness based on a game where I got dragged down and beat like the Goonie kids, if they'd accidently wandered into the Hellraiser movies*.
But the trouble with testing the AI in a game that contains as many moving parts as FE is that it can be very situational. It also has a lot to do with balance. Some abilites are to good, some are to weak and a human is always better a figuring out how to exploit them than an AI player. Some items may randomly swing the game ot much (if you get a berserkers axe in the first 20 turns, etc).
I can only play a limited amount of games per week, but if I can get feedback from you folks we can start to learn form that experience and figure out what is keeping the AI from being competitive. I would love to get the following from anyone who is interested.
1. General feedback on if you felt the monsters were a threat (were they too strong, too weak, or about right).
2. General feedback on if you felt the AI players were a threat (were they too strong, too weak, or about right).
3. What difficulty did you play on?
4. What faction/sovereign did you play (if you made a custom sovereigns, what traits did you pick)?
5. If you think the AI was too easy, what did you do to lead to your success (did you outfit your soveriegn in leather armor, find a good sword and then single handidly kill everyone, did you start producing an endless stream of spearmen and destroy with your armies, did you learn fireball and use it to destroy the world)?
6. Attach a save game at the point where you believe you have the game beat so we can check it out. A save at the tipping point, where you believe you have the game won and have to play it out is more useful than one where the opponents are all crushed because it allows us to see exactly what is going on when the AI loses. If you get to a point where yo don't feel a threat from the AI anymore thats a good point to get a save.
Thanks,
Derek
* If you weren't born in an era where killing a duck with a three pixel long sword wasn't awesome then please replace the above mixed analogy with "beat like Justin Bieber, if he'd accidently wandered into one of the Saw movies."
Ok here is where I am going to post a few issues that I have found, that either, needs to be fixed when the game is released, or change on how you do your code.
1) Monsters being random is great and all, the problem is when you get, let's say, those Knights of Asok near your starting city. I understand you want the game to have walls requiring you to level up and get troops to clear out your land. The problem is not that, but the fact that monster only become roaming when YOUR influence is over them, NOT the AI. If you make the city influence different than an outposts, that could solve it. Also, the aspect of city razing. When you, or random monsters, raze a city I noticed that the land that was currently being used by it become unsuitable for a new city. Not sure if that was what you guys where going for, but it does force me to reload or restart upon loosing cities to monsters many times. For those nasties sometimes get some insane roaming ranges.
2) The AI are interesting. I made my own nation that gives me -10% to research and I still out tech them on normal. Taxes are on Normal for the whole game also. The other aspect was that one game I found Queen P and she had Merchant 2 and both Path of the warrior and Assassin. Not to mention she was only level 5. I finished a game on easy with a level 23 hero, and no merchant was allowed, let alone the fact that you get to pick your first trait at 4, and the soonest I got my second path was around 10. I understand the main hero should be hard to kill with your troops, but you should also consider to program the expansion aspect of them, to expand after, or in safer locations. That could also take too much coding, but you could have them focus on clearing the land that they currently control, and when monsters are in there land they lower there expanding rate.
3) I started playing on beginner, to understand the mechanics, and game a little. After that I realized that even on easy I was getting the feeling of being overpowered by the 200th turn on Epic. Now I play on normal.
4)I made my own faction and Sovereign. There are two things that I want to state on Factions. It would be nice to be able to save your crafted armies for future use. Lets say I make a spearman unit with armor that auto upgrades. they should be saved when I play that faction in the future. The other is that it would be nice to have two options at the start of the game, one for sovereign, other for faction. So that you could play different factions with the same sovereign if you want a change of troops but same hero or vice verca. Now onto Sovereigns. The first and largest cheating move I found was that if you pick your profession last you can make a sovereign with a -1 point. Allowing you to essentially make an overpowered starting unit. The next part of Sovereign is that I found that death takes so many turns regardless. You should make it grow. Like lets say, +1 for every death in turns. that way you could penalize players, or AI that try to kill everything and anything with said hero.
- another part that you did not address was one that I think is lacking. That is special abilities your troops can get. It would be nice to be able to know when you will get upgradeable abilities for your crafted troops. Lets say the +1 level ability. I would like to either look in the crafting section and hover over it to find the required tech to use it, or have the tree tell me what abilities I will get. The former would be ideal.
- Last but not least I have found that the save game ability sometimes fails to save everything. That being troops mostly. I can't count the number of times I have seen Pioneers disappear after I load a save after realizing I was stupid and failed to do something important many turns ago. Or load a game after getting back to the game, and realizing that some of my military went AWOL. I now know how it feels to a commander of a soldier that vanishes on you.
With that said, I know I strayed a little here and there from the AI focus of this post, but I believe that there are a few things that would make your game just epic.
Hello,
just wanted to give you some feedbacks after 2h playtime of the current FE Beta. I am a day one Elemental purchaser and never get in the game because "there was something missing" - But now FE:
WOW
I really loved the first hours (and this is unusual for me most games i play for some minutes and then ...), i really like the game flow, the graphics, the challenging monsters (overall the challenge( i HATE games which feel like a cakewalk with tooo many rewards)), the changes you made compared to Elemental. I discovered no bugs so far (beta, what?)
Please keep up the good work and PLEASE NO CASUALISATION!!!
Thank you again. I really probably will buy the game again if everythings alright.
maruo
Game is really feelng "epic".
Hello, forgive me if I'm posting on the wrong thread here, is there a better place to supply feedback on FE beta 3 version .915? Also, I apologize if I'm repeating issues and bugs already addressed elsewhere.
