Blood slave units - transfer?

[Norfleet]

Ceremony: The AI behavior is a known fact: The reason it occurs is because the AI doesn't really make its move until you press host: Unlike a human player, who must decide his move AFTER a hosting, the AI decides his move DURING a hosting....after everyone has already submitted their moves.

Furthermore, the AI is omniscient, a behavior which can readily be demonstrated as a mage travels between provinces in the back of your empire of absolutely no importance....and suddenly....ARROWED!

Obviously, there are certain things the AI is incapable of looking at, or understanding, either because attempting to code them to look at this would reveal blatantly that the AI is, in fact, omniscient, or is beyond the capability of present programming techniques.

Also, not EVERYTHING can be undone. Bad Alchemy, for instance, cannot be undone: If you convert 30 Astrals to 15 Waters, when you try to convert waters to Astrals, those 15 waters will give you 7 Astrals back, not 30. If you alchemize back and forth, you'll just destroy gems. The only way to undo some moves is to redo your entire turn, which isn't a true "undo" at all, but merely a complete disregard of the data written into your 2h, which thus reverts everything back to what's in the .trn, that is never written to in the course of your order-issuing.

What I suspect is actually happening to those blood slaves is that values are imprinted onto them which differentiate them from the standard "Blood Slave". So when the game attempts to collect the blood slaves and repackage them back into the red Xes, it compares the blood slave to the standard blood slave, and a blood slave which fails to match exactly cannot be collected, such as if it were to be wounded and have to heal, or acquired an affliction, or othersuch which rendered it "incompatible" with existing blood slaves. It's just like when you attempt to gift-of-reason a unit, sometimes, you get a single unit representing a stack of completely identical units, but other times, the same unit is listed multiple times despite being the same type: Some data it contains somewhere is somehow different, and thus it is no longer a part of the stack. I suspect that it is this latter behavior which is controlling the blood slave issue, rather than anything relating to how province defense purchasing or alchemy behaves.

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Ceremony: The AI behavior is a known fact: The reason it occurs is because the AI doesn't really make its move until you press host: Unlike a human player, who must decide his move AFTER a hosting, the AI decides his move DURING a hosting....after everyone has already submitted their moves.

Furthermore, the AI is omniscient, a behavior which can readily be demonstrated as a mage travels between provinces in the back of your empire of absolutely no importance....and suddenly....ARROWED!

Uh? this is not exactly true I believe.

While the AI 'moves' during the hosting it doesn't play its side with the advantage of using the knowledge of the orders you just issued (unlike, say Shogun Total War). This is easy to prove: leave an unprotected province & move a strong host in...you will catch the AI attacking the aparently easy target.

The AI's 'omniscence' only extends to knowing which provinces you control (as if it had a few scouts around, same as you do), I do not think it knows what you have in those provinces unless bordering its empire. This is a pretty mild cheat IMO.

Cheers,
Pepe

[Johan K]

Originally posted by ceremony:
If a commander possessing blood slaves enters combat, the blood slaves become units.

They are supposed to revert to pocket blood slaves, but this might fail if the mage has been killed or moved too far away from the slaves.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Wendigo:

quote:

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Originally posted by Norfleet:
Ceremony: The AI behavior is a known fact: The reason it occurs is because the AI doesn't really make its move until you press host: Unlike a human player, who must decide his move AFTER a hosting, the AI decides his move DURING a hosting....after everyone has already submitted their moves.

Furthermore, the AI is omniscient, a behavior which can readily be demonstrated as a mage travels between provinces in the back of your empire of absolutely no importance....and suddenly....ARROWED!

Uh? this is not exactly true I believe.

While the AI 'moves' during the hosting it doesn't play its side with the advantage of using the knowledge of the orders you just issued (unlike, say Shogun Total War). This is easy to prove: leave an unprotected province & move a strong host in...you will catch the AI attacking the aparently easy target.

The AI's 'omniscence' only extends to knowing which provinces you control (as if it had a few scouts around, same as you do), I do not think it knows what you have in those provinces unless bordering its empire. This is a pretty mild cheat IMO.

Cheers,
Pepe

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Generally speaking I would concur with you on this point Pepe, but still doubt still hover in my mind... Last solo game I played, I had only once a seeking arrow hit me, and guess what? It was against my lone crone pretrender who travelled in the midst of my territories. Strange no?

[ February 09, 2004, 10:34: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Wendigo:
The AI's 'omniscence' only extends to knowing which provinces you control (as if it had a few scouts around, same as you do), I do not think it knows what you have in those provinces unless bordering its empire. This is a pretty mild cheat IMO.

I'm not sure I really believe that it is MERELY limited to knowing what provinces you own, which isn't even really a cheat since most humans can figure this out anyway.

However, the AI does seem to have an absolutely amazing knack for knowing where, exactly, your commanders are. On numerous occasions, I've had a lone mage out in the middle no absolutely nowhere interesting, in the deep interior of my empire, trekking about for some mission that only I would even comprehend, and suddenly, out of the blue, as he moves out of a protected dome area.....ARROWED!

And this isn't exactly a rare case, either: Aforementioned mage survived the arrowing, moved to another province, and.....ARROWED!

I find it very difficult to believe that the AI is targetting these things by pure random chance, or else a far larger number of far less interesting commanders would be getting regularly arrowed.

The AI clearly has an awareness of what is going on inside of your territory that outstrips merely knowing what your territory is, including the fact that during one particularly irritating string of arrowings in my capitol (okay, that's not a surprise, most humans can figure out a capitol too), when I stuck up 4 Domes....boom. No more arrowings. Not STOPPED arrowings, but a total halt in arrowings. And I know magic domes give Messages when they stop something.

All I'm saying is that something's up, and the AI knows more than he's letting on. Some things, he probably deliberately disregards, such as the movement of your troops: After all, Shogun did that, and the devs are surely well aware of the infamy of THAT move: It would just be a little TOO suspicious.

I still say there's something REALLY fishy about those sudden arrowings in the most odd places, though.

[Master Shake]

The AI DEFINITELY has some info on the province defence levels you set that turn (i.e., information that wouldn't show up in the province report of a spy). I have hundreds of examples of AI specifically responding to how I set my PD. In fact, I use this to great advanatge ala ceremony to funnel and destroy AI armies.

This AI foresight does NOT extend to army movements as far as I can tell. I do agree that numerous instances of commanders being targeted suggests that the AI has information of commanders locations above and beyond what a human player might normally know.

Personally, I have no problem with the AI cheating. The AI is pretty darn good in this game, but still, a computer oponent needs some sort of cheat boost, especially at high difficulty levels.

[pole_shift]

As far as the AI having information on the whereabouts of your Commanders: have you ever heard of Astral Window? The AI has and seems to like it. You can actually see which provinces have Astral Windows in them (besides your own) if you cast Eyes of God.