LOL
This is no longer true. The AI armies are ignored by the monsters. I've 'trapped' an AI pioneer unit that was 1 square away from a mob and left it there for 10 turns. The monster was a stationary camp one, granted, but in 10 turns, had it been MY pioneer, I know what would happen.
I read in the patch notes about monsters attacking the player as much as the AI but it seems that this 'fix' broke them from attacking the AI as well. I know in 1.01 the AI would get ate by the mobs, but no longer.
For the record, I agree that the game is not like others.
Despite my complaints, I honestly really enjoy it. I have had it for around a week now, and already have more hours clocked then msot of my games.
But despite people saying its not true, I have proof saying the opposite in almost every game I play. I can't expand quickly because the wildlife will wreck me, the ai expands near indefinitly and is never behind. Unless I am actually that bad at this game.
First, hat tips to Sweatyboatman for trying explaining the big picture.
I am not aware of the environment and AI difficulty levels you're referring to with this preferential issue. Having both at least challenging level there has been event notification not more than 5 seasons since the start when the wildlife has destroyed a faction, and this is not once-in-a-lifetime-event. Some "neutral" monsters do take note of possible fight outcome, e.g. Darklings. Step with a sole pioneer (or bunch of pioneers for that matter) and prepare to fight and lose. Take a deadly task force instead next to them they will just whine you a little bit and leave you be. Like in real life, if you needed to choose someone to bully on would you choose the target that's certainly going to mop the floor with you? Some monsters don't care, they will battle no matter how epic your team vs. medium theirs. This include Scrapyard's Golems and most elemental teams. Additionally, some laired monsters are less interested in bloodbathing, but in case of pioneers without escorts: never put bets on a gamble it will survive. Never.
But there is a point of unfairiness and this is simply a bug: an enemy army can "get covered" by a caravan unit and becomes unattackble. Player can browse between multiple stacks of units on a single tile. The one that has been chosen should be the one interacted with, even if it were a monster lair with the initial group and in addition to that the spawnling groups.
The game is about surviving and winning. If you lose faction power, on which the most score comes from "military power" you're stepping towards "the path of please, punish me". I know it is hard to think about training "primitive spearmen" and even from non-fortressed settlement, instead of topping first out the technology and military buildings to bring out the flawless task force you can walk the park from coast to coast. But you must resist this temptation. The best way to ensure you get enough land, settlements, resources and even peace, is to make sure everyone else will agree. So, if you like peace and harmony, this is completely wrong game to express and to expect having it back. If you have an early opportunity to capture a settlement or two from your neighbour, don't spend your time hesitating.
The question is: do you want to win or not?
Try setting up a non-aggression (ie, move freely inside one another's territory whether you like it or not) treaty, and the visit the AI's territory. Literally every time I've gotten inside, I've watched the AI lose units, outposts, and cities to wandering monsters. Not on every turn--but then, the wandering monsters on my territory don't attack me on every turn, either. But sooner or later, it's Rodan faces Tokyo, only without the motion picture cameras to let everyone know what's happening.
For example, in my current game, I've had a dragon revisit one outpost of mine for over 70 turns. It comes, it goes. It hasn't done a thing. If I'd been an AI, how many people here would be screaming foul play?
On the other hand, I've gotten carte blanche to travel through one other AI with whom my kingdom is close. Just upon entering, I saw a stack of spear units first kill some wandering darklings, then get torn apart by a group of four trolls. The trolls then swallowed an outpost. All you have to do is sit still, and watch. Because it won't happen quickly, but it happens all the time.
It's the monster AI: most don't attack right away. They engage in a behavior that changes from turn to turn, rather like the behavior in RPG games of characters under a Chaos spell. I personally think this should be tweaked so the percentage of turns when they focus on attacking whatever is nearest is higher, but that's where things are right now.
This whole subject is a zombie. It has been raised several times before, and killed with statements by Brad and Derek, and with video by players. But then someone feeds it with suspicion, someone else agrees, and suddenly they're buying into something that isn't accurate. The monsters do attack AI players. Watch, and see it happen.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. Hence the 'preferential' However, How many times do you get Wrecked by the Ai setting up next to some HUGE ass monster mob that's near your teritory, The ai has no fear of mobs because they rarely if ever attack them.
