*** Released 8/22/13 ***
Features
Ineluctable Vision is now unlocked with the Third Book of the Magi tech.
Fixes
Crash fixes
Fixed an issue where reloading an autosave may miss road building between cities and outposts
Fixed an issue where reloading an autosave may miss the opportunity to choose research
Fixed an issue where reloading an autosave may miss an opportunity to select a perk for a champion on levelup
Fixed an issue where reloading an autosave may miss an opportunity to select a champion at a fame milestone
Fixed some map issues and tactical map issue from Parrotmath
Fixed a broken AI unit design that was causing Peace Keepers (and other units) to show up without weapons
Fixed tactical bug where it was possible for RANDOM_ENEMY_UNIT spells to apply the spell and the particle effect on different units (ie: an Air Shrill casting Static Blast may injure one unit but play the lighting effect on another)
Fixed an issue in tactical that could cause 2 units to end up in the same tile
Fixed a crash that would happen if you viewed the city details of a partially revealed city
Fixed an issue where it was possible to be booted out of enemy territory, and end up trapped in between the gated section of the master quest wildlands area
Fixed a missing icon on the quest version of the ice elemental sanctum
Fixed a missing medallion on the Giant Ravenous Harridan
Fixed the Fear ability to correctly last multiple turns
Fixed Tremor
Fixed an issue that could cause a crash after the intro movie
Updated the riddle quests to not display the choice results on mouseover
Fixed an issue where some maps had features that blocked AI units
Fixed an issue that sometimes caused AI units to not move in battle
Fixed an issue that could cause AI units to be on top of each other in battle
Fixed an issue that could keep you from using Guarded Strike on a unit that last used Guarded Strike
Fixed an issue where the Break ability wasn't doing normal attack damage
Balance
Removed the wage cost form Mercenaries, Hunters and Knights of Asok
Pull of the Earth moved the Geomancy and the casting cost increased slightly
AI
Increased the hp required before the AI will cast barbs
AI won’t Beguile or Confusion on ranged units anymore
AI won’t cast blizzard on units that are immune to cold anymore
AI won’t cast Bottled Fire, Burning Hands, Embers, Fireball, Fire Breath, Flame Dart, Inner Fire or Soulburning on units that are immune to fire anymore
AI won’t cast Call Lightning, Channel Lightning, Lightning Bolt or Soul Spark on units that are immune to lightning anymore
AI Monsters more careful about leaving their lairs unguarded.
AI Updated the area threat evaluation to include stationed units.
AI champions significantly better about taking out enemy outposts and grabbing goodie huts on the way to another destination
AI better at building more lethal armies
AI much better at protecting its cities
AI fixed a bug where certain AI personalities had a chance of not building units when they should depending on the type of city
AI more aggressive about training units when it feels that city is vulnerable
AI no longer has a "auto patrol" system. Instead, the monster AI directly controls monsters and not the mobileobject system.
Fixed a pathfinding bug that caused monsters that were calculating a destination to not be able to set a destination IF the target was 1 tile away and it is a city.
Improved algorithm that allows AI to detect different types of threats to its cities and units
AI prioritizes pioneers more when there is good land its LOS (and less when there isn't)
AI prioritizes maximizing its army size before going into battle
AI more willing to sacrifice non-champion led armies to soften enemies before sending in champions/sovereigns
AI now makes use of a "ready for battle" flag to determine which armies it should send where
AI is less paranoid about distant monsters and more cautious about nearby monsters
AI has less ADD when it comes to targets of opportunity
AI generally less cautious about taking on battles as long as its armies are deemed ready for battle (i.e. AI is less cowardly)
Fixed AI bug where an AI would target a quest in unfriendly territory and then abort destination because of that and get stuck in a loop (result: AI sovereign would just sit there)
Some AI personalities won't try to build improvements early on so that they can focus on expansion while others will do the opposite in order to build up their capitals faster
Improved the AI's decision making for deciding how many units should stay in a city to protect it
AI generally smarter about when to build pioneers vs. other types. SOME AI personalities will create more pioneers than others depending on what strategy they are employing
Fixed AI bug where AI would sometimes not train units because it had improvements in the queue
Fixed AI pathfinding where the AI units could not "find" their rally point and as a result would no be able to concentrate their power.
