merlinme

One of the slight quirks of the game is that if you lose population you do not go down city levels. So if you get your city to level 5, it will stay level 5, even if you Sacrifice it down to 10 population. Later in the game when you have a few cities it generally makes sense to have one or two focus on building pioneers (and using Sacrifice, if you have it). I either choose a level 5 town or a town which has reached its highest expected level for the foreseeable future. Playing on higher

From memory, you get a certain amount of food per grain. So in other words if you get 50 food per grain and it's a 2 grain city then you get 100 food. 100 food can support 100 population. If you hit 100 population then that city will stop growing. Some city improvements give you bonuses to food. So if you built an improvement that gave you +25% food per grain, that would mean that your 2 grain city would now produce 62.5 food per grain, or 125 total (I think the fractions are

Since 1.2 the difficulty levels rely less on increased money and hit points for AIs and more on "bonus" skills, which arguably makes it a bit more interesting. So in other words on Ridiculous the AI gets a small hp bonus to its trained units, but they get free "Bloodthirsty" or "Charge" or whatever. So yes they will have more perks than are possible for a human player, but I don't really have a problem with this. Although it is quite hard to hit wraith units on Ridiculous! Re: "ri

[quote who="onomastikon" reply="9" id="3393506"] Just to clear up, I have played all of the factions, and while I have enjoyed most of them quite a bit, I have not seen the strategic synergy and power of Scrying Pool and Arcane Monolith anywhere. [/quote] Playing Pariden was interesting, but I didn't think it was overpowered compared to, say, Magnar: get Summon Skeleton Horde, cast Cull the Weak, gain nearly infinite mana, win. That is so overpowered I actually refuse

[quote who="Mistwraithe" reply="10" id="3393513"]Unfortunately it really turns me off making any game harder by just giving the AI crazy stats and as far as I can tell that is what the top difficulty levels are like. [/quote] Don't pretty much all of of this style of game do that? Civilization certainly does, which is the closest comparison. I believe the Civ AI cheats with fog of war, too. I was pushing hard for better AI in LH, but by that I mainly meant "less brain-dead

[quote] I was five hours into a game when I declared war on a Sovereign. He was at half the power that I was[/quote] I tend to agree with those who've argued that you need to raise the difficulty level. This has just never happened to me in my last two or three games on Ridiculous. I'm doing well if I'm only half the power level of the AIs when I meet them! In general the AI still has some weaknesses but it's much, much improved in 1.2 and 1.3. I can't say that I've be

[quote who="Fallenchar" reply="4" id="3391050"]The AI building lots of units when it has almost lost, as points 3 and 4 suggest, doesn't really serve any purpose.[/quote] I understand your reasoning, but this is very much a matter of taste. Personally I just think it's more "realistic" if the AI tries to defend itself properly. Apart from anything else it can't know if it's "almost lost"; it can't really know if you have to send your army somewhere else to tackle a

[quote who="onomastikon" reply="3" id="3391036"] I also think the AI could build more fortresses and less conclaves in general.[/quote] I assume (although I could easily be wrong) that the AI's tendency to make villages into particular types is influenced by its personality. So I would expect militaristic AIs to build more fortresses, research favouring AIs to build more conclaves. The developers have said in the past that this is why (for example) certain factions buil

I believe the AI trains units more often in fortresses in 1.3. I'm not sure I agree with never training units in non-fortresses; I can think of four exceptions: 1: I quite often train Pioneers in non-fortresses 2: In extremis I will train units in non-fortresses, either to increase the number of units I can train at once, or to quickly provide some defensive units. A high essence town or city with Heart of Fire etc. and maybe some other bonuses (e.g

Diplomacy is basic, but it's a bit harsh to say an alliance victory is not a meaningful option. I've quite recently chosen to get an alliance victory; if you've stayed friendly with one or two AI factions and have treaties with them, then it's fairly straightforward to become allies with them. Depending on the strength of their empire it may be quicker (not to say nicer) to ally with fri9endly factions to win rather than double-crossing them. I did this quite recently in

I did eventually work out a way to take an enemy city, basically I was able to take the Outpost (as originally planned) and then was able to attack in one turn with a 5 move army. There seems to have been a bug with Zone of Control where my capture of the Outpost was not properly registered (in fact I think the enemy city Zone of Control flipped the Outpost the next turn even though my unit was on top of it; I've raised a bug report about this). I was however able to move off the Outpost

I captured an enemy city which had built nearly all available buildings, so I wanted to build gold. However this was not an option, in fact there was no option to build any of the ongoing projects (gold, growth, research, mana) even though they were all available in my other cities.

