There are some issues about AI and here is a proposal how to solve them. What do you think, will this work?
1. AI doesn't enchant his troops.
2. AI chooses unoptimal places for settlements.
3. Human players almost every time take Enchanters (to have Scrying pool) while AIs may not have them.
Why does this happen?
City spells that enchant units are more expensive than econimic city enchamntement spells and have lewer priority. Thus Enchanted hammers has 120 priority and requires only 10 mana to cast, but Heart of Fire has abot 15 priority and 100 mana to cast.
Number of essence slots is short. Each slot is expensive and human players optimise their usage to maximum. At the start of the game players enchant cities with economic bonuses, later - with unit enchantments. Poor AI just enchants with what he has at the start and lives with that till his death.
What can be done?
At first, Priorities should be set properly. Out of all city spells the most combat effective is Heart of Fire, then I would name Enchanted Hammers, Aura of Might, Inspiration, Aura of Grace, Sovereign's Call... etc.
Then, all spells should have adequate cost... abot 20-30 mana each, no more, otherwise AI will cast cheap spells and leave others behind.
Then, let cities more essence slots. For example, what do you think if 2 level settlement would add +1 essence slot. Higher levels of settlements would add +1 slot more. So maximum 5 level settlement will give +4 essence slots.
Thus maximum player may have: 3 essence from terrain, +1 from Oracle, +1 from Scrying pool, +4 from 5 level settlement. Total is 9.
With 9 essence slots AI has great chances to enchant his cities with unit enchantment spells especially when we changed priorities.
With 9 essence slots AI has all chances to enchant a city with economic spells which will help to develop this city. Even is a city is set on no-essence tile, it still has option to have 1-6 essence.
With 9 essence slots human players may reconsider to take Enchanters trait every time.
But there is a problem: unit enchantment spells add bonuses equal to the number of essence slots. So these bonuses should be modified and add fixed values, for example just +2 to fire attack, +2 to defence, +2 to initiative etc.
Do you think this will help AI? At least partially?
1: I never use them either If the AI would only build troops in Fortesses, then it would be cool if those Fortresses had military enchantments. Sadly, the AI hasn't made step 1 yet. If you could change the AI's priorities when and if, that'd be cool, but you have to be careful to avoid 1 essence Towns with Heart of Fire on them.
2: You don't mention this in the rest of your post...? Would you like to set a minimum requirement of tiles for the AI to consider building a settlement? The AI already gets 3 bonus tiles. On a related note, in my current game I noticed the AI building lots of outposts and almost no cities.
3: This is a moot point. As a player, you can select strong or weak traits, depending on how much of a challenge you'd like. AI has nothing to do with this.
Your suggestion to change the amount of Essence per city is not the greatest idea you ever had. I like the fact that Essence is really scarce.
This may or may not be a factor in your motivation, but I believe there are reported UI issues with Essence > 5 (as in no easy means of access.)
Also, I believe 4 essence is the maximum "natural" essence value, though it's vanishingly rare.
Note that if you allow cities to have more essence slots, they will become available to players too. Consider a 3/3/3 tile that is turned into a level 3 fortress. With your mod, that would be 5 essence slots. While the AI will load it out with a fairly random assortment of enchantments depending on what's available, a player will probably choose a pretty optimal buildout, something like:
...whereas before the player would have had to choose between better production and unit enchants, now they can have their cake and eat it too. Poor AI will fall even farther behind the optimization hammer. And they'll be able to do similar for optimizing towns and conclaves, e.g. (for a conclave)
The main problem isn't lack of slots. The problem is that (seemingly) the AI cannot properly re-prioritize them. The spells seem to have a fixed AI priority regardless of the city type or current conditions, and the AI never (seems) to replace them once cast, so something like e.g. casting Oppression until unrest is under control, then dropping that in favor of something more currently beneficial isn't really done by the AI.
Unfortunately, I think you'd need some kind of event scripting for this to be handled properly, like (pseudocode):
...and that's just not available in the XML. (Note that for it to be useful the rules would need to be a lot more complex; the above is taken in isolation but in practice it would need to be compared against criteria for all of the AI player's available actions; I assume that there's something like this in the game, but we have no access to mod it.)
Thank you for feedback. You are right, too much eesence is bad. Unfortunately AI has difficulties in optimising best enchantments.
Thank you for feedback! I tested this. I gave a village 9 essence, but in the city screen there were just 6 and on the map only 5 of them were shown. So maximum is 6. But for better look it should be limited to 5.
So there is a task that these 5 should be a more common event in gameplay.
Since I already gave a ful set (3) of powerful Lightning staffs to Enchanters trait, adding Scrying pool makes Enchanters trait too powerful.
So my current working version is that Scrying pool is available to everybody after they upgrade their village either to conclave, or fortress or town. Second essence is automatically added with 3 level settlement.
So there remains maximum 5 essence for everybody +1 to those who upgrade their conclave. Results is 2-6 essence instead of 0-5. As you see, this is not a great increase, but note that difference between lower and higher values is even less (4 vs 5). Thus player and AI will live in more similar conditions.
I also set priorities to enchantments in this way. Just think, if you start the game and are in war in what order would you enchant your city?
1. Enchanted hammers
2. Heart of Fire
3. Inspiration
4. Aura of Grace
5. Aura of Might
6. Aura of Vitality
7. Sovereign's call
8. others
Though Sovereign's call is powerful in hands of human player, AI may have problems with supplying cities with sufficient food. AI also don't use queue cheat, but I have some thoughts how to stop human player from using it.
You still do not have my vote.
Maybe you can try to create different smaller mods, so players can mix'n match to their own liking and enjoy some of your improvements without having to 'suffer' changes they do not agree with?
You forgot Meditation. Imo, it should be nr 1 for the Spellcaster factions (Resoln, Pariden, Magnar).
My personal top 5 would be: 1 Meditation 2 Inspiration 3 Enchanted Hammers 4 Gentle Rain (once I have it) 5 Oppression. Sovereign's Call would be nr 2 if I play Kingdom.
Yes, it's possible to make mini mods to the main mod. Main files are in English folder, so in the Mods folder its possible to make mini mods with micro changes.
It's easy to make a mini mod which will return Scrying Pool to Enchanters ability. Do you mean this feature?
What about unit enchantments? In my mod I made mana more available, so meditation is no more the "last hope" for mages. I made my rating concerning AI. I my most games I immediately cast Enchanted Hammers, Inspiration, Sovereign's call or Meditation, but later dispell these spells in the main fortress, where I cast Heart of Fire and different Auras.
Since you asked 'the forum' what they use, I gave you my list; I never use unit enchantments. Admittedly, I have never tried your mod, so I don't know if I would use different spells if did.
Maybe I'll try your mod with some changes/exceptions. Thanks for the tip.
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