I have noticed from the ones that surrender to me they seem to have gotten to a very high level inexplicably (16) and all their level up choices seem either random or evenly distributed. It seems like they do a breadth-first traversal of the trait trees.
I like getting rid of encumbrance, and I think other things should be streamlined as well. This is like getting rid of hero attributes (strength, dex, ect), they are numbers which affect other numbers in ways that are never explicit. I think there is a problem with initiative, since it is is a complete mystery what the numbers mean. What formula calculates how often a unit attacks? Does twice the initiative equal twice as often as half the initiative? This would tell us how good is a plus ini
Balance is something that is obsessed about instead of fun, though often confused for it. I mean the tweaking in this game to the numbers on stats, reining in this and that, and making a competitive, fair AI is a wonder of labor that has resulted in an amazing strategy game. The problem is, and this could just be my imagination, probably 90% or more of customers will never play the game enough to realize how wonderful a pure strategic experience it is. Maybe it is just extending my theory of
I just want to justify saying LH is the best strategy game I have played by comparing it to the other big names in the fantasy TBS genre. I think what people liked the most about these games is something that LH could focus on a bit more and steal everyone's hearts, especially people who get annoyed at rough edges. I think what is making LH work so well now is that it has more game elements than any other strategy game I have played, and they are accessible and user-friendly
No doubt about it, this is the best strategy game I have ever played. It's strange though, all the elements were all there in WoM, which I couldn't complain enough about. And I still complain, because best isn't good enough. The biggest difference between WoM and LH is the mixture is becoming just right, more fun per game minute. Now if they would only make leveling up as fun as it is in an rpg...
I think as a matter of principle if you have a hero that earned a high level through 50-60 battles, that hero should never be obsolete. You shouldn't be able to pump out in one turn a unit that can take at least 2 of them by itself. If melee is a viable path for a hero then it should be possible they are the strongest melee units in the game. It is the fantasy way, maybe it makes no sense that one guy can take a unit of 6, but otherwise the player is wasting time making melee champions. w
[quote who="mqpiffle" reply="20" id="3334048"] Instead of abilities unlocking with their own trait pick, for the most part they should unlock along with other picks. So basically each ability choice unlocks a passive stat boost or ability and an active tactical ability (if applicable.)[/quote] This is the best idea. I also think the passive bonuses are way too stingy. Champions are very underpowerd now, since you can't effectively stack them and a trained unit is
I want to preface this by saying the game as a whole is coming together to be great, an individual fantasy tbs that is unlike any other. I am not a hater. I think those are great ideas mpqmiffle. I think that is the right track. New abilities are tangible, you use, see them and you know you have gained something cool. +1 attack is very uncool, and to have it 7 times over, I don't know what the spreadsheets look like, but it feels from a player's perspective to be a miniscule i
This is no joke, leveling is not fun. It hasn't been fun since some of the first iterations of WoM in my opinion, where balance was thrown out the door, but hey, at least it was fun. The new system just lets the player see in advance how much fun they are not going to have. It takes so long to level, and instead of getting something new and awesome for that work we are now 1/3 to 1/7 of the way closer to getting something that is at least cool (there really aren't many new abi
Wow, I have never noticed shadows in any game I have played. Don't get me wrong, I love good graphics and pretty games. I even have play 1st and 3rd person rpgs/shooters on occasion, but I still never notice shadows on or off unless I am looking for them. Even then it has almost no aesthetic effect for me. It amazes me how much effort is apparently put in to them.
I don't think there is such a thing as too much automation. When software/hardware development gets its act together like the grocery store systems, where efficiency is ratcheted up to the point all the parts fit together and the practices fine-tuned such that human effort waste is minimized, the progress will build on itself to such a rate that there will not be enough jobs for the population. This is especially true if some profound innovation in machine learning occurs. T
I was thinking that the fantasy genre offered interesting possibilities for diplomacy that parallel in Gal Civ what were neutral civilizations or City-States in the Civ games. The idea would be to have "factions" based out of monster bases, like a giant camp or whatever, that expand diplomatic options. They don't try to win the game. They may have varying other goals (unlike Gal-Civ and Civ, monsters as neutral factions are nothing like humans and they can do and want crazy, interesting t
I have read about powerful wizards such as Bupu who can do wondrous magic with dead rats. I think it is feasible your sovereign may have wanted to investigate this or the artifact may be too powerful to control by the one who found it.
