AI hero use

[Seravy]

As we could see from Hadriex's latests video, the AI is pretty capable of equipping their heroes now, which represent a huge force.
Question is, what strategy should the AI take with the heroes?
Currently, they are very likely to get stuck defending the capital until it's filled with units that have a higher cost, meaning normal heroes generally stay until the town is filled with a top tier normal unit like Paladins, but champions stay until stuff like Wraiths or better filled up the slots in the city.
Note that in insecticide, anything good was regularly sent out of the fortress which was helping offense but was a suicide move more often than not, and on top of it, the best units got stuck guarding nodes forever usually. So I'm talking about CoM (and Raid in the future) here.

The pros of the current behavior are :
-Heroes are kept safe for a long while, so when they do move out, they will have full gear and at least 2-3 levels.
-Fortress is kept at maximal safety all the time.
-As better heroes are kept together at the fortress, losing the items is less likely.
-They don't get assigned to unimportant locations or get stuck waiting for ships, nor die while trying to conquer top tier nodes. They are guaranteed to be use for a strategically important purpose : defending the fortress. Sending them to fight will not guarantee they'll do something useful, although it is likely. They might even end up in an idle stack if there is nothing to attack left on the continent.
-Low value non-champion heroes are still being actively used, and can be a huge threat with if well equipped. They can also gain exp actively.
-Heroes summoned when the Summoning Circle is not at the fortress can still actively participate in the game, only those that appear or are summoned to the fortress will stay there.
-Caster heroes contribute skill to the wizard.

The cons :
-Heroes don't gain more than a few levels, unless the fortress is attacked frequently.
-Heroes could win wars for the AI, or even eliminate the human player and win the AI the game, but most of them don't do it. Actually this might be a good thing, players don't enjoy losing? A good champion with some nice items is nearly unstoppable.

I think the pros heavily outweight the cons, but I wonder what does everyone else think about this?
How to use heroes is a critical strategic decision, and it's not an easy one even for the human player.

One thing I would like to mention is that I was able to make the AI actually use the vault today. So items can now be stored and immediately equipped if a new hero is obtained, which makes losing a hero somewhat less significant. Prior to this change, risking heroes was not even an option, as their items would have gotten melted down for mana unless another, unequipped hero was immediately available. Returning items to the resurrected hero later was not possible. Now that at least the items are safe (unless the entire battle is lost), sending heroes to participate in the game is more reasonable, but still a questionable strategy.

[Tiltowait]

The name of the game is offense. Heroes should be out gaining XP and levels. It is well and good for the computer opponent to defend its capital, but let's not go crazy here. We don't want turtling. Otherwise the game becomes a Civ 4-like experience in resource optimization to get to the Spell of Mastery. While Civ 4 does a great job being a game that you can optimize, MoM is not really refined in this area. Sure, build your buildings to get your economy roaring, but that's not really the whole point of playing the game.

I saw that in the most recent Hadriex game, the enemy capital is full of dragons and high-level heroes - there is no way to take it without a similar stack of dragons and heroes. The game then becomes an exercise in generating the most research points to rush the SoM. The player goes on the defensive and just runs out the clock. You can win this way but it seems pretty boring, and I might well just decline to continue the game at that point. Definitely defend the CP's capital well, but send the heroes out to cause mayhem and attempt to win the game.

It's worth looking at what makes invincible heroes invincible. It's the shields. If you can't damage a hero, then the battle is over. A hero with 20 shields is very hard to damage, and if you can't damage him, you can't stop him.

[Seravy]

I saw that in the most recent Hadriex game, the enemy capital is full of dragons and high-level heroes - there is no way to take it without a similar stack of dragons and heroes. The game then becomes an exercise in generating the most research points to rush the SoM. The player goes on the defensive and just runs out the clock. You can win this way but it seems pretty boring, and I might well just decline to continue the game at that point. Definitely defend the CP's capital well, but send the heroes out to cause mayhem and attempt to win the game.

Well, Clow Reed had a ton of dangerous units outside the capital, stacks of Great Drakes and stuff, but he wasn't at war so they weren't doing much besides taking out nodes. Which is the greatest problem with sending out heroes, it only makes them available to build attacking stacks, without a guarantee they will be made, or that there is something to attack once the stack is ready. Considering the amount of Drakes in his capital, there must have been at least a few heroes outside somewhere, too.
Had Hadriex started a war, I'm quite sure he would have lost at least 4-5 cities in the next turn or two to those stacks.
We can either have functional diplomacy, or mindless aggression, the two are kinda mutually exclusive.

In case of Tenshi, she lacked good summons so she "only" had a bunch of normal units walking around, although hammerhands, mammoths and the like, under the control of a Warlord, are a dangerous force.
Going for SoM is only really an option if you have a way to produce more research than the AI, and that's actually not that easy to do, higher difficulties give the AI a huge advantage, and if you try to reduce it by curses or attacks, you're facing a war.

Now that I think about it, this Hadriex game actually proves sending the heroes out is bad strategy.
Let's assume Tenshi sends those heroes out. If they actually do find their way to the Arcane plane, which will probably take a while, and they do become a threat instead of sitting on a random node, the player can make peace, walk to the capital, and take it, since there are no heroes inside left, and normal units can't stop a doom stack. And we have seen in the video, that's the first thing people will try to do. At that point, although the heroes might still wreak havoc, without the ability to cast spells in battle, Tenshi would lose all the remaining cities way before the heroes would conquer all the towns of the player.

It is well and good for the computer opponent to defend its capital, but let's not go crazy here. We don't want turtling.

Fortunately the capacity of the capital is only 9 units, so it won't have a significant effect on the amount of attacks they can make, it won't slow the game down or anything. It merely means 9 of the best available units will be used on defense, the question is, is it better if the heroes do that, or is it better if the paladins and storm giants do.

Heroes should be out gaining XP and levels.

While I agree with this, over half of the power of a hero comes from the 3 items they are wearing, and the first 2-3 levels can be reached just by sitting around.
And while this sounds counter-intuitive, a caster hero sitting in the fortress is speeding up offense more than by going out, by powering the casting of summon spells, curses, buffs, and global enchantments. At least in the vanilla game. Having, like, caster 45 which isn't high, means am extra storm giant to use in armies every 10 turns. Or a Sky Drake every 22 turns, which is actually more powerful than the hero probably would be.


About what makes heroes invincible, in my experience :
-Shields of course, but plenty of things ignore shields in the game. This only really helps when the player uses the heroes.
-Bonuses to Def as it multiplies the effectiveness of shields.
-Magic Immunity, Invulnerability.
-And their crazy high to Hit stats, you can easily have 100% hit on a hero from just Blademaster or two items, and that means enough damage to kill anything in a hit. Maybe they aren't invincible, but they kill things way before those things could kill them.
-Invisibility, at least in the hands of the player

Oh, and I think I haven't said that, but all of this concerns the capital only. All other towns work differently, and can send out both the cheapest and the most expensive unit depending on why they are sent out. In case of the capital however, it's always the cheapest only.

[Anthony]

One of the basic problems with MoM is that decapitation strikes are both highly effective and difficult to stop. It's not like moo where decapitation is often not possible (because of range) and doesn't do much anyway.