merlinme

I will generally accept or initiate both treaties if I benefit from as much or more than the AI player. That means I tend to have treaties with the smaller AI players (I don't want to make the stronger AI players any stronger). Having a road direct to a smaller AI's capital is really very handy if or when you decide to attack them. You certainly could make them into one treaty. Some people want to make diplomacy more complex, not less complex, though. Personally I

I hadn't realised that yields go up when city size goes up. However even if that's correct, I don't think it makes that big a difference, because it takes so long to reach higher levels. If it's going to take you 80 turns to go up a level, in that time with high production you could have built ten buildings, and you would get the incremental benefit as each building is completed, rather than having to wait eighty turns to get a new level. My games are generally over before I g

Yeah, it would be nice to be able to pick and choose which armour to get. But I'd consider that an extra feature, whereas zero metal and crystal cost for expanding the unit size just seems broken.

I played Age of Wonders a long time ago. It was fun. Legendary Heroes is also fun. I think it has enough tactical options to keep combat interesting, especially now they've added weapon special abilities, swarming, and there are endless possibilities with spells. It could be more complex but I'm not necessarily sure it would make it more fun. And there's plenty of other stuff to keep you interested, in terms of questing, building up characters, building up your empire, etc. etc. I

Some characters have an "Escape" ability. You can also get an Escape scroll. Normally though combat continues until one side is dead.

Zarkis, the tactical AI will definitely benefit from some love as welll, but one thing at a time. Frogboy has said he's planning to sit down and watch all those youtube videos before he starts improving the tactical AI. I assume the tactical changes will be added to a later patch than the strategic AI.

Yeah I've seen similar behaviour. I'm hoping the 1.2 AI patch will help with this, which the notes say should help with targets of opportunity, i.e. the army may be heading somwhere else, but if they notice something worth getting along the way they should target that. The notes specifically mention targeting Outposts, but I'm hoping undefended cities will also become targets.

The way I heard initiative explained, initative is added each turn, and you get a go when your initiative reaches 100. So in other words if your initiative is double another units you get to go twice as often, which makes initiative very important. I have noticed that if you give a unit a big initiative boost, e.g. by using Haste, they quite often seem to get two moves, one after the other. Not quite sure why this is, it doesn't seem to fit the explanation.

As it currently stands, if you have limited metal or crystal and a bit of spare gold, it always makes sense to build the smallest size possible and then upgrade, as you only pay the metal and crystal for the smaller unit size, plus a small amount of gold for the upgrade. This doesn't make a great deal of sense to me, and does feel like a bit of an exploit. It would surely make more sense if you had to pay the metal and crystal for upgrading the unit size, e.g. if you mov

Because of the way you get more growth the bigger the difference between your current population and the amount of food you have currently, it makes sense to decide on one town that you you will use for pioneers and Sacrifice, because the population will be replaced faster. A level two town works quite well for this. I've only once got a settlement to level five, because I've generally won the game before then, but this does depend on the size of the map, the way you play, etc

I think you need an ok start on higher difficulty levels, but I'm not sure I agree that you need a good start, not on Expert, anyway. I've won a game on Expert where I could only build two cities initially, and the AI eventually declared war on me and took my second city. I had one ok stack which I was able to use to defend my capital, and after I had killed his initial stack as it tried to take my capital, I was able to start taking his cities. This would be a

Looks pretty awesome to me, really looking forward to trying this out. It will be a lot of fun to play against a more intelligent AI. I was about to move up to Insane, but maybe I'll be able to stick on Ridiculous if the AI is going to fight smarter. Thanks for listening to all the feedback.

Yeah I agree, in general I don't think it prioritises production and unrest buildings enough.

I've now seen it a couple of times where units moving through other friendy units (as now allowed in 1.1) can end their movement on the same tile as the friendly units. I assume this is not intended. Not sure what would happen if the AI attacked that square, that's not happened yet. While it's not possible to deliberately select a friendly unit as your target for movement, what I think is happening is that I click on an enemy unit to attack and my unit moves as far as it c

I've posted before on a few different things, notably that the AI should concentrate more on defence when its on the defensive (building units, not moving units out of cities when there's a scary stack nearby). I've also had a chance to observe the offensive AI a bit now and it also seems to do some strange things. Normally I crush AI units before they get close to my cities, but I was caught slightly off-balance by the event which means everyone goes to war with everyone else (bl

You know you can select multiple units and then right click the tile you want them to exit to, yes? This is not a criticism, I think your user interface ideas are great. But this particular one I haven't noticed being a problem.

Good on you! I'm not sure the Spell of Making or quest are really the "easy way out" though. At some point in my experience you're so dominant you can more or less choose how you want to win. Often I find it easier and quicker killing AIs than doing the quests. Which way is easier depends on the map and on exactly how you play. I've also been playing with the standard factions. I haven't actually beaten my Ridiculous game yet but this is mainly a question of time,

Don't know if it's related or not, but I've also had a a quest which required my hero to return to my capital be instantly completed when I loaded a save. My hero was taking the scenic route, he was nowhere near my capital at the time.

Fair enough, just checking. Certainly looks like a bug, if you can pin down under what circumstances it happens and what circumstances it doesn't happen, I'm sure it would be a great help to Frogboy and the team.

To play devil's advocate here for a second, how do you actually know that the cities are not constructing anything? Are you basing it on what it says on the worldview? I've not played around without Fog of War; is it possible to open up the city screen and see what has been built? Another thread has reported that while it looks like the AI isn't building anything from the worldview, in practice it's building something very quickly (the screen flickers). I think the su

Not sure if there is an easy way to get rid of burning tiles. Have you tried putting the army in the south on Guard? It should be listed as an option in the same place as PASS, SHOP/TRADE, etc.

How bizarre. Certainly sounds like a bug, and one which would presumably have quite a big effect on the difficulty of the game, bearing in mind how important the first ten turns are.

I can live with it either way, but multiple combats per turn means a faster paced game, which is a good thing in my book. It also improves the viability of your best heroes, because they should be gaining a lot of experience in your stack of doom. It does however somewhat hamper the AI, which is not very good at building a stack of doom. It has also been reported (don't know if this is correct or not) that it will only do one thing with a stack each turn, which would presumab

I would have thought the simplest way round this would be to nerf the city after the player captures them. So in other words the AI gets the bonus, not the city itself. A little bit cheesy and you'd have to check for population caps etc., but as long as it was explained why I would be ok with it. This already happens e.g. when you tame a beast on higher difficulty levels, the version you tame is weaker than the version you fought

I like the idea of the AI playing differently depending on the sovereign's personality, although I assume it would be a lot of work because you'd have to come up with several different viable strategies. The AI rushing the player as soon as it meets you could certainly be interesting, although I'm not sure if it would actually be a more successful strategy, as currently one of the better ways of beating an AI (assuming you don't already have an overwhelming advant