The game I was playing last night was Challenging. I was Cereesa playing just standard races.
Playing Expert VVorld/Hard AI: I conquer a Yithril city, a vvandering River Slag heads straight for it from outside my area of influence and attacks. There's no lair visible (not so far) around the slag, so I think it's been vvandering for a vvhile...
Reloaded the game from a couple turns back, conquer the city, Slag heads straight for it and attacks the city...
Monster behavior really doesn't appear random on Expert level. I'm definitely feeling targeted, vvhile the AI factions are getting a break. At least I knevv it vvas coming the second time, and got my sovereign back in time to help defend the city so I didn't lose it again.
I'm thinking as Yithril vvas the top faction in the game, it probably vvould've been OK for it suffer some monster attacks from monsters it disturbed...
The AI is not impressing me. I vvant the AI to fight fair, making good choices to become a strong competitor, but anything past Hard skevvs the economy hard in the AI's favor. I'm playing Hard AIs because that's the "best" algorithms vvith no unfair advantages, if the tooltips can be believed. I've found Challenging AIs have ridiculous amounts of starting technology, and I suspect money as vvell to construct so many cities so quickly... But Hard/Hard difficulty is too easy... Maybe I should just go Hard/Hard and declare vvar on every faction I meet? Othervvise I focus on production improvements to quickly improve cities and end up vvith double the faction povver of any other faction...
I think difficulty should be scaled vvith hovv vvell you are doing compared to other factions during the game... Doing avvesome, then monsters get more hostile, other AI's gang up on you because they fear you... Doing vvorse than other factions, monsters vvander avvay and AI factions find more pressing matters to deal vvith as you're not a threat. The difficulty levels vvould then determine vvhen that behavior triggers.
Of course, this requires an AI for the factions that can be competitive vvithout huge tech and economic advantages first... Then it's a constant challenge... Right novv, early game is a struggle for me and it's interesting, and late game I'm just trying to end it because there's no vvay I'm going to lose.
UPDATE: Found difficulty settings in a file called CoreDifficultyLevels.xml... I'm going to experiment vvith higher AI intelligence factors, and minimal economic boosts. UPDATE: Oookay... apparently AI intelligence factors affect their economy, not so much their intelligence. 10 is too much. At 100 turns, a faction bragged up having Logistics, a tech that vvould have taken me another 470 turns to get if I focused exclusively on it. Got steamrolled by an AI faction.
I just experienced a forest drake, who was wandering between my territory and an enemy's nearby territory, take out an enemy city.
I then swooped in with a pioneer on stand-by, and took a nice spot near the ruined city.
All-in-all I definitely do not find that the AI is more aggressive toward any one player.
Play on hard/hard.
On Challenging, the AI does prefer to attack the human player over the AI ones. Brad's said as much.
As mentioned above, this issue isn't being framed correctly. It shouldn't be about the monsters preferring to attack the human player, but under what conditions monsters prefer to attack the human player. And on higher difficulty levels, that's one of the perks the AI gets.
It's also a matter of the odds used in calculating different monsters' roaming behavior. I've watched monsters attack the AI, and destroy both cities and outposts. I've also experienced monsters moving around next to an outpost of mine for roughly 90 turns, without ever attacking. And sometimes they seem to make a beeline for my cities, and just lay waste to them.
There is no argument that, on higher difficulty levels, the monsters target the player to the exclusion of AI. This is well known, working as designed, and the majority of players is A-OK with it.
The question, in many people's minds, is whether the monsters give the AI a break on challenging and below. I am not sure, I have played a grand total of one game on Challenging since release, and my gut feeling is not strong enough to go one way or another.
But for me, the question is a different one. The question is "Would the game be improved if monster behavior was more deterministic, and players could, on Challenging and below, count on the monster destroying whoever disturbed it?"
And for me, the answer to that question is "Yes, without any doubt."
I've written as much, before, in this same thread: the current system, in which monsters all behave as though under some AD&D Chaos/Confusion spell, just confuses the hell out of many players. I'd like to see clearly defined behaviors that make sense. A large, aggressive group of monsters like a bunch of trolls should head right for the nearest city or unit to attack, but as they're intelligent, a good defense should make them turn around and head off. On the other hand, I'd expect a drake to attack regardless. An umberdroth wouldn't attack an entire city, but it would attack an outpost, etc. And if a monster will attack a city, it should move past the one coming up on the right to attack another 60 miles down the road on the left.
I didn't have a problem with getting attacked. Like I said, the Skaths were just my fault, I wanted to build up a little bit of a force to deal with them and my city expanded before I did it. That's my fault. The Drake, that is a little confusing. I was playing a larger map and if it was the one I saw, it was pretty far for it to get there that fast. It had to move in a pretty direct route, I don't think my sovereign could have caught up with it.
I'm fine with the world attacking me, I was unprepared for the attack and that's on me. To me that is a random event and I should just be ready for a monster to attack my towns, it is a dangerous world after all. It sucked the two events were so close together. My question is why? I still think monsters behave like they do not see the AIs. That Drake had to get 'woken' up, and make a beeline to my city. There was no wandering aspect to it at all, it also was far enough that it could not see the town, how did the Drake even know to go that way to attack it.
It's hard to argue with Tuidjy. This is news to me, but here it is in the changelog from 0.99:
and this from 1.01 changelog:
So I was wrong to say that the AI doesn't get preferential treatment from monsters, since it clearly does on the higher difficulties. And with that, it can't be ruled out that the mechanism is broken or bugged.
But it seems that generally, if you don't want monsters to attack your cities, put the world difficulty setting below "Normal". If you just want it balanced, pick "Challenging". And anything above that, hunker down because it's you vs. the world. (Set the faction AI to whatever you feel presents the most challenge).
Actually, those changelog statements are ambiguous: there's only one human player and typically multiple AIs. If the chance were 50% human, 50% AI then the chance of each AI being attacked would be significantly lower than the chance of the player being attacked. Given the target selection strategy (which seems to involve some kind of range limitation) I suspect that the changelog entry means that the chance per unit is the same regardless of the controlling entity, but the changelog entries do not go into that level of detail.
At lower than Normal setting, monsters won't attack cities for anybody, humans or otherwise. So drop all the cities you want. Just watch out for wandering monsters near your units.
It's really funny watching the monsters camp the AI player as they wander by one group at a time. I almost felt bad for a group of cave bears when a catapult put an end to their reign of terror. I said almost!
I think monsters are selecting targets based on how juicy they are.
They will happily assault undefended cities, but for some reason they avoid well guarded cities.
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