I know that on higher difficulties the monsters have it for the player a lot more than for the AI.
I think that on Challenging, the monsters treat players and the AIs the same way, barring bugs.
I also know that as late as 1.00 there were monsters who considered themselves allied to AIs (could use their roads) but that comes under 'bugs'.
Two things, as far as I'm concerned:
1) Monster behaviour needs to be less random. I've said it before, they should have things like 'kill the problem' scripts where if their home is disturbed by border, they go find the problem. If they're powerful enough (and intelligent enough to make that decision), they kill the problem and go back home. There needs to be a greater degree of consistency in making it a seriously bad idea to explosively expand on top of all sorts of nasties you haven't at all bothered to clear out or know you can't hope to challenge. Monsters should not be freaking chaos theory. Even my damn hamster was in a fair few ways pretty predictable, and he literally had a brain the size of a garden pea.
2) Notices of places being burnt down. That 'customer is always right' rant was utterly bloody daft. The problem here is irrespective of the reality, people feel cheated, and people don't keep playing a game they feel is being unfair. In fact, the best designers and developers put a shitload of effort into hiding whatever cheating the game is doing to keep up with the player, because although everyone knows AI usually has to cheat in some way to challenge us, we also hate seeing them visibly not playing by the same rules.
We can deal with the problem of people feeling like the AI is getting too free a ride by everyone in the game getting a notice that a settlement has been killed by the wildlife. We don't need a name, or a location, just shit like, "Rumours reach your realm of a town devastated by denizens of the wild."
One thing i did not see mentioned in this thread: When the game generates the world, it always places less dangerous monsters close to the player, and more and more dangerous ones as you move away from your starting location. Its a difficulty progression that makes sense.
The problem is, this is not true for the computer players, as there simply is not enough space on the map to allow for a 'safe zone' around every starting location and still have room for the dangerous areas. So while the player has darklings and mites as his neighbors, the AI players can have clambercoil dragons and death demons in their backyard. If the monsters treated the AI exactly the same as the player, then the player would have a significant advantage.
Therefore it is my guess that the 'preferential treatment' AI's seem to sometimes get is built into the game as a way to equalize the playing field. Which is not an ideal solution, but i can live with it.
I agree, and this part doesn't bother me. I'd expect on higher difficulties for the AI to get preferential treatment--and on lower levels, I'd expect some things to break in the player's favor. I would like to see a list of exactly what things the AI/human players benefit from, however. We've never received that. And I wouldn't mind having the ability to toggle this monster behavior on/off at the appropriate difficulty level before you start the game.
But we have people complaining here that the AI gets preferential treatment from monsters regardless of level. And that's incorrect.
It's not a linear progression, though. Brad once discussed a starting zone--I think it was around 10 spaces from your first settlement, but don't quote me--that had easy kills and goodie huts. After that, however, it's a matter of difficulty level and randomness factor. You can literally end up with a dragon 15 squares down one side, and a group of ophidians down another. Or you may find things relatively easy. It's something the developers have wanted to keep just this way.
There's enough space on medium maps, and certainly on large ones. The AI gets the same starting conditions. You can check this out yourself with the cheats, revealing the map, and/or switching players.
Although I occasionally play a fairly "skewed" version of the game (large, challenging, 1 faction, monsters/wildlands/champs, etc to max) because I love the RPG aspect more than a rather "mundane" 4X with fantasy elements, I find monsters can definitely eat the AI's lunch. I played through a game recently where I spent the entire game wondering where the AI faction had got to. You do run into them eventually, after all, even at these settings. After the game (master quest victory), I looked at the graphs and the AI faction (I think it was wraiths) had been flat-line with occasional bumps almost to turn 120. SOMETHING was supressing it - had to be monsters. Apparently the poor wraith couldn't even keep their starting city alive.
And yeah, I've had runs of phenomenally bad luck at start. Recently I had my sov and one group of spearmen running around beating up on the easy mobs around my starting position while looking for a {edit: sorry, 2d] expansion, and ran into not one, but two air shrill armies (one of three and one of five) within about 10 squares of my start around turn 20 something. I actually beat the first group and the second ate me (they were spawns not disturbed). So it really depends a lot on luck.
