Started a new game, love the New Game interface and all the options.
Takes way too long to build meat shields. There's got to be a better way to balance late game troop building than making the early game a tedious slog as you wait 15 turns for a couple guys to make themselves some spears. Or maybe I just need to learn to play the game better and stop trying to play this like it's 0.95.
Well, I may be waiting for troops, but I am loving the environment! I'm surrounded by monsters, everywhere I turn there's a troll or an ogre or a bandit lair or a gasp slag! Nowhere is safe! The world is super dangerous! Finally, my troops arrive, I am able to brave the wilderness... and I find that my neighbor has expanded wildly. Foolish.
Wait. Why is that Slag chasing me and not the pioneers wandering without protection? Well, no worries, easy enough to escape. It's just a fluke of the random monster AI...
Strange to see an Ogre just wandering, oh, it's because some earlier pioneer put down an outpost and released him. Strange, the completely undefended outpost is still there. And here's another undefended outpost with roaming monsters all around it. Suspicious...
And then it happened. That same foolhardy AI Pioneer that the slag had ignored a few turns earlier walks into a forest infested with mites. Haha! Silly AI, now you're in for it. The pioneer steps closer, the mites move in for the kill... and they occupy the same space?!
A couple turns later, the AI's pioneer reaches a nice spot next to a river, with four monsters dens within a tile's distance and founds a city. Completely undefended. Maybe the monsters are just not attacking anything? I walk over to check it out, bang, I am attacked by a Troll and his wolf army.
That really sucks. The whole AI unit and monster unit on the same tile thing sucks. The monsters only attacking my stuff sucks. The whole concept that a pioneer can wander undefended and plop down outposts or a city without fear of the monsters it passes or settles next to sucks. The world is supposed to be dangerous.
I just wonder if because Frogboy would be testing the monster behaviour with the Ctrl+U command to remove the fog of war, whether that is hiding a problem that we see because we (generally) play with FOW on.
The last game I played, I had a loosed dragon heading directly to my city from 2 screens away. BUT I saved and logged out before it got to my territory. When I loaded the game it started heading back from whence it came.
Perhaps the function GetNearestEnemy, or ScanRadius, or a compbination isn't working as intended. OR there aren't enough triggers for the function to run again so it can select a more realistic target.
I agree with the above, that monsters should behave rationally. In fact I actually play assuming that if I stop in a square next to a beastie, I will get attacked if the unit is weaker than the beastie. I would much prefer that (note: I play on Hard monster to get a higher chance it will attak)
Yep...been saying that all along.
Its the "friendly" neighbourhood watch...
Sincerely~ Kongdej
Is there a way to just toggle the Monster aggressivness without everything else that goes with changing World difficulty? IMO this should be s seperate toggle in the options
That would be nice, playing with the world on insane tends to get the AI flipping around dying, but actually makes a very interesting game.But would be nice to choose monsters artificial boosts separate from agressiveness.
I have asked about a monster aggressiveness slider about 20 times already
Something like:
Docile - Gentle - Normal - Active - Nasty
World difficulty only affects monster aggressiveness and their toughness.
I know this has been a problem in the past, Brad, I wonder if it's still tainting your testing.
Yea but some players want maximum aggressiveness and not so powerful monsters. If anything else for testing purposes, my current home rules include levelling all my heroes in path of the governor (God thats useless) and then only really using trained troops, while 1 governor at a time is grouping up with a couple of trained units to whack the world. With monsters set on insane I have to tech up to ludicrous amounts of technology before trained units stand a chance against mites with 70 hp. But I really want the world's monsters to be aggressive, they need to attack stuff.
I do still see monsters in enemy faction's territory though, so obviously insane is not aggressive enough.
I'm going to have to do the cheat. My anecdotal evidence though is very different. Twice in 9.8.2 I have invaded a superior AI empire. I bypassed the roaming enemy heroes. I took all the cities. By the time I was done, the mobs had destroyed all the cities I had conquered. In both cases, there were so many medium and strong mobs floating a round that I wasn't able to get my heroes back in one piece, and yet the AI had, seemingly, had no issues. The AI was on Challenging.
I actually don't care if the AI cheats, but if you think it isn't then something isn't copacetic.
The theory is that it's related to simultaneous turns. That is, the monsters move at the same time the players do and monsters are only allowed to move 1 tile per turn (not sure if anyone noticed that before). So they tend to end up where the AI unit was previously. Whereas, a human, being slower, wouldn't get their unit out of the way in time.
So even if I explicitly target an AI unit, the monster might have trouble getting him. What I'd have to do is, cheat and have the monster look at the destination of the AI unit and then intercept him. But this is a pretty significant bit of surgery to try out.
It should be noted that AI players, unlike humans, start with a significant disadvantage -- there is no limitation to how close monsters start to AI players. We did this so that we can stuff more monsters onto a map. But if you unhide a new map with lots of monsters, you'll note that the AI gets a lot more monsters around them.
And from the logs, I can tell you, for a fact, that the monsters kill a lot more AI units per game than humans per game. Every saved game we get shows this. The monsters do far more harm to AI players than human players in the bigger scheme of things.
The part that gets me is their very selective seeming blindness to AI cities/outposts/resource nodes. I've popped that shadow rift spell down adjacent to an AI city before and every single monster it spawned ran directly away from the town.
