(February 9th, 2016, 01:26)Rakir Wrote: Seravy, I see on your site you have polls for combat AI.
I feel that if the AI is too intelligent in combat then battles will mostly be decided by whose army is stronger. The game will become more strategic and less tactical because you need to get more resources to create stronger armies instead of using tricks to survive overwhelming odds.
Exploiting the AI been part of the MOM experience since the beginning and thwarting this may reduce the charm and depth of the game.
For example, if flying units don't attack ground forces when they will die from it then it will be very hard to kill sprites. Usually I send several swordsmen and let them take the hits until the sprites ran out of ammo.
I think the combat AI should be set 1.31 mode except for stupid stuff like priests not casting heal. In 1.40n I had strong enemy melee units place themselves right beside my first striking calvary without attacking because they were chasing a weak hero.
I believe the game is complex enough that the AI will still play worse than the human player in many regards. There are new ways to exploit the new behaviors, for example if they don't attack you can use Mana Leak to make the owner lose a ton of mana crystals. I don't think flying units attacking was an exploit, it just was a plain dumb move from the AI's side, the player didn't need to do anything at all to take advantage of it.
Killing sprites is easy, you have Web in Nature, Flight in Sorcery, Black Sleep in Death, Chaos Channels in Chaos and ranged/breath/thrown attacks on units. Pretty much every race has a unit like that.
If the AI does end up being too strong, it's not too hard to make it dumber for lower difficulty, but the first priority should be to make sure it's not dumb unless it needs to be.