AI

[Seravy]

What if the AI required double the normal amount of forces for attacks when they are banished? Without spells, they clearly have no hope of winning an even battle - albeit if it's a sudden large scale war in the late game caused by the player banishing the wizard, the player might run out of mana crystals in the retaliation - still those troops would most likely be a lot more effective if used after returning?
Although without spells, even double or triple forces are unlikely to win...

[Nelphine]

Yup. Without spells, one sprite beats 9 jackal riders. The only hope would be 'not to attack at all', which is kind of useless.

[Seravy]

I wonder if the production reduction was too much.
For Extreme difficulty, I'm winning using what was enough to beat Hard only half a year ago, and on top of that, it feels an easy win. I don't think having only 1 unit in cities for this many turns was a working tactic on Extreme ever before. No incoming stray nagas, no nothing, even the lizardmen wizard sent stacks of 1-2 units only.
Or is this the effect of fixing the strategic combat bugs? Did they earn too much gold and mana from lairs that way? I doubt - the AI isn't attacking unless they can win so it shouldn't allow them to attack more things...it does reduce the chance of losing the battle a lot though.
I suppose there was a large map distance between me and my enemies, and they were busy fighting each other but still, idk. Might need to play another game to decide.

[Nelphine]

One of the effects of the strategic combat bug was that random lone ranged units - like sprites or javelineers - would consistently think they had fairly high strategic combat value, and go attack weakly garrisoned cities.

The other thing is that if you're actively at war with the AI, they rarely have random units that can hit you from behind. They're too busy on the main action continent. So the earlier you go to war, the less likely you are to be attacked from a random direction.

And, if you can get oracles (or natures eyes) in enough cities, you can see incoming far enough away to combine garrisons. But since your garrison's are tiny, the incoming 'attscks' are tiny too.

We may have to look at stack creation again. (Yes I'm aware that's a nightmare, and you've done a tremendous, literally unbelievable amount of work just to get it where it is. But without peacetime build up, the AI is still extremely hampered in its ability to threaten you.)

[Nelphine]

The other thing I'd like to see is certain strategies by difficulty. If the AI actually does certain things on harder difficulty levels, instead of just getting more things faster, that might help too.

This could actually fit directly into my spell priority project, if its something you're willing to consider. (Although I'd want a similar thing in combat too.)

[Seravy]

There already are certain things the AI does not do on certain difficulty levels, so we can have more of that.
Overland stack creation is certainly not the best but I have no better idea.

[Seravy]

The following production numbers will be used for the next release :
75/110/135/160/185

[zitro1987]

The following production numbers will be used for the next release :
75/110/135/160/185

Not bad, but I'm curious why make the game so hard in 'normal', a difficulty of just 2 out of 5, since various statistics don't even have matched %s (overland skill, power, now production)

[Nelphine]

To make up for stack creation. The AI literally needs more units floating around to be a threat at all (see my comments on impossible).

As an example of a 'problem', an impossible AI summoned 7 chimera into a hamlet; but left 3 other hamlets with nothing but swordsmen. The ai has no way of knowing which one of those 4 hamlets is important, so it randomly picks.

(Although I THINK spell of return picks a well defended city to come back to - at least in this case, it picked the hamlet with chimera)

Now, I couldn't beat the chimera, but it let me randomly wander in and take the other hamlets. But more, if the AI had attacked with those chimera, it could have taken out, probably half a dozen cities before I could have stopped them. But the AI has no way of knowing that. It only knows that the city it summoned the chimera into still needed a garrison, and even that it only knows after it summons the chimera.

[Nelphine]

Just got a message from an AI.

'Dispel your Evil Omens or I shall break our Alliance.If you continue to maintain your spell of Evil Omens, I shall be forced to break our Alliance.'

I have both Evil Omens and Eternal Night in play - maybe both of them are triggering the message, so it's being displayed twice, but Evil Omens is worse so it's getting mentioned in both cases?