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The River!!! The River shall save you!!!

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The River!!! The River shall save you!!!

When in doubt, hide behind a river.

from Elemental Forums

So I was testing out a quick game this afternoon and I did something I thought was kinda funny. As those playing the beta can tell you, we have a few spells straight out of old school Populous that lets us raise and lower land. The Blue nation declared war on me, even after exchanging children with me. Their son married into my family and my daughter went to them. When we went to war they started funneling troops at me in stacks of two.

Instead of fighting all the incoming stacks as my cities were on a smaller part of the continent I just lowered the land and made a River between my cities and the main continent. Obviously my enemy couldn't cross it. It's a good tactic and effectively closed me off from attack.

This leads me to a big question though. In the final version will the AI be smart enough to bring it's sovereign over to make a land bridge by raising land so it's units can get to me? It needs to be or players will shut them-selves out like this and the AI will have no way to get to them.

Still, just being able to do that felt pretty cool.

elemental
11,572 views 30 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting shadowtongue, reply 16
Sure, you all can figure out how to overcome this easilly.

 

Point being that AIs (yes even the overrated stardock AIs) cannot.

 

I will hope to be proven wrong, but I don't know what anyone would point me to to make me begin to consider that it's going to be any different in elemental.
End of shadowtongue's quote

AIs don't need to know what a river is. All they need to know is it is a tile that requires x points of movement to cross, where x equals how long it takes to ford the river or is derived from a subcalculation that tells them how long it would take the correct unit to reach the river and build a bridge. This makes the AI problem with the river a standard pathfinding problem that nearly every game has had to deal with (what's the shortest distance between point a and point b.)

It's about asking the right question and giving the order at the right time. In this case the right question is just a simple calculation, and computers are good at that.

A complicated AI problem would be predicting that the human was about to drop a river there based on previous in-game behaviours of that player, and have the worker already in the stack.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

I just thought of something. A "Water Walking" spell or buff would solve the whole "instant river in my way" problem.

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Reply #28 from Stardock Forums Top

Right now you can be pretty constrained in the demo if you DON'T roll an Earth magic sovereign; in more than half of my games, my starting location is separated from opponents (and progress) by mountains and sea.

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting tour86rocker, reply 28
Right now you can be pretty constrained in the demo if you DON'T roll an Earth magic sovereign; in more than half of my games, my starting location is separated from opponents (and progress) by mountains and sea.
End of tour86rocker's quote

 

it's not a demo :P and if you're experiencing terrible start locations report them in this thread.

Reply #30 from Stardock Forums Top

I was tired, I am fully aware that it's a BETA, that's what I meant to say, ftr