OK, so I'm one of the people that got the free download due to the dissapointment of the original Elemental. I played the original extensively and have played FE all three betas extensively thus far. Unfortunately I always break weak and choose to play instead of finding a place to offer feedback, until now. That and I'm not experienced at gametesting and reporting, so please bear with me.
Perhaps I am alone in this opinion, but after playing FE so much and then reading a few forums on people's experience, I wonder if too much focus is still being put on the begining of the game? Even with the many bugs (many less than there used to be, though, which is nice) I usually choose to forge ahead and keep playing until the game eventually becomes unstable and keeps crashing, which still happens every game when played on a large map with four or more opponents? I am yet able to finnish a complete game on Expert or Ridiculous due to the game crashing (getting too overburdened with everything?) unless I quickly conquer my opponents as described below. With that said, let me just say that I love this game and am still hopeful for the potential that is here.
In no particular order, some observations and thoughts:
Someone already mentioned this, but it is sooooo frustrating that I shall repeat it... during many animated battle screens (some with only a few enemies and only one champion or sov) it slows way way down to the point of ruining the experience and making continuing pointless. Is this a memory leak? I don't know, but its a dealbreaker because watching the animated battle is so much of the fun of this game. It does seem to happen more frequently later in the game.
The AI seems improved in many ways, especially on Expert and above. However, it seems utterly unable to deal with any terraforming magic such as created mountains or raising land bridges... I easily beat the AI when utilizing this magic, which takes the fun out of it. The most irritating bug when using terraforming magic is that the display on the cloth map becomes rendered horribly inaccurately, forcing a game exit and reboot to render the spell changes to the landscape correctly.
As someone else stated, this is very situational, and while pleasingly balanced in some situations, the AI is not in many others. Here are a few more scenarious that the game is easy to get ahead on... playing a Beastlord sov with Natural Leader trait and a kingdom/empire trait of Master Scouts and Betrayers. Playing a sov equipped with Porciphine's Crown makes it even easier. Although one bug is that sometimes after saving a game and then returning to it later, the AI "forgets" about my Master Scout ability and everything starts attacking my peeps, which I'm not set up for strategically since they're not supposed to be LOL. Utilizing existing terrain to my advatage (a la Sparta's 300) is often too easy, the AI just keeps sending hordes against me since it seems to only read the number score that says it is stronger than me.
Although I noticed a few more dialogue tidbits in the last update, I still cringe all too often when our sovs or the opponent sov reps share in discourse. For example, the all too often said "it will be your head on a pike" shows up when it really doesn't make any sense, such as when first meeting a new faction. As this flavor text was such an entertaining part of GAL CIV II its such a shame to be so lackluster thus far here.
Should a faction I am currently at war with still offer to trade tech with me? Is it advantageous to trade in the same tech, such as when they offer to trade 37 magic for 37 magic?
IMHO shouldn't there be a range limit (based on a unit's visibility) to powerful spells such as Earthquake? Like having a recon team on the ground to "paint" the target city with a laser target for the missile lauched from 100 miles away lol? If I've ever been able to see a city on the map, it seems I can target it indefinitely from then on whether I have units close by or not. Seems too easy.
It would be nice to see what a champion has equipped when in a trade screen with my sov or another champion, so I know what I should be giving them. Also to see what their traits are (such as warrior, mage, assassin, etc) so I give them the best gear.
Its a bit frustrating, (but acceptable if this is intentional for the sake of the faction alignment) that when able to recruit champions from either faction, even though I now have units who can use death and life magic, I can only harvest one or the other type of shard but not both.
The biggest frustration with the newest version is just that it crashes once I reach a certain point deep into the game (sometimes within forty turns, but usually not until several hundred turns or more), with no discernible pattern other than theres just too much going on for the game to handle. Once I've reached that point, I can exit and restart the game any number of times but it still will crash, and almost always on the same turn.
Please advise if this is the type of helpful info you are looking for, and I will continue to post more as I have been compiling a list of stuff (that I foolishly didn't make sure I had readily handy when I started writing this post). If I'm addressing points that aren't of much concern to most others then feel free to let me know, I won't get all butt hurt lol. Oh, and I am definitely of the Goonies generation. Great reference lol.
1. Monsters a little too weak.( I think it should be random where they are, not kept away from starting positions, as was mentioned)
2. The AI players were no threat, no wait, they beat me like a step child.
3. I started on challenging and couldn't hang, then normal, then easy and found I could eke by. This is weird, because I used to destroy strategic games.
4. I have been playing Altar since the last patch.
5. Obviously, I didn't think the AI was too easy.
Some errors:
1. After I get well into the game, like year 250 or so, the game closes when I try to save. (I save it in about 5 different saves, is this bad? take up too much space or my comp not bad enough? Intel t6500 @2.1GHz x 2.1 GHz, 4 GB ram, 64bit, 94 gigs free space, Toshiba Laptop)
2. A lot (most always)of the times whoever on my side goes first in a battle, doesn't get control choice buttons. Have to quickly flip the auto fight button on and off to pass first players turn.
3. A lot of the time, after attacking an army of npcs or monsters, their icon stays on the map for several turns, I think until I save usually.
Sorry, if these have already been brought up. I don't have a lot of time to read everything lately.
I just tried to download the update, it's been a while since I did that, and had an issue right away. My norton security suite said it was a virus and deleted it. While I know I can get around that if I need to, It is something that needs to be looked at.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
