Nomads + Life, non-Artificer hero strategy

[Catwalk]

I'm afraid I didn't save this game on turn 1. I see this occurring pretty often though, I'll make sure to keep a turn 1 save of all future games.

I've played until 1407 now, and this strategy seems very strong. I haven't played it particularly well, but enemy wizards just roll over and die when I come marching with my band of merry heroes.

[Seravy]

I'm afraid I didn't save this game on turn 1. I see this occurring pretty often though, I'll make sure to keep a turn 1 save of all future games.

I've played until 1407 now, and this strategy seems very strong. I haven't played it particularly well, but enemy wizards just roll over and die when I come marching with my band of merry heroes.

Do you have the backup saves option enabled? If yes, then you do have a save for every turn - unless you played another game meanwhile. It should be on as default.

[Domon]

I'm afraid I didn't save this game on turn 1. I see this occurring pretty often though, I'll make sure to keep a turn 1 save of all future games.

I've played until 1407 now, and this strategy seems very strong. I haven't played it particularly well, but enemy wizards just roll over and die when I come marching with my band of merry heroes.

Do you have the backup saves option enabled? If yes, then you do have a save for every turn - unless you played another game meanwhile. It should be on as default.

this feature sure needs to be better advertised?

[Seravy]

I have a scary thought. I think I know where the settler bug comes from and why I couldn't reproduce it in 20 games.

The Surveyor does not include tiles the player hasn't scouted yet into the information it displays, right?
The AI uses the data reported by the surveyor to select where to go.
This means the tiles next to the human player are literally the best available tiles, as everything else reports a big fat zero : it's not yet visible for the human player. So the settler goes there. And why was I unable to reproduce it? I revealed the map to see what happens and as soon as I did, the source of the bug vanished.

If this is true, the AI is literally only able to send settlers to the human player's scouted territory (or randomly if that's unreachable as all spots report zero resources).

...not sure how to fix this, either the surveyor needs to report the data from unseen tiles, or somehow it needs to know if it's the human player's turn or not.

[Nelphine]

No, too many cities made by AI on their own continents, in at least decent spots, before the human explores there. Can't imagine that would happen, say on the other plane, if that was the bug.

Any way to convert the surveyor to a tile value, that the surveyor (and AI settlers) call/ that would rule out the bug.

[Nelphine]

However if unexplored gives a modifier instead if a flat zero, when the square is unexplored, that could account for it. That way unexplored tiles would still have different values to compare against, and if the modifier is big enough to ensure unexplored tiles get set to 0, that could account for the bug.

[Seravy]

Bug confirmed. When playing a map without revealing it, the first settler was sent to the place I sent my first spearmen to. When the same map was revealed, it built next to the mithril closer to its starting location.
Confirmed on the code side as well, the Surveyor has no checks for human player or not, it automatically skips all unscouted tiles. It even returns the number of such tiles as a parameter, but this parameter is not used for anything afterwards - which is great, we can use it to indicate human or AI for the surveyor instead.

PS : The AI can build on all zero value spots, it'll merely result in always building on the closest unblocked tile. (or not even that? 0 divided by any distance is still 0...so maybe whichever tile it finds first.)

[Catwalk]

So basically the AI has been expanding more or less at random up until now? Interesting! I've found the turn 1 save if you need it.

[Seravy]

So basically the AI has been expanding more or less at random up until now? Interesting! I've found the turn 1 save if you need it.

Randomly if the settler could not reach the human player's territory, and specifically there if they could.
I don't need the save anymore, I was able to reproduce and fix the bug. I hope I'll be able to release the fixed version in a few days (I want to finish my current game and fix everything else I have noticed to be wrong)
...unfortunately the fix isn't compatible with the 1.51 vanilla game patch, as previous AI settler improvements weren't either.

[Nelphine]

Hurray still finding giant game changing bugs!!