Touch of madness on longbows? Ai issue

[Xietor]

Is there any way a small improvement to the ai can be made where it does not cast touch of madness on archers? The ai is not supposed to to be dumb, and that is just plain dumb.

I have trolls etc to man front lines, and 60 longbows to shoot the enemy archers behind the walls. AI casts touch madness on my archers and has them stacked up behind my front lines in perfect formation for the enemy god to get them all with a couple of fire clouds.

[Endoperez]

Touch of Madness has pretty low range. Did you script your mages to cast the spell? If they were ordered to cast it and the longbows were the only target in range, they couldn't have done otherwise.

Sometimes the mages decide to cast berserk spells on stupid targets on their own, and that is indeed a problem, but it's quite rare. It's most annoying when they target other mages. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[thejeff]

It's also possible they were aiming at more useful targets, but missed.

[NTJedi]

Xietor said:
Is there any way a small improvement to the ai can be made where it does not cast touch of madness on archers? The ai is not supposed to to be dumb, and that is just plain dumb.




Unfortunately to play a safe battle nature mages need to stay away from archers and other mages... otherwise I've also seen them cast beserk spells on archers and/or mages. The lvl_1 nature mages should be okay.

[Xietor]

No, they were not scripted to cast touch of madness.

Two other useful changes I would like to see for mages, is (1)where after you set your 5 spells, to have an option to cast only "offensive" spells.

Spells can be broken down between offensive(spells that do damage and kill enemies) and all other spells. An option should exist for your mages to cast only offensive spells. There are times when you only want your troll commander to cast bladewind(like when you are fighting micitan MA), and repeated casting of legions of steel on archers is not needed.

(2) An option where mages only use gems when they are specifically scripted to cast a spell that uses gems. I may want mass regeneration cast once per battle, and no other spells that use gems(swarm). I know you can have a melee commander carry gems and feed them after a battle 1 at a time to the mage, but why not eliminate micro management?

[Taqwus]

Oh, I've seen a lowly mage cast it on his own pretender. Tell me THAT'S not going to hurt his karma...

Nature mages also used to need to be kept well away from Abysians. Haven't tried that combo lately, 'tho.

[Foodstamp]

Let's fix blink while we are at it thanks! I just love it when an astral caster goes through his scripted routine then blinks into the enemy ranks <3.

This normally only happens in the early parts of the game, the AI finds more worthwhile things to cast later on, but early on it can be pretty annoying.

[Ewierl]

Xietor said:
No, they were not scripted to cast touch of madness.

Two other useful changes I would like to see for mages, is (1)where after you set your 5 spells, to have an option to cast only "offensive" spells.



I'd been thinking something very much like this as well. Combat spells could be pretty easily categorized into a handful of groups: attack (direct damage/death/paralyze etc), harass (slow/penalize/curse etc), summon, and buff. Then, mages could have an option for after their specific script runs out to choose, for example, "cast buff" rather than just the "cast spells" currently available.

Heck, if there's any chance this could actually be coded, I'd be happy to volunteer to categorize spells...

[MaxWilson]

Ewierl said:
Heck, if there's any chance this could actually be coded, I'd be happy to volunteer to categorize spells...



That would be really cool. I wonder, though--historically, do game changes that require UI alterations get made in patches, or only in the next version of Dominions?

-Max

[SafeKeeper]

I suggested the breaking-down of spells before, in the lenghty list of suggestions I made prior to the release of Dom 3. Offensive spells, support spells, defensive spells, and whatever the Heck else. Would've been really nice. Being able to toggle gem usage on/off for individual commanders would be nice, too, to make them save the gems they carried for later, more important showdowns.

I think it'd also be nice, though a lot of work for our programming duo, to have spells be more 'intelligent' and dynamic. But I guess that one goes without saying.

[Ewierl]

SafeKeeper said:Being able to toggle gem usage on/off for individual commanders would be nice, too, to make them save the gems they carried for later, more important showdowns.



I thought about that, but I don't think it's practical without a very advanced AI. Just a toggle wouldn't solve the problem, after all; one of my least favorite things to have happen is when I have an army all set up to storm a castle, and my opponent drops a medium-sized army for a field battle outside first (breaking seige, or reinforcements from elsewhere). All those gems and spells and formations scripted for castle-storming get wasted before the main battle. A toggle wouldn't help that situation!

[Xietor]

But a toggle to only cast spells that require gems if scripted would help a ton, and it would not require too much work, would it?

[MaxWilson]

I note that you might also want the toggle to control whether they use the minimum number of gems required; otherwise a D2 mage casting e.g. Shadow Blast will burn 2 gems instead of 1 to try to keep his fatigue down.

It's true the toggle wouldn't solve every situation, but it would eliminate the annoying micromanagement of juggling gems between scouts and mages. It would solve *that* problem, at least.

-Max