Frogboy

[quote who="seanw3" reply="12" id="3081651"]I have been studying the current spell list to get a better idea of what I can use for my Ivory Towers Mod. There are alot of good spell functions, but some of them are bugged right now for modding. That reminds me. Will the AI be able to specialize in Earth Magic when it starts next to an Earthshard? I remember you saying something about checking to see if a shard was safe from attack in some thread. [/quote] The AI val

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals Please give your honest opinion on the overall state of BETA 1. Thanks

[quote who="DsRaider" reply="7" id="3081580"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 4I am lobbying against a new public beta this week but it's Derek's call. There are a few very key feedback items that we think should go in. While I understand your point, it seems like you keep pushing the next patch back further and further. It doesn't have to be perfect. The community would love even a small patch that fixed only the most broken things. You can always have another p

Also, bear in mind, you'll never see all those spells in a single game. But if you look in CoreSpells.xml you can see quite a few of them if you want spoilers.

Sure you do. It's in foreign policy.

Here's an auto battle (i.e. I just hit auto): http://screencast.com/t/pxLeoMVX

Annoyance is it being 11:10 and realizing that the IsUnitVulnerableToAttack(AttackType) isn't working and thus you have AI players using burning hands on Ignys. Tomorrow...

[quote who="StevenAus" reply="73" id="3081017"]Does that mean upgrading regular units will be cost efficient in the next version , or just that the AI with bonuses will do it more often? [/quote] Yes, we are having to substantially lower that cost.

[quote who="StevenAus" reply="133" id="3081015"]But Derek doesn't post as much as you do. Question is, based on what you know, are any of the above changes possible before release of FE?[/quote] I'm not familiar enough with some of the issues mentioned. I don't have the same appreciation of balance as Derek does. Programmatically, what you mention is straight forward. Whether it makes good balance sense is a different thing all together.

[quote who="Gandhialf" reply="3" id="3080947"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 2for i = 1 to num of spells should I cast spell = rand()%; Will the final AI have any randomization (if value of expected outcome of possible AIs actions isn't the same)? Little randomized AI could be sneaky [/quote] Yea, the AIPriority value I randomize so that it's not too predictable. But randomness won't change the fact that the AI won&#

BTW, the above is by no means a complete list, just what I am thinking of off the top of my head.

[quote who="seanw3" reply="69" id="3080894"]How much better is the AI in .78?[/quote] It's hard to say how much better it is. It is certainly a lot more sophisticated. A few things at the top of my head include: + The AI creates army groups and uses them as a single force (rather than each stack being handled invividually) + The AI will upgrade its units + The AI is much better about choosing better units + A lot of work has been done

That's really up to Derek to determine. I can only really speak towards things that are programatically difficult.

[quote who="StevenAus" reply="63" id="3080659"]Here's your challenge Frogboy - make an FE AI that can consistently beat most of us without *any* bonuses whatsoever. If you can do that, maybe then you'll need to provide more bonuses to *us*. [/quote] That'll never happen, unfortunately. It would be a commercially bad decision to do that. I wish I could do that though. The reason why is CPU power. Think about a chess game where you have to wait bet

[quote who="smakemupagus" reply="127" id="3080831"]This sounds really promising. I was a little worried about some of the "no big changes" posts in past couple weeks -- flashbacks to wom beta -- but this post and Brad's recent posts gives me a lot more confidence that this time around you guys also see the remaining rough spots and have the plan to fix them. [/quote] I think the biggest thing we run into with regards to "no big changes" is that what we consider a big c

Roads between cities and outposts will become a function of your overall civilization rather than something players have to manually do.

The Revenge of the Sith novelization fixes the plot of the movie Revenge of the Sith. In the novel, it's pretty obvious that the Jedi had it coming and that Anakin did the right thing. Whether he needed to personally "deal" with the Younglings or not is debatable but it was pretty obvious that someone would have to deal with them. Now, in the CGI show, The Clone Wars, Anakin is a pure hero. No whining. No endless brooding. Even the voice acting is forceful. He's doing

Caravans, as a unit, are going away.

The most recent episode had a great light saber battle between Anakin and Dooku. It has been very enjoyable watching the very gradual descent of Anakin in the show (unlike the third movie which felt rushed).

These are indeed legitimate issues that are on the list of things that we're working on. It is not accurate to say that they are "carried over" from WOM (beware the placebo effect -- there's a lot of that here on these forums, if people realized how different the code base was for FE, they'd be shocked). The fundamental issue is what the OP mentioned -- FE is extremely multithreaded and so getting the UI manager to properly synchronize user events

I've printed out the comments in this thread. You will all regret it. ;)

Well a big thing is listening to people play the game. Can you imagine how cool it would be to write the Starcraft AI to deal with the Korean champions?

It's in internal beta. It's supposed to go public "any day now".

[quote who="Blight0r" reply="87" id="3077546"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 80 Quoting Trojasmic, reply 79So is that it? Are we going to hear anymore about the AI Wars: February Edition? yea, when I work more on it. Doing the AI is my night job at Stardock. The weekends I get to do whatever I want which, this weekend, was helping with sound and music. Hrm. Sorry but that kind of attitude is just wierd, and outright plain sucks.<br

I agree. Derek and I have been discussing Act II and Act III in the game intensely. This is the area of the game that's getting the most attention right now. The first part of the game (Act I) is really fun. But Act II starts to be a bit of a grind and Act III becomes a total slog. It's not hard to address (in terms of cost) but it must be addressed.