SP AI definitely still questionable.

[JaydedOne]

I'm surrounded on two sides by Pythium, with about 100 troops in each force and his Pretender leading one of those forces and sitting pretty in his castle. So, I sit and wait as I'm marshalling my troops.

Next thing I know, I've got a "You killed our God!" message.

I check the battle replay and Pythium sent its Father of Serpents... and 8 bodyguards to fight my 120+ Shinuyama army and Pretender? What's up with that?

Definitely still needs some polish. I'm just not sure in what universe the AI thinks that's a good idea...

[Gandalf Parker]

What were the other settings? Was it easy AI on Aggressive setting?

[JaydedOne]

Difficult AI. Normal setting.

[Twan]

Perhaps his pretender was supposed to be followed by an army, but the commander leading this army was killed before moving (assassination, magical attack...). Was Pythium the only AI ? If not this suicidal attack may be the result of another AI action.

[Cainehill]

Frankly, it jibes with what I've seen - sometimes the AI brings a proper army, other times it sends a prophetized warlord with 5 troops against 60-70 barbarians.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think that the problem is it runs like this...

Create ArmyA
Fill ArmyA
Send out ArmyA

The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.

[Theonlystd]

Killed most of an ulm army.

They routed.

And the next turn the last surviving commander and 15 troops attacked my 5 mages,pretender and 120 troops..

I was a bit confused.

[JaydedOne]

I -was- assassinating commanders in an adjacent province, but it seems strange to me that the AI wouldn't think to maybe bring more than one commander as back-up. ;-)

[Ballbarian]

In my current game, the AI player used Faery Trod to take a forest province right next to my capitol! I don't recall ever seeing the AI use that spell in Dom2. Correct me if I am wrong, but I was impressed. My main armies were rampaging through Arco's lands and readying to siege his capitol when suddenly a hefty chunk of his army was on my doorstep. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Arralen]

JaydedOne said:
I -was- assassinating commanders in an adjacent province, but it seems strange to me that the AI wouldn't think to maybe bring more than one commander as back-up. ;-)



Of course there are surely some bugs left in the AI, as those are the hardest to track down and squash completely.

But in this case "bringing a back-up commander" wouldn't have helped, as it doesn't work that way, and you should know that, as it works for both AI and human players the same way: Units are moved in squads, and squads are assigned to commanders. If you assassinate a commander on the very same turn as the AI moves its army, the assassination will happen directly before movement.

Therefore the AI wouldn't know about the dead commander before the next turn. And all squads assigned to that commander will be left behind in the movement phase, as there's no way how they could get "auto-transfered" to another commander.

Instead of whining about an AI bug you should congratulate yourself on the perfectly timed assassination!

[Hammerstein]

Im currently trying the demo (oh god why isnt my copy here yet) and have cranked up some province defenses to 50, which gives you quite a lot of troops. What I noticed is that the AI will throw wave after wave of units against highly defended provinces and often take horrible losses.

Yet it manages to get another another huge army up by the next round. Obviously the AI uses every resource in every available province to ship troops to the front. I still hate this part of the game, if you do this as human opponent it takes an ungodly amount of micro-managing to achieve the same, once you control 20+ provinces it takes forever to ship your units anywhere.

So was this changed in DIII or do you still have to do all of this manually to counter this AI strat ?

[JaydedOne]

Arralen,

I think you misunderstand my point. By back-up commander, I mean that he had roughly 200 units in nearby provinces. I assassinated a single commander. The AI brought the Pretender and another two commanders without squads, ending up with about 12 units against my 120. I don't know why it didn't split squads up between commanders (as most players I know usually do).

Furthermore, I'd been consistently assassinating in the support province for about three turns. So it wasn't a complete surprise, although I wouldn't fault the AI for not being able to root out assassins or anticipate future attempts.

So I'm not "whining" about a bug. I just feel that my assassination, decent as it was, shouldn't have yielded the surplus results that it did. Particularly since the AI called the God back within about three turns and then proceeded to do the exact same thing all over again.

[Taqwus]

Fairly odd choice of items: the LA Marignon Bahomet that my Starspawn killed lately was wearing a fire-resistance ring, giving it a rather high Fire Resistance of 200. *shrug*

Odd choice of spells: watching a Starchild, fighting solo in an assassination, cast 'Communion Master'. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/redface.gif

[DominionsFan]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think that the problem is it runs like this...

Create ArmyA
Fill ArmyA
Send out ArmyA

The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.



I think that this could be fixes. Example: The AI shouldn't move his pretender to battle, unless it is commanding a very strong army. Let's say an army of 500 troops minimum. That way the AI pretenders wouldn't be killed like they are now [pretender + 15 troops are attacking a province what is defended by 400 troops etc.]
The other thing what is a bit weird still, that the AI sometimes attacking a province what is defended by 200-400 troops with like 3 commanders and 20 units. Imho there should be a code for this situation also. It should work like the code for the pretenders. IE...don't attack a province what is defended by many troops with a very small army.
Hopefully these codes can be added. That would drastically change this given situation.

Anyways regardless of these problems, the AI is much better compared to the Doms 2. AI already. We are on the right track lads. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Twan]

Real AIs (AIs who learn after a mistake and adapt to your strategy like a chess bot) are very rare even in big budget games. So I think you shouldn't expect the dom AI not to repeat the same errors. Games AIs don't think like humans, and the dom AI certainly don't have a memory to remember past failures to take a province or past assassinations.

Anyway to make assassinations less effective, the AI may be coded to split armies between as many commanders as possible each time several commanders moving to the target province are available, or may be coded to evaluate more efficiently province defence ; but don't expect it to ask itself "why did I've failed" then adapt its strategy.

[Agrajag]

Maybe the AI is trying to use his pretender as an SC, but isn't very good at it http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

[Meglobob]

JaydedOne said:
Difficult AI. Normal setting.



There r now two more settings above this for the AI. I don't think u can complain about the AI until u can beat several impossible AI's in SP.

An AI is good if its a challenge to beat and keeps yr interest. No AI will ever be as good as a human, we learn, a AI just gets updates or patches. So is the AI challenging u and keeping u interested?

[Cainehill]

Don't think the issue with the AI not bringing troops has anything to do with assassination - in the game I saw the behavior, Abysia was the only nation with assassins, and it's the one that sent the Prophet and 5 infantry against 70 barbarians.

[DominionsFan]

Meglobob said:

JaydedOne said:
Difficult AI. Normal setting.



There r now two more settings above this for the AI. I don't think u can complain about the AI until u can beat several impossible AI's in SP.

An AI is good if its a challenge to beat and keeps yr interest. No AI will ever be as good as a human, we learn, a AI just gets updates or patches. So is the AI challenging u and keeping u interested?




2 impossible AIs just kicked my butt in my first full SP game. I was with Ulm. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Injured.gif
C'tis has moved like 1000 units to my capital at turn 36 in 2 turns, needless to say that my main armies were far away, since like ~1200 enemy troops were messing around at the north side of the island.
My SC pretender and 150 troops were massacred easily.
The AI is definitely much better now.

[Archonsod]

Gandalf Parker said:
The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.



I'm not so sure it's a problem. I've noticed the AI tends to move several armies into a position to attack the same province. While the small army attack isn't going to win, it can put you in trouble if you can't replace the troops it killed before the larger armies attack.
I've seen the AI use attrition type tactics against my better defended provinces a few times. I was quite impressed actually - the province it was attacking was essential to my supply lines to the South, and it repeatedly hit it over four turns. I had no castle nearby, so it ended up grinding down my numbers before launching a huge army into the province, well before relief could arrive.

[Teraswaerto]

Archonsod said:

Gandalf Parker said:
The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.



I'm not so sure it's a problem. I've noticed the AI tends to move several armies into a position to attack the same province. While the small army attack isn't going to win, it can put you in trouble if you can't replace the troops it killed before the larger armies attack.




That may be, but sending the prophet or pretender with a small army on what's essentially a suicide mission is what I'd call a problem.

[Archonsod]

Depends on the pretender I guess. If they're immortal and your in their dominion, it makes perfect sense.
Besides, I've used my pretender on suicide missions myself, especially if they can cast some nasty spells. If your in a last ditch defensive situation, using your pretender as a nuke can sometimes be useful. I dunno, the pretender as a whole is far less important in Doms 3. In fact, each time I've set an awakening option I've had nothing for the pretender to do by the time they arrive.

