Private builds for the adventurous » Forum Post by Frogboy

Hi Brad,

I thought Altar's first city was pretty well defended so I decided to walk past it and see what other cities they have. So the AI made a pretty good first city on ridiculous, but look at the second city. Max pop, no production, no defenders, and building what troops? Yep, you guessed it pioneers. Argh.

The other thing is that I walked right passed the AI city which had 5 guys (armor class or whatever you call it) of 62. My little band is a 30. They let me walk right passed when they should have come out and pounced me.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

In theory, you shouldn't be able to beat a ridiculous AI 1 on 1 on a small or larger map.

Normal = average strategy gamer level.

Challenging = decent strategy gamer level.

So basically, work your way up from Normal and see how things progress.

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So I take over the second city and Relias steps into my ZOC...game over.

Aside from the obvious mistake (stepping into my ZOC alone), Relias did some thing else that was a little strange. When I first moved towards his main city, he came out alone and attacked me. This is possibly a good strategic move if the enemy sovereign has lots of magic he can do to soften my troops because even if he dies, he just respawns in the nearest city. The problem was that he only had one spell (one that did not do any damage) so I let him cast it over and over and over and over until he had no more mana and then I killed him. So now when the big battle happens for the city, he has no mana to help his troops. You might want to look into that as well.

Brad, I hope these tips are helping. It seems like you are you trying to defend the way the AI is working. I hope I'm misreading your comments. Even though we are sometimes harsh on this forum, we're only trying to help.

Anyway, now I need to start over since I just learned that Altar was the only AI I had set on ridiculous. By the way, you keep asking about the map size. I've been playing on medium and large maps with 8-10 opponents. The 1 v 1 sounds interesting. I might try that too. Maybe having less opponents would make it harder.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Some of these things are, realistically speaking, just going to happen. For instance, you took over his city while he was heading there to reinforce it. Since it's simultaneous turns, he got caught in a bad situation which you were able to capitalize on.

Right now, my focus is on more bread and butter type things like city building and strategic use of armies and the like. But feedback like yours does indeed help.

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how does ai affect the minor factions? or rather, where do you adjust the ai for them (so they upgrade the equipment on the daughters i send their way!).. this is in general.. rather than this build.

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I didn't realize the AI difficulty option until 4 days ago.

Major difference.

Hope those hardcore players who complained about the game being to easy knew about this.

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Thanks Frog! So now I'm asking for it. 5 opponents (all Empire / all ridiculous). I'm the lone Kingdom faction on a medium map. This will hopefully give them some time to build up and kick my bumper. Unfortunately, here's the first stupid AI trick. Magnar did not bring his best troops to attack me and so he died.

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I haven't played in a while so I don't know if this is a new bug, a known bug from 1.1, or whatever:

When a unit is destroyed, I just noticed that the game still considers the unit as active, with 0 hp. If it's a summoned unit, that means that you still pay mana for it until you dispell the spell. If it's a built unit, it still is listed in your unit list with zero hp (and probably are still paying maintenance on it, though I did not confirm that at the time).

In any case, I'm happy to say that I've been playing for an unusual number of turns, without the game crashing (with 1.1, I did have a problem with ctds, which is why I haven't been playing).

Anyway thanks for the new build.

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Quoting AlLanMandragoran,

reply 23

Brad - you may want to consider spelling this out somehow in the docs and game. If Troj and I were both confused about the difference between the world difficulty level and each individual AI, then I guarantee newer players are too. I would recommend that the world difficulty should default to the AI's - I think players are assuming that is so. I think GalCiv2 did that if I remember correctly.

It is a bit confusing. I did already notice that the difficulties had to be individually set. But I'd be willing to bet 95% of the people on the forums who post about playing a game at ridiculous settings are NOT playing against ridiculous AI.

I had assumed at first that I just had to set it to ridiculous in just one place when picking the map and stuff. I like your recommended fix. Or Perhaps a slider for default AI difficulty on screen where you select the other factions might be good too, so it doesn't take 20 extra clicks to get all my enemies difficulty set up correctly.

