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AI Planar Travel

This game the AI put Planar Travel on a few of its heroes and sent them to my plane alone, loaded with artifacts.
I think this is a very bad move and the AI should either not target heroes with the Planar Travel spell, or...learn to assemble an entirely planar travelling stack and move it to the other side together. (this could be a copy of the doomstack procedure except with the limitation to pick the 9 highest cost units with planar movement)
The former is likely easy to do, the latter isn't, but would likely mean the AI could be re-enabled to shift shadow demon stacks. However, another one of the reasons we disabled that was because it was unfair - there is no way to deal with random units poping out of nowhere that belong to an unreachable enemy (the fact they can also curse cities most of the time just makes it worse.) and also it resulted in the AI losing its main forces on their primary plane as they go to the other one, so we should think this through. Maybe limiting Planar Travel to settlers only would be a smarter move?

(also it would be great if the AI could actually tell which plane they need their units on, instead of just always trying to move them to the non-starting plane but I think I got stuck on that and couldn't come up with a good algorithm for a decision like that.)
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idea:
*what if settlers from an astral-gate city come with planar travel ability? If this is a primary usage of planar travel by AI, we could replace the spell with something else.

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What about Planar Travel artefacts?

Planar Traveling heroes is definitely a player-only trick. For the AI more than likely does more harm than good. I always thought it a bit funny with items, as you can move just one Planar Travel item around to port each hero whenever needed.

As said, planar traveling stacks don't seem like a good idea. Given that there is the Myrran end-game-enemy concept, it gives the myrran AI massive advantage if he has planar travel.

Astral gates work sometimes nicely with the myrran enemy. In my present game I had some fun times with the myrran pouring in some nightblades prior to war. The human can block the gate easily enough, but it can be a fun challenge figuring out where they are. It's a bit unfair in that the AI probably doesn't know to do the same for human gates.

It does beg the question, what purpose does planar travel serve? Would it be better to replace it? As is, it seems the player might find some borderline tricks for it, with the AI maybe taking part so far as those tricks include settler shifting. But mostly the tricks aren't worth it. Except dropping a doomstack on enemy fortress, which was too good and removed (for the AI, not the player).
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Well, Astral Gate serves as the spell that allows an unlimited amount of travel on a fixed location inside your empire while Planar Travel allows anywhere but requires casting it on every unit.
It's not absolutely necessary to have Planar Travel but then we'd have an empty spell slot we'd need to fill, and Life is already doing very well in that department.
The AI does not recognize Planar Travel (or other similar overland) item powers in their decisions - it can only do so for the spell and unit ability.
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So to summarize, first we need to pick one from this list :

1. Remove the Planar Travel spell from the game and replace it with something else.
-in this case do we want to keep Astral Gate? What about the Planar Travel item power?
2. Keep Planar Travel, but disallow the AI to use it on at least heroes. (It allows the Myrran AI to drop stacks or single units on the human without the human being able to strike back - we already disallowed the AI from doing the same using Shadow Demons.)
3. Keep the spell and teach the AI to gather fully Planar Travelling stacks, and teach it to make the right decision on when to sends units to the other plane by writing a completely new AI planeshifting procedure. (this one would be very hard and time consuming to do but probably not entirely impossible even though it is currently listed on the unfixable problems list - but it would require completely redoing the entire procedure plus implementing a copy of the doomstack procedure for planar travel stackbuilding.)
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(January 31st, 2018, 10:40)Seravy Wrote: Well, Astral Gate serves as the spell that allows an unlimited amount of travel on a fixed location inside your empire while Planar Travel allows anywhere but requires casting it on every unit.

Well yeah, that's what it does technically, but what useful gameplay/strategy this allows - and further is it human only or is the AI smart enough to use it too?

It seems rather obvious do not let AI gather plane shifting doomstacks to drop on the player. If it could, it would make life AI as myrran the "you lose" card in a game that would otherwise be at a challenging, fun, difficulty - not certainly but likely enough. The player doing the same is quite a bit unfair, too, undercutting the AI. But not that much, you can generally navigate around AI strongpoints anyway, just a little bit slower. And the cost matters much more for the player.

Shifting sporadic units can be useful for scouting. Probably nice that the player can do this. Given the AI fog-of-war properties, not so sure how nice it is that you cannot keep your cities from being revealed if the myrran AI happens to be chaos/life. But might be just a fair part of the challenge when facing this type of AI. Dropping sporadic units (especially heroes) on already scouted areas is likely a waste of units. So it's a trap the AI should be steered clear of.

And then there's the matter of shifting settlers. Which seems like a worthwhile thing for both player and AI - although challenging to be successful with. Could be a "fairer" form of scouting the player plane for the AI - it's something you could cull before it takes root.

What else is there? Making earlier contact with/by myrran ai?
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*How about getting 'plane shift' back? Or is it too good/dangerous?
*How about 1 unit with plane shift allowing entire army to plane-shift with it, thus a wind-walking style army effect. Obviously needs to be expensive.

if unit enchantment replaced, it is hard to think of ideas that don't result in unbeatable units. If we keep it to movement-based:
*cheap cost and 0 upk - enchanted unit has 3 (or 4) overland movement
  --Main Purpose: mass-buff spell preventing slow units from slowing down your army  too much
 -- For varied armies, it simulates weakly wind walking effect as whole army will move faster this way.
  --lack of combat effect removes fear of endurance-combo overpoweredness.

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Quote:*How about getting 'plane shift' back? Or is it too good/dangerous?
*How about 1 unit with plane shift allowing entire army to plane-shift with it, thus a wind-walking style army effect. Obviously needs to be expensive.
Both of these would make Astral Gate obsolete. We specifically picked Astral Gate and Planar Travel to keep because Plane Shift has the advantages of both in one spell (move entire stack, but anywhere).
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For some reason I can't think of many uncommon spell ideas if we plan to limit plane-shifting spells to just 'astral gate'.

*Not sure if doable - a unit enchantment that grants 'supply commander' ability (or one to stack adding ammo to an enchanted unit)
*A unit enchantment that adds an 'armmaster-style' ability, speeding up exp points in certain stacks (for those armies prior to altar of battle).
*aforementioned overland 3-4 cheap spell or land-only wind-walking - helps mix slow units with fast units in armies (like wind walking does)
*a unit enchantment that grants some or all priest skills - helps your units heal without carrying fragile shamans or slow priests, a relatively tactical spell best used in offense. If also 'purify', adds a defensive utility

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First we need to pick one of the three options. Coming up with a new spell is only relevant if the majority prefers "1".

Quote:1. Remove the Planar Travel spell from the game and replace it with something else.
-in this case do we want to keep Astral Gate? What about the Planar Travel item power?
2. Keep Planar Travel, but disallow the AI to use it on at least heroes. (It allows the Myrran AI to drop stacks or single units on the human without the human being able to strike back - we already disallowed the AI from doing the same using Shadow Demons.)
3. Keep the spell and teach the AI to gather fully Planar Travelling stacks, and teach it to make the right decision on when to sends units to the other plane by writing a completely new AI planeshifting procedure. (this one would be very hard and time consuming to do but probably not entirely impossible even though it is currently listed on the unfixable problems list - but it would require completely redoing the entire procedure plus implementing a copy of the doomstack procedure for planar travel stackbuilding.)
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