AI will generally notify player when they've cast an offensive strategic spell on them (complete with snark).
Increased odds of AI interacting with player regarding world situation events
Improved performance of battle engine for autoresolve (makes AI vs. AI battles faster)
More AI weighting if players aren't geographicaly near each other (+1 to +2)
UI
The game now highlights the targeted tile in tactical combat (so you can see exactly where you are going to move to)
Updated all the Hiergamenon entries to current rules
I think you can get a message from a monster army and still have them attack you that turn - they have done that in some of my games.
Have you seen it the other way, where you're next to them, they do not attack and do not send you a message?
It's possible this is just something I've not seen before; it's also possible I'm seeing it now because of increased wandering monsters, hard to say from a small sample size.
However I'm fairly confident in saying that I've never had a wandering Fire Elemental with two or three Ignys stack in my borders so early on in the game. That is perhaps what's changed in this version, lairs seem to be spawning significant stacks of dangerous wandering monsters, even if you don't expand your borders over them.
I don't mind so much if this happens from a quest or event (although having Bonesplitter and Ascian didn't help), but I imagine players on Easy would be a bit startled to meet wandering elementals when they only had three cities, and Peter says he has seen stacks like that early in the game in his testing on Easy. If something in the monster AI changes has caused this then it probably needs tweaking again.
Yes, these are good points. I always use the highest setting for monsters (however at Challenging/Challenging difficulty), so I don't know what it's like on lower settings (of both monsters and map difficulty) but it is quite possible that something has caused the monsters to even more go on a rampage.
On the subject of the AI being more challenging, Gilden just declared war on me and then turned up with four full stacks, two Strong and two Deadly. My Stack of Doom is still officially only Strong, but I was able to kill the first Strong stack fairly easily with Blizzard. I've got relatively limited mana though, so it's going to boil down to whether I can kill the stacks without running out of mana, and whether Gilden can replace the stacks faster than I can kill them (and replace the mana).
If I lose though it will be the first time I've been genuinely outclassed by the AI after having got out of the early game; I think it's fair to say that Ridiculous is now quite challenging for me! I'm continuing my policy of using a different standard faction each time, so this isn't necessarily my best game, but certainly it feels like the game has taken a big step up in terms of the AI.
In a game last night, I gained a level and was about to choose my level-up. I wanted to select the third tier of an air spell, but I got a scroll-over message stating that I had to be level 5. I've never noticed this before, so I assume it's new with 1.3.
Personally, I don't care for the restriction.
Hey Borg, that restriction has always been there.
Ok, thanks. Strange how I never noticed it before. I guess I never attempted a b-line down a single magic path.
Well then, it puts a crink in my play style.
I've noticed this more as well in the current release. I don't know if the level limits have been tweaked; I don't remember them coming in for level 3 spells before. Alternatively this could just reflect that it's harder to gain levels than it used to be. I don't really mind though, I just choose Mage upgrades that I want eventually anyway.
Awesome, thanks for finally taking a look at the auto-save bug issues and for all the AI tweaks, I'm looking forward to trying them out.
Huzzah! This should help GREATLY. Might still be nice to have a higher contrast on movable tiles, but at least now the selected tile will be easier to determine. Thanks, SD!
The Ridiculous game is now looking a bit more comfortable, because after I killed Gilden's four full stacks two of the other AIs declared war on them, and I've got a reasonably favourable map layout (I'm on good terms with my closest neighbour; Gilden is some distance away and there's a bottleneck). However I had to reload after trying to take the offensive to Gilden and ending up one tile away from his city; he then promptly started spamming Tremor on me, which when you have a Stack of Doom strategy is pretty much game over. Whoops.
It might be nice to have a reasonably expensive Counterspell to remove immobility, in the same way you can counter spells cast on your cities, as having your main stack immobilized indefinitely is not a great deal of fun. Maybe the spell could come from late game Magic research. The AI would need to know when to cast it on its units, of course.
Alternatively the immobilizing spell could end at the end of the turn of the person who cast it, so the immobilized stack would always get at least one turn before being immobilized again.
The strategic AI seems much, much improved. I now get a chance to see this "late game" which people speak of! My only comments so far are:
1) the AI doesn't seem to build Pioneers for good city sites as much as I'd expect, although this may reflect their personalities or the "Ridiculous" monster lairs in my game. If it's the latter then perhaps clearing lairs could be given higher priority if they give access to a good city site.