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I had no idea you must set AI difficulty manually, and I've been playing since beta...

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Quoting Magog_AoW,

reply 35

I had no idea you must set AI difficulty manually, and I've been playing since beta...

Yeah, I'm thinking a UI review might be in order there...

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Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

+441

It was new in 1.1. In 1.09e, the AI would automatically be set to the difficulty of the world difficulty. This was introduced in 1.08 or 1.07, and now it's been reverted.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

Flat out, you guys need the same options you had in GalCiv II.

Random opponents,

fixed difficulty level you can set for all, independent of world difficulty

then be able to set specific opponents, or difficulty levels.

My own personal way of playing:

I always set my AI to be the hardest it can be without cheats (as I hate AI cheats, one reason why I love Brad's AI, it competes without cheating)- though I will house rule myself if the AI can't handle something, and I try to automate the boring stuff instead of micromanage (also for balance's sake)- no stuff I have to automate in Elemental though, which is good.

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Some of these things are, realistically speaking, just going to happen. For instance, you took over his city while he was heading there to reinforce it. Since it's simultaneous turns, he got caught in a bad situation which you were able to capitalize on.

Right now, my focus is on more bread and butter type things like city building and strategic use of armies and the like. But feedback like yours does indeed help.

I think I have an idea to cure this problem. That's you can let the town in a chaos mode for 2 - 3 turns before the occupier's zone emerges from the captured city. Just consider the attacker need to normalize the situation before they got the grip of the city. That way, you can avoid the death of the unlucky sovereign when he / she wants to reinforce / to recapture the city.

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

2 comments on 1.1 C:

-The AI is still not building cities optimally, even though it's getting better.

-It still needs to update its armies, badly. It's defending cities better, but outdated or inadequate troop should either disbanded or used as fodder for skirmishes. Keeping a few of those spears+padded armor dudes to fill the defense of a city is fine, but as time goes on, the focus should shift towards better troops, or I will steamroll him. Combined weapons is the key here, and it still doesn't do it well.

-It focuses too much on building glass (or semi-glass) cannons. It looks like lack of metal and materials is guilty here. Anyway, I haven't seen the AI build any shield-equipped soldier.

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AlLanMandragoran

Join Date 09/2010

+63

Quoting Marks1381,

reply 31

I didn't realize the AI difficulty option until 4 days ago.

Major difference.

Hope those hardcore players who complained about the game being to easy knew about this.

Yeah, in my new game Resoln has 5x the power rating than me (everyone else is 3-4x) and just threatened war if I didn't pay up. I refused and now it's on. They have war staff technology and I have light plate - without the metal or funds to equip my armies. This is the first time I've seriously been threatened. Ridiculous is finally starting to truly feel ridiculous. Kudos to Brad!

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Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

+441

I've complained plenty of AI difficulty being lame, and I was aware. For the record.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

I'm still having a lot of problems with some of the APIs that I've been looking into yesterday and today.

I do think I've eliminated that crash issue entirely that some people reported. For you techies, here's what causes it:

Elemental has simultaneous turns. This is important to remember.

Once in awhile, a unit will attack another unit who was in the process of joining yet another unit into an army. The attack is queued up but it is on the pre-army "unit". So if that unit dies, eventually you will have a bad pointer floating around. It's a rare thing and almost always involves monsters so depending on ones world difficulty settings and how many players are in a given game and how much monster attacking is going on, you can end up with a crash there.

Another issue is the pioneer one. I have hard-coded at this point ways to keep the AI from building pioneers if the city isn't defended. As you guys know, I don't hard code things as a general rule but I am flummoxed on this one. I'm still looking into it.

The most serious issuing I"m dealing with is pathfinding. I need APIs to give my units finer control of the path they take. Right now, I specify a destination and have to rely on the pathfinding to do its thing. For performance reasons, the game tries to avoid recalculating the path very often (it has a pretty sophisticated algorithm to control this). But there are times where I want to have my units walk far around other units. Basically, I need the ability to create way points. This is why you see pioneers "invading" or even attacking cities sometimes.