I have no issues with getting my tail handed to me by even early monsters (as someone mentioned, ctrl-n is your friend). It's the kind of game I like playing, especially since 4x has been conceptually pretty generic since at least Age of Empires. I also think the AI gets eaten about as much as the player.
Anyway, major kudo's to Stardock for breaking the mold of 4X. I love this game!
I have yet to have a monster take/raze one of my cities. Granted I'm only on my fourth game and I am playing on modest settings. I am also sure it is going to happen eventually. What I am not going to do is start a post that says "Players getting preferential treatment from AI Monsters."
Just because I flipped "heads" four times in a row doesn't mean the coin doesn't have a "tails."
That the AI does not get the same starting conditions and that there isn't enough room for them to be the same are actually Brad's words. My own contribution to the debate was only the guess that the AI gets preferential treatment from monsters due to the the above.
Unfortunately i cannot give you a link to Brad's statement as it was some time ago, but it was on this forum in a post detailing monster lair allocation throughout the world.
If I'm wrong, I'd like to know it. This isn't aimed at you; I'd just like to see evidence, so that I can change my opinions accordingly. I'm not doing myself or anyone else any favors if my facts are wrong--and that's true for you, too.
I am sure about my facts. That i cannot prove it to you with a link is unfortunate, but doing so would involve spending an afternoon sifting through old forum posts and the matter just isn't that important to me, sorry. Maybe someone else can confirm this for you.
(just a side note as to why i remembered that brad's statement: Not being able to play on huge maps was my greatest complaint at that time, and my first thought after reading "we have to put the dangerous monsters next to AI players because there's not enough room" was 'well then make the maps larger, dammit ')
Shouldn't this age old question be easy to verify?
Just load up the game with the /cheat flag and hit ctrl-u to unhide the map and watch.
The AI cheats when I lose. It doesn't cheat when I win. That's all the proof I need.
If AI gets steamrolled by mobs, give them more troops at start? Not hard.
And there is too much roaming in this game and not enough patrolling. When I upped it, it got better, and they actually attacked me when I went by, but there needs to be 2-3 square zoning to make for better maps. Predictable movement in start is good, and leave the roaming for late game. (more random "event" stuff then is good, let the insane roamers start raiding you then, when you actually can deal with them if you play well)
I think what I'd rather like here is more options with the Monsters rather than just keeping them streamlined with the AI.
I'd really prefer it if the 'Boss monsters' that are in heavy defendable camps , STAY in those camps and just attack if you're a square away, sending out hordes of mid level monsters to attack you instead.
But yeah. EVEN IN HARDEST MODES.. A pioneer from the AI should not be left alone by the monsters. It should be Hard environment, not preferential environment.
And once again, This is from 'normal' on up that the ai gets preferential.
The monsters do not give preferential treatment to the ai.
I wasfollowing an AI pioneer unit through wildlands to see what will happen - guess what - he was never attacked by anyone. and eventualy settled on a piece of land I didn't see as settleable..
Try making a custom pioneer with the stealth ability that makes monsters pay less attention to it. Fun stuff. The ranger ability that makes them move fast through wilderness is also good.
You cannot make a custom pioneer. Tarth has the stealth ability by default, and so could a custom race, but there's no such thing as a pioneer with 'ranger'.
And that's a bad thing.
I chose a spot for a new city that was not going to expand toward a deadly lair for a long time, and started developing it. The AI comes along, plants an outpost next to the lair, which causes the mobs to wander. Where do they wander? Well of course they completely ignore the outpost and in three turns beeline to my city and destroy it. This is on "normal"
I really wish these hidden racial abilities were explained more in depth, I'd of used Tarth for my rangers then.
Anyone can use roads. But only members of the nation can go through improvements owned by that nation.
No, you are wrong.
When you are inside someone else's territory, the roads will not work for you if you are at war with them.
Thus, a monster can use a road to travel quickly when it's outside of any nation's dominion. Wildland monsters can use roads within a wildland dominion. Those are fine.
But if you see a monster moving more than one tile per turn, on a road, within an AI dominion, you know that the monster does not consider itself at war with the AI, i.e. it will not raze improvements or attack troops.
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