[LH 1.0] Let's talk AI army construction

This is a bit off-topic, but it seems you hit the problem pretty thoroughly in your main post.

I am curious, have the AI heroes ever been a problem to you? I know my sovereign, depending on build, may do the majority of damage in my empire. If I am going to use a hero, bother leveling it up with its own army, it will generally be able to do something significant. I have never seen an AI champ/sov do anything signficant in a battle.

I keep capturing sovereigns, high-level sovereigns 16-17 on Hard/Expert, that have random or breadth-first trait selection, so despite being endgame level they don't have any traits over two-levels deep in any tree. They will completely fill out the general tree every time. This means no attention has been paid to leveling strategy. I know strategic map army usage is critical, if the army never gets there it is a non-starter, but it seems like in most successful strategies, some heroes/sovereigns need focused leveling because powers/spells are such powerful tools. They are suped-up one figure units without focused leveling (though with crazy hp in your example).

Short answer is kinda/sorta/not really/no.

-Kinda/sorta: Some champs cast spells.  The spells really seem more a problem than they are.  Curse, for exmaple -- I hate to have it cast on me but can't remember any time it really caused problems.  There's a spell that drains health from all my units, healing the caster.  It's caused me some problems, making it take longer to kill that caster, but at the level my troops were at that time their lost health didn't really hurt.  If the AI did a decent job of spell use, focus fire, etc. then I think AI champ casters would definitely hurt.

In the early game phase the champs/sov aren't bad, but as time goes on they get less and less effective.

As for AI champ melee types, they don't do nearly the damage as the built-up normal troops do.

-Not really/no:  I typically don't focus on AI champs.  They just don't do the damage that regular troops do.

The above holds true for Sovs too.  They are generally more powerful than champs, but still can't match the damage done by normal troops.\

A further problem is that when killed an enemy champ/sov ends up in a nearby city with 1 health, for 5(?) turns, slowly healing.  If my army is on a roll (and it usually is, once things get going) I hit the next city in a few turns, so the enemy champ/sov is at low health.  Sometimes they're at 1 health.  Even then, I won't usually target them, even tho they're an easy kill -- other, normal, units are too dangerous to put off attacking.

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In my current Insane game (same game referenced in the past week's worth of posts) my Sov is now lvl 20.  While it's true I spent a lot of level-ups to max 3 spell lines, and haven't spent much gold in the shop to max out his armor/etc. (too darn expensive, even netting 200 gold/turn it's more effective to upgrade normal units than sov/champs), I just use him to cast the following spells:

-heal

-slow

-haste (very very rare)

My lvl 20 Sov spends tac battles casting basic, low level spells, acting as support.  My normal units do the heavy lifting:

This is my lvl 20 Sov:

This is a normal melee unit that I made back in the early phase of the game, partly upgraded and now lvl 14:

Here's a ranged unit from the early days, now lvl 13, mostly upgraded:

This is a newly-made unit, melee, lvl 3, high defense:

Even the newly-made lvl 3 unit has 7x the attack 4x the defense, and almost 2x the health of my lvl 20 Sov.

I try to have 4 melee, 4 ranged, and 1 champ/sov in each army.  The champ/sov really only act as support.  If they can cast heal, slow, or haste they're useful.  Otherwise, unless there's an enemy unit with only 10 or so health to finish off the champ does nothing.

The name of the expansion is Legendary Heroes.  Does anyone feel they are legendary in mid to end-game?

How powerful should a champ be?  My preference would be someone who could hold their own against a normal, current tech, unit.  One champ shouldn't lay waste to whole armies of normal units, but one normal unit shouldn't lay waste to one champ.

If the above is considered a topic to address to improve, suggestions are:

-champ/sov should ramp up faster in power (perhaps more "+1/lvl" bonuses, rather than the "+1", "+2", etc. per abilities?)  Also, greater health/attack/defense increases.

-upgrading champs at the shop should cost significantly less, or even be free.

Wow, I can see why you have to rely exclusively on units on insane. I was not expecting them to be so useless, but since you are always behind the tech curve on that difficulty, it makes sense. I don't normally play an unmodded sov outside of challenging/hard, but if the AI was already significantly up the tech tree in the early phase, I don't think there would ever be a sweet spot where heroes would be effective.

On the lower difficulty levels, the lack of HP boosts mean that AOE spells from an evoker type sov can decimate entire armies in the relatively early game. The sheer number of hit points on those late level troops you are posting would make that far less devastating, but games are usually effectively over before troops like that can be produced. I don't think I have ever seen an AI troop with 150+ hitpoints.

I have never found a melee hero nearly as effective. Again, they have to hit a sweet spot ahead of the tech curve, but it must be much before, and it is not easy to get them to dominate a battlefield. But in a game that doesn't hit the highest levels of tech progression they can be useful.

I wasn't expecting a criticism of hero progression, but I didn't take in to account the effect of the game difficulty you were playing on. I still think one of the big weaknesses of the AI is not taking advantage of heroes, but I don't think that has much effect on Insane difficulty because they are apparently outclassed too quickly.

I see this often as well. Partial armies stacked on top of each other try to invade my land. A check to automatically add units to an army if they are on the same tile is definately in order. Especially if this army is currently in attack mode.

I fully agree with you Nick, this is quite a big problem that really hampers the AI. I think early days in the FE beta Brad spent quite a bit of time in making the ai armies come together at logical places creating some nice armies. For some reason this seems to have deteriorated over time. It's one of the weakest AI points currently: too many easy kill lonely units or heroes.

Hi,

are those unit stats with refined attack/refined defence etc.?

I am also playing insane/insane, and the main use for my defender hero is tanking things or trolling people with cleverly placed firewalls.

He could kill #infinite of weak troops, but even Magnars slave militia tends to have 100+ attack and 50+ defence

Those are his own troops, not AI faction troops. As such, I believe that those don't receive any health boosts aside from structures like the Guild Grocer, faction abilities like Tough and Ironeer blood, Aura of Vitality, and a few special pieces of equipment. Base health value for trained units is six per figure, plus two per level per figure, so it isn't that hard to get a single unit with a maximum health of 20 or more per figure. If you go in for the health-boosting traits and equipment, you can increase that by something like 10 health per figure, and if you have a few towns with Guild Grocers or find a few Wild Game resources, it isn't that difficult to get a faction-wide health bonus of 20% or more. In my current game, I have four-figure units that don't have any health boosting traits or equipment and which were not trained at a location with Aura of Vitality, yet at level 10 they have 125 health (six base health, plus 20 health from levels, plus 20% health from Guild Grocers and Pastures, multiplied by four figures) - twice what my level 14 sovereign has.

The biggest problem for champions against troops (especially for melee champions) is that troop health increases by 2*figure_count per level before bonuses and penalties, and most champions won't have access to weapons and armor which are significantly better than (or in many cases even equal to) the equipment used by troops, which means that melee champions often deal damage equivalent to one- or two-figure trained units while being at least as vulnerable to troop weapons as the troops are to the champion weapons, and except for spells which scale per figure in the target unit (like Blizzard) or which are already enormously powerful (like Mana Blast, assuming you have a large mana reserve), most mage spells simply won't keep up with late-game unit health. This is before getting into the various city spells that improve units trained there - it isn't uncommon to have a three essence fortress, and in my current game I have a four-essence fortress, and a site that I can turn into a five-essence fortress, and I have the Auras of Grace, Vitality, and Might, as well as Heart of Fire available for city enchantments. It would take a truly exceptional champion to compete with even a level 1 unit that comes out with all of that. Granted, I've never seen the AI take full advantage of these enchantments or of fortresses.

Completely agree, and I am amazed the forum isn't filled with threads with this topic.

They should get massively more HPs, and in such a fashion that the uber-powered endlevel mage is still FAIRLY frail, compared to a same level Warrior / Commander / Defender type, i.e. if the mage could take 150 "raw" (after defense etc) damage, the Warrior and Defender should have 300+.

Given that some mass spells can severely turn things in battles, there has to be some balance between melee and magic.

Overall I find it disturbing that 2-3 hero classes have zero / close to zero unit buffs, making them even more pointless / worse than any normal army unit.

