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Omg Good Moon. I've been summoning arch angels, but I'm now going to buff every slinger I own with holy weapon and lionheart. In about 2 rounds. 25 mana to cast both buffs? this is ridiculous. I can buff 2 full STACKS per turn.
July 15th, 2018, 08:35
(This post was last modified: July 15th, 2018, 08:37 by Seravy.)
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Meanwhile my Gnoll game is done, and I actually got my 3rd or 4th best score out of it. Won before 1420 which is kinda rare nowadays. Early game was great (all enemies fighting each other, no contact with others for a long time, large unclaimed territory, aura of majesty, aether binding, 4 sorcery nodes albeit 3 had air elementals, I could kill them with phantom warriors anyway) but gnolls were pretty useful as well - jackal riders were quite unstoppable when I attacked the first wizard, getting me another continent. Past that normal units stopped mattering, but even then they did ok against adamantium buffed trolls from the other side.
When I have time, I'll upload the recorded videos. (unfortunately I encountered a lot of bugs as I was testing new features, but nothing gamebreaking.)
Next game I either play Life/Nature gnolls, or something with heavy chaos artificer hero strategy to try how good Pandora's Box is if you build around using it. Neither of these are ideal for getting a feel of the new early economy system though...
July 15th, 2018, 11:52
(This post was last modified: July 15th, 2018, 11:56 by Seravy.)
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Getting random freezes. So far I narrowed it down that it happens during the AI's movement.
None of the recent changes should have been affecting that, the only one I can think of is the AI plane shifting procedure - but that has been working during the last game (well, mostly, at least it didn't crash).
...it is the planer movement, disabling it fixes the problem.
July 15th, 2018, 11:56
(This post was last modified: July 15th, 2018, 11:59 by Nelphine.)
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Fairy Ring, on a life primary game, is very strong (with 4 wizards still surviving, although at least 1 doesn't have any spells that can trigger it). Angels and Archangels aplenty! (The only other units I have that are uncommon or better are unicorns and water elementals)
Actually speaking of Fairy Ring, what spell casting skill does it look at? Total (including heroes)? Instant (including spellweaver)? Or combat? (If I had a vote, it would be combat)
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Instant, including spellweaver.
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Okay, this is weird. If I remove the call to the AI plane shift procedure there is no crash. If I keep it, but make the procedure do nothing, and even return instantly, it's still crashing. So the problem must be somewhere else, I have to guess the stack is already corrupted before reaching there...
(it's a near call. So it can't be a relocation problem either.)
...oh I was removing the call wrong. I didn't remove the addition of a parameter. So putting extra data into the stack that isn't needed fixes the problem so yes the stack is the problem...now let's see what was changed in the AI turn, the order of tax and production decisions, so there must be something wrong there.
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Yeah swapping back the order of changing production and setting tax/food fixed the crash.
I don't see any direct reason for that though. Setting food and taxes before or after production should make no difference. I suspect there are risky far calls in one of those two procedures... made both before I knew how to determine which are safe.
Which means the AI has no way of knowing to set no farmers in their housing cities. I guess we have to bet on "they have low enough units and maintenance to usually have no farmers in those"? Or better, I should make the farmer setting lower priority if pop is low.
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btw two more notes I made during the previous game...
"efreet might be too strong" - the problem isn't really their raw power but their initiative - a stack of efreet casting warp lightnings on the enemy army pretty much destroys any change of the defending army to deal damage to them past the first turn (and then you can cast a Flame Strike on top of that if you want). Unless the other wizard has Apocalypse specifically, you can expect to kill almost anything with no or minimal losses. They're immune to Flame Strike and unless there is a resistance modifier, also to Massacre and Holy Word, while single target spells won't help as the battle ends really quickly.
"AI Jihad problems" - I have seen the AI hurt itself by this a few times already but haven't really seen any cases where it helped them. I even saw them attack with a single (mithril beastmen) halberdier which was dead turn 1 to warp lighting. It helped them a little with getting through my tower blockade but at the price of being even less effective at damaging my doomstack or slowing down my invasion to their plane... maybe it's not a good idea to allow the AI to have jihad outside of Spell of Mastery afterall? Oh and jihad also causes the AI's doomstack to abandon conquered cities and leave them empty... to make it worse, the low garrisons will happen even if the human isn't the target of the jihad.
July 15th, 2018, 16:09
(This post was last modified: July 15th, 2018, 16:10 by Nelphine.)
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given how often you get 4+ efreet defending a node, and i've never found that particularly dangerous, I'm really not sure efreet can be considered overpowered.
I mean, look at my holy weapon/lionheart slingers; they one shot great drakes, which warp lightning doesn't. I'd be much more concerned with things like that, than with efreet.
Given chaos' relative weak summons overall, I don't think there's an issue with efreet.
Jihad, I don't think I've ever actually seen a Jihad outside of SoM. Certainly haven't seen one where the consequences were noticeable. Easy solution is probably to set AI who use Jihad to raze conquered cities 100% of the time.
As for attacking with that lone halberdier; given that this is actually a tactic that humans USE, the fact that the AI is using it, albeit badly, doesn't mean it's a waste. In fact, if they AI could attack with all of their halberdiers individually, you'd never mana left ever again.
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Quote:given how often you get 4+ efreet defending a node, and i've never found that particularly dangerous, I'm really not sure efreet can be considered overpowered.
I don't see how that has any relevance to efreet vs typical AI garrisons whatsoever.
Bring 6 efreet, kill the 6 most vulnerable units with warp lightings turn 1, kill the rest with normal attacks and your spells next turn. Enemy has 2 turns to try to damage your high resistance, fire immune efreets.
(yes, if they had something like magicians, they also had a turn to shoot at you but that's it. And magicians are extra weak to chaos magic.)
Aside from this and a hero doomstack, pretty much everything else would take more turns to win the battle.
But yea, I'm probably worried over nothing.
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