Current Impossible Strategy

[Arnuz]

Don't be offended but my feeling is that assuring yourself against attack through strategic strength is borderline abuse...

If we raise the distance factor that'd be even easier, you could use even less bersies to reach the same level of assurance for cities farther away from the action.

Life feels OP due to that, imho - it simply has the best synergy with that strategy, but I could be wrong.

[Nelphine]

That's why I'm trying to get bezerkers set to 4 figures (and melee and thrown increased by 2 to compensate, hp increased by 1 or 2, as seravy feels appropriate) and thrown/first strike/breath to be worth 60-75% of a melee attack in strategic combat instead of 100% (for breath/thrown) and 50% (for first strike). The units that have first strike also all have very high movement - so Seravy's concern that first strike seems overpowered at 100%.. I disagree with, but I also don't think any of those things are as good as a melee attack ever. First strike units are stronger than breath/thrown units though, and strategic simply doesn't reflect that (heck, except in very rare cases, breath/thrown are often so weak that realistically they should be even less; thrown 3 simply doesn't get through enough armor on ANY enemy to be worth as much as 3 extra points of melee attack).


Life for me is easy mode but not really overpowered. Life lets you do all the things the easiest (immune to many of the most annoying spells, great economy so that you can just brute force everything whether spells or production). Why not overpowered? Because the things life does don't WIN for you; they let you make mistakes and still stay ahead/equal with the AI. But you need something else to actually win with.

Bezerkers are very troublesome. Yes, I do avoid attacks do to them but honestly, its the diplomacy factor that I care about more. I regularly have cities with nothing but a spearmen or two in them, and they don't get attacked - obviously not because of the strategic strength of the garrison, but because the AI doesn't dare risk declaring war on me.

And that's not something we want to change without a lot of thought (Seravy has created a fantastic diplomacy system that both makes as much sense as possible, while working toward the goal of challenging the human player), and it's something you can do with lizardman and probably dwarves - it requires a bit more work than bezerkers, but it's doable. I used to do it with Beastmen too, but I'm not sure I still could with all the changes (notably unrest).

But on the flip side, what I ACTUALLY love bezerkers for, is conquering lairs and nodes. Yes, your first doomstack has to avoid strong ranged nodes like water elementals or shadow demons; but sky drakes? great drakes? hydras? behemoths? death knights? eat them up for breakfast. And that has nothing to do with strategic strength; I used to do it with halberdiers but you REQUIRE loads of buffs to do it with halberdiers. Bezerkers can do it without anything except Elite experience - buffs simply allow them to do it without taking losses. And once you have a bunch running around and can replace losses (Or you have a megabuff stack), even ranged units aren't a problem - many colossus? 9 megabuff bezerkers!

And why do I love that?

Because the MOST enjoyable thing in this game for me is still dungeon crawling, and getting retorts/spell books as treasure. Nothing else compares. I know WHY we reduced that, and I totally agree.. but, I still want those extra picks. It's also why I prefer long games - its why I play as if I was a peaceful perfectionist. Because I don't care about the enemy wizards. I want to end the game with 22 picks worth of spellbooks and retorts, which means I have to beat the AI to it (and the AI has to be strong enough that I don't accidentally wipe them out while going after lairs/nodes, so I can't just play normal.)

If we magically fixed strategic strength over night, I would simply reduce the difficulty until I found the same balance of maximized dungeon crawling, with AI that make the game dangerous while I do my dungeon crawling. If we change bezerkers I MIGHT have to change my gameplay, but unless Seravy completely changes them, I probably won't. They're too good at dungeon crawling.

Note that I don't base my balance and discussion ideas around my preference for what makes the game awesome. I'm aware the game is still meant to be played to win, so I discuss strategy and balance with that in mind. It just isn't what actually makes the game awesome for me (even if it makes the theorycrafting and discussion awesome.)


TLDR: Not remotely offended. I know my strategy is effective (albeit very difficult to master), and in some ways its for the wrong reasons. But really, at lunatic, is it any worse than kiting around hydras/chaos spawn for ghouls? Or draconic archers? Etc? (Actually I don't even know if there is an etc. Are there any other strategies that work at lunatic right now?) These are things the AI simply can't be taught, and has no way to counter. They're also things that are very difficult to remove from the game without losing a lot of other very good things. As much as we talk about reducing cheating and then nerfing the lunatic strategies... Seravy has done a LOT of work in balancing this game. I've put in a lot of time suggesting balance issues, and many others have made great suggestions. All the things that remain, remain because they are very very difficult to remove without giving up very important gameplay. If they weren't, they'd be fixed already. That's not to say we can't fix these things; just that it's not remotely a simple task.

[Seravy]

Nah distance is only part of priority, not the check of being able to attack or not.

[Nelphine]

V 5 atempy at this. Just got declared war on by Horus (life sorcery), who stacked up 62 nagas around the target city before declaring war.