Another issue I'm dealing with the AI being overprotective of its cities late game. I'm working on this.

Since it's the holiday and I'm the only one messing with the project, I'm taking advantage of that to see about late game performance. What happens is that you end up with a ton of events occurring during the turn and those things can take awhile. So I'm seeing what I can do to improve this. Part of the issue is the sheer number of units you can have late game. Thousands and thousands of units. I think there's things I can do on this though.

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Certainly keeping on eye on the thread, i think i'll try the exe you put up looks like fun.

Also, i would like to put forward the theary that Heavenfall is not aware. He is a machine. An experimental ai api that has since turned on the creator and looks to trip him up.

with regards to number of towns: I find with the current build that after i found my kingdom i will build my second town after i get my first 2 or 3 techs - i pretty much always get equipment first to build units with spear leather helmet armlet soldier cloak and travel boots. 1 to defend my town and 1 to travel with my pioneer.

after that i will build more towns as i find resources in the wild.

if i can get a safe zone of control without the ai harassing me, then i will build small outposts for that extra 5 population to use in my bigger cities. When you have access to 2 or 3 food resources then it is the tile limit of a city that gets in the way more than anything. I will have 1 super town, then gradually get a few lv 3 towns to make grouped units. When i get 4 lv 3 towns then i will spread around my food around to all my available cities to grow my population resource quickly to spam units.

Only time i have had trouble on the hardest difficulty is when i have not paid attention to my armour tech. I pay a lot more attention to warfare tech then i used to. When i saw the ai put together grouped units with lord hammers it taught me not to ignore warfare. (High powered glass cannons, they used leather armour)

this taught me to:

1)use warfare tech more

2) search for and protect metal asap because you can't get to mid game without it (adventure tech doesn't always spawn metal, sometimes it is gold or materials)

3) magic lacks the punch to deal with grouped lord hammer units

4) I'm not sure why crude bows are not opened up with the equipment tech, they seem too far up the tech tree to be usefull, if i open up the tech for them, may as well bee line for the next 2 bows after that otherwise there is no use to them, crude bows are already countered by leather armour. I am thinking of troop units here, not heroes - heroes get a bit more out of bows initially than troops do.

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thanks for the exe file I'll try it out for my next game.

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I played couple of ~500 turn games on epic / Challenging world / normal AI with version 1.1c. The AI is more significantly tougher on Normal mode, and I'm loving it. I've also seen roaming world monsters that I'd never encountered before in similar games in version 1.1, and its always fun to seen a stack of pack drakes running around wreaking havoc in the year 180.

I have mixed feelings about the additional resources, however - and thats due in part to the kind of game pacing I enjoy. In the last couple of games I have played on 'Challenging' world difficulty with a large map, food resources were allocated densely enough to provide for cities just about everywhere - and this was before the additional food resources had been unlocked by any players through the technology tree. With an abundance of food, settlements tend to pop up everywhere and blanket the map in influence early on, which in turn cuts down on roaming monster hoardes (and I love my monster hoardes). Its just a minor beef, but I'd be happy with a decrease in the amount of resources spawned or better control of resource availability through world generation options.

Secondly, there seems to be a new non-crashing 'bug' which causes certain units to die, but remain on your active ungarrisoned stack listing on the left side of the UI. I'm not sure what exactly causes it, but I've been able to reproduce it fairly reliably by starting a new game, building a peasant, and setting it to auto-explore. When that peasant runs into a monster and the option to battle or auto-resolve the conflict is presented, I hit auto-resolve. If my peasant dies, his portrait will remain on the stack listing until I click it and disband him manually.

There also seems to be an issues with layered music in 1.1c - I'm not certain if I just didn't notice this occasional glitch in a week of playing 1.1, but under certain undetermined conditions the background and foreground music layers will desynchronize. It's not a big deal - exiting and reloading fixes it right up after all.

Thanks for making 1.1c available Frogboy, I'm having alot of fun playing with the new AI.

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I seem to have come across what Brad(=frogboy, right?) was saying about the crash happening when splitting/converging units who are under attack. That was the one crash that happened on my first run if this.

