Test games played

[Nelphine]

I've never seen AI get rare or very rare before me. Uncommon yes. I wonder if that skews our bias.

I'd also be interested in a modifier based on number of units in the AI stack, but we don't know that either.

I agree that turns maybe backfiring is true. I'm OK with skipping that.

However, I don't agree with your point about splitting up a doomstack. That can already happen. This might make it happen a unit or two earlier, but generally that shouldn't matter. In most cases it will still be 7+ units. In case of great drakes, if 5 drakes are effective, 4 will be too. That positioning to avoid losses isn't due to just positioning. Its also due to spells. On normal and advanced we WANT to reward the player for clever positioning and spell use. If they can defeat 4 great drakes with 5 without losses, they will feel GOOD and rightly so. By expert, its 100% again.

Master and lunatic, the AI should have the casting skill advantage. If the AI can use 4 great drakes, and cast 12 doom bolts, and the human has 5 great drakes and can only use 10 healing spells, the AI is going to win. And even if the AI loses, those 12 doombolts say that the human gets hurt in the process. (And realistically, at lunatic, if the human can win with 5 great drakes against 4 great drakes, without losses, then the AI getting 1 more 1 great drake won't change anything. And at master, we're only talking a 10% difference - so they won't attack those 5 great drakes with their own 4.)

But the real problem is that the AI can't do attrition against human. It doesn't natter if we did 30% the AI doesn't know how to take advantage of it. It needs to throw 9 halberdiers at the human doomstack, 7 times in the same turn, just so it can throw endless cracks call against the chosen one hero. And no amount of flat reduction will let it do that.


However, I do think reducing the percentage on easy/normal/advanced, just to let the player get to experience and win more defensive battles, is still a very worthwhile thing.

[Tlavoc]

I thought the issue was stacks the AI couldn't combat, such as megabuffed berzerkers. Even 9 great drakes can't match up to that rating and the AI isn't going to be stacking flame blade, iron skin, adamantium, etc. So if it's to address other aspects it would have to be buffs/leveling/etc., right?

[Nelphine]

That's a super extreme version. Honestly, nothing can fight megabuffed bezerkers without dispelling wave anyway, so not attscking a stack of 9 of them is just smart for the AI.

The problem is things like not attacking 5 elite bezerkers with no buffs other than chaos channels.
Or arnuz hero stack because it happens to be stronger than what the ai has.

Definitely not trying to fix the super stacks.

The only major place where AI needs to be able to attack really crazy things is towers and even then, if the human can megabuff 30+ units, or summon 30+ very rares before the AI goes to war, the human is probably going to win anyway. That requires a ton of skill and mana, and to avoid war before you're ready, you already need a huge army. Admittedly it make the last AI less of a threat, but that's the purpose of the new surrender function.

[Seravy]

Started a game with Dwarves. It's too early for a conclusion, only played 10 minutes but so far I got such a crazy amount of gold, I was able to spend all my power on skill and research while paying for mana costs using gold and Alchemy. No other race can do this. I'm not playing on Rich and only have 1 gold ore and haven't even bothered to build the marketplace yet.

...I overextended a little and 5 Nagas attacked me when I was not ready for it. However, Dwarven Swordsmen have so high resistance, they are literally immune to poison so my 2 starting swordsmen and 1 cannon was enough to oblierate the 5 Nagas without losing a unit...

...AI attacked one of my adamantium cities. It was next to a Sorcery node so I lost it. Note to self : Never build next to a Sorcery node - with these fast Nagas it's very hard to defend a city there.

Both Myrran wizards are Maniacal, one is pure Sorcery the other Sorcery+Death. Eww...

[Nelphine]

'no other race can do this' - what? Any race/build that deals with unrest well does that. You do have to 'bother' with the marketplace, but that's my standard (as per my conversation a long time ago where I literally asked if anyone ever doesn't play on max taxes for almost the whole game). Admittedly I've only done it with life, death, chaos, halflings, barbarians, dwarves, beastmen on any kind of consistent basis, but that's certainly not 'no other race'.

