Many players have complained that the monsters treat AI differently than they treat the player. Brad says that on challenging, the monsters treat the AI exactly the same way they treat the player.
Many players claim that the AI dogpile on the player without rhyme or reason. Brad says that this only happens on higher difficulties.
Brad may be right. I would not know, I seldom play Expert, and never below that.
This is why I am going to play ironman on challenging with what is considered the worst sovereign, Queen Procipinee. When the game is over (or has become too boring) and I will go back to my saves, and take a look at what the AI is doing (someone will have to tell me how, but I know it can be done)
By the way, do you have to do something before you start the game to be able to look at the AI moves from saves? If so, I would really appreciate it if you tell me before I start. (Which will be about 30 minutes from the timestamp of this post)
The experiment has been concluded, and the results can be found here.
i have noticed a bug quite often that i cant figure out how to duplicate, but quite randomly and fairly often, the grain/materials/essence info will just disappear and not even show up when you mouse over the tiles where they used to be, but if i save the game then reload it, they all reappear. So it may be playing into it seeming like the AI is settling where there are no resources, when there really are and that bug has popped up.
This is a different issue. Disappearing tile yields are just a display error, probably due to a memory leak. In this game, the AI settled on a swamp tile. Not only do these never have yields, you cannot even build from an existing city on them, not without using "Raise Land" first.
I don't own elemetal yet, though I'll tell you why I would maybe increase the difficulty to challenging
the reason is simple: our history of gaming
Generally I tend to play this kind of games on the "AI doesn't cheat & player have no advantage" scale.
the worst AI cheat I saw was on Empire Earth (the first one), if you forgot to kill 1 builder unit it could rebuild its whole base elsewhere in a matter of seconds. So maybe try to not go overboard either on higher difficulties, it's one thing for an AI to have 2x, 5x or 10x more money income (the AI still needs to build up strenght)
it's another thing to be able to rush anything with no cost (the AI has no challenge, it can just build whatever it wants however it wants, not very fun for players in my view)
I play the game at lower levels. I play the game as a casual story with a bit of a challenge, as I expect many do.
If I had only just bought FE, and I had happen to me what has happened to me on several occasions, were the AI steam-rolls me into the ground for no reason. Then I might very well have thrown the game into the bin and warned others off buying FE.
This sort of thing can easily happen were first impressions are paramount.
You didn't read the post I was quoting..
he wrote "I do not care what game you play, when you pick a harder AI or difficulty the AIs "cheats" by getting bonuses the players do not. This has always been the way it was done." Which I responded to.
You totally missed my point
Yep. A good game sure, fun certainly, but polished? No, not by any reasonable definition of the word.
Not yet anyway and at the current rate of progress I think it is at least another month or two away from possibly reaching 'polished'.
I remember this, but EE is still one of my favorite games of all time. That game was so moddable it wasn't even funny.
for:
"
* AIs gang up on the player in war.
Confidence: Low
Reasoning: I was consistently near the top of the pack. No one attacked me. The AIs ganged up on Kraxis as I was crushing it. If the AIs gang up, it's on weaker nations, not on the player specifically. Of course, with all the ways the AI gets an advantage, it's easy for a player to end on the bottom."
The AI does gang up on the weak, no matter the faction (Empire/Kingdom). They don't seem to have any flavour diplomacy wise wrt to that split - in either direction. In my recent start Tarth was 'close' to everyone (both factions) really early in the game despite both neighbours being on the wrong side of the empire/kingdom fence.
What it looks like is the AI 'respects' an army, but too much so. They shouldn't be friends with anyone who has an army and not friends with those who don't.
As per the mass war issues - I've seen a clearly consistent AI response in my last 4 games. At some point in the 'early' (sub 80ish turn) game each AI hits the mark where they trigger looking for a war. They then all DoW the weakest (happens to be the player a lot just due to focusing on buildings vs. units). As I fought back each of them in turn, they asked for peace -- effectively showed I wasn't a meal and they backed off to 'normal' diplomatic relations (my empire/kingdom types liked me, the opposite ones didn't). They would carry on wars vs. each other (sometimes to the point of neither faction having anything left).
