Extreme chaos games

[Seravy]

If it can be fixed, this would really improve the game.

It can't and that's how it is meant to work anyway. Wizard's Pacts are not a mutual agreement (even says in the help entry for it), it's you offering not to move there in exchange for you gaining relationship points with the wizard, and being able to skip their hostility rolls. (as well as having a safety belt against war declaration)
Diplomacy in any game where the AI is bound by rules and the human is not is inherently asymmetric.
The AI literally gets nothing out of this treaty as you are free to break it and attack the same turn whenever you wish.

[Nelphine]

You won by spell of mastery? Wow. I'm shocked.

Beastmen halberdiers are indeed power houses when backed up with the right magic. I'm trying to see if I can improve on them. (I want to see if I can get swordsmen or cavalry of any race to have enough effect early enough that it makes beastmen halberdiers obsolete, in the same way beastmen halberdiers made hammerhands/orc hordes/jackal riders obsolete. Barbarian cavalry are looking pretty promising.)

[zhantul]

• 8 giant spiders (only solution I know is gargoyles + immolation, but both were far down my research list)
  
• 5 giant spiders + 3 sprites
  
• 2 wyrms + 1 colossus tower (chaos channels might get me there, but I end up going to war first)
  
• 7 cockatrices + 1 war bears (in a nature node, so my javelineers don't do much before becoming breakfast)
  
• 5-ish stone giants
  
• 3 djinn tower
  
• 8 shadow demon tower
  

Lizardmen are fast expanding and build up towns fast. That's why I like them. That and javelineers. Water walking, ranged troops with extra health and quite good at melee as well. Not to forget expendable. The trick with lizardmen is forgetting they can build cathedrals, armorers guild, wizard towers and even amplifying towers. You can have a large army instead. Forget colosseums for small towns as well. You miss out on some magic power and dragon turtles. But are they worth 2300 production? That's 30 javelineers . Not to mention 21 less building maintenance.

Warlord combined with eldritch weapon or flame blade makes a huge difference in damage output. I had the 5 giant spiders + 3 sprites in ruins. It went down with 5 or 6 magic weapon javelineers loss (I never had mithril or adamantium). Lightning bolt works. Later on, blazing march or flame wave. I'm really glad magic spiders are no longer missile immune. For 8 spiders, a stack of javelineers could work. You might need a second stack to finish them off.

7 cockatrices and a war bear. Use a stack of javelineers with eldritch weapon + blazing march. Lethal. Keep moving backwards while shooting. You will have losses, but you'll win. That is if blazing march works.

5-ish stone giants. A stack of javelineers. Perhaps warp creature to weaken them. You can chaos channel them for defense to keep losses to a minimum.

2 wyrms + 1 colossus tower. Chaos channels is indeed the way to go. If warp wood gets changed, you might be able to do this one lossless. It might take multiple turns to kill the wyrms.

3 Djinn tower. This is one to leave for later. They turn invisible. Spearmen and apocalypse clears them out. Or invisible units of your own. I didn't manage to clear it out in my game either.

8 shadow demon tower. Another one of those "ouch" groups. A flame wave helps, but is usually not enough to kill them. Even a full stack of javelineers goes down. Leave for later with apocalypse/disintegrate to reduce the numbers permanently. If you have adamantium, you might be able to kill them if all units are enchanted (either chaos channel for defense or eldritch weapon+flame blade). You will get losses.

[jhsidi]

Those suggestions make sense. I feel a bit rushed as generally in my Extreme games, it seems like the AI is busy clearing out nodes with extremely asymmetric results to what I get. For example, I was holding off from a node with 2 doom bats and 6 gargoyles. Sharee rolled in with a stack of 1 fire giant, 1 halberdier and a couple other things I can't remember (nothing strong) and won, keeping all 4 units. At another point, once I had efreets, I was taking over a node on Myrror with many wyrms. On the last turn, with 1 wyrm remaining, Lo Pan rolled in with 1 fire giant and won. That's literally impossible for the human player: the fire giant wouldn't survive the first turn.

There is definitely more an element of luck to ruins etc now. Some games, it seems like everything surrounding me is strong; some games I get a bunch of easy stuff. But I dislike the easy ones even more as the AI can typically take it at the point I'm still scouting with solo units.

Thanks for the pointer on lizardmen, I did indeed spend time building amplifying towers.

By the way, yes, I was just using 4.0. I'm going to upgrade to EXP7 and see how the new spell feels.

[jhsidi]

If it can be fixed, this would really improve the game.

It can't and that's how it is meant to work anyway. Wizard's Pacts are not a mutual agreement (even says in the help entry for it), it's you offering not to move there in exchange for you gaining relationship points with the wizard, and being able to skip their hostility rolls. (as well as having a safety belt against war declaration)
Diplomacy in any game where the AI is bound by rules and the human is not is inherently asymmetric.
The AI literally gets nothing out of this treaty as you are free to break it and attack the same turn whenever you wish.

I agree with this reasoning, it's fine for the relationship to be asymmetric.

