Thought on the ai glass cannon syndrome and city spamming

from Elemental Forums

I had a sudden thought while reading some of the new posts. Is it possible the ai is building the glass cannons because it doesn't perceive most of the world as a threat because the neutrals don't attack it? I'm not sure how quickly the ai rallies itself when you group together your strongest units into a stack of doom and go on a murderous rampage.

 edit: i can't go on a murderess rampage, i don't know enough female murders to do that... sigh

Speaking of stacks of doom, when it comes to upgrading units (do't get me wrong i love this feature) is there a limit on how many times you can upgrade a unit?

I haven't had a chance to double check (kids and wife keep swiping computers from me, I just bought a new mac but my external usb drive isn't registering) but it seems to me that when i give a custom unit three skills i can only upgrade it once. Not sure if i saw this problem with other units with 2, 1 or 2 skills. Yes i was in my zone of control, and i restarted and reinstalled a few times, but it is still happening to me. The upgrade button just disappears. for example i research standing army and then give my clubmen with three skill a shield, then i learn leather working 2 several techs later and can't give them body armour. Also, it would be nice to be able to upgrade with other things as well, such as those handy rings of fire and frost for the elemental defence.

In the future will having the ring on give a glow on the weapon? how do you tell if the ai is using theses rings ?

4,971 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

you can upgrade units? xD I usually just send my units to they're doom somewhere, and build new :)

Cannot really speak about why the AI tends to spam glass cannon units, meaby they are trying to play a different game where multiple armies are allowed in the same combat? :D.

Like the idea about the rings, but me thinks all its should say is elemental resists, rest is abit non-important to me.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The AI is attacked by monsters as much as the player. The difference is that the AI knows the exact parameters of when a monster will attack, whereas we do not and thus are attacked more often. The AI is building crap units because it has too few unit designs to work with. You can make lots of unit designs for each faction to increase the quality of enemy units. It also probably cannot upgrade units and does not have a good enough economy at the time of training to make a better unit. One thing you can do is go to war with them and kill off all the Peons. Then make peace. You will notice the quality of the units has increased. 

Groupy 2 - Organize multiple applications into grouped tabs on your Windows desktop
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 2
The AI is attacked by monsters as much as the player. The difference is that the AI knows the exact parameters of when a monster will attack, whereas we do not and thus are attacked more often. The AI is building crap units because it has too few unit designs to work with. You can make lots of unit designs for each faction to increase the quality of enemy units. It also probably cannot upgrade units and does not have a good enough economy at the time of training to make a better unit. One thing you can do is go to war with them and kill off all the Peons. Then make peace. You will notice the quality of the units has increased. 
End of seanw3's quote

Properly right on the point that the AI needs to "learn" to upgrade units, and "learn" to remove old useless troops, either by upgrade, disbanding or charging them into random enemies.

It seems alot of people advice designing alot of units for each of the factions, but I have done so, and it didnt affect my games, meaby the game should come with 50% unit designs for each faction, focused particularly on higher level equipments, also meaby the AI should be able to convert other faction's unit design to they're own faction, so I don't have to play ALL the factions before the AI have a serious amount of unit designs. Meaby make an AI logic center to change traits on unit designs?

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

maybe*

 

Well what we have now is the most basic features in beta 2. This is a beta, don't expect fun. But you can make it fun by adding in the content we don't currently have. The reason the devs don't make an exhaustive list of unit designs is because it sounds like they will be useless come the next version. Of course there are some that would like the beta to be fun. One might even mod it to feel like a finished product. I am personally going to keep a version of .86 to compare the new directions of the game to.  :ninja:

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

no, i wasn't complaining about fun, i was just curious about an issue and where it stood - i just started playing the beta and was wondering where things stood and was asking about a problem. My main intent was to hopefully bring to the dev's attention if they hadn't considered iy.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Oh they know. They just seem to be focusing on other things. You could always try out the new version of my WFNB mod if you want to see some minor fixes to this issue.  :blush: