[AI] applaud

Wait, you can raise mountain ranges? I thought you could only raise hills at best.

I think curgen's volcano can make mountains?  I should try that some time... (but I think it takes 10 turns to case, so I do not know if that was plausible here).

There are some high level earth spells that do this.  The AI only started to intelligently do this kind of thing in v1.1.

Which ones?  Except for volcano, the high level strategic earth spells I remember explicitly are prohibited from creating mountains.

You don't say we can keep our borders completely locked down by artificial mountains without any way for enemy to bypass them?

No, cause you can cast lower land on mountains..
 Oh wait

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

You can't. He raises the mountain on his territory and you can lower the mountains on yours.

Excellent tactic - you need to push your cultural borders to lower those mountains.

Hell yeah, wtg Frogboy!

You cant...

For the current rules, if everyone was equally smart with using raise mountains, each game would have to end by spell of making due to mountains being neigh impossible to deal with when inside hostile territory, and each player would just wall off each of his/her cities.
Then again, that would probably cost tons of mana, but still I want an option to throw mana, or gildar after the problem instead of having to find a different route, even though it might be a lot of mana or gildar.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

You can sometimes push your borders, by gaining influence and/or by getting bonuses to your zone of control.  Sometimes you can shift borders just by planting an outpost next to your opponent's border.

Can't find raise mountain spell in corespells.xml. where is it? also spell doesnt exist in pdf spellbook. Further I don't see the coding for this in the AI files i dumped. anyone know?

What OP would have us believe and SD has backed up here is, the value assigned to raise mountain spell is now so high that it casts it more than 1 time in a turn in formation to block pathing, and it picked this values in such a way to block the approach of an army. So possibly SD has added a new world map script not based on RNG as per the entire rest of the game and a triggered script now runs when an army approaches? Seems like something this innovative would have been something SD would have mentioned in the patch notes.

While I wish this was possible, it seems doubtful, sc2 a game with a much larger dev team and wallet was only able to script the AI to create walls with Protoss forcefield inconsistently and not to a degree of human intelligence as OP indicates here. Further if the spell doesn't exist in the corespells.xml file, how does the AI have a weight value assigned to this spell?

Would very much like to see fraps/youtube, a savegame or pics.

With regards to the AI, spells are cast as explained in this thread,

https://forums.elementalgame.com/438446

"they are in nearly every file under the english data section, everywhere you see an AIpriority tag and a value, that is the weight some decision algorithm assigns to that game element. Spells, equipment, and traits each have these. CoreAIDefs.xml has the weights on the main game ideas. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of what look like hand-picked weights. So the idea is that game comes up with candidate actions by applying these weights and applies the decision with the highest value. I didn't find the algorithm that computes this, but picking the weights amounts to determining the policy, so the rest is search. The behavior is set with these weights."

There used to be a spell of that name in E:WoM, but it no longer exists in FE. The only way to make 'mountains' is to use Curgen's Volcano.

I can only post a screenshot. I was playing an ironman mode, with single savegame so there is nothing I can offer you to show how it looked before and after.

Savegame is uselless for you probabbly, unless you install all the mods I did.

Anyway - screenshot:

note the outpost: I was attacking from northwest toward the city to the southeast. Do you see  a road still poinint in that direction.

I was slowed down because in war you cannot use enemy roads, and I claimed the outpost. On the next turn I was facing a mountain range you see now.

The screenshot is from the endgame save, when the city is already conquered, but I had to make a 20 turns detour to reach it (longer than necessary, because I detracted to finish off Lizardmen empire) 

There are 66 xml files in my English directory, but only 7 of them contain AI priority:

CoreAbilities.xml
CoreAIDefs.xml
CoreArmor.xml
CoreSpells.xml
CoreWeapons.xml
CoreWorldResources.xml
Treaties.xml

There are 990 instances of the AIPriority element in these files.

The use of the element in CoreAIDefs.xml looks different from how it looks in other files - 71 of those, with 22 unique values of the InternalName attribute:

Arcane, CityBuilding, CityDefense, CommandPost, ConstructionTimeConcern, Crystal, Economy, Expansion, Farming, Food, GoodieHuts, Housing, Merchant, Metal, Prestige, ResearchTimeConcern, Shard, Shards, SovereignProtectionFactor, Study, War and WorkShop.

CoreAbilities.xml defines the level up perks.

CoreSpells.xml defines the spells and would be the logical location for any mountain creation spell, so I took a closer look at it:

There is one strategic earth5 spell: Earthquake, but it needs a city as a target.

