revjwh

Join Date 02/2006

Brad please make Sovereign Suicide Rush your first priority!

I am playing on a large map and have roughly 1/6th of the world explored. I have the max number of kingdoms and empires on the map. Unfortunately, in an otherwise overall epic and enjoyable game - the AI has now decapitated 3 empires by having their sovereign suicide rush my main army stack. Two of the empires had equal cities (8-9) to mine and they even had more troops!! If they knew how to use them they could have wreaked havoc by bypassing my main stack and attacking weaker areas. I don't understand why the AI with a roughly 250 rated stack would attack a 500+ stack??

The original Age of Wonders had empire decapitation - which was over a decade ago - and they solved it! Erk.

So now the Ythril, the Wraiths (Roln? or something) and the Magmar (Magnar?) have all fallen even though they should have been around to put up a long and hard fight.

Please Brad make this a top priority b/c up until those "rushes" the game felt as it should - epic and deep. (I have quests and locations turned off which makes the seizing of cities and resources paramount)

elemental

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Check out the most recent posts on the front page (Labor Day Notes). The reason for the AI rushes, and in fact most of the basic AI issues is that it wasn't updated after all the data changes just before release. The AI doesn't weigh equipment and techs properly, and so rushes you because it mistakenly believes that it's sovereign is pretty badass. Once that data is updated for the AI's eyes and it realizes that it's actually running around half naked with a sharp stick, the suicides should stop.

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Agree that this issue needs top priority.

I can compensate for the bad AI by imposing rules on myself which can result in an epic game, but i'm powerless when the enemy sovereign simply decides to suicide

Heck, even making the AI sovereigns glued to their first city so they never leave would be preferable to this(i could compensate by never moving my own sovereign either )

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I think that this is a double issue.

1) AI should evaluate better before rushing, both if the Sovereign is involved or not.

About this, I'm confident that Brad will solve it as soon as he has some time to work on the AI and make it evaluate better equipment and so, as he anticipated in his last journal entry.

2) Empires and Kingdoms should not disappear when their sovereign is killed.

I'm more worried about this, because it is not a bug, it seems to be a design decision.

But it is a stupid one (no offence intended).

Nobody likes this, I've read a lot on forums against this decision and not a single post in favor of it. This makes the dynasty tree useless.

When the Sovereign dies, its empire/kingdom should go to his heir (with some penalty). This is very simple to implement, and can make the rush issue much less disturbing.

Then, devs can elaborate a lot on this (maybe in an expansion pack), giving us a possibility of fight between heirs (empire divided in two, first and second sons becoming sovereigns and in war between them) and/or a possibility of breaking in pieces of the empire (each town become a minor faction). These possibilities can be different according to the empire/kingdom (giving us another way to differentiate them).

A lot more ideas on dynasties have been posted on these forums, and I like almost all of them: dynasties can be the other strong point of Elemental, together with Elemental magic (which should be strongly re-designed to make it much more powerful and element-related (for example, no missing spells for defense, they should only fail if the unit has a strong element resistance for that type of element)) .

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2) Empires and Kingdoms should not disappear when their sovereign is killed.

At the very least, they should not disappear while the sovereign has a son/daughter with the "first in line for the throne of... " tag attached to it

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I agree that Empires shouldn't disappear when the sovereign dies. Their heir should follow onto the throne (if the heir is not yet grown up, let him be ruler, anyways - till he grows up that Empire will be gimped).

If there's no heir make the cities independent, or have a pretender (from the freelance adventurers) rise to the throne, or pretenders who split the Empire and fight each other.

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A dead sovereing with no heir means game over, but even if the faction disappears, that doesn't mean all the cities should disappear as well. There is still a civilazation there, there is just not a major faction anymore.

The simplest would be to turn every city into a city state. One minor faction per city. Alternatively a big empire could be split into several smaller of one or more cities, but this would make them different from other minor factions.

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Quoting Carewolf,

reply 6

A dead sovereing with no heir means game over...

Pretty sure even if there there are sons/daughters/grandkids, it's game over. The game has no concept of 'heirs' as such, I believe.

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Adding heirs makes the game feel more epic. It's like a Crusader Kings type of feel and actually makes each game feel like a story. King Fart dies leaving his own child, Princess Butt as the new leader... she vows revenge! Otherwise, having the whole dynasty mechanic just feels tacked on and useless.

Heck why not explore the idea of being able to let your kids care for a city or two or more and they become the "automatic governor" this game needs when you have a huge empire. It would cut down on the micro a bit.

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