Randomness is hard to do well. Random tech draws, like in the first iteration of War of Magic, do offer an unpredictable experience. But it also gives up the user's sense of control, and there will be the times when you spend a bunch of turns and end up with something useless. I believe if there is going to be randomness in teching/leveling, then you have to make sure every random option is interesting and useful. I think this plagues the leveling system in FE, the first fun level
[quote who="zlefin" reply="8" id="3299496"]the reason you seem to be the only one seeing the problem being so hard is that you're looking at a different problem than everyone else. You're looking at advanced artificial intelligence capable of complex learning and optimal gameplay. Everyone else here is looking at practical solutions for the question of improving ai in games people play; which is far easier, and only requires simple kinds of learning, not complex ones. 
[quote who="zlefin" reply="6" id="3299126"]i'm not familiar with tbs community developed ai's; though it still wouldn't surprsie me if some were better than the oens the games came wtih. Good isn't about beating master players; it's about being a more respectable challenge, and doing fewer stupid things. Greentea AI for sc2 is quite a bit better than the one that came with the game.[/quote] I am approaching this from an optimality standpoint becaus
[quote who="zlefin" reply="3" id="3299059"] what xml are you looking at? I'd like to look around the ai some myself; and i didn't see any xmls for the ai. [/quote] 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, mayb
Background I am curious about what it would take to make "good" (competitive with dedicated humans) commercial turn-based strategy game AI. My impression is that this problem is fantastically complex, probably orders of magnitude more complex than chess or go for a litany of reasons. In go for instance, you can only do one thing in a move, place a stone on a board against a single opponent. But in FE there are way more complexities: multiple opponents, it is possible
I have just completed my first graduate course in Intelligent Systems, and this is my take on how hard it would be to make the FE AI good in the strong human player sense of the word. This doesn't make me an expert, but I have some perspective on what the problem looks like from a machine learning perspective. First, if you could make the FE AI as good as a strong human player in a game development cycle timeframe, I firmly believe you would be doing so by passing up the opportuni
[quote who="Alstein" reply="109" id="3268294"]I won't go so far as to say folks like Brad aren't different. While you do need to enable folks to take risks (say what you will, the lack of a safety net will make folks risk-averse), you also do need to give an incentive for folks to take those risks. Not everyone takes the risks of new ideas for the sake of IRL-peen. [/quote] There is different in the manner you are talking about, and it gets conflated
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="58" id="3250246"]The gulf between the rich and the poor is only going to get larger and larger with more automation and globalization. I'm not sure how that can be helped.[/quote] There is a simple way to solve it, tax the rich more.Make sure no one can make millions of dollars and pay 10-15 % in taxes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/business/questions-raised-on-withdrawal-of-congressional-research-services-report-on-tax-rates.html?_
I played another game tonight and I am wondering if they actually test the gameplay changes they make or if they tweak values and hope it turns out alright. Things are tweaked all the time and the changes don't seem to be cohesive. Things that used to be fun like exploring and leveling up your heroes aren't fun anymore. The game has been made much harder, but in a let's throw annoying mobs at you all the time and make it take forever to get powerful kind of way. The
In my original post I used language that expressed intent instead of effect. I don't know what the intent was behind the changes made from earlier betas, but the effect is a game that is a more manageable AI problem. But the thing is it will never be enough. Games like this are problems that are far harder than Chess and Go from an AI standpoint. To list some factors that make up this huge gulf of complexity: there is a larger number of both candidate moves and actual moves per turn, ther
I am of the opinion that these are realistically mutually exclusive philosophies. I see changes in place from earlier betas that are designed to make the game easier to play for the AI, but less fun for the human. The idea is slow everything down. Make the hero progression slower, because humans maximize that resource better. Make access to good spells slower, make units move slower, make tech progression slow, all for the same reason. If you reduce the available options on each move, it is e
I can't believe how slow the leveling has become. I saw this happen with GalCiv2 as well. Suddenly in one patch there was a steep rising cost to each successive tech, so it took 50-100 turns to research one tech (planetary invasion). Stays that way today. These pacing decisions can kill the fun of the game.