I'm against life/sorcery, death/sorcery, death/chaos, death/sorcery. Ughhh. Who do I kill first? Who do I permit to live till the end?

Horus has Life Force and Aether Binding both cast (and is the Myrran opponent); and it's only 1408.
Raven (death/sorcery) is barbarian so his army strength is as high as mine.
Sharee and Lo Pan are both peaceful, so I basically have to let them expand like crazy because I can't afford to declare war on more than 2 at a time.

[Nelphine]

Since raven was barbarian to start, my guess is he was the strongest AI for basically the whole game (army strength wise). However, Sharee owns 3 very large barbaroan cities, that are within 10 tiles if Ravens capital. While its possible these were neutrals, and somehow Sharee got to them first, that's highly unlikely - which means Shared probably conquered them.

So, mental exercise of the day: anyone have any guesses how an AI managed to conquer a barbarian city? (And since it wasn't the fortress it seems unlikely that that Raven filled it with weak summons - and as death/sorcery it's not likely he would have weak summons anyway.)

[Seravy]

Stack of 9 Wraiths? Or she did that when they were still producing swordmen using ghouls? Another possibility is the weak summons - filled is unlikely but I think Berserkers have low garrison priority so the AI Most likely has some summons in the cities at least.

...yep, Berserker garrison priority is 12, equals barbarian Shamans so it's half this half that probably. But if berserkers are called for stackbuilding, it can be mostly Shaman.

[Nelphine]

Yeah this would have been in the era of common summons. So all the bezerkers leave to fight, and the shamans (worse than swordsmen for barbarian strategic strength) then lose the city. I'd up the priority of bezerkers. Against humans they're decent, against AI they're amazing. Don't need to increase it a lot, but they're better than war bears/hell hounds against humans. Elite ones are better than chimera. Not sure about anything else offhand.

[Seravy]

No, Berserkers are absolutely horrible against human players - possession, confusion, shatter, wraith form, cloak of fear just to name a few spells that wipe them out. Even Shaman are more of a threat.
Bears are 10, Sprites are 20, Hounds are 6. Skeletons 5, Ghouls 17. Nagas 6.

[Nelphine]

And bezerkers are12? Yeah that's not bad. I wish you could do percentages, instead of flat comparisons. So if its 13 vs 12 right now, then all the 12s just get replaced. But if it was more like the unit has a 10% chance of being replaced per difference, that would let us get some better mixes. So if it was a 17 vs 12 and there was a 12 already there, and a 17 was produced, it wouldn't automatically replace the 12.

Of course that would require redoing the entire priority system, so I don't expect it to be done. Especially since if the city is left long enough, it would have the same result anyway.
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So never mind that whole idea.

I'd like a 2 tier priority - priority if there are less than 4 units of that type in that stack, and a different priority if there are 4 or more units. However I'm not sure if 4 or 7 is a better cutoff.

Of course that requires twice the space PLUS retrieving the stack its in, so that's provably not remotely doable either. But I'll keep wishing.

[Seravy]

Huh...while a different priority is definitely impossible, I do see a way to make about 50-60 bytes of free space - that might be enough to at least count the number of identical units in the stack.
So we could have a flat -X priority for each duplicate unit kind of thing perhaps?

But in many cases duplicates are the better choice so that might backfire. 9 Sprites are better than 5 sprites and 4 war bears against most enemies...and where sprites fail, 9 bears would be better. But some of both is the worst case option as it allows a generic mixed army and strategy to beat it instead of having to specialize to beat one or the other. (which also happens to be the less interesting situation for gameplay as well. Specialized stacks are more fun because they do have strengths and weaknesses)

Likewise we don't want to mix Colossus with something like Behemoth or Hydra - 9 Colossus outperform a mixed garrison.

Also, this is a fairly important segment that might need the space for more important things - power income, gold income etc are calculated here as well. So I think it's better to leave it alone - if we absolutely want the AI to mix two kinds of units, setting their priority to the same amount works.

btw I specifically tested the game and let it run 3 AI only games to turn 100 to see if early fortress spikes (nagas vs sprites mainly) happen or not but none happened in those 3 games so I think AI having sprites in garrison without bears is fine.

Berserkers, idk, half berserker half shaman...might be worse then all berserkers or all shaman actually. But honestly, all 3 options suck and barbarians don't get a better garrison unit. Barbarian AI is kinda easymode, always felt like that, even their attacks are a joke. Anything kills them...9 berserkers? Fire Wall+Fire Elemental and they're all dead. Terror, same.

Also AI garrisons are kinda always easy - 90% tends to be magicians and they are easy to counter (Fire Storm, Elemental Armor, Magic Immunity, Flame Strike/Wave of Despair) - and anything else is even easier because they don't shoot so a ranged army kills them all. Not much aside from very rare summoned creatures is hard to overcome.