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Are you, in fact, a pregnant lady who lives in the apartment next door to Superdeath's parents? - Commodore |
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AI Planar Travel
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Well, I did play many games on Extreme - now Master - albeit that was half a year ago, but it wasn't anywhere as bad as you describe. Lunatic might be, haven't played one of those in years.
Maybe I should try playing high difficulty games again, but they are completely unfit for testing basic balance issues like races or realms.
February 3rd, 2018, 12:59
(This post was last modified: February 3rd, 2018, 14:42 by zitro1987.)
I think if the enhanced stack-level planar travel is applied to rare, moving/weakening 'inspirations' to +50% to 66% production would be best, but much lower cost. Early on, our cities crave for production, and we already have a pop growth/unrest one that shouldn't be rewarded too early easily with an uncommon prosperity.
The 2 healing spells don't fit in too well as uncommon. *note: i like the idea of an enhanced stack-level planar travel. It's less redundant, AI can be taught to use it, and has a more powerful end-game feel.
Inspirations if by far the most powerful city buff in the game. I wouldn't want to see it as an uncommon. Not only does it produce more than Prosperity, but of a more valuable resource (hammers) as well.
I don't think any Life rares would be suitable for uncommon except prosperity. (maybe mass healing? it's somewhat situational, but being an all-targeting spell, it would be very weird as an uncommon)
Prosperity would be ok as uncommon, and it does inspire usage of stream of life to further benefit the player (prosperity works better with higher pop and taxes). I'm fine with that.
downside is that it may be a skippable research spell in first 8-10 yrs as it works better later on when cities are developed. 
Okay, let's try to summarize...
Option 1 : This has the most cons and also is the hardest to implement while losing fairly important existing features. I think we most definitely shouldn't pick this one. Option 2 : This is a good temporal solution until we can do the other, more complicated ones. I'll most likely include it in 5.14 as there have been several changes that await a release, and doing the other two would take days or weeks. Option 3 and 4 : These seem to be the best long term solutions. 3 would retain Life's ability to have two uncommon planar spells so mixed realms could still reliably enter the other plane 90% of the time, while option 4 would lose this ability and planar access would become significantly more random, but it would be easier to implement and a lot more AI friendly overall. Note : Life can still reliably access the other plane through Enchant Item to make Planar Travel items - unfortunately, these won't help settlers reach the other plane, so the hero needs to find a neutral city AND conquer it, defend it, and spread settlers all on its own. As Life has no relevant summoning spells to speak of at this rarity, the neutral city also needs to handle producing the troops as well as settlers which is difficult to achieve. Furthermore, the AI cannot spread to the other plane using this strategy - so no matter what, access to the other plane will be less available if using option 4.
I had a talk with a friend about this and it shifted my opinion somewhat.
Basically we concluded the AI should not use planar movement (from any source) because -It's unfair, the player might get attacked by units without having a way to fight the wizard sending them. (and the worst possible source of this, the Death/Life wizard, is Charismatic most of the time so this can even drag the player into a multifront war through AI alliances) -It allows the AI to curse the player with no way of retaliation or stopping the curses. Unlike units which the player can kill, this can cause permanent damage with no way to prevent it. (normally you at least have the option to try to banish that wizard) -Breaks the intended functionality of towers to seal away the other plane until about rare spells. -Breaks the intended functionality of the Myrran wizard developing into a "boss" due to being alone, resulting in inconsistent difficulty - if a Life wizard encroaches on Myrror early enough it can result in having no such strong wizard in the game. So that rules out pretty much all but two solutions : S1 : The AI is disallowed from using these spells or S2 : The spells are removed from the game and replaced by something else. We don't need to pick the same solution for all 4 sources of planar movement (items, Shadow Demons, Planar Travel and Astral Gate). As abuse from the human player is much less likely, I'm tempted to keep at least some of the travel sources - using them is fun (even though it's usually ultra risky). The problem with S1 is that restricting the AI like that is generally bad practice (it was fine for shadow demons as not using it was better for the AI as will, but for planar/astral this is not the case except on heroes), but with S2 the problem is "life doesn't really need a new spell" instead. The downside is obvious, it becomes too easy to lock the AI into one plane and win through spells from the other. Whether that's bad or not, is not that obvious, I do think it's makes things a bit too easy, but we can't say it promotes bad gameplay - blocking towers isn't that trivial to do and at least requires some level of intelligence from the human player to go for it as a strategy. If we do think this is a problem, we might need to think of replacing the spells with something Life can use to get around the blocked towers -> SoM scenario.(albeit, is that a real problem? Life has so much resource advantage spells, plus Enlightenment, they should be reaching SoM first in the majority of cases - unless the player has Spell Blast.)
February 22nd, 2018, 17:19
(This post was last modified: February 22nd, 2018, 17:20 by Nelphine.)
Blocking the towers is trivially easy (in comparison to other strategies that work at master and above).
Life AI needs a way to get around that to threaten the human on the other plane. Yes it allows the AI to curse without retaliation. And that is bad. But locking life ai onto one plane is much worse. (Unless you give them a viable way to attack a blocked tower. Chaos and nature have high strategic strength summons plus overland spslls, death has high overland strength summons, and sorcery has the anti SoM spells.) Recall the issue is ATTACKING the blocked tower, not actually winning he battle. The ai isn't smart enough to use bezerkers (or any other high strategic strength city units) in late game, let alone have warlord to make them decent let alone smart enough to put them with an archangel, so mono life literally can't attack a blocked tower. They need the planar travel to avoid that. |
