AI

[Nelphine]

Right but strategic combat can't. There's several threads of mine regarding strategic combat, and basically its a giant space issue. It needs to be far more in depth, but there's no space to do so.

Unless you meant specifically for when the AI is considerimg the human as a target. In which case, they'd also need to consider the humans spell ability, and once again, overland decision making runs into space issues - can't make a different formula for facing the human than when facing AI.

[Arnuz]

Ah! I thought there was a spells phase in strategic combat? I guess I was mistaken. Never looked into it much.

[Nelphine]

Its just a general number based on number of books and combat casting skill. Actually spells is not taken into consideration.
However, even that limited spellcasting is not taken into account during overland decision making which is why I'm trying to change the required overland army strength to determine if a target is valid or not.

[Seravy]

I considered making the casting skill part of the decision but had to throw away that idea. Even if the AI has 500 skill against the human player's 60, it doesn't matter if all the AI units die in the first turn or even two. In fact, combats where all the skill is used up on both sides are probably the minority.
Also, 500 skill from a wizard that only knows Holy Word as a rare combat spell is entirely worthless so casting skill is far too unreliable and tells nothing about how much combat spells can help making up for army differences.

[Nelphine]

Interesting. I find in strategic combat, just watching AI mana pools, that often one side is so weak that they don't use up all their casting skill. But in tactical combat, I find that the AI regularly uses up their entire mama pool (not so much the human player, because we can judge when further spells are not needed and therefore conserve mana - but the AI can't, it always tries to cast a spell.)

The only time the AI doesn't use up all their mana is when they have a very low number of units, but the ai (usually) won't attack with very low numbers of units, and with the AI being smart about spell selection I find its not worth attacking enemy units that don't pose an immediate threat.

[Arnuz]

Well, I wouldn't make skill the only factor, but if it is possible I'd use it to weigh the decision. I'd also use the colour of owned books, if it's impossible to use the spells: a good pounding with fire bolts makes quite a lot of difference during a drawn out fight, like a many halberdiers Vs many halberdiers can be.

[Nelphine]

Yup, number of books (but the exact effect is based on realm - chaos is pure attack, and each other realm has varying amounts of attack and defense.) But it still has nothing to do with known spells. So even if the AI was chaos, without a single combat attack spell it would still get the same effect in strategic combat as an AI that was chaos and knew flame strike, lightning bolt, and mystic surge.

[Seravy]

The difference in the effect of magic between
-Normal combat where the AI doesn't know any good combat spells or the combat ends in too few turns (0 contribution from casting skill)
-Normal combat where the AI knows good spells and it lasts a good amount of turns (full contribution of casting skill but effects are extremely diverse)
-Strategic combat with overwhelming one side (partial contribution of casting skill, but effects entirely different than normal combat)
-Strategic combat with more even sides (full contribution of casting skill)

iis so large there is no way to have any sort of consistent formula based on anything without being able to actually simulate the whole combat to predict how it goes, which is not possible- if it was, we wouldn't need strategic combat to even exist.
(and this doesn't even consider the distance multiplier and availability of mana crystals plus the AI's willingness to spend any of it)

[Nelphine]

It's not exactly what you were looking for, but I just watched an AI use a single Naga to attack a different AI single guardian spirit. The spirit won. The first AI did it again, 2 more times, on the same turn.

What this shows is that the spirit AI had enough spellpower to win, despite the naga having significantly higher attack and defense than the spirit; which means the spirit AI should be able to attack the naga AI with significantly weaker stacks.

A guardian spirit is: 7 melee, +3 to hit, 6 armor, 10 hp:
Offense rating: 198. Defense rating: 400

A naga is: 4 melee, +1 to hit, 4 armor, 5 hp, poison, first strike:
Offense rating: 594. Defense rating: 480

[Seravy]

What books and casting skill do the two wizards have? Or even better, upload the save file for the turn before this.