I prefer Large, personally, as I like the added strategic challenge of managing a larger territory. That said, I'd recommend optimizing for the default, as that's a happy medium. Ideally, of course, you tweak the settings for each size so that it plays well on all map sizes, but I understand that's something best done once the mechanics and balancing are nearing completion.
Favorable Impressions: I like the new mechanics (Essence and city specialization.) I feel like I'm making meaningful choices each time I add to the build queue and that's very good. There are always competing priorities, particularly with resources requiring build time. The AI is doing a good job at Challenging, though I'm a bit suspicious as to how it's progressing as well as it does (I share the suspicion of others here
I hate to say it, but I think the real problem with the AI is that the game is too complicated for an AI to manage. There are so many different ways to accomplish your goals and this is a great thing for the depth of the game, but it also means there are countless loopholes and exploits that the human brain heuristic processor is so adept at discovering. Version 1.1 has done a brilliant job of really making you feel like you have numerous paths to victory, but the sheer number of
I had fun too, though at some point it was clear I had won and it was basically just a repeated 'next turn' until the necessary research was complete for my Magic victory goal. Once I successfully research Equipment (so I could build armored units) and Teleport (so that there was no longer any real worry about positional logistics), the rest seemed far too easy. A horde of spiders is much less frightening when you know that they can rarely even hit you.
I played a game on Challenging going for a Magic win. Once I managed to get Equipment and a few troops, I had no trouble dealing with any of the monsters around me. I was fortunate to wind up reasonably near to all the Shard types except one, which meant I only had to go to war once (which I won quite quickly using just my sovereign and an Earth Elemental, as the AI only had the one city and was quite weak.) There was one tense moment in early expansion where I managed to sn
Will the mod tools include XML schemas to allow for Intellisense in tools like Visual Studio?
Several times I've found myself forgetting to check what new spells are available and thus leaving spell points at the cap without researching. It would be handy if the game generated a little pop-up indicator (like the building complete indicators) saying "new spells are available for research", which links directly to the spells screen when clicked. It would appear every time the spell points have crossed a threshold necessary to add additional spell choices.
City Improvements Right now I don't feel as if my choice of where to place an improvement on each turn is very meaningful. In some cases, I'm moving to reach a resource, but otherwise I find myself just randomly picking a direction. Right now the resources seem to be 2x2 tiles, so what if there were some 1x1 resources with minor effects? Small patches of fertile land that couldn't support a full farm, but would improve a garden Pat
I had the game freeze while attempting to place a merchant in my first city. The custom (Elemental) mouse cursor was still visible, but nothing was responding. Alt-Tab also did not respond. Ctrl-Alt-Del allowed me to get out and returning to the screen gave me a black screen with only the mouse cursor responding. I was able to capture a memory dump of the process before I force-killed it, but it's a tad large (172MB in .rar format). I've posted the file in case
"We are thinking of including the meat grinder with the game so that people can actually see the AI do its stuff." I would love to see that, though it would probably give the human players an unfair advantage. Normally the players have to infer the way that the computer is executing its strategies by watching the computer actions from within the game. If I could see what the computer is doing, in detail, it would make it that much easier for my human brain to analyze its
The main reason game AI tends to be rotten is because most developers aren't necessarily very good at their game. It's possible to create systems that learn without necessarily understanding what they've learned, but such systems can produce very bizarre results if you don't give them well-structured training. Neural networks are one fairly well-known example of this type of system. A neural network couldn't execute the logic for an entire AI
Stupid enough. The AI can be better at making choices. It seems that you know nothing about testing and math. The choices is finite so the AI should know the values. According to your text I should be glad to play aginst weak AI in chess in case i just have less figures? Do you really enjoy play agains idiot who cheat all the game long? That's all about. No one like it. The search space for a complex strategy game is much larger than
I also encountered this hang. I attempted to build the merchant in the most SW corner of the main city. I was unable to reproduce the crash from my last save, though it was a few turns back from the hang. debug.err
In the attached save game , the sovereign has unlimited movement. Simply select the sovereign, right click on a tile, then right click on the sovereign twice. The sovereign will move toward the tile. You can now repeat the process, though you now only need to right click on him once to make him move.