2) The AI cast Tremor on me when I was already Tremored. Or at least, I got the taunt every turn I was immobilized. Surely casting the same spell twice on a unit is illegal? Is this a bug, or is it by design that you get the taunt every turn you're immobilized, even if no new spell was cast? The Tremors didn't seem to stack, so it may just be that the AI was taunting me every turn.
Occasionally the AI can stack (or at least cast multiple times) a spell that shouldn't be able to be cast more than once on an enemy or stack. I've seen Spiders Web the same unit multiple times, and a Darkling Shaman Shrink the same unit multiple times. The code for controlling AI actions is different to the User Interface controlling player actions - the AI does things directly and does not use the interface, so fixing or changing their behaviour requires different code changes that are not related to the player's UI.
I'm having a fun time on hard now against the AI. Strategic AI is much better indeed. I have to think twice before invading some of the AI cities now. Their sovs and champs are pretty scary too.
I see some Weird things though. Umber keeps sending pioneers into my borders while we're at war. I've killed 5 of those lone pioneers already. Quite a waste of resources there.
What is "Ineluctible Vision"?
reveals the entire map for as long as you pay the mana maintenance fee
Ineluctible:
Unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable
Sounds more like a curse spell...
Conquered an enemy city and found that there were two enemy heroes (just previously defeated) sitting slap bang in the middle of my 'new' city's town square. I've seen the same with caravans. Doesn't seem right, somehow, particularly with the heroes. At least they did not flip the city ownership.
I've already posted about this in another thread: defeated the Guardian of the World's End but his territory did not reset. He was far out of his stomping ground when I finally found him, that may have a bearing on it. Nor did the quest marker disappear for that matter.
Conquered outposts do not get a road connection. Intended or oversight?
I've seen that as well. When I saw it, the enemy army was already sitting on the city, but not stationed within, when I conquered it. I only fought the stationed army. After the city was mine, the enemy army sitting on the city remained there, and neither moved off of it nor attacked it. I Tornado'd them off. I wonder if I'd have left them there, would they have been stuck there forever, or would they have eventually attacked?
How are AI vs AI going in 1.3? My last game I was barely touched by AI at all (Insane AI), they seemed to be more fond of hacking away on each other. Both had 1000+ power and 20+ cities and the one attacking me was my neighbor. (5-6 stacks total, they were hard but doable so if they had sent more it would have been challenging for me) I have Spell of Making disabled, and the AI's of course had all the towers built. Afaik that gives a huge diplo disadvantage, could that have been the reason for the passive play I observed?
Also, thanks for making dodge completely useless on Insane (the AI's all spam Accuracy bonus now, on my last Insane game all AI units had 400+ accuracy) Don't know if that is intended, but assassin heroes hardly needed a nerf. I get that this isn't high priority, but I am just making you aware of the possibly unintended consequence of the change. Also useless due to this are the spells Evade, Guardian Wind, Obscuring fog, and any trait with dodge. If someone could point me into the direction of where stuff like this are coded (if it's in the XML) I could change it myself, as I guess this is low on the priority list for 1.3.
Minor issue: The "B" shortcut for settling the first city does not work with the champion.
Could we mayhap get a shortcut key for roadbuilding for units with that ability? It's tedious to use, mousing forwards and back for each step.
Who's da' man Derek? You da' man!
This new spell really seems out of place, or rather, it is a very new idea to the world of elemental (obviously existing in other games...civ4 it's the 'satelites' tech as an example)
Perhaps, could a lesser version of the spell be created earlier in the tech tree?
Some ideas include:
- Casting a "Reveal Land" type spell with oneshot casting cost to select a 5x5 area to be revealed for a coupel of turns. (similar to starcraft's terrian comsat upgrade)
- Casting an "Extended Sight" spell with a casting cost and casting maintenance to increase the sight of all your cities and outposts by 2
- Casting an 'Awareness' spell with an initial and maintenance costs that reveals all cities on the map, but no surrounding territory.
It did patch today.
Yeap, we updated the beta today.
This looks like it's going to be great patch!!! Cheers to everyone at SD!
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