So dog piling against the player they don't do on purpose, but it's consistent on 'when' they chose to look for a fight, down to the turn in most cases. Amusingly, if you meet an AI just before that turn hits, they'll DoW you out of the blue right after meeting them - even if they're across the map.
Ofc, the problem with this behaviour is that the AIs don't mop up the monsters near them at all due to using all units for war. As well, there's no 'surprise' attacks as the AI DoWs on that turn and then shows up much later (if ever) with an army.
bump - because this thread is important
I really would like to know how many of the things I found are bugs, how many are working as designed, and how many will be addressed in 1.01.
I'm pretty confident that the A.I just shops around for tech. In my current game I've out-teched the A.I (challenging) but they always seem to be shopping around for techs so I think they keep themselves in the game by trading techs with each other...which in my book is a competitive A.I
...* AIs gang up on the player in war.Confidence: LowReasoning: I was consistently near the top of the pack. No one attacked me. The AIs ganged up on Kraxis as I was crushing it. If the AIs gang up, it's on weaker nations, not on the player specifically. Of course, with all the ways the AI gets an advantage, it's easy for a player to end on the bottom.
Here's a thing that I think could use some sharp eyes on it:
Do the non-aggression pact and tribute treaties "work" or are there circumstances where an AI will declare war despite one or both of these treaties being in place?
I feel like paying tribute does not offer protection from war, except in the sense that refusing the offer may result in an immediate declaration of war. The trade window indicates that it offers 30 turns protection.
I am certain that I've paid for non-aggression treaties right before making a declaration of war in order to isolate an AI from it's allies. Yet they came to the rescue of the AI I'd attacked within a few turns, breaking our non-aggression pact.
I believe that as of .992 non-aggression pacts and tribute offers had absolutely no effect on an AI ability to declare war.
Given that I have not seen anything about that in the changelogs, I expect the same is true for 1.00 and 1.004
Wow, I almost forgot this bug. Quickly making non-aggression pacts by giving them so much gold only to be get attacked immediately atfer just several turns.
But hey, so far now, diplomacy really does not exist in this game. I don't think I have ever opened diplomacy window since the game was officially released. Kinda surprised they still have not fixed this (since this bug has existed for a long time.)
You should. You can get paid to declare wars, and you can get some cash for your tech. Also, I find that, sometimes, you can get away with selling horses and wargs.
And of course, once you kick someone's ass thoroughly enough, it's well worth it for make peace, get trade/tech treaties, and even make them pay for a NAP and Alliance.
Negotiating from a position of weakness does not work, but negotiating from a position of strength sure does. Just like in reality.
I see, but the most of the time, when playing Expert or higher, I normally on low-score all the time, getting war and stuffs. Normally, it is usually AI wanting peace first, not me.
And when my power rating is high enough get such suggested bonus as in position of strength, the game is already over and in sweeping process anyway.. Well, I guess my gamestyle is hardcore enough (playing Beastlord as Ironman-mode due to the reload bug issue on my game.)
That said, I trust Brad's word, and decided to use auto-run mode with stock factions on 12x8 map. I will post observations on this thread or will start new thread.
I did auto-run for 12x8 map, setting epic, everything dense/plenty except resource being moderate. all stock factions plus Capitar and Umber custom sovs. Difficulty is Challenging/Challenging. After about 270 turns. I removed the fog of war.
In short, AI cheats on monster aggression. As I said, all AIs have semi-immunity for monsters.
More description : it cheats real hard.
Even more description : it is to the point of laughable and ridiculous (not really 'semi'... more likely 'almost'), and I wish I did not run auto-run, because after I saw how hard AI cheats on monster aggression, I completely lost any will to bother playing this game anymore until someone (either devs or modders) brings significant changes on this.
I suspect you won't notice much since most AI vs monster battle is mostly AIs attacking them first, and monsters really rarely attack anything.
