trankillity

Join Date 03/2002

AI Tournament difficulty levels

Is the AI cheating?

I'm not exactly sure who is in charge of AI balancing at GPG but Demigod's AI is anything but balanced. Played through the campaign on Normal and thought "Wow, that was too insanely easy. Hopefully hard provides more of a challenge!" and then I start again on Hard and can't win a single match. I'd really hate to see what Easy or Insane considering I found Normal a cakewalk and Hard impossible...

So my question to the population (or to the developers) is this: does the AI follow the game rules on all difficulties or are it's damage/health values tweaked to make the game "harder" because it sure as hell feels like they are. This is simply cheating, not making smarter (i.e. harder) AI, but cheating.

If they are following the game mechanics, then why do I feel so much more helpless on anything above Normal difficulty?

demigod

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I played one tournament with difficulty set to normal and I agree, it was way too easy. I haven't had time to try hard yet.

What comes to AI, the manual says the following about skirmish AIs.

- Easy AI. At “easy” the computer players receive fewer hit points and less gold than the human player.
- Normal AI. At Normal, the computer players have the same hit points but get slightly less gold from gold mines than human players.
- Hard AI. At hard, the computer players receive the same gold and same HP as their human opponents.
- Nightmare AI. At nightmare level, the computer players get a lot more gold and slightly more HP than humans do.

I don't know if this applies to the tournament mode as well.

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Thanks for the clarification TheDagger. I guess I must just suck then if Hard is meant to be "same as playing against a person" in terms of game mechanics.

I'm just sick of companies that take the cheap route with AI and just break game mechanics to create difficulty instead of actually coding the AI itself to be more or less difficult. I'll keep at it til I learn the classes on Hard then and head into the Pantheon from there.

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For the record I am considering myself an able player, also I am an oldschool RTS/PC player. I am far away from being something extraordinary but generally hard settings in any RTS isn't a problem for me, also I can generally have success facing real players.

I have played a couple of hours yesterday trying to get a crack on the single player - hard tournament.

the normal was a walk in the park, and wasn't a challange at all.

It all changes with the hard mode.

The enemy demigods are usually 2-3-4 levels ahead of me in experience, and they constantly killing my allied bots.

Also my allied bots are lacking in assistance. they fall back with even high HP, and there were many occasions when in a match on the exile map Regulus was happily standing at a flag capturing it while I was getting killed just 10 yards away from the flag by 2 enemy demigods and Regulus wasn't even tried to initiate combat with the other 2 gods or try to focus fire the one I brought to low health.

in Hard mode many of my allied demigods tends to fall back with high HP and mana to the citadel and waiting there for serious amount of time doing nothing.

Also my allied demigods tend to sit on top of a captured flag for some time doing again completely nothing.

Also in most matches by the time the enemy demigods hit 20 my allies are still around 13 no matter if at some point I can pull of dominating most of the flags in a conquest mode.

Also it seems the Hard bots tend to farm my allied easy mode demigods for gold and experience and I can't do anything about them being an easy target.

I have tried the single player - hard tournament with 4 gods so far: Oak, Sedna, Unclean beast, Vampire lord.

My best results was with Unclean beast, but still Hard AI owned me in a very frustrating way each match.

I think at the moment it its a frustrating experience to play hard tournament where you end up having gimp bots on your side where the enemies demigods are obviously cheating.

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At Hard and Nightmare you and you teamate have a bigger delay for respawn, and teamate AI is lower that ennemy, who too get less money at start, witch lower they power.... so at Hard and highter is mostly you vs 3-4 ubergod has they kill your teamate like if you was play easy.

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The discrepancy between normal and hard is too insane.

In normal I could win matches within about 10 minutes, stomping the computer into dust. On hard, I have yet to win a match, as all of my ally bots feed levels and gold to my opponent, and I slowly start to lose map control.

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Hard AI... Is a tad difficult to win the tourney when you get the Kill # games. AI just owns your teammates... That's my only gripe about Hard AI, I'm used to AI "cheating" in RTS games on higher difficulty.