Some updates/clarifications, since my previous post in this thread:

-When I mentioned my lvl 20 sov just cast heal/slow/haste, and while he's maxxed out 3 spell lines, they're water, earth, and air.  Not fire, else he'd be casting fire spells as they're fairly powerful.  I depend on air/earth/water in Insane games, for their strategic spells.  It's more important to damage/delay/scatter enemy armies than use fire spells in tac combat, at least for my playstyle.

-My regular units shown above have no 'refined' stats.  They're 'men' race.  The spear maiden in now lvl 15:

I have researched all techs except warg riding, and of the 'refined' techs I've only researched the gold-enhancing one IIRC.

Here's some of the units I'm facing, all Kraxis:

The strength of the AI units at Insane isn't bad, in fact its pretty good.  I can sorta match them now that:

-I've researched all techs

-I've carefully protected my early units so that although, for example, the spear maidens only have leather armor (and not the boots/gloves, instead the soldier armor), they have decent stats

-I dedicated my first city as a fortress (3/3/3, with scrying pool for 4 essence) with all the possible unit-enhancing buildings/spells/etc. -- quality over quantity.  The challenge is surviving until this unit-producing city is online (need place-holder units until it is) then the challenge is keeping the 'keeper' units alive so they can level up.  And then the challenge is getting sufficient gold to upgrade their equipment (where possible -- you can't upgrade accessories for example, or add horses).

The 'my units vs AI units' comparison is good.  It's the 'my regular units vs my champs' comparison that might need tweaking.  Even with decent bows/swords/etc. I'd rather cast slow/haste/heal than have champs/sov do damage, as it's essential to keep my regular units alive -- they need leveling to compete and that takes time, they are relatively slow to build, and they cost a lot of crystal/horses/metal/etc., so keeping them alive is important.  Slow helps delay enemy units approach (and on maps with choke points, allows stopping an entire flank), allowing time to kill off enemy units a few at a time.  Haste gives regular units more attacks -- a force multiplier, and if you're going to multiply a force it should be your strongest force.

Fire spells are different, they can do good damage, but given the choice of finishing off 1 enemy unit (best case for using fire spell) or healing a quality regular unit that might otherwise die before the next chance to heal it, I'll pick the latter every time.

AI sovs can do pretty good damage.  My previous post gave them too little regard.  Since then Magnar wiped out one of my stacks, all by himself.  On the other hand, it was one of my 'placeholder' stacks -- 1 fairly useless champ (Flurin lvl9 assassin) and 8 strong melee units (it was a pretty impressive win for Magnar nonetheless).  Had the stack been one of my 'main' armies (4 melee, 4 ranged, champ/sov healer) then Magnar would have died easily, I think, even if he was in a full 9 unit army (as Kraxis and Yth has previously).

Could you provide info on your defender hero please?  I'd like to see how you're able to tank some of these enemy units (see my post 1 up for some of the 600+ health, 700+ defense, and (not pictured) mages that do 100+ damage per cast, that I am facing. 

My only hope in those situations is to tornado-divide into bite-sized pieces, or if not then weaken the AI army with strategic spells first, then hope my ranged units have better initiative, then hope I can kill off enough of their ranged units for my units to survive the first round, and then hope I can heal my targeted unit(s) to keep them alive.

On the other hand, that city was Yth's last city and Krax was attacking Yth.  Yth is gone, so Krax declared on me, and just happened to have his armies right there from his previous war.

Magnar declared on me about 40 turns ago, and I never saw one of his armies.  Krax is between Magnar and I, but still, Magnar should/could have pre-positioned armies to hit me, and if Magnar couldn't for some reason then he shouldn't have declared.

So, there's been improvement (no pioneers/scouts in armies, initially the AI armies are mostly full and come in bunches), but there's still a lot left to improve (subsequent armies are piece-meal and incomplete, declaring without preparing and even without attacking, etc.).

Early and mid-game, I agree, we're pretty far behind the tech curve (I was lucky to field a 6 unit 400 strength armies vs the AI's multiple 9 unit 1500+ strength armies).