Interesting note about my lunatic game vs Catwalk - with only a 4 year difference, I'm gaining almost 5 times the power that Catwalk is; and the AI is ahead of me. The variance on Lunatic AI can be extremely high.
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Current Impossible Strategy
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November 3rd, 2017, 07:36
(This post was last modified: November 3rd, 2017, 08:33 by Nelphine.)
May 1414. I now have 2 beastmen cities conquered from Jafar (so I have an archangel dedicated to moving beastman settlers to arcanus). I'm also up to 9 melded Myrran nodes, and he's down to 2. Every node/lair/tower has been cleared; no more very rares (so I'm missing consecration and call to arms, which is ideal, since both of those are useless this game.) And no more books. Stuck with 4 life, 1 sorcery.
I'm up to 2868 power production per turn, and about 600 additional research/skill. So my power production is about 5% higher than his with all the new nodes. I've managed to keep Aether Binding away; I have to disjunction it every 4-5 turns or so, but it means he doesn't disjunction my crusade/charm of life. He does have Survival Instinct though. However, that combination means my army strength is about 20% higher than his. I'm up to 523 overland casting skill; however, he can summon 3 sky drakes per turn plus 2-4 other assorted spells, and since I'm using spellweaver, his combat casting skill is higher than mine as well. I haven't seen any other very rare spells yet (he has sky drake and spell ward; but he should eventually get 2 more sorcery and 3 nature - maybe he did get stuck with great unsummoning/creature binding), but I've finally started researching SoM. Only 276 turns to go! I continue to lose archangels, but I also continue to kill more than I lose. He managed to attack 8 ultra elite bezerkers! Which means that doomstack had some HEFTY strategic strength. Buffs for the win! (He uses iron skin, focus magic, endurance, and invisibility extensively.) And my bezerkers got destroyed - I had no archangel there. Which is slightly scary, as none of my towers have archangels with the 9 bezerkers; I'm relying on him not being able to attack at all.. I haven't bothered with the hero route, as my bezerkers crush sky drakes like little flies. So I'm awaiting the time his fortress has lots of sky drakes (I think he's up to 5) instead of those scary storm giants. And with the very last rampaging monsters of the game (they came out of the last node I cleared), Jafar lost a hamlet that he hadn't yet been able to summon things to. This point I think is very crucial - the AI has so many cities, that it simply can't randomly summon good things everywhere because it doesn't know what cities are missing good things, which is exactly what Seravy has been trying to tell us for a while.
November 3rd, 2017, 10:43
(This post was last modified: November 3rd, 2017, 15:55 by Nelphine.)
Catwalk, I had over 15 nodes in 1409. Just a different gameplay. My point is about the AI strength - I let the AI go until 1411 or so, and for your gameplay (so if you didn't have any planar travel ability) I believe that would have gone beyond your ability to compete, using your current strategy. (But if you hadn't got astral gate, maybe you would have focused on towers earlier, so I'm not trying to say your strategy couldn't handle it. Simply that lunatic AI has huge variance.)
For strategic value, yes, this has been my strategy - get so high you control war declarations, and prevent attacks. However, this is a major disvussion woth Seravy. Setting it to 75% will make chaos nodes black holes that destroy doomstack after AI doomstsck. It also makes the AI on advanced or expert (where they generally don't have a combat casting skill advantage) have a huge disadvantage. Finally, high strategic strength shenanigans such as mine ONLY work with warlord, life buffs, and a race that has a unit with at least 6 figures and at least 16 HP total (so either 3 hp 6 figure, or 2 hp 8 figure) without any buffs or experience, or war mammoths. (In order of abusability: barbarians, beastmen, dwarves/trolls/lizardmen (not sure of order on those 3), gnolls, high men, orcs.) So changing the limit when ANY other strategy is used (which is the majority of strategies) would have overall negative consequences. Which is why I've suggested changing it based on difficulty - if someone uses my strategy at advanced or expert they probably won't use it so much that there are any problems - leave at 100%. At master, again, probably not using it for abuse, but MAYBE they are - so I suggested dropping it to 90% on master. (Master AI also usually have enough casting skill to make up that 10% difference in strategic strength if it isn't being abused.) And on lunatic its even more likely that it might be abused, and the AI has even more casting skull, so I've suggested 80%. (And even then, this may be bad in the first 60 turns if the wrong node is around to destroy early AI doomstacks.) Normal I think should be reduced to 75% just so the human gets to fight winning defensive battles more often, and easy to 50%; but then we need to deal with the chaos node black hole problem.
How about simply adjusting the required strength for attacking based on the type of target, if node attacks are the main problem?
It's a good point that getting sucked into wars too soon has sapped me of strength in this game, I could have gone node hunting in a major way as well if I didn't have to fight off AIs early on. Quote: Let's say it's set to attack at 75% of the current value, would that make it play better? That's what we had prior to 5.0, so if you perceived the AI doing better (land bound) attacks now, then it means 75% worked less effectively. Note that intercontinental stacks are completely different and received massive improvement so for those, pre-5.0 is an entirely different and obsolete system. So this is only for land stacks. Personally I think 75% was worse albeit that's not the only improvement the AI received on land targeting, it's by far the most impactful one. It's hard to balance this because a lower value means the AI will attack with incomplete, weaker stacks, but a higher means it might need more force than it can have in a full stack of 9 in some corner cases like buffed berserkers. (November 3rd, 2017, 10:43)Nelphine Wrote: Finally, high strategic strength shenanigans such as mine ONLY work with warlord, life buffs, and a race that has a unit with at least 6 figures and at least 16 HP total (so either 3 hp 6 figure, or 2 hp 8 figure) without any buffs or experience, or war mammoths. (In order of abusability: barbarians, beastmen, dwarves/trolls/lizardmen (not sure of order on those 3), gnolls, high men, orcs.) Actually after having understood the system with the life game, I can apply it much earlier to any setup. 2 Dwarf halberdiers can block a common doomstack. |
How much of your power is from nodes?