There are two strategic earth4 spells: Destroy Land and Summon Earth Elemental. The description on Destroy Land reads "Plunge land or mountains directly into the depths of the sea."  That is a new one for me but it looks like this one is available only to certain sovereigns. 

 There are three strategic earth3 spells: Lower Land, Raise Land, and Set In Stone.  Set In Stone is a city enchantment.  Lower Land has the description "Turn mountain into hill; hill into land; but not land into water." and Raise Land has the description "Turn water, beach and cliff into land; land into hill; but not hill into mountain."

There are three strategic earth2 spells: Cloak of Thorns, Stoneskin and Tremor, and three strategic earth1 spells: Aura of Might, Enchanted Hammers and Nature's Cloak, but they are not high level and do not change terrain.

Also, looking for any mention of spells that mention earth in any way, I get this list:

Aura of Might, Cloak of Thorns, Destroy Land, Earthquake, Enchanted Hammers, Lower Land, Nature's Cloak, Raise Land, Set In Stone, Stoneskin, Summon Abomination, Summon Earth Elemental, Summon Familiar, Summon Titan's Imp and Tremor.

Anyways,, the claim that there was a high level spell that did this was from Frogboy and I am not in any position to dispute him. But if there are such spells it looks like they are buried in the game implementation and not defined as a player accessible spell.  Still, if Destroy Land is spell that follows the same pattern, it's likely only certain sovereigns can access the spell and then only if they get the right levelup perk.

So I went poking into the dll and exe files, and I found two of them that had strings that correspond to the internal names of these spells: DataZip.exe and FallenEnchantress.exe.  Interestingly, neither of them seems to have the full set of internal names, and they both have exactly the same set of internal names:

Earthquake
LowerLand
GreaterLowerLand
RaiseLand
GreaterRaiseLand

So it's looking like there's a Greater Lower Land and a Greater Raise Land spell, and I imagine that Greater Raise Land can create mountains.  But since it's not listed in  CoreSpells.xml I think it's not something that players can use.  (But I find it odd that none of the other spells are listed in FallenEnchantress.exe -- I'm sure that I've seen AI Sovereigns with Stoneskin, so I do not know what it means that I can't find the spell names listed -- but perhaps it means nothing since executable files are strange things).

Edit: yes, going back, I see that GreaterLowerLand is an attribute of the Destroy Land spell.  I also see that Raise Land has an explicit list of which terrain types it applies to, so presumably it could be applied to hills in hypothetical situations not constrained by the current CoreSpells.xml reference.

Those are the names of the attributes (or effects) used by the spells. LowerLand is used by Lower Land (obviously), GreaterLowerLand is used by Destroy Land, and RaiseLand is used by Raise Land. However, there is no spell using GreaterRaiseLand anymore. Like I said earlier, there used to be a Create Mountains spell in E:WoM, but it is gone in FE.

SD is saying one thing and players are saying another.  I'd like to side with SD on this one but I find myself agreeing with Gaunathor instead.  Is there anyway we can get a response from SD please?  It's kind of one of those things where the evidence sort of speaks against StarDock

I am not from SD, just a casual player.

I've shown you what I've seen. as best described and documented as possible. It was the first time I've seen it and it was impressive to me.

Was it bug? maybe.

Can I reproduce it? not easily.

Is it consistent with xmls? I don't think so, but there is so much hardcoded stuff that it is no wonder.

Is it doable by player? I don't think so, but I am talking about Sentinemodo difficulty, which uses Insane AI factor for cheats of all kind, so I am fairly ok with anything.

Would I like to see AI do more such tricks? Anyday.

I played a game today on rediculous and found something like this happen as well, but it was more like the AI tried to close off its boarders to me before I even knew they were there.

I'd still love to know how we are able to cast this like SD says.

And I think its a fantastic view you gave us, makes me think about the rules of the game in a new way, most of these rules aren't perfect because the AI couldn't handle spells earlier for example, so it doesn't come to attention to the plyers.

I do hope the AI learns more of this stuff, and then when things go out of hand, meaby Derek and/or frog should take a re-look at the game rules (not the AI) to see if its too silly.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I'd love to be able to use this spell.  It would help a lot on rediculous or insane with a tiny map, 8 AI, lots of monsters and quests.  If the AI can use it so should we.

About the "Destroy Land" spell. I don't see it in my spellbook, not even with an earth archmage. Is it somewhere in the gamefiles but currently disabled?