If the mods are just xml files deployed to user space then and if you also make it trivial for them to use the xml files you are using, they might support the issue. But if you give them something to debug and they cannot reproduce your problem when they try, or if you make it complicated and difficult for them to even try, or if your files are not valid xml, they will probably not want to waste their time on this issue.
[quote who="Fallenchar" reply="6" id="3300272"]- Pathfinding doesn't always work. Units ignore roads when calculating fastest route[/quote] They will do this when the road is blocked by something hostile. Unfortunately, they will even do this if you have an epic army and the unit blocking the road is a small pack of mites. And, we get no chance to adjust priorities. And ... yes, this needs improvement, but there's a crazy sort of useless sense to it also.
[quote who="Annekynn" reply="6" id="3300913"]Well its certainly possible to get lucky and have the AI do something impressive, but I think thats just circumstance rather than proper planning. Ive yet to see the AI do ANYTHING impressive even just once and im playing on difficulty settings where all the best routines are supposed to be used (or so it says).[/quote] I think this also depends on the sovereign and the resources available to that sovereign. They do take different app
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="3" id="3300945"]There are some high level earth spells that do this. The AI only started to intelligently do this kind of thing in v1.1.[/quote] Which ones? Except for volcano, the high level strategic earth spells I remember explicitly are prohibited from creating mountains.
If the crash is reproducible that is bad for us, but that is good for the developers if you can get them the save file that causes it -- the hardest part of fixing problems is getting them to happen in the first place.
You can always bump difficulty up to a higher setting. Or, if you already have it on insane, you can change the map to make things interesting (though anything that hurts you will probably also hurt the AI and anything that helps the AI will also help you... still, insane can be quite challenging).
If I recall correctly, flamewave is a tactical spell and tornado and tidal wave are strategic spells. But I do not remember any damage description on tornado and tidal wave -- where are you seeing the damage numbers?
I think curgen's volcano can make mountains? I should try that some time... (but I think it takes 10 turns to case, so I do not know if that was plausible here).
Personally, I configure my game so that there are zero turns between save games. So whenever the game crashes I can always load the last autosave to restart from the end of my last turn. I wish the game did not crash, but this is not the only game that I have enjoyed playing that has stability problems, and I am glad that autosave makes living with the occasional crash so easy.
It was modder interest -- interest on the part of people that would be building (and designing) the AIs that I meant. I am not sure how to measure that kind of interest (except by making the API and seeing how people react, but that takes time and effort).
But if Stardock makes it possible for a player designed AI to play the game, that opens up a whole new kind of game play (and modding). We could have AIs that are only capable of playing a specific sovereign or a specific faction or a specific map size or whatever. We could watch player created AIs compete with each other. If AIs can read from files, this could even be a basis for someone to make a "play by mail" mod for FE... The risk of course is that for this to b
since the AI territory is typically dark you mostly do not see attacks. Sometimes you do, but usually your only clue is resources appearing (when a settlement gets overrun) or sometimes a road to nowhere (if they are not implicit in your map) or some other secondary evidence (like maybe noticing that a temple is now an altar...)
Ideally, the AI would have goals it wants to achieve and obstacles it wants to overcome, and these would add precedence to any relevant options when the AI needs to make choices. Currently, it does not have anything like that. And, I suspect, for level up perks, it always picks the first option.
The AI is also weak in the late game.
[quote who="Kalin" reply="84" id="3299992"]I never said that, I just said that magic isn't a real solution to dodge stacking, nor is expecting accuracy trait on troops to be some magical fix. By the time the AI can get 40 mana per turn, the game would be in its final stages... dodge troops would have wiped the floor with them before that ever happen. The same is true for troop design (nevermind that the AI can't design its own units). If you expect them to suddenly rush a d
[quote who="Kalin" reply="82" id="3299950"]I'm not sure what you expect me to say? If you want the AI to devote all their time to working on accuracy, all that will happen is that the player will ignore dodge (because it becomes meaningless). If you want them to dynamically assess such need, then it becomes a preparatory problem, where they don't have enough time to react and field a counter (by the time the threat arrives, it'll often be too late). This, of course, completely ign
[quote who="Kalin" reply="80" id="3299909"]Lucky actually isn't so bad by itself, it only becomes a problem when you get to 80+ dodge (that's the only time that it would rival wraith's blood). By then it's already too late. I fear you're just looking for something to blame when the real problem is staring you in the face.[/quote] Is there a reason you entirely ignored my commentary on accuracy and magic?
[quote who="abob101" reply="76" id="3299698"]Maybe the to hit chance floor should be 10% rather than 3% for everyone... That would go someway towards counter balancing the dodge stack strategy?[/quote] I am not sure that that's a good idea. The issues, I see, for dodge stacking include: The AI has some severe disadvantages, for building high accuracy armies. The AI sovereigns do not use magic properly. Lucky makes dodge stacking easier.</
[quote who="baddl" reply="7" id="3299567"]Exactly.[/quote] Ok. That is surprising -- I have not seen this issue. When I move units out, I have never seen the remaining units change. I imagine stardock's people will want to fix this (once they are back from vacation, and if they understand how to make it happen -- I do not know how to make it happen myself, so I cannot explain that to them).
[quote who="baddl" reply="5" id="3299518"]The splitting is exactly what does not work for me. With that mechanism in place, if I move two slow (2 MP) units out of a group separately, the rest of fast (5 MP, say) units won't be able to move. Does that mean I have to do it in a different order? So where is the interesting part in all that pointless micromanagement? I rather suspect an invalid optimization of the pathfinding problem behind that counterintuitive behavior. Age of Wo
[quote who="Kalin" reply="75" id="3299531"]The game in that ss was on expert, normal pacing, medium map. After I mowed over my neighbor early (magnar with a ton of useless slave troops - couldn't hit me if they had 1000x my army) and absorbed his cities the game was effectively won. So I just went around and cleared the wildlands and allied everyone afterwards. It was just a quick test game anyway. Having said that, the dodge strategy has been known to work on even the highest
You do get forts by taking them from the AI, but JonSarik is right that those forts typically do not have any essences.
[quote who="Kalin" reply="1" id="3299182"] Outposts has all the basic building, Town has the basic buildings + Market, Grocer, and Growth lines of buildings, + Missionary Hall Fortress has the basic buildings + Forge and Training lines of buildings, + Walls Conclave has the basic buildings + Herbalist and Sage lines of buildings[/quote] I think I would call the initial state of a settlement a "village" rather than an "outpost" -- the game also has
It's perhaps worth noting that on default settings it's easy to get into a situation where there's no wildlands or creatures left to level on.
I think governors are great for city defense -- if you ever have a need for an army to garrison a city, a governor is not going to make that particular situation worse and over time you'll have a better army because of the bonuses provided by the governor. In a way governors are similar to building city improvements which provide production -- you do not get an immediate benefit so sometimes they are the wrong choice. But if you can survive long enough the benefits