A Magnar, with 250 power rating, with 9 cities completely surrounded by "strong" and "deadly" monster groups, from nearly 100 additional turns I only see 4 cities being razed, and by looks of it, it is most likely because the city was on the path of the monster movement and/or a city was built literally next to the monster lair. Pretty much all the time, monster movements inside of influence zone was nearly completely random, sometimes attacking unguarded pioneers but that's it.
And no garrison troops. Nope. Magnar's capital city, surrounded by three Earth Elemental armies, with just pioneer, not even fortress-type city (it's just a level 3 town.) Never gets attacked.
There is no need to believe or anything. Anyone who has this game check oneself. Do yourself a favor and do auto-run, and you will see. There is no need of arguing about player bias or something, because the evidence is just... right there.
Maybe, MAYBE it's because monsters overestimate garrison troops on city as Tuidjy said to me.... oh wait, all Magnar had was a pioneer unit on its capital city. Well, if those mightly elementals overestimate terrible city militia (level 3 town), well, all I say is all of these power rating thingly is completely FUBAR.
So, in order to comfirm Tuidjy's theory, I am running another auto-run, but this time world difficulty is "ridiculous" and AI is "hard". If I don't see any difference, I will try insane-novice. I will post the result later.
With setting up world difficulty higher than AI indeed makes AI struggle hard, but I don't see much strong evidence that monsters are aiming for city more often. Indeed there are more cities being razed by monsters.... But with such high monster density and too many of them roaming around, it should be much more destruction. I say this is just inconclusive.... I don't see an evidence claim that monster overestimating city guards, but then, saying otherwise is also claiming without proof.
Yes, it is very hard to set up an experiment that shows anything conclusively. When I said 'Confidence: average' I was pretty much saying, I do not know.
It has been said that above challenging, the aggressiveness towards the AI is lower and towards the player is higher. I don't know if this applies to setting the world difficulty insane or if it is setting the AI difficulty insane. I suspect that the world difficulty determines the monsters aggressiveness towards the player and AI.
The experiment should be done specifically on challenging world difficulty.
But as I have done many times in my own games was place buildings where ever I liked. I don't worry with dragons, rock spiders, umberdroths. I lose maybe 1 or 2 a game to the monsters, but not very often.
The power rating system is a bit iffy at best anyway.
What you have to bear in mind is that a big group of Air Shrills or whatever, they use up their Sonic Blasts on their first turn and then by the time their third turn comes around they're either dead from arrows/staves, dead from magic, dead from a group of horse riders.
Now against rookie troops and champions, that elemental damage is rarely resisted and can be quite lethal, but against troops that have fought wars and have hitpoints in the triple digits, it's like 'Did you just... attack me? That was a bit lame whatever it was.' So the power rating for the monsters is lower than the player's army by a couple of orders of magnitude. But they'll still attack because they think they have a chance.
My point is, if the rating system doesn't reflect the true power of both sides, then who knows what other barmy decisions monsters are making at the end of a turn. They see a town and they're like 'bright lights! bright lights! run away!'
No, and I know that they don't always wander off to find a dark cave to sleep in, but they do seem a bit sluggish to respond to the little folk repopulating the world. I've lost just one village because I got too cocky setting up near to monsters, so either I'm really lucky, really scary, or I just haven't been playing long enough.
it sounds like the AI is cheating in completely remarkable ways. Being able to build in blocked tiles, and getting free essence, are pretty ridiculous cheats, imo. Omniscient knowledge of the map is of course a cheat too, but that's at least pretty standard for AIs in games.
Stardock is known for amazing AI in galciv 2, i remember reading lots of blog posts from developers boasting about it, and describing their algorithms in intricate detail. i expected better from this game hopefully it'll be fixed. i want an AI that can beat me on an even ground.
I don't think the AI was designed to be able to do these things on purpose, I believe they are bugs that will be squashed.
I thought some of these bugs have already been squashed and are in the 1.01 update already (which has not been released yet)
By the way, just so you know, it is not a smart thing to brag about having only lost one village (like I did above). A group of ogres decided to come in and smash up another one. Oopsie.
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