Frogboy

Go ahead and try my stand alone EXE replacement. It may solve it. http://draginol.stardock.net/files/Elemental-v11d.zip

@Lantros: It's a map issue. Kraxis's starting position was in the middle of a swamp. The map generator shouldn't have put a fertile tile in the middle of a swamp (swamps and fertile land are mutually exclusive).

That's the same setup I'm using here. Since you're having this issue and I have the same setup, try out my EXE replacement I made: http://draginol.stardock.net/files/Elemental-v11d.zip Also, on behalf of a fellow Radeon 5850 owner, good choice! :)

Thanks.

My guess, regarding archers, is that the tech for archery and the improvement for archers is not high enough priority as I never see the AI training archers either. I'll take a look at it.

[quote who="sjwt" reply="93" id="2855731"]Heads up Brad and all. The bug where the AI is not seting its self to the world difficulty when you add them to the game appears to be back, ive been playing on 'normal' AI when I though I was on ridicules.. [/quote] That's not a bug. The AI difficulty has nothing to do with world difficulty. There have been no changes in that area (that would have been a data change). The game will remember the

All my updates work with existing save games. I'm not changing any data in these.

[quote who="razor436" reply="41" id="2855639"]I really love reading your journals as you continue to improve the AI. It is intriguing to learn how you investigate AI behavior and tackle the issues. Yet, I grow concerned as you seem to focus only on Strategic AI. Can you give more information on what your plans are for tactical battle AI? Thanks for your hard work.[/quote] Thanks. I don't actually program the tactical AI. That's done by different developers. I

Eventually I plan to take over the tactical battle AI. Right now, I only do strategic but the developers working on that will soon be working on a different project so I'll be jumping in there. I've been getting familiarized with the system. A few decent tweaks would go a long way. Strategically, the AI does use magic, A LOT. Mostly for buffing. I have also been working on it over the holidays to make them do more offensive type spells too.

NEW version: http://draginol.stardock.net/files/Elemental-v11d.zip

[quote]They resources they produce are stockpiled in the city, not distributed to their empire as a whole? If they build anything they must have produced the materials for it locally?[/quote] correct. They lose access to global resources, they can only use what they make locally and what they produce is cut off from the rest of the kingdom/empire.

The AI already manages things much as you describe.

Sieges cut a city off from the global resource system. Effectively, sieges make cities behave like they do in GalCiv/Civ.

HeavenFall: I'd like to see that as one of the XML parameters. Then people could create their own difficulty levels as well as modders. I think a lot of people, myself included, want to focus in the near term on making the AI play a better game without cheating. But yea, I do think on ridiculous level, the AI should be able to just ignore some of the resource restraints and just plain "cheat".

I should have a new EXE available today that has all this stuff in.

Elemental has a random land mass generator, it's in the map editor if you ever want to see it. Just go in there, choose a size and press go and it will randomly make your world. The problem is that it creates maps that aren't fair. Elemental isn't like say Civilization where you can pretty much do anything with each tille thus the shape of the world is largely irrelevant. We'd need to modify the game mechanics before we could do a truly random land mass creator.

Try turning off the outlining. There are some machines that really choke on that.

Yea, the fix for the crash issue is having that side effect. I think I fixed it today. Will have to double check though. I'm going to play around with resource placement too.

I'm still having a lot of problems with some of the APIs that I've been looking into yesterday and today. I do think I've eliminated that crash issue entirely that some people reported. For you techies, here's what causes it: Elemental has simultaneous turns. This is important to remember. Once in awhile, a unit will attack another unit who was in the process of joining yet another unit into an army. The attack is queued up but it is on the pre-army "unit". So if that

Some of these things are, realistically speaking, just going to happen. For instance, you took over his city while he was heading there to reinforce it. Since it's simultaneous turns, he got caught in a bad situation which you were able to capitalize on. Right now, my focus is on more bread and butter type things like city building and strategic use of armies and the like. But feedback like yours does indeed help.

In theory, you shouldn't be able to beat a ridiculous AI 1 on 1 on a small or larger map. Normal = average strategy gamer level. Challenging = decent strategy gamer level. So basically, work your way up from Normal and see how things progress.

Umber must not be set to ridiculous. Each AI can have its own difficulty level. I'll verify with Umber in a minute.

World Difficulty has nothing to do with AI difficulty. It just determines the placement of resources and how many monsters there will be. As you can see, in your screenshot there, the city is getting a lot of resources. Certainly, if you're on a tiny map you can rush the AI. There's not much that I can say about that other than only you can decide if you want to do that or not. But if you think you can take that city with a defense rating of 20 with Janusk you're

As you can see, on ridiculous, the AI is, on turn 20, already building a hedge wall, doing 9 gildar per turn, has 50 food, and has a defense of 44. That's "ridiculous". Your screenshot indicates you were playing at normal -- or lower. Here's turn 20 at normal on my machine with 11c. <img src="http://content.screencast.com/users/draginol/folders/Jing/media/5fae707f-f79d-4d29-b9c9-b06089d520f4/2010-12-25_2100.png" alt="" width="1279" height="766"

Here, let me show you the game when played at ridiculous. Turn 20, AI player: