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.
This ties in with the auto-raze feature.
Would be nice if a raze option was given to you as you passed over an improvement.
For monsters, code can be changed just try raze after every turn of movement. Special attention to be given to cities as they are sometimes conquered by monsters...
I'd prefer that monster AI on hard or above purposefully targets cities/improvements/outposts as well as units. Especially the bigger stuff.
On a side note: troll groups tend to attack cities on expert difficulty. I had no units in there, they attacked it, then went back the other way. So certainly seems targeted.
I've seen monsters attack AI units; sometimes pioneers or other combat units. It once knocked out the AI pioneers to prevent it from settling on a choice plot of land (w/ 3 essence) and allowed my escorted guys come up knock out the monsters and take the spot.
If you're having problems with AI beating you to the punch on plots you want; and you are willing to customize your nation. Take a nation of enchanters; then amass mana early to plop down arcane monoliths faster than the AI can get there. It helps cordone off lands that you may want to settle but can't get to yet. Or resources that you will want to develop later.
Let your initial city engulf any enemy outposts in your ZoC. And save the arcane monoliths for territories that the AI won't be able to similarly take control of your monoliths with their expanding ZoCs.
I changed the option to allow me to control where I place my buildings instead of allowing the AI decide. This way I can snake or expand my ZoCs to thwart my opponents.
e.g. towns I try to have them sprawl out. Conclaves/Fortresses I might tend to keep them more compact; or push it in a direction to take control of a resource or outpost in control of resources.
On that note, with Pariden, I don't recall seeing any arcane monoliths cast by their sovereign. I believe I see similar outposts.
So, how does the Warden upgrade for outposts work if it doesn't repel monsters?
Excellent.
Dont treat AI differently when you spawn mobs though, that is a horrible decision, on challenging difficulty it should be EQUAL. Also, on harder difficulties, why on earth would you help the players? To fit more monsters on the map is not a good excuse at all.
The game is WAY too easy as it is.
Whoa!! ease up there FrenziedMan!! I played a game just recently (.981) with expert dense monsters, and a caster sovereign using Life and Water magic. It took me 50+ turns to start clearing the monsters away from anything worth while.... that and I left the number of champions on random.... I only had my soverign.....
That was a challenging game. Especially since trolls like taking out cities!!
this is still heavily happening in 983
it still seems to me monsters just dont target ai 99% of the times
It doesn't do anything at all right now.
Sincerely~ K
Wow. So it's broken? Sounds like a need bug fix, then.
Saw a bug report about it at some point, someone looked through the code.I might be wrong though, I just have not seen a bug fix for it through patch notes, and I usually gain no benefit from building it, it doesn't really keep monsters at bay...
The fact that the devs haven't targeted it for patching leads me to wonder whether it isn't instead working as it should. The problem is, we as players can't tell that. We can test out other things that the outpost improvements do, but there's no way to see this one. Or to know what it will repel, what it won't, and why.
I should have taken a screenshot the other day. I went near an AI city to try and get a closer look. It was surrounded by 2 dragons, 1 drake and 1 slag and they did not attack it... ever. And it was a wimpy city so they should have crushed it.
Elemental: Fallen Enchantress in a nutshell... See this all the time.
I woke up iron golem to south of my capital ~25 tiles away. He went all the way through passing 2 cities of mine, then he was hanging around for idk like 50 turns there chilling, and enjoying the views. Finally he went to have a party somewhere else.
Everytime I wake up monsters or they attack me instantly, or they just move on with their lives.'
Would be cool to know from dev if they are going to do something about it.
Why does this happen?
-"ive settled near golem this month, asked him if its okay and he was like sure why not, I could use some company"
-"thats weak. I met this dragon once, and said to him - fuck this, you are my bitch now so ive pimped him out as my dog and he fends of all the invaders for me thats cool right bro"
It feels almost like AI have some sort of contest who have bigger balls. Thats the conversation im hearing in my mind they are doing something insane like this.
Really this is so wrong. Simultaneous can explain why a lot of time the loser who set it off don't get attacked.
The thing about not attacking outpost just makes me sad. Especially since some players will argue nonstop building of pioneers is a strategy. And a winning one at that.
As a player the only way not to get peeved off about this whole thing has been to just be the biggest prick and set off all I can against the AI and if it chases me in their territory and wrecks stuff. good.
Flogging a dead horse I know, but this thread needs to stay bumped.
In my recent game (.983) as Pariden, Magnar, Resolyn, and Yithril declare on me. I advance my strong army into a town bordering mine to find 2 lairs and 4 armies of strong crag thingies. My army gets attacked three times by the bloody things which is fine, but why is it not attacking the town??!?.
I reload, send my army to another town instead, my fortress (near the above mentioned magnar border town) gets destroyed by a strong stack as above. Note that the lair this army spawned from was RIGHT NEXT TO THE MAGNAR TOWN which was not defended at all by anything serious.
Thats not fun at all.
Add to the fact that ALL of my expansion territory was somehow settled before the lairs were killed off... and any attempt to destroy those outposts was hindered by the monster mobs all the way through.
I really hope this is being looked at hard.... cos its not fun. Challenging difficulty should mean no advantages or disadvantages for the AI, like it was in GalCiv2.
It really does.
I am trying to play less hero more civ. The monsters that I can see go past there stuff and into my cities, its maddening, hair pulling stuff. AI builds right next to a hoarder spider stack, the spiders hang round do nothing for like 10 turns, then go past his city, past his outpost, turn left instead of right (righ is another AI city) and attack my city!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Its like turn 50 or something, Not even all my heros and all my troops teleported to this city can win this fight. THere is literally no way to win a battle that should never have taken place.
Its just plain not fun.
I like that more people than me is trying to play with the civ part of the game, but you pretty much nailed one of the big reasons I keep away from elemental at the moment, its impossible to protect against the big creatures of thë world in the civ part - in the same way it is in the hero part of the game.
Sincerely~ Kongdej
game is not supposed to be played without a sovereign and heroes
they are part of the game, then it should be possible to develop different things but they still are are and have to be important
FWIW, in my current .983 game, Altar lost 2 towns to a rampaging troop of bears. OTOH, an Obsidian Golem seems to have wandered 25 tiles away from its start without hitting any of the 4 towns on its way.
I must confirm the strange behavior of monsters in such that monster do not attack AI cities [0983 version].
AI settles their cities everywhere, activating dragons, shrill lords etc. and monsters just roam around...
Ok i see that sometimes monster do attack AI units, but then again not so often...
BUT when i conquer one such cities and if monsters are nearby, they attack my cities everytime...
So it can be sometimes pretty frustrating, beacuse AI don`t have such problems expanding as human player does,
but it can be interesting and challenging game
Update says that the AI will be better about not settling next to monsters. Let's see what that does and make sure to give new feedback come .984.
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