Slashman wrote:
No. My saved game was named "Broken Lords - Turn 240".



It is listed on my post on the previous page.



I can post it again when I get home if you like. I have shared vision with the Drakken in it so I can see their armies.

Oh sorry.



Right, okay - the design itself seems okay albeit lacking in accessories as empire hasn't unlocked much in the way of strategic equipment.







The issue is, I think, that old units aren't being retrofitted sufficiently quickly. We did do a pass on this and saw improvements, but we later raised the priority of buying heroes seeing as the AI wasn't using as many as the players. There are a bunch of higher-priority tasks this Drakken empire wants to accomplish before doing any retrofits, including buying resources and, yes, getting a new hero. I'll see about digging a bit deeper into this. It's a very delicate balance: there's a lot you can do with dust.

wilbefast wrote:
I've made note to look into the battle targeting - what I really need are specific cases where there is an issue. I haven't, for example, been able to reproduce a healer healing itself. I've no doubt the issue exists though because you're not the only person who has brought it up. If you can send me save I'd really appreciate it.

I will try for a save game.....i do know of one scenario i keep seeing.



Attack a sisters of mercy camp with a Hero and two units...move them to the back of the map and keep them on passive. The sisters will clump up and start buffing each other for multiple turns before 1 or 2 gradually make their way ove the map. I assume all "buffers" will follow this behavior.



Also - the militia example was a real life game where I was using one GIANT broken lord hero vs 2 marines hitting for 96, 3 militia and 1 gov. The BL targeted the militia first (b/c of infantry slayer 4 i assume) instead of just one shotting the marines. I can get that save if you want it.

Slashman wrote:
I second this. Strategically speaking, the AI was able to keep pace with me, and in some cases surpass me, as BL through a good portion of the game. Of course BL's Dust nature makes that less easy in the latter stages because I can buyout everything including population (maybe BL are a bit overpowered).



One thing I am a bit concerned with is weakness of AI armies. It seems like the unit design aspect of the AI is still a bit slightly lacking. This is troubling when you take into account that the AI sometimes has more than enough resources to outfit armies with superior equipment.

I totally agree with you on the AI armies...and their generals especially...but I have to say.....Endless difficulty would become impossible if they were significantly better. The AI is throwing out lvl 8 units at turn 30 currently. That is....very hard to overcome.

BigBalls wrote:
I totally agree with you on the AI armies...and their generals especially...but I have to say.....Endless difficulty would become impossible if they were significantly better. The AI is throwing out lvl 8 units at turn 30 currently. That is....very hard to overcome.

There's nothing magical about the current level of cheating that the Endless AI does (AFAIK). If the AI suddenly got much smarter, they could always tone down the cheating to compensate.

Antistone wrote:
There's nothing magical about the current level of cheating that the Endless AI does (AFAIK). If the AI suddenly got much smarter, they could always tone down the cheating to compensate.

Buffs to certain factions in the last patch......and they also made the AI slightly better at unit building. Lvl 8 units with no equipment are much easier than lvl 8 units with decent equipment.





AI was not making the Strat deed at turn 22 before this patch.....

BigBalls wrote:
Buffs to certain factions in the last patch......and they also made the AI slightly better at unit building. Lvl 8 units with no equipment are much easier than lvl 8 units with decent equipment.



AI was not making the Strat deed at turn 22 before this patch.....

Toning down the bonuses is something we are considering now that the AI is a bit better at making decisions. Some degree of cheating is necessary given that the current state of the art isn't up to matching the human mind of an even playing field. Exactly how much cheating is used though can be changed if the community feels it is excessive. We do want Endless to be somewhat "unfair" though, so that people can have bragging right

wilbefast wrote:
Toning down the bonuses is something we are considering now that the AI is a bit better at making decisions. Some degree of cheating is necessary given that the current state of the art isn't up to matching the human mind of an even playing field. Exactly how much cheating is used though can be changed if the community feels it is excessive. We do want Endless to be somewhat "unfair" though, so that people can have bragging right

No problems with you guys lowering the bonuses at the first couple difficulty levels above normal. I think that the hardest levels should be brutal.



I still think the AI needs to outfit its armies better. I don't know what the process is for them doing this in terms of unit design. Do they go after a particular stat? Like defense or damage? Do they try to outfit in all one type of armor? Like all Glassteel or all Titanium? Currently, even if the AI fixes its targeting, it won't compete well if it doesn't outfit its armies better because even bad decisions by the player will still result in its easy defeat against superior equipped forces.