However, the rigidity of the mechanic is detrimental to the overall game. For instance, I can no longer use pathfinding to direct my ships around the world once I enter any wizard pact, as the AI goes apeshit at the sight of a lone trireme on the horizon. Exploration becomes a cell-by-cell process, knowing that a cell in the wrong direction could end a treaty. I don't think that "petty aggravation" was probably a design goal of the system, but OTOH it's probably impossible to include some consideration of the # of units or # of turns spent nearby a single city, no?

[Seravy]

it seems like the AI is busy clearing out nodes with extremely asymmetric results to what I get. For example, I was holding off from a node with 2 doom bats and 6 gargoyles.

There were a few major bugs in strategic combat so the AI could won battles it wasn't supposed to. Should be fixed in EXP7.

# of units or # of turns spent nearby a single city, no?

Turns already matter. You get a warning and a loss of 5 relation points the first turn, nothing the second turn, and lose the treaty in the third consecutive turn of violating the treaty.
(unless the repeated warning mechanic upgrades the first warning to losing the treaty but for that you had to do something like using corruption on them beforehand.)

Number of units is not considered but could be - but it's hard to argue a Great Drake is fine just because it's only one unit so I rather not.

Engineers and Settlers are exempt from this check, so if you really need to explore their terriotory, you can use those. (Yes, that will be slow)
I could add melding units as another exception but honestly I don't think I want to encourage the player scouting territory they aren't supposed to enter. Wait until you have an Alliance and you can enter with anything.

Also, this is at least clear and easy to understand. A rule like "no more than 18 total attack strength worth of units" would be confusing and hard to keep track of for the player.

Finally, an Alliance, which you will usually get if you manage to keep the pact going, is a massive advantage, and I want that to be costly - not in terms of resources, but in terms of dedication. If the player is unwilling to deal with it, they don't deserve allies.

[Seravy]

Started my own Chaos test game.

There was only one wizard on my continent, also 10 Chaos. I was able to form a wizard's pact then an alliance.
I noticed their capital only has Hell Hounds. The AI definitely gets the two  "guaranteed early research uncommons" picks for 10 books, so not having Gargoyles meant there is a bug. Either they don't get the spell, or fail to pick as research, or fail to spend on research to get it.
I was able to spread lots of settlers around, as the only nearby wizard was friendly. This probably should have been enough to win the game, however...
I decided to attack the capital using 9 Gargoyles, as the game was going to get abandoned anyway. I don't see a point playing through a 20 hours game when my first opponent was significantly held back by a bug. Surprisingly, the attack failed. While the Gargoyles (two of them having Immolation) easily dispatched the halberdiers which already replaced the hounds, the two low level heroes proved unbeatable for them - they didn't have the damage output to deal with 11 armor units.

Conclusions :
-Bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere, arggghh!
-Gargoyles are fairly balanced at the lower research cost. While effective early units, even in stacks of 9 they aren't guaranteed to deal with an enemy wizard's capital or other random strong unit.
-Sometimes Chaos doesn't have an early game problem in the first place, as it's able to settle a large amount of land without getting into a war. This isn't a common scenario though.
-Fixing the strategic combat bug didn't seem to hurt the AI's capability to take out weak lairs much - the heroes already had two or three low tier items equipped.
-The reduced AI resources seem to still provide enough challenge on Extreme - the army bars of all enemies were much higher than mine.

Edit : uploaded a fixed version of EXP7 where the AI picks Gargoyles correctly.

[Nelphine]

I'm playing a game, impossible, old resource allocation. One opponent is: 2 life. 2 nature, 4 sorcery, 6 death. In 1407, his capital still had 7 sprites (and 2 heroes, including beastmaster) in it. At the time he had about 20% more power production than me, and since I was playing on max power, and had.. 8 or 9 arcanus nodes, that's a very hefty amount of power production.

Strategic combat definitely seems to be working better - the AI has taken several neutrals, nodes, and lairs, but even on impossible didn't simply walk over everything.

Given your comment about gargoyles, I'm wondering .. What kind of timeline would you expect an AI to have for research? 7 sprites feels awfully weak for an impossible AI. Though they were buffed, at least some (I haven't attacked him, even in 1409, so I don't know details).

I think his first war started somewhere late 1406.

[jhsidi]

I've also started a new game. Preliminary comment: holy crap, horsebowmen with flame blade in 1401. They're even badasses in melee (currently 6 elite units @ 9 melee attack!). This actually feels like the major balance shift, more than MS.

Mystic surge seems to have the correct effect on my strategy. In a battle I was worried would give me significant losses, I cast it once; the unit got bloodlust, regeneration and bless, which would have been awesome if it were a melee unit. But the regen meant he ended the battle with full health, which was a neat roll of the dice. However, I won't use MS in an ordinary battle, knowing that one of my units will be crippled afterward -- so I've only used it once so far. It feels really powerful but well balanced for being a "break in case of emergency" skill only. As fun as this game is so far, I think I'll restart with Myrran trolls so that I can try using MS in every battle.

One issue: bloodlust gave the unit undead status as a side-effect, which persisted after the battle was over. That would be a really horrible outcome for a hero or valuable summon.

[Nelphine]

Yes bloodlust is the one effect that can do that. In theory it's rare, but I don't know. Multiple effects, plus the raw stat line, for a relatively cheap price - and bloodlust, plus ending combat at 1 HP are the only downsides.