I think all 'experienced' player of this game clear the area of lairs as we go to allow for clear 'inner' city transport. Out of curiosity, does the AI? I know that the AI does a much better job of connecting the dots from an influence perspective. I wait to do that until after I have myself settled a bit.
Heh, I really don't want the mobs to specifically target the AI, that would suck. I will though start a new game and see what the cheat shows. Like I said, my evidence was anecdotal.
While the AI and monsters move on the players turn, have you tried making each AI player and the monsters have seperate turn orders, so while I am playing my turn, the game would first play say gilden's turn, then tarths' then resoln, and then when the AI is done it would move the monsters?
And target their cities, outposts and resource nodes.
Thanks for engaging us on this issue. That theory is sound (I really don't think FoW is affecting anything.) I also think the "NearestEnemyUnit" might need a little tweaking to keep monsters from reacting to local stimulus by charging wildly across the map.
Personally, I don't think AI players should have that disadvantage on the higher difficulties. I would bet that when you fix the simultaneous move bug (or whatever it is), the logs are going to show the AI getting absolutely crushed because they can't even get their pioneers out of their first city.
I do understand the motivation for it: you don't want human players getting frustrated by mega-monsters ending their game on turn 50. So on Easy or even Normal, maybe you can give the player a nice comfortable cushion protected from monsters. But on Hard and above, the monsters should just be around.
But how much of that is due to the AI not knowing how to use spells or build sufficiently strong armies? There's two interconnected issues. One, the AI seems to be able to dodge monster attacks. Two, the AI does not know how to use magic (though it's getting better at this and at building armies).
I have been engaged 2 tiles away from some monsters (Mostly mites actually, and yes in 0.981), so it doesn't always follow that rule, but in general yes I see it and thats is half the reason I'm not being eaten by monsters all the time
Hmm, I don't think I would have done like this, but whatever works.
The ai's doing battle with monsters, and being attacked by them is not the question at fault here, not at all, it is the constant finding of AI cities right next to river slags, where the river slag is within the territory of the AI's city, and then 2 turns after you see this, the river slag wakes up and instead of going for the city who annoyed the slag, it will bee-line for player territory to munch on the poor Umber.Thats how I understand it anyways, correct me if I am wrong, And hope you don't see me as too negative, I just want monsters to FEEL like they are fair, I understand that while I am not seeing the AI the monsters are surely to eat tons of AI pioneers and units, and whatever, I am confident in it anyways since you keep stating the AI is being eaten, and there must be something to support that, besides AI heroes have wounds once in a while.
GJ working on the AI and thanks for trying to both talk to us ppl and listening
Hi Brad,
I can live with the monsters moving to a space just vacated by an AI army. The almost-simultaneous turns stuff is pretty cool. Kind of freaky really. I've been sitting there watching my screen when all of the sudden a big ogre takes a step towards me. Kind of eery. Really cool! Anyway, two things:
1 ) Do monsters always have to move last during the turn? Could it be random? Sometimes they move first (before the AI can get out the way). Sometimes they move last and just miss the AI.
2 ) Towns don't move; therefore, the monsters should not be missing the AI towns like they do.
This is a single player game so there is no need for simultaneous turns. Now if this is game ever becomes a MP game then an option should be put in for simultaneous turns (but let it be an option.)
They move first in the turn, but your notion about random orders makes me think of the simultaneous turns in "Age of Wonders" where only 1 unit had a "movement queue" at a time, so they would avoid clogups like this, it was slightly messy to play with, but an almost similar system could be used for the logic engine on monsters and ai, and then let the game queue up the animations and run them after the player moves.
I also appreciate Frogboy's candor in the matter and the discussion on environment vs units and same-turn mechanic disparity. I don't understand how it's relevant to "how an AI expands into hostile environment without clearing the area or suffering lost expansion".
Do the environment mobs switch target often? If 2 slags and a forest dragon are "aggro" and have potential to eat a city does an AI unit spawn detract said mobs' attention and path the creature away perpetually? Can we do this? Can I "train" 2 slags and a forest dragon at someone, for the monsters to "get tired" of chasing and decide to eat an opponent city?
Very AOW:SM ish I like. But I also like a little randomness in my games as well.
I made some maps in the old Starcraft game, and in Warcraft 3, and I found one of the most interesting random mechanics was a low chance to act differently, when designing encounters and a world that wants to eat players, let it be predictable most of the time, but make 10% of the guardian statues aggressive instead of docile, give dragons a 15% chance each 25 turns to spawn dragonlings that roam aggressively in a 4 tile radious around the dragon lair, that kind of chances instead of 50% to ignore troops, and 30% chance to ignore its own lair, and beeline for the opposite side of the entire map.
Meaby thats just me though
we trust you
but this isnt good if you think it deeply
this is really bad in fact
we dont want randomness, we dont want ai to die randomly cause they spawn near 20 dragons, this is unfun and just plain bad
we want ai to be attacked WHEN IT DESERVES it, like when ai build a city in front of a lair, when a strong monster randomly roam near ai city, here is when we want ai to be attacked (and us players too ofc)
tbh i dont like so much ai spawn points to not have the same privileges as players, its much better all start the same way
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