The only time I really felt a big threat from the Necros in terms of military might(even though they were ahead of me), was when they lead an invasion force with a Guardian. They still lost all of their units even though I took losses as well and I had less units and one hero.

Slashman wrote:
No problems with you guys lowering the bonuses at the first couple difficulty levels above normal. I think that the hardest levels should be brutal.



I still think the AI needs to outfit its armies better. I don't know what the process is for them doing this in terms of unit design. Do they go after a particular stat? Like defense or damage? Do they try to outfit in all one type of armor? Like all Glassteel or all Titanium? Currently, even if the AI fixes its targeting, it won't compete well if it doesn't outfit its armies better because even bad decisions by the player will still result in its easy defeat against superior equipped forces.



The only time I really felt a big threat from the Necros in terms of military might(even though they were ahead of me), was when they lead an invasion force with a Guardian. They still lost all of their units even though I took losses as well and I had less units and one hero.

The AI's Unit Designer try to optimise the military power of its forces, and military power is calculated based on a formula which includes all of a unit's stats. The choice of equipment also takes into account the amount of available strategic resources: equipment is perceived as less powerful if there's not a lot of it to go around. It's not perfect but something that has come a long way in the update, so if there's a way yet to go we'll need to know exactly how you feel the designs could be improved.

wilbefast wrote:
The AI's Unit Designer try to optimise the military power of its forces, and military power is calculated based on a formula which includes all of a unit's stats. The choice of equipment also takes into account the amount of available strategic resources: equipment is perceived as less powerful if there's not a lot of it to go around. It's not perfect but something that has come a long way in the update, so if there's a way yet to go we'll need to know exactly how you feel the designs could be improved.

Since I don't know what the AI is equipping in my current game, I can only go based on what I see of their stats. Currently those are lower by a good margin than my current units. Please take a look at the save game I posted for examples. The Drakken especially are good examples of this.



This is just my personal way to play, but most of the time I'll try to get as much of each stat as I can in a unit and then compensate for shortcomings with trinkets. Some units have naturally higher stats than others so if a unit has a high initiative, I might try to boost that with equipment and trinkets that give initiative while equipping my hero with things that give boosts to the army as a whole combined with their skills.



Maybe BL are just too powerful late game and I have too much stuff, but I don't currently fear any AI army in my game that isn't lead by a Guardian. And even then...not so much. But there is simply no way that level 6 units should only have 200 HP and be doing 60 damage.

wilbefast wrote:
Well actually the harder difficulties levels are now less cooperative in diplomacy and more likely to declare war - it's something we added in the update.

Can this be modded? The new AI update is excellent. It's knocked me down two difficulty levels. So I'm now playing on "hard" -but I'd like to see less diplomatically friendly AI factions. Can I play on "hard" difficulty with the AI diplomacy of "impossible?"



Thanks in advance.

BigBalls wrote:
Endless difficulty would become impossible if they were significantly better.

Endless difficulty should be impossible, or close enough that it requires extreme cheese + game knowledge + luck.



See: Diety in Civ4

Darvon wrote:
Endless difficulty should be impossible, or close enough that it requires extreme cheese + game knowledge + luck.



See: Diety in Civ4

Agreed. No one should expect a fair game at the level. The first couple of levels above Normal should be a bit of a smoother climb IMO. The AI is better. That should be reflected in the bonuses.

I'd like to point out that making the highest difficulty unfairly difficult, and then having an achievement for doing something very difficult on top of that (e.g. "Quick Out of the Blocks" in Endless Legend, or "Don't Even Think About It" in Endless Space) makes it more of an invitation to cheat or cheese it than an actual challenge.



I mean, sure, you could get "Quick Out of the Blocks" by intentionally designing an awful custom faction and then forcing the computers to play it. And I saw people on the Steam forums getting "Don't Even Think About It" in Endless Space by exchanging random seeds for a 1v1 game where you can bottle up your opponent in the first couple turns if you follow a specific script. But is that really what you want to be giving out achievements for?



I'm totally fine with creating a difficulty level that you don't expect reasonable people to ever beat, and even for having an achievement for beating it. But I'm not in favor of doing that and then creating more achievements for doing flourishes on top of that.



Maybe there could be achievements for doing flourishes at sane difficulty levels?

Slashman wrote:
Maybe BL are just too powerful late game and I have too much stuff, but I don't currently fear any AI army in my game that isn't lead by a Guardian. And even then...not so much. But there is simply no way that level 6 units should only have 200 HP and be doing 60 damage.

