While I personally don't find Fair to be too difficult, I absolutely get where you're coming from. The AI is quite aggressive about expansion, and often intentionally picks spells that will let it move settlers above water. Worse, as you said, the AI often knows which spots are best since it doesn't have to do any scouting unlike the player, which often means that it just gets to grab amazing spots for free. And what's even worse is when they will keep plopping settler after settler on your main continent(s) and get mad when you decide to burn their crappy hamlet down. Further, when the AI is allowed to develop, it will happily send wave after wave of mediocre troops, which is often enough to crush even good uncommon summon armies or armorer's guild units. I've found that it basically forces you into spamming lots of halberdiers, a cheap yet effective summon, or deploy a strong early game hero, and that makes the combat and strategy a lot less interesting. I get that the AI is incapable of strategizing like a human player, and so needs advantage in numbers, but I think the current numbers and behavior are far from ideal, atleast on Fair.
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Things I Miss from Master of Magic
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February 24th, 2021, 17:30
(This post was last modified: February 24th, 2021, 17:32 by prokolyo.)
I think COM is pretty perfect. Now that I think, I don't miss anything from MOM really. Back in the day I used to start playing MOM and quickly switch to MOO2 because MOM was no challenge at all, even on impossible and even with additional self imposed handicaps. Now when I start a COM game, I just don't want to stop
 It's true, it's harder, I watched lots of YT videos until I learned some tricks, it's even stressful sometimes, but it's so much more rewarding Funny enough, I tried COM back in the day but hated the new city images and dropped it just because of that So maybe that's one thing I'm missing from MOM. But not really anymore.
The new city images are actually what was supposed to be in the original, but didn't show up due to a bug. It's the city images for cities without walls. Build a wall and you get back the old ones.
Maybe it might be a good idea to consider an AI restriction for settler spots? In particular, something like "location must be no further than 8+(turns /4) tiles from the fortress"? While the AI does not scout, that could limit how far they can push their settlers. Or maybe use "10 tiles from nearest AI settlement" instead? ...no, I have a better idea. What if locations outside that range were considered a "generic" location of 12 max pop, 25% production bonus and no other features? The main reason why the AI sends their settlers out far away is because the further location is that much better on resources compared to the closer one that it can outweight the distance penalty. Of course, even this would only be a minor setback, the next settler would need to take the further location anyway as the nearby one is already in use so it really only slows them a little, but it does make it more realistic? In CoM II we can even mark the tiles the AI have seen and use that as real scouting information, but the problem with that approach is, the AI does not scout intentionally. Either their troops randomly end up on those tiles while pursuing a target, or not.
Having the AI settle closer sites might actually benefit them. An average site 6 turns away might be better in the long run than a better site 24 turns away. It also allows the capitol to send more garrison troops sooner. The AI seems to target special mineral sites, but I don't think it exploits them properly. The AI might settle an adamantium/coal site and fill it with summons, rather than pump out troops for the empire. Marking sites past a limit as generic sounds like it will work.
(February 25th, 2021, 05:11)Seravy Wrote: The new city images are actually what was supposed to be in the original, but didn't show up due to a bug. It's the city images for cities without walls. Build a wall and you get back the old ones. omg )) this is funny, all this time that I hated on the graphics, and in fact that's how it was supposed to have been...
The only thing I miss is the D&D-style bovine Gorgons.
Diplomacy-wise I think the game would have benefited a lot from some sort of more pronounced border system like in SMAC - maybe even a "hard" border system like in Civ 3 and on where you can't enter another player's BFC period unless you've signed an agreement. Wizard Pacts are mostly just annoying in this game. Actually, a simpler/better solution might be to waive the border aspect of Wizard Pacts entirely - they're an agreement to not attack or cast hostile spells on one another, nothing more. Free access to each others' territory. To prevent the player from exploiting it, breaking a Wizard Pact would result in your units within the other players' borders getting booted back to your nearest city. It'd still be differentiated from Alliances because Wizard Pacts wouldn't require you to go to war against one another's enemies.
But you'd think alliances are supposed to be better than non aggression treaties, not worse.
Overall I do think Wizard Pacts are annoying and don't add much worthwhile to the game, especially since the goal of the game is to become the strongest wizard, which involves control of territory and thus inevitably wars at some point. If it was possible to diplomatically win games ala Master of Orion, it would have been more worthwhile imo. I think that wizard pacts would work better if they could acknowledge units within a certain distance of your cities or on your nodes and such as not breaking pacts. Or perhaps they could allow more non military units through. I feel Magic Spirits should not count as military units, nor should (small) shaman/priest stacks. (February 25th, 2021, 05:11)Seravy Wrote: Maybe it might be a good idea to consider an AI restriction for settler spots? In particular, something like "location must be no further than 8+(turns /4) tiles from the fortress"? While the AI does not scout, that could limit how far they can push their settlers. Or maybe use "10 tiles from nearest AI settlement" instead? Can you tie the AI's preference to it's personality traits? |