[Teraswaerto]

Sure, in some cases it can be a good idea to let your pretender be killed (not so much with the prophet though), but I doubt the AI behaviour is limited to those cases.

[Archonsod]

I don't know, I've only managed a few games so far. I haven't seen the AI attack with it's pretender when it wasn't on the ropes though, I've also noticed a few more inanimate pretenders being taken by the AI.

[moodgiesanta]

I think it is vastly improved, since I lost maybe two games of Dom 2 in all the time I played it (I only play SP) but have lost 3 of 4 games so far with Dominions 3.

The biggest problem that has been around since I first got Dom 2 is enemy pretenders picking death-3 scales on non-Ermor nations. This is probably the single most frustrating thing about Dominions to me. I hate coming to a new nation and killing its 100 total troops and taking its 5000-person populated capital all due to heavy death scales. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[Cainehill]

We're not talking immortal pretenders / prophets, nor last ditch situations : in my case, Abysia was _ahead_, only me coming close, and yet they pissed away prophets and pretenders to no good purpose.

It still ain't particularly good as an SP game.

M-Santa : Worse : Non-death AI nations casting Burden of Time in Dom2. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

[Boron]

Caine you are imho to harsh to the AI.

The AI builds now castles, so imho you are challenged enough if you take impossible AIs. The big AI hordes usually give you lots of trouble.

The suicidal Gods might be a bit annoying, but if you take a look at Aow 2 SM or Warlords 4, there the AI is rather suicidical with their Heroes too.

The AI imho provides enough challenge in SP and given the complexity of the game you can imho call the AI decent.

[Leif_-]

It's a pity Illwinter didn't include a bot interface to Dominions III. It might have been fun to play around with.

[DominionsFan]

Boron said:
Caine you are imho to harsh to the AI.

The AI builds now castles, so imho you are challenged enough if you take impossible AIs. The big AI hordes usually give you lots of trouble.

The suicidal Gods might be a bit annoying, but if you take a look at Aow 2 SM or Warlords 4, there the AI is rather suicidical with their Heroes too.

The AI imho provides enough challenge in SP and given the complexity of the game you can imho call the AI decent.



I totally agree. The AI is much much better now. I've almost never lost an SP game in Doms 2 [just in very rare situations, like a 5+ front war]. Now that I have the full game, I've played 2 MP games so far, and 1 SP game. I lost that SP game against impossible AIs. In fact I was owned. Well the situation was bad too, since I started in the middle, so basically I was attacked from south first, then an other AI began to invade me from north with a huge army, and a couple of other smaller armies. Impossible AIs are a hardcore challenge now.


There are some things what should be improved regarding the AI [especially when the AI is doing insane things like attacking a province defended by 200 troops with 20 troops an 4 commanders, or 20 troops and a pretender], but which AI is perfect? I am sure that the devs will try to improve these problematic things as well.

[Daynarr]

DominionsFan said:

Boron said:
Caine you are imho to harsh to the AI.

The AI builds now castles, so imho you are challenged enough if you take impossible AIs. The big AI hordes usually give you lots of trouble.

The suicidal Gods might be a bit annoying, but if you take a look at Aow 2 SM or Warlords 4, there the AI is rather suicidical with their Heroes too.

The AI imho provides enough challenge in SP and given the complexity of the game you can imho call the AI decent.


There are some things what should be improved regarding the AI [especially when the AI is doing insane things like attacking a province defended by 200 troops with 20 troops an 4 commanders, or 20 troops and a pretender], but which AI is perfect? I am sure that the devs will try to improve these problematic things as well.



Note that those can be considered 'probing attacks'. AI will lose those battles 100% of the time IF you keep those forces in that province. If you decide to move them, you will lose that province. That way AI effectively ties your forces to a province. It shouldn't be doing that with pretenders though.

Also, AI's can make dumb things sometimes. Declaring AI as dumb just because it does those things sometimes will make us ALL dumb as will ALL do dumb things sometimes. Simply put Caine, you didn't play with this AI long enough to declare it good or bad.

[DominionsFan]

Hm actually "probing attacks" can be good you are correct. Perhaps you are right, and the AI is doing it with a purpose. However yeah, pretenders shouldn't take a part in probing attacks.

The other thing what should be upgraded is the AI pre-game nation design algorithm. AIs shouldn't take very bad scales, especially not the difficult -> impossible AIs.
Also, they should take the proper magic paths what are the best for the given nation. [Example: EA Agartha -> earth, fire, death mainly]

Overall I am absolutely impressed about the AI really. It is building lot of castles, and fielding massive/strong armies.
Today I don't have time to play sadly, but tomorrow I will try to play a long game, and check the endgame AI tactics. I wonder if it is gonna summon units properly or not for example. Maybe that part of the AI has been upgraded also.

[Frostmourne27]

DominionsFan said:
The other thing what should be upgraded is the AI pre-game nation design algorithm. AIs shouldn't take very bad scales, especially not the difficult -> impossible AIs.
Also, they should take the proper magic paths what are the best for the given nation. [Example: EA Agartha -> earth, fire, death mainly]



This isn't such an issue though, since it's much, much harder to diversify, and having a bit of say nature magic on an agarthan pretender is actually quite good, since with a bit of searching, maybe some tribal shamans and empowerment... The problem I see with AI pretender design is that it takes magic between six and nine which is weird. Six casts allmost all spells, and nine gives bless. Why would anyone take in between? Except if you've calculated things and a rushing for utterdark or something. But the computer doesn't think that deeply, so those are waster points, and in some cases (say, death magic on a great sage, or something they don't start with) it can be a LOT of points.

[Nerfix]

Well, people would take styff like Ghost King with Water 1 Fire 1 Earth 3 Air 2 to get acces to almost all of the buff spells...

[DominionsFan]

Frostmourne27 said:

DominionsFan said:
The other thing what should be upgraded is the AI pre-game nation design algorithm. AIs shouldn't take very bad scales, especially not the difficult -> impossible AIs.
Also, they should take the proper magic paths what are the best for the given nation. [Example: EA Agartha -> earth, fire, death mainly]



This isn't such an issue though, since it's much, much harder to diversify, and having a bit of say nature magic on an agarthan pretender is actually quite good, since with a bit of searching, maybe some tribal shamans and empowerment... The problem I see with AI pretender design is that it takes magic between six and nine which is weird. Six casts allmost all spells, and nine gives bless. Why would anyone take in between? Except if you've calculated things and a rushing for utterdark or something. But the computer doesn't think that deeply, so those are waster points, and in some cases (say, death magic on a great sage, or something they don't start with) it can be a LOT of points.



Well I meant, that sometime the AI is taking magic paths what is making no sense with the given nation. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif
I agree with your statement, that the AI also shouldn't take magic between 6 and 9. It should be coded like, 6 or 9. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[Agrajag]

What if you want Nature-8, for Regeneration, with Berserk messing with your mages?
What about taking Death-7 + the 2 death boosters (assuming both are still in dom3 and no new ones were added) so you can cast Utterdark?
There are other cases where you might want just 8 or 7, so just hard-coding 6 or 9 isn't that good of an idea. Perhaps make the AI less likely to take 7 or 8, depending on nation and/or standard/agressive/defensive.

[Frostmourne27]

Maybe not as a black and white rule, but still, it's not really worth it, since the computer will rarely do sensible things with them. Bless effects aren't that much better at eight as opposed to six (+1 attack, defence, 5% extra regen etc) comparedd to the points needed. wrt path boosting, there are other ways around that - Death six mage can forge scepter of dark regency, and then cast utterdark. Without artifacts: ring of sorcery, skullface and skull staff - more expensive, and needs an astral mage, but hey - computer probably won't forge sensible path boosters in any event.

[DominionsFan]

Agrajag said:
What if you want Nature-8, for Regeneration, with Berserk messing with your mages?
What about taking Death-7 + the 2 death boosters (assuming both are still in dom3 and no new ones were added) so you can cast Utterdark?
There are other cases where you might want just 8 or 7, so just hard-coding 6 or 9 isn't that good of an idea. Perhaps make the AI less likely to take 7 or 8, depending on nation and/or standard/agressive/defensive.



Well if I can get 8, then I surely wouldn't skip 9.
You are right however theres a small point in taking 7 or 8, but still, it is much better to take 9 for full bless effect.