[Arker]

Sindai said:
Ideally, every single battlefield spell would have a "desirability" function that observes factors about the battlefield situation and tries to gauge the usefulness of each spell. Then just cast the most useful spell.

Actually I *don't* think this would be a good thing, at least not exactly as you explain it. Part of the charm of Dominions2 is the way combat is never completely controllable, things never go perfectly. There's a saying 'no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy' and while it's exagerrated for effect, there's a lot of truth there. I wouldn't want the AI to always make the optimal move.

I like it being somewhat random. People in battle are somewhat random. They make decisions based on imperfect information, without the time to sit down and weigh all the factors and think it all through carefully, and that means a lot of the time they don't make the best choices.

But that said, yes, what would be good would be for it to have at least some grasp of these factors. Casting BoW then bunching up with a bunch of friendlies with no cold resistance is taking it way beyond realism into the land of the absurd, for instance. And that's what's so frustrating about it for me, I guess, it's not that I'm taking friendly fire (I take that all the time, naturally I don't like it, but in a wierd way it adds to the charm of the game... in cases where it makes sense.)

This would take a lot of coding and testing but is probably not totally unfeasible, mostly because a lot of spells have basically the same behavior. For example, there's scads of projectile spells that all function in basically the same way. There's a lot of spells that hit the whole battlefield. There's a lot of personal protection spells. There's a lot of summoning spells. And so on and so forth.

It's my understanding it *does* pretty much what you said, *in regards to those spells.* That is, direct damage spells, it tends to favour those, and it does seem to be calculating which spell is the best choice at that moment, to damage the enemy. For instance, Ulm Master Smiths will cast blade wind against light infantry, but switch to magma bolts for knights, which is exactly what they should do. I have a little problem with that part of the routine - for instance, when the knights are in position to hit my infantry next turn, and there's a big group of slingers waaaay back where they won't be able to do anything for a couple more turns (as if they could do anything to my troops anyway) I'd really like it if at least *part of the time* my smiths were smart enough to realise that the knights are what they need to be focusing on, instead of racking up meaningless kills on those slingers and letting the knights hit my line unscathed... even though it might be worse in terms of winning or losing, I'd rather see it cast the wrong spell but at the right target, i.e. hit the knights with blade wind. Stupid, but at least it would seem more tactically aware. If they'd hit em with the earth sink or whatever it's called, which does no damage at all, but locks em in place for a bit and lowers their defence... now *that* would be sweet AI.

Anyhow that's a comparitively minor point. They do seem to calculate what spell will do the most immediate damage to enemy troops and cast that.

The big problem is with the spells that don't fit that mold. The buffs and utily spells basically, tangle vines, aim, protection, blink (THAT one can really cause problems too) anything that doesn't do direct damage... the AI doesn't seem, from my observation, to have any underlying logic at all to when they cast those, they just seem to pull one out of the hat and throw it out like 'what the heck, I have absolutely no clue.' Throwing out fire clouds directly in the path of their own troops when the enemy is running away, for another example to add to the ones we've run into the ground I've seen that several times. Most of the time it does silly stuff it's not directly destructive though, and so you don't notice it unless you're paying close attention... casting strength buffs on other mages when those knights are charging the heavy infantry line for instance... watch closely for it and you'll see, but it's not even in the same league with BoW for annoyance, and as long as it doesn't happen too often it actually makes the thing seem more 'human,' no?

I don't want it to be perfect, but I do want it to simulate someone with something approximating a clue. And it really *does* do that most of the time. Just needs some work on certain spells...