Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes (1.2).

New Tactical Battle Maps. Battles are now much more intense with far more special skills available and initiative being far more important. New combat mechanics - such as swarming increase the strategic options.

Sounds good, so what's the problem?

Let me start first by saying that overall it's a great game, or I wouldn't have spent 90 hours on it altogether so far. That said:

It's Season 476. I am at war with Capitar, the sole remaining enemy faction. Their power is 810, mine is 285. Not only that, but Capitar has twice the number of cities, more income, more research, etc., etc.

Capitar is on the attack, loaded for bear with 8 armies en route to Fort Esiricin (a good strategic choice, in theory, as it's where I'm building all my troops).  5 stacks have already entered my territory, with a sprinkling of heroes, all better than my equivalents. Capitar's main builds are: Marksmen (initiative 16); Knights of Calder (initiative 22, att 72, def 10); Militia (armed with mauls; initiative 14, attt 144-168, def 24). The amies also include a few catapults. Most units have 6 members.

The plucky defenders comprise a sole slender stack: Ruler (lvl 15, Death/fire Archmage) Initiative 29; Lith Serratta (lvl 14, Defender) initiative 29; Ascian (lvl16) Initiative 30; Mounted Archers x4, (5 members, lvl 6-7, Ramshorn Bows) Initiative 24; Magush (lvl 10); last but not least, 1 Fell Dragon (lvl 13).

I can start by casting freeze, wither, pillar of flame, tidal wave, to weaken the stacks a bit.

The battle  tactics are so simple as to be non-existent:

(1) Dragon flames 4-5 Capitar units at the outset.

(2) Ascian mauls the nearest group. Doesn't matter which.

(3) Ruler casts mass curse (She has -1 time buff).

(4) Lith Serratta rests (or could cast haste, it doesn't matter).

(5) Magush rests -just along for the Exp. (or could cast Slow on a big-life enemy hero).

(6) Twang twang twang twang, the archers pincushion the remaining enemy.

(7) Dragon tail swipes the wreckage. (8) Ascian finishes off anyone still standing; if necessary, Ruler finishes the job with a flame dart or flame wave.

No enemy troop ever has the chance to use their splendid weapons.

Frankly, this is a serious AI flaw; why doesn't the AI (particularly one with such a huge lead in development) build at least to some extent to counteract the rather obvious tactic that a player with the 'archer' skill is going to build a lot of fast archers? And why didn't Capitar either build a dragon on its own dragon's lair (which I found much later), for a measly 250 gold, or at least provide some of its troops with fireproof cloaks? Better still, why not fan out across my lands to 3 or four different targets? If AI knows the best enemy units are concentrated in one stack, why not send, say, 2 of the 8 to four different undefended cities?

It's worth contrasting what would have happened in, say, AoW2.  First, AoW2 allowed stacks to 'gang up' so allowing a counterattack in massive force and from several directions in response. Second, AoW2 had a maximum turn mana use limit - not so important for the cursing, which only costs a few mana - but it would have made the freeze, wither, pillar of flame, tidal wave, etc either/or alternatives (compare poison plants, fire storm etc.) Last but not least, AoW2 attacked several strategic targets at once (and there was no 'cloud walk', at least until teleportation gates - a huge investment - were completed.) 

If there's one thing in FE-LH that needs a major overhaul, it's strategic and tactical combat AI.

It sounds like this is the problem....not the battle itself.

Not sure if putting cooldowns on some of these types of strategic spells would help mitigate spell spamming....there should be nothing wrong with casting a strategic spell and thereby you shouldn't be penalized for it ... yet they are powerful...

There are so many strategies the player can use in the late game I'm not sure it's going to be feasible to come up with good AI responses to all of them. What I think could be improved is that the AI makes better use of what it's got. So yes, it should be building dragons etc., it should be focusing more on mounted troops with better initiative and the maximum amount of buffs possible, and it should be making much better use of tactical spells. But to be honest I don't think its troop builds (with the possible exception of the militia) were that bad. It could certainly focus more on buffing mounted troops to give them the best initiative (through magic items etc.), but what conventional army exactly were you expecting to stand up to three heroes average level 15, average initiative 29, plus a dragon? I struggle to think of an AI strategy which would beat that.

As you say, there may be scope for improving the use of cloaks and Nature's Cloak, and there may be scope for improving target selection when it can build a lot of stacks. This could lead to the alternative flaw that it doesn't concentrate its attacks well enough, but on the other hand, I'm not sure there are many targets which you can get with five stacks which you couldn't get with three. So maybe you could put a limit on the number of stacks it sends to attack one target, so it spreads its attacks out a little more. A three stack limit per target would mean it attacked three different targets in your case, which would presumably stretch your defences more.

But I don't think it would change anything very much. Even if it had bought a dragon, had max buffed troops, had a sovereign who cast good tactical spells, and attacked three cities simultaneously, I imagine you'd still win, it would just take longer and you might lose some units, burn more mana and have to run around a bit more. Unless you are resource limited and can't replace your losses after the AI attacks, you should still win quite comfortably.

Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer it if the AI provided more of a challenge when you're fighting epic battles against the strongest enemy faction in your game. But on the other hand, if you have a Stack of Doom, I don't think it should be a great surprise if it kills everything.

Hence....stack of DOOM!

Well, yes, most of my strategy revolves around building a Stack of Doom. I know some similar games (Civilization) have tried to make the superstack a less obvious strategy, but when the entire game revolves around heroes, dragons and super spells, I don't think that would be either easy (or particularly desirable, for that matter).

Off the top of my head, the AI would have to be able to beat:

1) Summoned Skeleton Horde

2) Summoned Lightbringer

3) Fireball

4) Heart of Fire etc. buffed troops

5) Titan's Breath and similar spells which knock units prone (ok, that just means mounted units)

6) Summoned Grave Elemental (gives Death Ward to surrounding units)

7) Dragonbreath

8) Blizzard

9) Horrific Wail

10) Mass Curse

11) Ranged staff troops

And that's before considering basic Haste/ Slow/ Heal/ Shrink/ Growth strategies and strategic spells. A human player is always going to be able to work out some way of building a stack of doom when you have such a rich magic system. I mean, high initiative, warg mounted and buffed ice staff troops + a dragon + a tactically summoning hero + a troop buffing hero + a Fire/Death mage with damage spells... how exactly would the AI stop that?

There still seems to be plenty of scope for the AI cloaking its troops more, buffing its troops better, casting better tactical spells and co-ordinating its attacks a bit better, and I hope that will happen. I don't think the AI is ever going to be able to create and use a Stack of Doom as well as a human though.

Definitely in agreement with the above few posts.  I made a similar remark in a post about AOE magic and dragons.

In sum:

-AI doesn't itself use powerful AOE magic (or dragons) nearly enough.

-AI doesn't use elemental-resistant cloaks or Nature's Cloak to mitigate the damage.

-AI tends to favor troops with extremely poor initiative, letting the human player nuke them into the ground (with whatever type of offense they prefer) before they can even act.

On a separate note, I agree with Frogboy's stance on not placing high priority on player exploits.  If a player is saying "Why isn't this game harder...but I just can't help myself from training 3-man units and then upgrading them to 6 to save oodles of crystal etc..." then that player simply has a problem.   

And as for this:

You can avoid even getting yourself in a situation where your cities stop growing if you make sure to spend time researching the appropriate techs, and building the appropriate improvements in your Towns.  Most likely, you have it in the back of your mind that "Oh, I can put off building that granary because I can just queue a pioneer later if I need to..." so you put it off, and you research Blacksmithing instead of Agriculture, and guess what?  Your towns stop growing!  "Whoops, how did that ever happen?  Oh well, I'm sure I'll need a pioneer at some point..."  and so on...

I'd definitely rather see improvements made in the actual AI, and players left to their own self-discipline regarding intentional exploits in a single-player game.

The game is (or was originally) Elemental: War of Magic.

Limiting Magic in a War of Magic game, because the AI currently can't make even rudimentary use of strategic magic, isn't the answer.  It's lowering the bar, it's giving up, it's the easy way out.

The problem isn't that players use too much strategic magic, it's that the AI uses too little.

The solution is to improve the AI.  After all, there's no MP so the AI is all we have.  Dumbing down the AI only makes the game 'smaller'.

And saying that casting 4 spells is "...spell spamming..." is an interesting redefinition of the term.  And that's not even considering that some of the spells are already limited (such as tidal wave having to be cast within 4 squares of an ocean, etc.).

If the above sounds a bit harsh, my apologies, but I hate the idea that when AI is not up to par, that the solution would be to dumb things down instead of improving the AI.  I think the folks at SD are capable of giving us very good AI, much better than currently exists in the game.  It'll just take some time and the will to do it.

I think with the current level of game development talent it's easier to change the game design so an AI can be written to play it rather than to write a competent AI for a complex game

whether or not that's good or bad for enjoyment depends on personal factors

no 4X game of this complexity has ever had decent AI. I don't know what people consider to be smart opponents, but even if it's quite good relative to other games (eg. Gal Civ 2) it's still extremely weak

Well we disagree then. To be a bit provocative, why do we have FE/LH apply any rules then? Why doesn't the player just decide how many troops they want to have, how powerful they are, how much gold they have, whether they win each battle, etc? Surely the player could make sure they didn't give themselves any unreasonable advantages that exploit this lack of rules?

Trying to win is a key reason why people play strategy computer games (there are other reasons, but I don't think you can dispute that trying to win is a key reason). By definition this means striving to beat the AI by playing the rules of the game. There will always be tactics and strategies which are stronger and playing the game to win basically means trying to optimise your game play to choose the strongest tactics and strategies for the situation you find yourself in.

Now you are saying that the player should deliberately avoid exploiting the game rules. This goes directly against the entire goal of striving to win the game. You are saying the player should try to win but not too hard, which I think is a difficult position to defend.

It also becomes very hard to classify what is an exploit and what is legitimate playing to win. Is building club armies an exploit? The consensus seems to be that clubs are clearly superior to other weapons, should the player deliberately build worse units to avoid exploiting weaknesses in the game rules? Is it an exploit to build your own custom leaders/factions since it is possible to build much more powerful leaders/factions than the default ones? It is a very slippery slope.

