The solution we're playing with for Thursday is for the super powerful monsters that spawn next to the AI to commit suicide at the start of the game. And make the AI hella smarter about founding cities near monster lairs.
I feel a great disturbance in the force... like millions of tiny voices crying out in pain, then suddenly silenced.
I'm liking this. This was something I thought of when you mentioned that the AI don't get the boon of having a radius of 8 saftey net like players.
are the suicide monster just apply to the ones at the starting position?
You need them to kill the starting position's monsters, if you are going to add better settling functions for the AI. Like if dragon there don't settle command needs to ensure that their starting location don't have these monsters nearby. Otherwise the AI won't settle and the game will be over before it even began.
I enjoy reading about the AI coming out in such a random way. I'm glad you are turning up the heat for the higher difficulties. Are you going to make a territorial net for the AI monsters? Namely, if lair exists and I am x number of tiles away, the chance I go towards my layer is x * 5% (or something along these lines). I don't mind the monsters wandering, but it doesn't make sense for a territorial monster to claim territory 30 tiles away. Each turn is roughly 3 months and travel is slow, but in 3 months on can travel easily 120 miles. This makes each tile roughly 60 miles. I don't think monsters should claim territory as their own 1200 miles away from their home. We are talking about a dragon from Michigan attacking California, for fun. Seems unreasonable.
Although, I can live with the fact that these monsters move long long distances from their layers to attack the world around them. The radius I'm thinking about the monsters is somewhere along 20-30 tiles from origin. (Although, I know many would like the wondering to be smaller)