The resources added is crazy, ended up with a smattering of fiveto eight split between my first two settlements. The AI is more annoying, especially during the first few turns. New Pariden's queen kicked my small warlord's behind when I tried to ambush her. I get really unlucky if I run into shrills early game too, the earth-type specifically. I even have AI send me caravans! I thought it was an attack at first, but good thing I canceled the battle.

The AI does stupid things occasionally too. Another game New Pariden's queen declared war on me, sent several dozens troops into my territory only to attack Magnar. Seems they were at war and the only way to reach him was to go through me. No other option but war? I was on friendly terms(or so I thought) I had several caravans going to her, she was in awe of diplomatic capital, same allegiance, etc, etc. But b/c the Alliance tech wasn't researched, I thought it was a bit much. Seems she could have terraformed a way to Mangar without involving me. Lower land is one of the first few spells you can learn, right? I understand it isn't easy to encode all options, all possibilities, but it was a thought.

Soon I would like to try and see about throwing those custom factions as opponents into this build, that would be wicked. Anyone want to give it a go? I understand how to make them selectable, but would it work without crashing the game?

I'm having an issue though with a quest, Maggie's Key Quest. Every time after I kill the first alpha wolf and run back to town, or if it was a different champion to activate the quest, I can't enter the scene with the three wolves to capture the key. I've not had the problem with 1.1 but with this new build. I wouldn't mind just skipping it or having an option to abandon the quest, but sometimes its in the way of city improvements, or more accurately, would rather it not activate when I'm on to other things.

Aslo a question: Just what are minor factions? Do they serve a purpose? Do they randomly start up in places at random times? I've never actually seen one myself.

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I've had a strange occurrence in your build you posted here where i've auto resolved a fight where monsters are attacking one my cities protected by 2 observers. I lose the fight but there ends up being some kind of stand off where the monsters stay outside, and my observers stay alive with 0 hp.

i'll look for a debug file and see about posting it.

lessee, need a dropbox account i guess

edit: here we go, not sure if this debug file has the info you need

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17459978/debug.err

hehe in rereading the last 2 posts i see this bug has already been reported LOL more tired than i thought - christmas non-drinking hangover

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minor factions are small factions that will have one town which does not get stronger. It stays at level 1. If you walk up to them and make a non-aggression treaty, you can buy unique items from their store.

I'd like to see these guys become invulnerable town you can't attack and have the option to buy a special unit from them as well. That would be nice.

I think you you take over the town you get access to a special unit, never had the chance to test this one out yet.

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Heavenfall

Join Date 07/2008

+441

The AI is a LOT better at building groups now. Around turn 160-200 on ridiculous they'll start pumping out groups in every city with a war council, and they won't stop.

Unfortunately, I'm also seeing a DECREASE in perceived unit quality, particularly on empire side. Despite the AI having 5000 metal and 20 000 materials, they still focus their training on building 12xsentinel groups, sentinels being units equipped with a warstaff and a leather chestpiece. They are now LESS a threat than before, because at least lordhammers could damage my units, even if they came one at a time. Now it's just an infinite amount of warstaffs getting ALL their damage blocked.

I've also seen the AI use Call to Arms, which is kind of cool.

I have not yet seen a single cavalry unit, or a unit with a helm, or a unit with a shield. That is flavour that could make the AI more interesting to fight.

Is it possible that your function to make the AI use whatever resource they have a-plenty of is going haywire? At ridiculous, the Ai can't ever train more units than it produces materials. Maybe that is getting it stuck in a permanent "build units using only materials" loop.

Edit: Also, enemy AI still not using any "unit quality" when training new units. I don't understand that. Is it a design choice? I don't think it's the right one. The player's units receive massive health bonuses, while the AI's units stay more or less the same. It is such an unbalancing factor - a completely FREE upgrade - up to +200% health - and the AI is not using it.

The AI is a lot more fun to play against now, but the basic production and designing of units still need to be brought up to an "ok" level, instead of the insanity that is happening right now.

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