For me this is a 5 star game reduced to a 2 star game because of the terrible AI.
I play on easy, but never get a chance to settle into my game before the AI declares war on me. It wars on me for no reason but for me not giving it money that I don't even have. I am not a war strategy genius, I just want to enjoy the game. How ever much I try, it builds and expands 10 times faster than I ever could, so I stand zero chance of surviving.
I am this far <-> from abandoning this game for good and support something of similar vain, such as Worlds of magic.
If anyone knows of a way to hack the AI so that it cannot declare war on me please share.
As a suggestion to the OP; try increasing the concentration of monsters and shards and stuff when creating the map; things will be closer together, and there will be more things for your heroes to do, before you and the AI players are close together and in a position to war on each other.
The map I am now playing seems to be going well. Saying that, I haven't met the AI yet. Tell the truth I don't want to meet the AI, because the game will probably go downhill from there, unless I can kill it's arse, which I would very much like to do.
I would like to do a lot of horrible things to the AI in this particular game.
Do the factions AI's behave differently?
If so, is it possible to adjust custom factions behaviour? (eff you spellcheck, behavious is a perfectly cromulent word)
Well here's the thing.
The AI in this game is playing to win the game. This means it will try and flatten you if it believes it can. The game isn't about peaceful developing empires like say, civilization. It's more about many great leaders competing for ultimate power over a world recovering from apocalypse. Basically, everyone in the game is after ultimate power, which all of the victory conditions and lore support.
So you have to look at the game as a competition with the AI. I mean, it's much easier to steal a city from an opponent than build one from scratch, so if you have the military might and opportunity to do so, why wouldn't you? It's by that kind of logic that you need to make sure you keep a decent military power rating. If your rating is low, you get negative diplomacy modifiers and other leaders see you as weak. If it is geographically viable, they might attack you over being weak, unless of course you've had some positive influence on them, such as making treaties and trading with them. In many cases you can prevent war with your neighbors even with a weak military by signing economic and trade treaties with them. In the most dire of cases, you can offer tribute to prevent war, and that is what many AI's ask of you before they will attack you.
For a tip on managing diplomacy, you can see what other factions think of you by going into the Govern panel and hitting the foreign relations tab. There you'll see the reasons why each faction loves/hates you and how they balance towards war or peace.
It's kind of interesting you should say this. I Slash and Burn, EVERYTHING. Partly to force the AI back without leaving exposed cities in my wake (that they could theoretically reclaim with a mere Pioneer), partly because the 50% unrest penalty on taking a city from an enemy can be insanely prohibitive, especially if you haven't gotten your Fort cities up to level 4/5 yet and base unrest in your current cities is at, near, or above 50%.
On top of that, I find the AI tends to make fairly poor location choices (or at least, poor compared to a human strategist), which often leads me to want to re-settle their former lands anyway.
I'm at the tactical point where my city type decision tree is as follows:
If tile has 2+ essence, Conclave.
If tile has 4+ food, Fort.
If tile has 2 or 3 food, Town.
Ignore tiles with 1 food, unless grain is in reach.
Prioritize tiles with access to rivers for Forts and Conclaves, access to forests for Towns. Access to both is epic and trumps all other concerns except in the case of:
I need more mana/research production, ergo, prioritize Conclaves.
or
I need more unrest reduction, ergo, prioritize Forts.
In all cases, two lesser build sites are preferable to one awesome site, except where a 3 essence site can be garnered, which quite literally trumps ALL other concerns.
Once you have enough towns those cities that have 5 production and 1 grain are a blast as forts, with huge production you can build another cannon fodder city very, very quickly.
It kind of sounds like much of the complaint is that the bots always "play to win", and some people want to play in a more RP setting, where at least most of the bots have some kind of desire for peace, rather than being constantly focused on achieving one of the win parameters.
Currently, if you're a small country with little army, bots get so mad at you for it that they're willing to commit suicide by sending most of their army across the map at you when they have incoming armies from larger countries headed their way.
I also wish bots understood when they were losing a war, not just power score. It would be nice if after losing 10 battles and 3 cities to me, the bot would say "okay, this war is not at all profitable, lets ask for peace", and then if I accepted, they didn't declare war again for a very long time. However, currently they just keep smashing their head into the wall until my power score is above theirs.
Assuming you don't have any essence in this 1 food city, and haven't dumped any research into the "more food/grain" endgame research item, that's 39 towns.
Negating that much unrest is itself 3 fully upgraded Forts with both unrest options (which actually leaves you with a net +6% unrest, from the Forts themselves = P).
So yeah, I ignore 1 food tiles = P
I have managed to make one of the two AI's into a friend. This is very unusual for one of my games, and the only thing I can put it down to is having the world difficulty on a higher level than the AI's. I now often see the AI's scouts getting squashed by monsters.
Just waiting to see what the second AI is going to do. I'm fully expecting it to go through the same old routine of asking for money then WAR. It would be refreshing if it did something else as did my first friendly AI.
I would dearly love to be able to get on top of the AI and punish it for the many games it has ruined for me.
Yeah, I can see where people like that are coming from, especially if they come from the civilization series, which has always had a thing about replaying history, which isn't always war. The thing is, the lore of Fallen Enchantress completely supports warmongering AI, so there isn't any real RP reason to want completely peaceful AIs. In fact, by playing to win, you're RPing
I decided to play my current game on easy/easy, and though I haven't officially made contact with any of the 7 AIs yet, I did notice that Altar conquered the Shroud city before turn 50. Surprising, since on challenging/challenging the AI took over 150 turns to start to truly expand. This should be interesting.
Yeah, I think what they have done is got their EASY all tangled up with their SUICIDE-DEADLY-IMPOSSIBLE difficulty.
This is a really good AI thread. I hope the title doesn't prevent Frogboy from reading it. It has just the kind of feedback he likes to hear (as far as I can tell).
Well I certainly didn't have any intentions of offending Frogboy, but I guess you are right, the title was a little abrupt; maybe I can change it, I don't know, I have never tried.
I know the job is by no means a easy one, programming AI must be one giant headache.
My thing is, that the AI must have a greater purpose than to walk all over developing players, it's just not any fun, especially if your not all that good at it. And I'm not all that good at it, that's why I play on easy.
Happened during the FE beta, too. Problem is, most testers never play the lower difficulty levels, so they end up being way out of whack with what they should be. That's why threads like this are important; casual/new players exist too, and the worst thing SD could do is have an AI that's so tough on low levels that those players are never given a chance.
My games are ruined if there aren't opponents out there trying to ruin my game. I love it if my chances of winning in the end is not higher then arround 20%.
Are there any levels lower then easy? Perhaps introduce a super easy option? It's also important to point out that other options also effect difficulty, as for instance strength and quantity of ressources/magic, autoplaced buildings or snaking turned on, number of opponents, quantity of monsters etc....
Like I said before, if you are not that good and still have problems on easy, then maybe you should try one of the lower difficulty-levels. However, if you really don't want to do that, then maybe you should take a look at some of the Let's Plays out there. The ones from Eddy and Das123 are pretty good. They are based on 0.50, so certain things have changed since then, but they should still provide enough information for you to improve your game.
Yes, two in fact.
Well, this has actually been brought up in part in other forums - the AI in early game seems to be able to expand waaaaay faster than the player can. They seem to have some sort of weird research and/or production boost that makes it insane.
That being said, I too am a casual gamer, and like a nice relaxed game. To that end, I go with the larger map, fewer opponents, and I set them to mostly Kingdom ... those empire dudes are just plain bat***t crazy.
And I haven't tried this yet, but I think you can even pick and choose which specific opponents you want ... so you can choose ones that are less aggressive naturally. Don't choose Yithril or Resoln, 'cause those guys are nuts. Whenever I see them on a map I know my game is going to go downward in a hurry.
As I remember I use to play FE on beginner, but that was a little too easy, the monsters were pussy's.
I have been watching Das123 lets play videos, but they are for FE. I didn't know he had made some for LH, when I done a search that came up blank.
Now I know where the LH episodes are I will be watching those. Thanks for the link, I like his videos, I watch them in bed on my tablet.
@lelovelady
We are told that the AI doesn't cheat, but I can't imagine how it can expand at the rate it does without cheating. I have 2 spear-men and one and a half towns while the AI owns half of the map and fields legions.