[Seravy]

Any race/build that deals with unrest well does that.

I don't get how you're going to get 30+ gold per turn from your pop 4 starting city or pop 1 hamlet using taxes, unrest or not. And that is the only thing you have in the early game. A Dwarf city with a Miner's Guild gets 24 gold a turn from a single gold mine.  And on Myrror, you will have some gold mines most of the time, even if not playing Rich. (ok, if you play Poor you might not but only a masochist plays Dwarves on poor.)

Simply put, every gold ore you find near your starting location is as good as an early node, except it has no defenders so you get it for free, and gold (or silver/gems) is way more common than easy nodes. Especially on Myrror. It's like playing the Sprites strategy except you don't need Nature books or mana or picks to use it - it's there for free.

(and if you play on Rich, you can expect double-triple the amount from it)

[Seravy]

Anyway, currently I'm not doing so well - having to deal with constant attacks from two maniacal sorcery wizards is not making things easy, and I lost two cities which were both razed. However I can now produce adamant golems and a single one of those can wipe out entire 9 stacks or enemy cities, so I expect to turn things around quickly form now on.
I'm making 279 gold a turn from 6 medium sized cities.

[Nelphine]

Choose the Alchemy retort instead of Myrran (1 less pick, and now you only need 15 gold per turn to have the same 'mana' income as the dwarf). You get 13 gold from marketplace + initial 4 population. And now every marketplace in each new city is as good as a dwarf city with gold ore. Except, you can play on poor, or fair, or rich, and it still works - and even on rich, many cities won't have a gold ore. And you aren't stuck with the extremely low dwarf population growth, so you actually end up with more cities than the dwarf.

What year is your 6 dwarf city with 250 income? I would expect a 7 barbarian city (the worst economic race) in 1406 to have about 100 income, which with Alchemy retort is almost as good as your dwarves. (And yes, the dwarf is still better. It should be. But it certainly isn't supremely better.)

And no, this isn't remotely comparable to sprites. Sprites were getting literally thousands of gold/mana from lairs/nodes, and doing it before 1405.

[Seravy]

Well, I picked alchemy AND myrran this game (no other retorts though). However conversion assumes I want to spend it as mana which is not necessarily true. It was this game because I found no nodes at all and no crystals. Speaking of crystals, a Crysx is 30 power by itself if it's a Dwarf city, no conversion needed. Quork is 15. Both are worth as much as a node or two, no conversion needed. It's not just gold I just forgot about crystals because I haven't found any this time.

(maybe I should have picked Dry land. Deserts have crystals and gems and no useless ores like nightshade or wild game which Dwarves cannot double. )

Year was 1409 but I lost two major cities to enemy attacks so I was way behind normal in population - had to rebuild both from outpost up. Without that, and not messing up my attack on the enemy hamlet on two gold ores, I could have had that income in 1405-6. Seriously, I was completely at fault there, didn't take the thing out while it had one unit as I'm not used to fighting troll hamlets. By the time I attacked, they were too numerous to kill with my sprite army so I had to wait like 4 extra years before I could raze it and build mine. (But the 64 gold/turn was well worth it even then.)

By the way I have just taken out the second best city of my main enemy (who controls like 70% of Myrror) using a single Golem. They are that good. I expect to conquer all of the plane by the time I produce 15 of them, so far I got 3 major cities by 1 golem each and killed at least a dozen large stacks of units the same way.

I think I haven't mentioned it yet, I'm playing 7 Life, 2 Nature, Alchemy, Myrran.

[Seravy]

After 3 years of Golem goodness, this is how things look :
   
Purple and Yellow are the two wizards on my plane.
And this much growth despite me razing 2 of the conquered cities to build something better in their places. (I did keep the other 5)
All continents I discovered are mostly cleared of enemy units except purple's home continent, too.
Again, there is no other race that can expect to field 1 unit armies and win battles with them without buffs (yes I play life but I'm not buffing the golems (except in battle) - they are immune to all other spells so they get hit by Dispel Magic quite a lot if I do so all I put on them is Water Walking.