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in skirmish i'm beating insane ai, but in tournament @ hard my teamate ai feed and become underleveled..

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Yeah, they really need to do something about the Kill X DGs levels in tournament. I'm 6 games into a Hard tournament and have only lost those ones despite having at least 4-5 kills each time since my bot teammates just throw themselves away.

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OK, so I'm not crazy then. The AI is indeed cheating on Hard AI in Tournament mode. Thanks for the clarification.

I'd also noticed the insane stupidity of friendly bots on Hard AI as well. I've experienced them standing at the base doing nothing for up to 20 seconds at a time and falling back before they need to but at other times they'll throw themselves into the fray and just die without even falling back. It certainly feels a lot more artificial than intelligent.

Guess I'll just muck around and learn some strats/levelling paths against the AI til the Pantheon issues are fixed.

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I just noticed this last night. I pretty much steamroll any combination on normal difficulty so I cranked it up to hard. Get stomped pretty much every single game, with the enemy Demigods always a few levels above me. Only won 2 matches of over 10 games, but those were pretty much flukes. Managed to blitz the portal spawns and rush the citadel without having the enemy come back to help. I figured I knew the game mechanics well enough after playing a healthy amount of Dota and some of the beta, so I know I shouldn't get stomped from enemies with the same health and gold level.

Closely monitored ally Demigod's for a few games and I can confidently say the AI is seriously broken. While the enemy AI retreats from losing battles intelligently most of the time, the ally AI seems to get stuck on the patrol paths they set. I've had more than one occasion where an ally had less than 1000 health and went back to patrolling a nearby area after being attacked multiple times, ultimately getting killed. That explains why an ally has 20 deaths while the highest enemy death count is 5 x.x Hopefully skirmish difficulty is better, want to practice before I get crushed online

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The problem is you're not buying upgrades at your citadel. I guarantee you if you start doing that as often as possible, you will win.

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I agree. Normal is too easy, Hard is too... hard
But the problem is not the ennemy DemiGods but our stupid teammates. They must be on normal level, and as I say normal lvl really sucks.

lokideath

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Quoting Vid-szhite,

reply 11

The problem is you're not buying upgrades at your citadel. I guarantee you if you start doing that as often as possible, you will win.

I buy at least equal items:citadel upgrades ratio. I've even tried to completely forgo hero progression and simply stand back and rake in cash purely for citadel upgrades. Nothing works with allied AI this stupid and enemy AI so brutal. So yeah, your guarantee fails

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Gonna do that annoying forum thing and agree with whats being said. Hard mode tournament shouldn't have such crippled team mates in my opinion. Or there should be a more variable scale of difficulty.

I've gone back to skirmishes and varying the difficulty on either side rather than Hard tournament. Things wont matter so much when multiplayer picks up a bit but sometimes I like to play against the AI.

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As Oak (My only used character right now), I am able i beat the Hard tourney.... I do not advise spending any money on Citadel upgrades...

Because you need your hero to have the best items possible, because you are the sole killer on your team...You have to be able to stay in your lane from the start and barely ever leave it.. so you can out-level the AIs....And you need to get the early kills/Firstblood...

Once the mid/ late game starts... you should have a few TPs to tele kill any enemy AI stragglers you spy... also you need TPs to tele out to areas where there is no opposing heroes, so that you can freely farm on the creeps.. As Oak...I can win easily by maxing raise dead and soul power with a few points into divine punishment.. + surge of course...

And save up for the uber items..

I do believe the hard tourney taught be a great build for my Oak hero.. I cant win the dominations on hard.. because my team cant hold flags well at all..... (capture locks and teleports can help you fare well) and Slaughter is very hard to win sometimes unless you get a killer start... But when it comes down to fortress or conquer (w/e its called..)... well, ill just say you'll be able to tell if your build is happening... When you end up godlike on hard dif...

So keep playing with your builds and find one that breaks the AI... then post it!

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