I couldn't find the units you're referring to I'm afraid. We are talking about the save called "FIGHT REDS"?

wilbefast wrote:
I couldn't find the units you're referring to I'm afraid. We are talking about the save called "FIGHT REDS"?

No. My saved game was named "Broken Lords - Turn 240".



It is listed on my post on the previous page.



I can post it again when I get home if you like. I have shared vision with the Drakken in it so I can see their armies.

wilbefast wrote:
I do have an example of this issue actually, it's one of the things we're working on at the moment.

Oh that's good.



While we're at it. Have you also taken a look at the AI's army outfitting? I'm past turn 230 in my current game and the stats I see from AI armies are very underwhelming. Level 6 units with less than 200 hitpoints etc. Even when I fought the Necros, they were just not very threatening. Which is worrying considering that all the AI have access to the rarest strategic resources from what I see.



When I get home I will post a save if need be and you can take a look.



I've added the attached save game file.
Broken Lords - Turn 240.zip

One thing I've seen really odd is the ability to "force peace" with a nation who declared war on you by immediately offering peace and gobs of resources. This can easily and effectively lock out any war based win. It doesn't make any sense that a nation who just declared war on you is going to simply "accept" money as payment for immediate peace. I can see that occurring after 10-15 turns of War, but not the intimidate turn following the declaration of war.



I think two viable and simple solutions would be:

1) War results in 10-15 turns of no diplomatic talks between either side, including peace and force peace (this would semi-nerf Drakken... but they're currently overpowered anyway against the CPU).

2) War initially causes a highly curved favor in the required goods/gold/towns/diplomatic points to achieve peace. Which then slowly works its cost back down to normal over 10-15 turns. Again this should also affect Drakken's force peace, greatly raising the diplomatic cost and then tapering down to normal over 10 turns.



I think the above solutions would greatly improve the feeling of passive wins and prevent cheesy mechanics of forcing "peace"

wilbefast wrote:
Oh sorry.



Right, okay - the design itself seems okay albeit lacking in accessories as empire hasn't unlocked much in the way of strategic equipment.







The issue is, I think, that old units aren't being retrofitted sufficiently quickly. We did do a pass on this and saw improvements, but we later raised the priority of buying heroes seeing as the AI wasn't using as many as the players. There are a bunch of higher-priority tasks this Drakken empire wants to accomplish before doing any retrofits, including buying resources and, yes, getting a new hero. I'll see about digging a bit deeper into this. It's a very delicate balance: there's a lot you can do with dust.

Well I do understand that it is a delicate balance. It's just that this close to end of game and seeing that he was fighting a war earlier with the Cultists, only Iron and a Titanium weapon is a bit underwhelming.



If I turned on him and declared war, he'd be in some trouble I think.

There is one clear way in which that's an unwise retrofit-- the redundancy of shields with iron rings. Dropping the iron ring would save some dust. Beyond that, it does seem like a pretty lousy unit for turn 240 (presumably normal speed?) I expect the AI is on T5, in which case dust weapons would outperform titanium weapons.



Even if this template is built for affordable retrofits, the AI ought to be building new units which don't need to be retrofitted; when it does, is it limiting its templates to those like this drakkenling's, or is it making multiple templates a turn for retrofits and for production?

Katrisa wrote:
One thing I've seen really odd is the ability to "force peace" with a nation who declared war on you by immediately offering peace and gobs of resources. This can easily and effectively lock out any war based win. It doesn't make any sense that a nation who just declared war on you is going to simply "accept" money as payment for immediate peace. I can see that occurring after 10-15 turns of War, but not the intimidate turn following the declaration of war.

It seems to me that bribing someone into calling off their war is an entirely reasonable thing if the payment is big enough. It's not "forcing" if you offer them such a good deal that they don't want to say no.



It also seems to me that players should be able to "extort" you by threatening war unless you gift them resources, and if that's not coded in as an explicit thing, then the naturally way for them to try to do that is to declare war and then immediately accept a generous peace settlement.



I think there was a discussion earlier in this thread that the AI seems to be too willing to accept terms that contradict terms they want to declare (e.g. they'll choose to break a peace treaty, and then immediately pay you resources if you propose a new one), so I wouldn't be surprised if they are letting you out of the war too cheaply. But the fact that you can buy your way out of the war at all doesn't sound like it's inherently a problem.