How do you fight fliers with golems? What are your opponents that they don't have enough ranged to just shoot the golems, or fliers that the golems just can't hurt?
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Test games played
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Quote:How do you fight fliers with golems? What are your opponents that they don't have enough ranged to just shoot the golems, or fliers that the golems just can't hurt? They have plenty of ranged. Golems are immune to that if it's magical. Missile can hurt but bows don't do much against 12-14 shields especially from a long range. I'm the only Dwarf so no cannons to fight, closest to it was 3 summoned Catapults, but the Arcanus wizard is doing that and they can't enter the plane except through planar travel settlers. The golem was able to beat those anyway tho it took quite a few heals. Fliers, I put the golem next to the flier, before the enemy army drops too low. I avoid fighting stuff like halberdiers until all fliers are dead. If the enemy army is all fliers, I use Fairy Dust on the leftovers, or retreat and attack again next turn, hoping they produce 1-2 more units so they will be attacking. I had to fight draconian units and had no problem with it, it was somewhat annoying but nothing more. Also, I have 2 Nature books though I haven't found Web so that plan failed. I should have picked it directly instead of sprites, which helped me almost nothing this game (well they did get me a pop 4 dwarf neutral and maybe 300 gold? That's all. Not worth the pick.) Anyway, I thought I'm doing well. Wtf is going on in Arcanus? I thought green is the dominant wizard there but...I met blue. I make 221 power a turn so blue is making like 800. Oh and this isn't Lunatic or anything like that, it's Expert. And green has Alchemy, Omnisicient, Conjurer with Nature, Sorcery and 1 Life book so he has everything to be the strongest. Blue has nothing interesting, all Life+Sorcery with Charismatic and 1 Nature book. I control 18 cities, roughly 70% of Myrror. There are 3 smaller "continents" more like islands left, each with ~2 cities, and the Purple capital which is full of Shadow Demons - I don't have a good counter to that yet. If I had to take a guess blue might be playing Klackons which can get quite ridiculous with early stream of life. But that much power from Klackon cities? That doesn't seem to be right.
October 21st, 2017, 14:58
(This post was last modified: October 21st, 2017, 14:59 by Nelphine.)
Ah I forgot AI wasn't taught how to kill golems. OK, I suppose using a unit that the AI completely doesn't understand makes humans (who are aware of that fact) easily able to use dwarves. That doesn't make dwarves balanced, that makes golems (and magic immunity, which we already acknowledge) abusive, although golens are probably not a lunatic level strategy. I'd much rather see the race balanced as if the AI knew how to counter golems, because otherwise the AI who plays dwarves will always be a joke.
If I had to guess, blue is lizardman? Probably. And they have (on expert you say?) 8-12 nodes. High elf may be more likely - or even halflings. Uranus' blessing + aether binding + life city buffs, sounds like my own games. Life is a ridiculous monster for economy in 'late game' (any time after stream of life). Alchemy doesn't do much for AI due to cheating bonuses - they don't actually have to worry about running out of mama/gold, so conversion didn't help them much except during an expensive war. Conjurer does very little to contribute to graph power. Charismatic and similar books means blue and green probably never went to war, allowing both to just grow like crazy. Actually, going back to guessing lizardman. The extra HP skyrockets the army graph, and intercontinental improvements mean they get nodes faster. 
Found a new bug. AI used combat Flight on units that already had overland Flight on them....or not. Replayed the battle and the units did not have Flight at the beginning, they gained it from the buff. But I certainly had a unit not lose Flight when I dispelled it, and another where "Flight has been dispelled" showed up twice. So something is wrong, even if not that.
...meh, can't reproduce it anymore. Happened one more time and not since then. I found no bugs in dispelling either. My only remaining guess is somehow two units stepped on the same tile so it actually dispelled the spell twice because it hit two units. (which is still a bug but not in dispelling...) Also, banished Yellow. With 3 Golems despite all 9 units in her capital flying on the first attack. I dispelled Flight from the last unit and the rest were not afraid to attack.
Yeah problem there is that the AI can't be taught how strong the units are so the fliers attack when they have no need to attack. But as golems are a super specific case, either its not worth it, or there are still multiple cases around it. But my guess is that since we didn't change anything for sky drakes specifically, we probably don't want/need to change for golems either.
The AI kinda knows how to fight against it (well, not the flying part but I could have had web anyway), but didn't get any of those spells.
There are 3 ways to fight Magic Immunity : 1. Crack's Call - my opponents weren't Nature. 2. Buffing own units - My opponents weren't Life or Chaos (and honestly chaos buffs would not be enough to stop a golem) 3. Summon something stronger - Earth Elemental, Air Elemental and Paladins are not early enough, Phantoms can be protected against by True Sight (but neither wizard actually had Phantom Beast, yellow didn't get that far in research and purple didn't have the spell) So aside from Life and Nature there is nothing the AI can do.
October 22nd, 2017, 07:58
(This post was last modified: October 22nd, 2017, 08:00 by Nelphine.)
Ha. Elite Flame blade halberdiers would wreck the golem. Especially draconians. Even veteran orcs can work before you say that requires life.
But I'm talking things like, surround the golem with 8 flying units, then do nothing. Prevent it from attacking or damaging the city, none of their units gets lost. The problem here is that strategic combat ratings completely mess things up for multifigure fliers against single unit adamantium life buffed units. They continue to attack thinking their army is strong enough, until few enough survive that you can web them all. And since this is strategic combat based, I don't think there's much you can do about it. Magic immunity you can't do much about, but normally, it requires deep sorcery investment to get magic immunity on a human unit (and only on human units does it matter). In this case, you can get it from a city (which is cool), but that unit has the specific drawback of not flying; and the AI doesn't know how to deal with that. Because of magic immunity, the human can use it for attacks that are completely nonsensical to the AI, because the AI doesn't understand magic immunity; and once those attacks are made, the AI doesn't know how to deal with it, and will allow itself to get in to a position where the human golem wins purely because of bad tactical decisions on the AI part. Not saying this shouldn't be in the game; not even saying you should try to fix this. But this is something only the human can do, and dwarves also need to be balanced around what the AI can do - and balancing them around what the AI can do will ensure that the human can do things other than just build golems. So all I'm saying is that when talking about dwarf balance, ignore what the human can do with the golem (unless you really want to try to fix that problem; then you could include it in the discussion). Quote:until few enough survive that you can web them all. Well, actually, if I had web, I could cast it about 6 times each battle so...I could wipe out entire flying armies. Quote: but that unit has the specific drawback of not flying Definitely but unless the human plays Life/Death and no other realms, they will have one of the three spells that can work around that. So let's not assume the AI can count on that to happen. Healing + high armor unit = win. Golems just happen to be especially good at this thing because they don't need the extra 2-3 heals to negate spell damage and can safely ignore fortress lightning. In case of other units, you probably need to attack using 2-3 so one absorbs spell damage while the other(s) kill the enemies, or you need to have a significant advantage in casting skill. So golems are clearly better at it but it's not a "quality" change (aside from the fortress lightning part). Also, the AI misjudging their flying army strength against a single high armor unit is not specific to this either, and can be taken advantage of, even if no golems are involved. Armor is simply not an AI friendly game mechanics as we already know from strategic combat issues.
October 22nd, 2017, 08:45
(This post was last modified: October 22nd, 2017, 08:46 by Nelphine.)
Sure (although normally with other units, if the AI misjudges flier army strength, their combat spells make up for it, so they win anyway). But that's my point. Don't balance dwarves around what the human can do with golems.
More importantly, this is a HUMAN test, a human is playing the game testing how well the race works for human players. For AI tests, the AI should be playing them, but running enough self-playing games will be a long term project.
Purely speculation based on my previous games but I think it's a very hit or miss race for the AI. If they play the right books, on the right map, it can be formidable. If not, it's one of the easiest Myrran race to beat due to its slowness. Lack of magic is probably the main problem - the AI isn't a threat without powerful magic, every kind of normal unit is easy to beat if you know how to, no matter which race. |