Well, I'm through with the game

[Aezeal]

Comperatively the AI in dominions is worse than in other games. Dominions has so much options that while AI in games has usually say x different strategies, it might also have those in dominions but x is just to low compared to all options here.
- Ai should have better pretender/scales design
- AI should be able to get enough supplies for itself
- AI should have notion of which troops are good/decent/bad and never spend money on anything in the bad group (couldn't you add a secret tag to troops saying this?)
- AI should be able to somewhat use and counter SC/thugs...

sure they will never beat humans but then SP would already be somewhat better and in SP more would be needed from a player.
In SP I coudn't really see why a SC would be so good.. since my regular armies and 1-2 mages also beat everything.. my first MP game showed me differently

MP rocks

[kasnavada]

In SP I coudn't really see why a SC would be so good.. since my regular armies and 1-2 mages also beat everything.. my first MP game showed me differently

I couldn't agree more. I'm learning to see dominions and tactics differently since I started MP games. I learned that scripting could make the difference between losing and winning (I found some of the winning ones and lots of the losing ones), the point of using thugs and SC, the effect of micromanagement, that raiding actually hurts a lot. Hell, I even have found at least one good way to use harpies in a pangaean army (not patrolling!). And I'm not yet above turn 30 in the MP games I play...

[Twan]

I don't find time to continue these games, but had good experiences of challenging SP in dominions 3, using boosted AIs (with mod and map changed to give them immobile researchers, more gem income, better scales and pretenders etc...). Of course the AIs are still stupid, but if you give them about 80 RP / 20 gems a turn at start, they tend to use their mages more.

I guess I should post my AI boosters on the maps&mod forum one day.

[llamabeast]

Yep, as Twan says, you can use map commands to design the AI pretenders yourself, and then they can still be on Impossible or whatever. You can easily set it up so that the game is extremely difficult to win.

I have to agree that in the late game the AI can't compete with things like SCs and ingenious use of battle magic. But difficulties like death scale use are very easy to fix.

[Chris_Byler]

Aezeal said:
- AI should have notion of which troops are good/decent/bad and never spend money on anything in the bad group (couldn't you add a secret tag to troops saying this?)

You could, but it would be nearly as much effort as just *improving* the bad troops (in stats, cost, or whatever it is they're so bad at), which would clearly be a better move.

[Edratman]

I am a SP player because I am sure that I would not be able to fulfill my obligations to a MP game.

But I am going to join the ranks of the defenders for the SP game. I enjoy the SP game. The AI whipped my butt for several weeks before I caught on. Now it is faily easy for me, but I still enjoy the games. I've tried the all human start, map modding to give the AI an advantage, scales variations, etc, but it is still beatable. (I must admit that I only start in a corner because I got overwhelmed by 5 neighboring opponents last time I didn't. That tells me the AI has some degree of competance, at least in the early game.)

I limit my play to 100 to 125 province maps and still do not finish games because of the micromanagement. That bothers me only a little bit. The major issue with this is that I quit before I've researched all the spells. (Tried easy research and didn't like it, probably because it changed the rhythm of the game as I learned to play it.)

I read the MP posts and it does seem to be a lot more fun and a much more intricate game. Players are always referring to situations, tactics and combinations that I have never encountered or even had occasion to use.

But the SP game still amuses me after a year. What more can one ask of a game? And as several others have said, what strategy game AI is any better?

[Endoperez]

People still play the demo of Dom:PPP to avoid the turn limit.


Think about that for a while.

Dom:PPP's sprites are half that of DomII/3, and those sprites aren't nearly as well drawn. The maps are pixel-porridge that's nigh unlegible with the base colors of the maps that come with the game. Province info (magic sites, dominion, statistics) takes perhaps 1/3rd of the screen, and commander view (about 9 commanders at once) another third, while gems aren't shown until you go to laboratory. That means that you have less info visible at once, but it takes so much space that only one third of the screen shows the map, at once. I don't think you can zoom the map either. But I recently found a thread named Dominions: Priests, Prophets and Pretenders because the original demo HAS NO TURN LIMITS and wider selection of nations, and thus the poster played it rather than the later demos.

I found the thread from Dwarf Fortress forums, who are used to bad interfaces and not-so-good graphics, but it's still rather amazing.

[lch]

Endoperez said:
People still play the demo of Dom:PPP to avoid the turn limit.

Next thing you're telling me that there's still people playing Conquest of Elysium, too.

Endoperez said:
I found the thread from Dwarf Fortress forums, who are used to bad interfaces and not-so-good graphics, but it's still rather amazing.

Ah, those people. Masochists.

---

The idea of having pre-made pretenders for the AI is interesting. Or at least some templates that can get modified/mixed/mutated like in genetic algorithms. Very often you have problems where the initial task of finding a good/valid solution is very hard (time schedules for example) if you do it by random / trial-and-error, but once you have found a valid solution you can quite easily find other solutions by modifying that one a little, through point mutations (little changes to the initial concept). Other games like Armageddon Empires go as far as having a very good AI, but a collection of some couple dozen premade decks for the AI with some hints how it should use them, something like an AI personality of sorts if you want. If we'd ever see stuff like this in the Dominions series, it would be a major success I'd think.

[Edratman]

One change that (I think) would benefit the AI and is easily accomplished is to hard code the temperature to ideal for each nation and then hard code growth, luck and research to 3 (my preference)for all AI nations. Maybe reduce AI points somewhat, but not entirely, to reflect the scales adjustment.

This would satisfy KO's preference for random deities to give each game a different aspect, yet it would remove the glaring weaknesses of AI random scales selection and give it an edge in decidedly benefical scales.

And hard code Mictlan to an awake pretender so they don't die a dominion death in the first 2/3 turns.

[Rich]

I never play mp. The main reasons I bought this game is that it looks like fun and especially is advertised that it has a "challenging ai."

Haven't had much time to play it yet. Was about to really study the manual and do the tutorial again but now I don't think so.

It would be nice if publishing companies had some honesty in their advertising.