Hopefully my experiences aren't a fluke, but I have to say that the tactical battle decision making seems to have really improved in Shifters. I have actually lost a few battles to the AI where I went in confident that I could wing it and win. So far I have not seen any horrible targeting decisions, and in addition, I was surprised to find that the AI knew to target the Skyfin as a matter of some urgency in most of my battles where they were involved.



All we need now is to make the AI slightly more all-in when it goes to war and I think we'd have an even bigger winner on our hands. Good job on this Amplitude.

I've had some issues with the Shifters hero not wanting to fire his crossbow and keeps moving away from the battle.. so I've taken him over for now.

I still have some trouble with [move] + [attack] orders, where the unit simply doesn't move.

Perhaps I don't understand the system yet, but it gets frustrating at times, because I could move my ranged units out of enemy reach, but they insist on staying where they can be hit ...

Have yet to see any of those issues. The Allayi hero has never glitched on me. And I do use attack move with him.



Could your units be trying to move to a space that is already occupied and so don't move when they can't get there? Although I did hear that there was a range calculation issues lingering still that they were working on.

MizzouRah wrote:
I've had some issues with the Shifters hero not wanting to fire his crossbow and keeps moving away from the battle.. so I've taken him over for now.

There is currently an issue with the Allayi heros if they are entirely alone in their army. We have a hot-fix in the works which will resolve this issue.

icarus86 wrote:
I still have some trouble with [move] + [attack] orders, where the unit simply doesn't move.

Perhaps I don't understand the system yet, but it gets frustrating at times, because I could move my ranged units out of enemy reach, but they insist on staying where they can be hit ...

Ouch if this is the case then it's a general battle bug, not an issue with the targeting per se. Either way we'd really appreciate a save or specific details on how we can reproduce the issue!

Slashman wrote:
All we need now is to make the AI slightly more all-in when it goes to war and I think we'd have an even bigger winner on our hands. Good job on this Amplitude.

Thanks a lot of the improvement are based on your and natev's feedback so if you're both satisfied is pretty good news.



As always if you see weird behaviour send in your saves - we'll keep tweaking things to the best of our ability and hopefully iron out any remaining kinks

There could be a Release Notes for the AI, I´m sorry I don´t see that much improvement. The AI still doesn´t know how to use charge, aoe abilities, to keep formation for high morale on even turns, to target according to X Slayer, to play offensively without attacking every turn with every unit.



I think the only thing I noticed was that ranged units stopped running to the front to attack, which is good when you have dekari but bad when you have bishops or ancients.

BPrado wrote:
There could be a Release Notes for the AI, I´m sorry I don´t see that much improvement.

Oh



We fixed an issue where support units would not respect the "hold position" strategy and added many more targeting behaviours for specific buffs and debuffs which are now used instead of the stand "support" behaviour. So healers and other casters should be a little cleverer about which targets they select. There were a few other issues that were fixed too, like cavalry over-evaluating high-ground and units all targeting the same unit rather than spreading their attacks for battlefield control. And there has been a lot of general tweaking of the behaviour weights since Forges Of Creation - pretty much every behaviour's weights have been modified in some way, shape or form, I'll try to dig up the changelogs for you.



It's unfortunate this stuff isn't more visible.

BPrado wrote:
The AI still doesn´t know how to use charge, aoe abilities

We do have some tile-targeting behaviours we're experimenting with that should improve these areas - they are on hold though as their development has revealed some issues with the way distance calculations are performed for the battle targeting. This means that said new behaviours will result in inferior targeting choices unless these issues are fixed. We're working on it at the moment. When the issue with the distance calculations is fixed we'll be able to release the new behaviours for you to try.

BPrado wrote:
to keep formation for high morale on even turns

This kind of thing is really tricky to implement given how the battle targeting works, as a good human player will take into account initiative order and intuit what the other team is going to do. All the AI can "see" is how many allies/enemies are adjacent to a given tile, and how many allies are targeting tiles adjacent to a given tile (a heuristic which depends entirely on the order in which units have targets assigned by the targeting controller). I may move a unit to a position I think will be next to an ally but have that ally move to intercept a target. I'm not sure given the current system we'll ever be able to replicate human-quality formation. Well take another stab at it though if you guys feel it's a serious issue.

BPrado wrote:
to target according to X Slayer

Hmm... I suppose specific behaviours could be created for each slayer...



I'll need to check what the upper bound is on the number of behaviours before the auto-battles starts taking long periods of time to execute.

BPrado wrote:
to play offensively without attacking every turn with every unit.

Could you elaborate on this one?

BPrado wrote:
I think the only thing I noticed was that ranged units stopped running to the front to attack, which is good when you have dekari but bad when you have bishops or ancients.

It seems the Life Siphon ability target enemy units, not terrain tiles near allies. This is something that can be fixed. The Shared Wisdom ability should target free positions though - not sure exactly what is going on here...

Something I have noticed: When attacking a settler with 50% life (second attack) with a skyfin, if you use auto-resolve, the settler will NOT be killed. If you manual, it kills it in one shot (even if you don't give it orders, it will automatically attack the settler). Not sure if this is all the time, or just some of the time. I am guessing that in auto-resolve, the skyfin is targeting itself for the morale boost?

Thanks for the attention, willbefast! (gotta love that nick)

wilbefast wrote:


We fixed an issue where support units would not respect the "hold position" strategy and added many more targeting behaviours for specific buffs and debuffs which are now used instead of the stand "support" behaviour. So healers and other casters should be a little cleverer about which targets they select.

Yes! I did notice that, especially with the Cultist and Ardent Mages buffs which can make a lot of difference used correctly, the AI is indeed choosing the right friendly targets, should have mentioned it.





Regarding "to play offensively without attacking every turn with every unit." I mean for example an army composed of fast Infantry and slow Ranged or Support. An offensive stance is not to charge with the infantry and leave the ranged behind, but to charge with the ranged and safeguard them with the infantry. Even if the same infantry unit is attacked twice (making you "lose" an attack in case of a 1:1 proportion), the general distributions of life/def stats between ranged and infantry (and particularly in case an infantry stops an anti-ranged from reaching your ranged unit) make it still be worth it.



Another case is a fast cavalry army with a couple of support units - which falls into the "to keep formation for high morale on even turns" I mentioned. Ideally, you´d deploy everyone as far as you can to charge and safeguard the support as better as you can on turn 1. Then on turn 2, in order to use the best of charging, you must not attack, but retreat and regroup with the support units. If you keep charging one side to the other, you support units will be slaughtered and it would have been to simply better use an entire army of cavalry in order to get a larger average of Morale.



Even on Full cavalry armies, the charge can never be dispersed. On turn 1 you hit as many targest as you can, but then on turn 2 you reach whoever you can reach and just position the rest for defence and morale, in order to use your movement advantage and a better charge on turn 3.



Regarding Ancients, I might have spoken about the wrong problem. They have always moved decently between turns now that I think of it, they´re just not deployed very well.

wilbefast wrote:
There is currently an issue with the Allayi heros if they are entirely alone in their army. We have a hot-fix in the works which will resolve this issue.

Awesome, thank you!