Is there a way for lairs/caves/ruins/towers to mix realm creatures? Could be a ton of fun and remove concern of lack of variety (but not sure if doable)
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My sprite strategy
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Ctawalk: AI won't attack unless they have a certain percentage of the strategic strength. With the difficulty modifer, they just rarely ever attacked nodes lairs at all. Attrition isn't something the AI consciously knows how to do.
Also attrition in strategic combat is almost always damage spread over all units. Nodes/lairs auto heal to full after every battle, so AI can't do attrition reliably against them even if they wanted to.
Is there an easy way to fix strategic combat spreading damage over all units?
And I saw your setup just now, same as in the test games. I think you're undervaluing Heavenly Light + Cult Leader enormously. Try my setup above, you'll be much more consistent in generating high power in no time. Quote:As for node strength, I agree that the AI should be able to crack them. Why was that difficult for them to do? The AI attacks stuff if their stack>0.75*target stack. Past a certain point (9 of their best normal unit) the AI can't grow their stack strength at a reasonable rate. To go above that the stack has to include one or more high end creatures, or heroes with godlike gear. Even if they have such a stack on one or two continents, they won't have them on most of them. (Life AI is an exception as they have many buffs and global enchantments that grow the strategic value of their normal units) Furthermore if the AI does have a stack of 9 anything and all lairs are too strong to attack the AI won't wait around until stronger units arrive but mark the continent "uninteresting" and leave it. There is no attrition in strategic combat. Damage is distributed roughly evenly so unless you do like over 75% of the damage needed to win, nothing will actually die. Furthermore the units in lairs heal back to max health after every combat because their health is not stored - they aren't actual, existing units on the map. Exception being if the secondary monster is much weaker, then they'll probably die leaving only the primary. It's irrelevant though because the AI won't attack the target anyway unless they have a strong enough stack to have a chance of winning in one go. Quote:Is there a way for lairs/caves/ruins/towers to mix realm creatures? Could be a ton of fun and remove concern of lack of variety (but not sure if doable) Not right now but I could probably do it. If instead of picking a specific realm, these would set a list of available realms then the new algorithm could pick form any realm on the list. Quote:Is there an easy way to fix strategic combat spreading damage over all units? Yes, but this was an intentional change. It helps minimize the losses on the winning AI's side, preserving more troops and giving them momentum in wars against other AI. It also makes strategic combat more playable for humans, albeit I'm not encouraging that. Quote: I think you're undervaluing Heavenly Light + Cult Leader enormously. Cult Leader is on the "watch list" already. Could you please not involve that until we sort out sprites? It's a separate possible problem.
Catwalk: Perhaps. But what would you go after in my game? And no, I use heavenly light cult leaser a lot. But for the pace that sprites want, I don't think its necessary. I could be wrong. Feel free to try a game with both and see which works better. In this exact game I think you're right, but only due to the two neutrals stopping me from getting pre turn 10 lairs.
And no, strategic combat is basically a disaster, but we're stuck with it, but the exact disaster was chosen on purpose based on a fair amount of exploration into the subject. You can go look at my various discussions on it. The simplest way to describe it is to take every figure in the battle, add them to each other. Take out half the special abilities, and end up with one super figure. Each sides super figure then fights, and distributes damage (mostly) evenly across all the units on that side. It does do some distribution, but not much. And since damage is done to the super figure, a VERY regular occurrence is that the winning side takes no damage at all, because of how the percentages go. (If you're really interested I could try to explain it more, but there are still odd quirks that crop up from time to time that don't fit the usual that I can't explain.)
I don't think the sprites are working for this game. Admittedly, exceptionally bad lair/nodes, but, june 1403, I cleared the two lairs I could, lost my first stack on the fire giants (I'll take it with the next stack, but without any nodes.. my skill isn't increasing fast enough.)
Now it's possible this was due to not going for cult leader and heavenly light. But I think more importantly, despite two neutrals and 2 lairs, I just didn't have anything else that I could conquer (and it's not like any other realm would be able to either.) Since I had no power, I've been dumping all my gold into mana, so no spread empire either. Catwalk, do you want me to keep going, or start a new game? Actually I'm just going to keep going. My halfling racial research just got me giant spiders anyway, so I should get the node and that should be able to get me to shift into full giant spider production. My capital plus the orc neutral put out lots of settlers, so by end of 1404, I should have.. 5 halflings cities and 7 orc cities and the barbarian city. Build one barbarian cavalry, summon 8 giant spiders, and go crazy after AI. But.. that means this really isn't a sprite strategy, this is an 'earth lore plus spiders' strategy. The sprite part didn't add to it. May 1405, encountered first AI (i've been able to see him on the map for some time). He's got about.. 7 times my power production, and has taken out at least one of the nodes I can see that I wasn't going to be able to touch (I think it was doombats + hellhounds). But my spider stack is almost ready (I have 7), so as soon as I complete it, I'm just going to go straight after him, and see how much damage I can do.
April 23rd, 2017, 13:47
(This post was last modified: April 23rd, 2017, 14:02 by GermanJoey.)
Oh no, don't suicide sprites against fire giants! That's just a waste of mana! Just save them for Myrror if there's nothing else to attack on Arcanus.
(April 23rd, 2017, 10:04)Nelphine Wrote: Ok, read germanjoey's game report. Thanks for reading my report! Yes, spiders were important in that game for a fast finish. Spiders are an extremely powerful, fast, and hearty unit, especially once you get nature buffs layered on them (LL, WW, RE, and later SI). A LL+RE+SI Spider is about as good as a rare-level summon for about a third of the cost. However, the only reason I was able to cast so much of this stuff was the income provided by the sprites. (and layer Javs, but you know how good lizardmen are already) However, Spiders aren't the only trick Nature has up its sleeve. For example, Blizzard spam was just as important for devastating city garrisons before Spider Stack would hit them. For example, that last Myrran wizard had his cities stuffed with Warlocks and yet I don't think I ever had a single doom bolt cast on me thanks to Blizzard. Furthermore, Nature's Cures was really important to make full use of my spider's high movement and high hit points. My stacks were always at full strength and I could hit a new city nearly every turn. And then there's Transmute... I had dozens of adamant javs by the end of the game that never saw combat use against a wizard only because they couldn't keep up with the spiders' 5 moves per turn. Without spiders, I'd have still won quite easily, just not as quickly. But of course, every realm has good spells. The difference here was simply the enormous snowball that was due solely to sprites. By the way, in general, I don't play on Max Power, but on High power. (one level up from the bottom) However, that game was probably on Max Power because IIRC Catwalk typically plays with it and he had provided the save. I do typically play on Rich Resources, however. |