I had an issue with Zone of Control when capturing an enemy Outpost that I believe was on the edge of an enemy city's Zone of Control. I captured the Outpost, then the next turn the Outpost was silently reverted to enemy control, even though my unit was on top of it. This meant I was now in enemy territory and could be targeted by enemy spells. I reloaded, and was able to move off the Outpost and back on, which gave me control of the Outpost and also give me Zone of Control for the Outpos

Fairly self explanatory; if you use Defensive Strike twice on the same enemy unit you get "This spell has already been cast on this unit".

I've had an intermittent problem with the Commander ability "Command". Basically when my hero uses it on another unit, HE gets an infinite number of extra turns; i.e. the user of the ability goes to the top of the the initiative list every single time, no-one else gets a go. My Commander had high initiative, 29, which was possibly the highest in the battle, I don't know if this is related (Peter Huebner has also reported a problem with very high initiative units). Workaround:

[quote who="Brainjuggler" reply="233" id="3388328"] Quoting merlinme, reply 211 It might be nice to have a reasonably expensive Counterspell to remove immobility, in the same way you can counter spells cast on your cities, as having your main stack immobilized indefinitely is not a great deal of fun. Maybe the spell could come from late game Magic research. The AI would need to know when to cast it on its units, of course. +1[/quote] I'm beginning to th

I'm not a huge fan of the way the game will let you go massively negative in gold if you accept an AI treaty proposal for more gold than you currently have. What exactly is happening? Can the AI spend your negative gold? Maybe it would make more sense if the AI proposed taking all your gold and a per turn tribute for an appropriate number of turns. Negative gold can also cripple your economy (unable to pay troops) if you're not paying attention.

Not sure about this one. The amount of money you get from cities does seem pretty marginal, +10 gold a turn when you can get multiples of that from one fairly small lair. However I think the intention is to encourage you to go lair clearing and questing. With the city gold I mainly want to see that my balance is manageable, either positive or at least not going down too fast. If you build a lot of towns with gold bonuses, and especially if you set them to produce gold, you can produce fairly

To clarify other people's very good explanations somewhat, the way I think of research is that you need a certain number of research points to get a certain tech. So say you have 10 research a turn; it will take you 10 turns to research a tech which requires 100 points. When you have researched that tech, you will get a certain amount of tech points to trade with other factions; I believe this option is only available however if you have researched more in that Tech than they have. It mus

The Ridiculous game is now looking a bit more comfortable, because after I killed Gilden's four full stacks two of the other AIs declared war on them, and I've got a reasonably favourable map layout (I'm on good terms with my closest neighbour; Gilden is some distance away and there's a bottleneck). However I had to reload after trying to take the offensive to Gilden and ending up one tile away from his city; he then promptly started spamming Tremor on me, which when you have

I've noticed this more as well in the current release. I don't know if the level limits have been tweaked; I don't remember them coming in for level 3 spells before. Alternatively this could just reflect that it's harder to gain levels than it used to be. I don't really mind though, I just choose Mage upgrades that I want eventually anyway.

Personally I don't think this is as devastating as Titan's Breath, which with a high power mage with -1 turn casting time is basically an "I win" spell against any army which doesn't have a lot of prone immune units, which is most AI armies. If mounts are going to remain fairly rare then I agree the AI should use Boots of the Spider more.

I'm currently playing as Karavox, and being able to convert Trained Units for 100 gold does seem powerful, but in practice I haven't had the chance yet in my current game. It's also not relevant unless you're actually fighting the AI, and I assume you have to pay wages to the converted unit, which makes it much less game changing than Tame. Also you have to expose your sovereign, which is dangerous against high level AI Trained units, so I assume this means waiting till the en

Slightly off-topic but I got Ascian the panther Assassin via a quest in my current game. Ascian comes with Maul for free, and can go up levels as an Assassin. I've only taken him up a couple of levels, but with a Commander with accuracy bonus he's pretty devastating. The biggest problem I can see is that his Attack is only 16, but if you do enough Maul criticals most things are going to die anyway. He's also got a lot of hitpoints, so he has some survivability, even without h

On the subject of the AI being more challenging, Gilden just declared war on me and then turned up with four full stacks, two Strong and two Deadly. My Stack of Doom is still officially only Strong, but I was able to kill the first Strong stack fairly easily with Blizzard. I've got relatively limited mana though, so it's going to boil down to whether I can kill the stacks without running out of mana, and whether Gilden can replace the stacks faster than I can kill them (and repla