Every other strategy game I've played has had a pretty decent set of rules. Sure there are usually some exploits but they usually only arise in rare situations or are arguably not exploits (eg you can do some pretty exploitative things in MoM by combining the right units and spells BUT I'm pretty sure that is deliberate as it appears to be what the game is about, there are many, many ways of becoming very powerful in MoM if you build your faction well).

Unfortunately FE/LH seem to have a lot of exploits that occur regularly, often without the player even trying. The pioneer queuing bug is an obvious example, food limits and growth are core mechanics which determine city levels (a major feature of the empire building part of the game) and have multiple technologies and buildings devoted to them. Yet the entire food/growth mechanics are largely eliminated by this single exploit which is so common that the user can't help but do it to some degree (in that queuing pioneers is a necessary part of the game).

From my point of view it is a no brainer that these core exploits should be fixed. Perhaps they don't matter for people who are not playing to win but they do for those that do, such as me.

Dude...it's a game.  And a SINGLE-PLAYER game at that.  If it FEELS like an exploit to you....don't do it.  If it feels like trying to win....well go ahead.  I for one have NEVER ONCE trained a Pioneer simply to keep my cities growing.  Nor have I trained a 3-man unit with the intention of upgrading them to a larger unit to save resources.  I just don't feel the need or desire to do so.  I DO save frequently, and reload if something goes drastically wrong.   By some people's rules, that would be cheating.  It doesn't bother me though, so I go ahead and do it.  Such is the freedom of a single-player game.

Moreover, regarding the pioneer thing, I'm not sure it's an exploit if you actually BUILD the pioneer.  Because then you are actually losing the population from your city.  If you CANCEL the pioneer after you've moved it to the back of the queue and built the necessary improvements to get more food, then it's an exploit.  And that type of behavior would never come about over the normal course of gameplay.

Anyway, this thread is supposed to be about the AI, not exploitative players, or self-discipline.

I'm not really expecting the AI to be able to challenge a decent human player without lots of handicapping, given the complexity of the game. But if the AI can continue to be improved to eliminate what seem like obvious mistakes to a human, and improved to the extent that Ridiculous and Insane are challenging for a good player to beat, that would be great.

For me the problem with LH is that games end way too fast (disregarding the AI part). Playing on a huge map, I barely explore half of it and get past mid tech research, and the game is over (AI wins by map control, playing vs 10 opponents, we're left 5 when this happens).

My research pace (on expert world / AI) is on par with AI's, my MP is top mid of ladder, my economy / production / research are all up there, yet it seems like they play their own game without me being able to do much about it (even with all troops mounted, buffs and items you can only move & fight so much in a number of turns, even with no casualties).

I can't help weaker AI's against their attackers as I can't send them troops, give them mana or spells, no matter how many resources I pump into them, they won't be able to put a fight and stay in game. I can't have 20 armies of similar strength going in all directions to cut off the swarm of AI troops. If I make it to their area of control and start taking cities there, they just take them from the weaker AI's.

Another thing, the AI seems to disregard completely the distance between the player and it's own territory. They make DoWs (based on faction power) even if by the time their armies will arrive in the vicinity of my territory (if they can get past other AI's / wildlands / lairs etc) I will have researched and upgraded everything I have to the point he would get 1 shot.

I don't find magic use to be in the top 3 things the AI does badly. They usually freeze or tremor me when I enter their territory. I see 2 main problems. The first is the AI does not maximize production enough by prioritizing unrest and and production buildings, especially in new cities, and they still build too many units in non fortresses. Secondly they still do stupid shit like remove half their army from a town I have a huge stack outside of and just let it sit their within easy attack range. The AI doesn't seem to understand that any units near enemy stacks will die.... That's a huge deal.

Freezing me doesn't help them unless they are smart enough to use the time to merge some units and bring up their own stack.

Heh. I think I summed it up best by saying we disagree. I see your point, I just don't agree with it.

To give you some idea of my perspective the most fun I've had in strategy games in the last 5 years has been playing Civ 4 and Civ 5 game of the months from the CivFanatics website. Preset maps and starting positions which you can download and everyone tries to see how quickly they can win by the nominated victory method. Its great fun and all sorts try it, typically the fastest wins are around 200 turns but there are usually others who took 300-400 turns who still happily submit their saves and chat about the game. There are a few exploits which some of the fastest players use (mainly extorting money out of the AI at mid-high difficulty levels in Civ 5, although one could argue that is just a very effective strategy) but by in large Firaxis have closed most loopholes so it comes mainly down to strategy and tactics (and a bit of luck).

I'm not sure it would be possible to run similar GotM for LH simply because the number of exploits are so large and have such a huge effect on gameplay.

I think exploits are related to the AI. If there are lots of exploits then that works against the AI and makes it harder for the AI to provide a challenge. If Civ 5 had the number of big exploits LH does then the fastest people would be completing those GotM in 100 turns and complaining that the game was always too easy.