There is in fact something you can do to make the AI never declare war, though it will affect every difficulty level. In the Steam->steamapps->common->FE Legendary Heroes-> Data-> English folder there is a file called CoreAIDefs.xml. If you open this, which you can do if you set it to open with notepad, you will see priorities for early game, middle game, and late game defined at the top third or half of the file. There are tags which surround priorities for the game elements. One of them is war, and the number is currently 0.10. Change that to 0 for each of the three phases you don't want the Ai to declare war in, and I believe the AI will never declare war. You will need to change it back if you ever want an an AI that can declare war, but it should solve the problem. You can copy the file and store the copy somewhere before making the change. Only change the number in that tag, don't change any of the text or syntax.
I hope you enjoy the game, and I understand that some games you play to just have fun. That's why I play this game, I play chess when I want a nearly perfectly balanced strategic challenge. In this game, I just edit the files necessary to give me the fun stuff the game wants me to never have or labor my butt off for. I am very fond of editing my sovereign to make sure it is definitely the most special unit in the game.
I also checked the CoreDifficultyLevels.xml file, and it appears there is very little difference between easy and challenging. I am not surprised that people expecting an easy game find an experience comparable to challenging. The only major difference is the tag AIintelligenceFactor, .9 in easy and 1.3 in challenging. What exactly this number does is a mystery, I believe it may affect how much processing time is given to working out moves. There could very easily be a bug in the interpretation of this number in places that could actually make the game more difficult on easy.
One of the problems is the sheer amount of luck involved at the beginning.
Either you get very lucky, with several good city spots in close proximity, with weak opponents you can easily take out with basic units you start with, letting you get a fast start to developing your realm.
Or you don't get lucky, have only one shitty spot to settle, are surrounded by enemies ranging between strong and epic, and have your capital razed by an angry dragon in the first 5 rounds.
Those are, naturally, rather extreme ends of the starting spectrum, but the fact that those are both things that happen (latter more oftenthan the former in my case) is an issue on random maps.
I play on normal, and i don't use cheats (mainly because the "give 1000 everything" cheat breaks the cities so i got 1k populace, and can't get past level 2, and not allowed to pick specialization), and most games end with me getting my ass handed to me (if i don't just give up soon after starting), but my current one has me 8 hours in with power score slightly above other 3 factions combined, 3 armies roaming around exterminating monsters (main army beiing my level 17 sovereign, 6 level 10 warg riding pikemen, and 2 fell dragons), i got 8 cities and high taxation (unrest in cities ranging between 0% and 19%), got all the towers and the forge done, have all other factions at war with each other (because i bribed them to declare war), and only reason i haven't won yet is because i'm too busy exploring shit to actually go and cast the spell, or exterminate the other factions.
And all because i got a sweet starting spot with the option of immediately starting 2 other cities, with only few weak monsters to take care of to secure them.
Haha!!
Done that thanks. I have now effectively chopped of the AI's nuts. Starting a new game now. This is going to be so good.
It is likely that whenever they release a new patch they will overwrite that file, so you may have to change those 3 numbers again later to get the same effect. It is also possible, though I think it would be bad form of them to do so in most cases, that they may have hardcoded some automatic triggers for war. I know there is an event that causes all civs to declare war on each other, and that number will almost assuredly have no effect on that (though it may make peace treaties easier to get). I have never personally had that event, so it may be pretty rare.
If I were to guess how the war tag works, I would say it adds up all the numbers in the diplomacy history (like -2 for military history), and multiplies them by the priority. The faction rating may be part of the equation too (as in the ratio of there power to yours). Maybe the formula is (dipNum1 + dipNum2 ... + dipNumN) * (their rating/ your rating) * warPriority (I just included this for fun speculation). This would make it a negative number in all cases where war was a possibility (by setting warPriority to 0 the number will always be 0), and if that number is more negative than a certain hardcoded threshold there is a random chance every turn for a war declaration. The reason for making a war priority would be to alter the behavior in data, and not in the code where it is run. That is just speculation though.
I think that were everyone declares war on everyone else, was a random event, which I have turned off.
One question. Now that I have those numbers at zero will the AI fight back when I declare war on it?
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