Mighty Ai
 

I am a very experienced Dom player, but i have typically played on the difficult level. For the 1st time, i stepped up to mighty, and on cradles map, with 15 computer opponents, i got a crappy spot Valoga(bottom left of top right section) next to the water. By turn 10 1 was at war with ryleh, abysa, ulm, and oceania. Having never played mighty, i feared for my forests. But I took out abysia rather quicky with centaur longbows and mercenaries. I kept a big army at my home castle and defended that against repeated attempts by the 2 water races9oceania coming by land from the west.

Now I have ulm's main castle, ryleh gave up its attacks, and oceania is being driven back. Mother oak, gift health are up. my gorgon is doing very little, while my armies of hoplites, centaur bowmen, white centaurs, and war minotaurs are crushing all they fight. Within 5 turns i will have haunted forest up and its basically game over, even though i own only top eastern part of the map.

I was expecting a much bigger challenge from the AI on the mighty setting(: I only play MA, and i have to say the old ermor in Dom II was tougher challenge.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I saw an increase in difficulty from easy to difficult, and now i've moved on to mighty as well.. not so much. Admittedly i still use about 25% difficult (so someone else can fail early), but i really haven't seen a discernable spike in AI. Moving up to impossible next http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Well, you don't /have/ to use SCs. I don't think any dominions AI has ever been able to deal with them.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I've voiced this in numerous threads so I'm not going to go into details, but personally I find Impossible AI to be a serious misnaming. It's no smarter than normal AI, it just gets more gold, gems etc. That makes it technically harder to play against, but no more challenging. Even people who RP, use suboptimal units, mess around etc should still whomp this level easily.

If you want to make things harder for yourself I suggest you just skip the first 10 turns then start playing. This way you don't out expand the AI in terms of provinces at the start of the game.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Some big issues with the Ai:

The AI that has astral gems do not use them to dispel spells.
Ai seems somewhat oblivious to the disadvantage of fighting someone that has gift of health up. And it also does not seem to dispel burden of time ever, even if it is capable of doing so and the spell is crippling it.

If the AI has the capability, and is at war with someone, they should try to dispel their beneficial spells.

AI also sends it god in solo to fight against silly odds, when it has big armies near by that can be led by the god.

AI does not take scales to fit its race theme. In my present game, on the mighty ai no less, ulm was playing with 3 sloth. The designers should make a few strong themes per race, and let the AI stick with those.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Hmmmmm.....
AIs with unmoving gods. Set it to logical scales. Give it enough gems so that it will use them for things farther down the priority list. And Im guessing remove units from its castle that people dont think it should use.

That can be done. Map or Mod?

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Or the human could give themselves a similar starting situation to the AI. Try taking an AI-style pretender: a chassis that is not appropriate for SC work, no level 9 bless, problematic scales.
The AI's usual bad setup goes quite some way towards nullifying benefits from the difficulty level. Have a look at some AI scales, then try playing with them. See if you can still beat the high difficulty AIs with a weak god - it's probably not realistic to expect massive improvements in AI design unless, as gandalf suggested, someone goes through all the hassle of making a specific map.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I do have a SC, but usually only use her early in the game. Mid game she makes artifacts, and just patrols my own dominion.

I do handicap myself by not using any blood magic, and no spells that kill people. I do not even use stealth to take provinces and set tax rate to 200. I never set the tax rate over 100.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Actually if you want a challenge game against the AI then start a game, pick a map, put all the AIs in. Dont pick a nation for yourself. Then hit accept, accept, accept (it will choose pretender and name it for you, but you will get no scales)

Re: Mighty Ai
 

@Xietor:

better play EA with impossible AI and with vanheim and hellheim next to you.....probably niefelheim too.

its sure going to be fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif)

impossible AI could be a lot harder though...but with vanheim/hellheim your pangea will have a lot of fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif and do not use medusa as SC if you want some difficulty added at all.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

They actually need to make a MA race called Death that is AI only. To challenge experienced players.

They get ermor death dominion, Vampire queen with 10 dominion, max on every scale, except 3 death. Bane lords would be recruitable commander.

Reamination would not produce ghouls and soulless, but banes, wights, vampires, ghosts. Vampire queen would also start with 10 of every magic, and would be programmed to cast death globals, and dispel any human race globals.

Death would start games with complete line spell research from conjuration and evocation already known.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

That can be done as a mod. You should request it in the mod forum.

Not sure why "Vampire Queen" though. One of the complaints is that the AI sends gods to Arena or into combat. Why not boost a Monolith

Re: Mighty Ai
 

it seems to me the only difference when scaling up is the size of the armies you face.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Hopefully the developers read these forums also, and can incorporate some of the ideas into future patches.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

To improve a bit the pretender from the AI, at least when playing in SP, instead of putting an AI and its difficulty in the setup, you could put only Humans. This way you could design yourself each pretenders you want to fight against with its magic paths, scales and dominion strength.

Then you could just get the nations you are not playing going to "Computer Controlled" in the Options when ingame.
But in that case, as i don't find that information in the manual, what would be the level of difficulty the AI that takes control will use ?

Re: Mighty Ai
 

If you switch them to AI from human controlled they're at normal difficulty. Normal is as smart as the AI gets, but they don't get the bonus to stuff that the higher difficulties get (which negates crappy scales anyway).

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I believe that levels higher than Normal simply get more design points at the beginning of the game - no improvement to AI (and I don't think they get bonuses to gold or gems or resources in-game, except from the good scales that they can afford and sometimes happen to take). So creating a nation and then setting it to AI control would be essentially fighting Normal opponents who have the advantage of non-random pretender design. Of course there are plenty of other ways to handicap yourself, some mentioned here already.
Xietor, the developers do read these forums, though not as much as some other people. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for official features that could be implemented as mods; improved AI is always appreciated, of course, and may or may not happen, but most of the suggestions here you can do yourself with little effort.

It *would* be interesting to be able to mod the design points that different difficulty levels give you... Even a half-blind lobotomized AI could probably do pretty well with perfect scales and a quadruple bless... Yeowch, that's scary just to think of!

Re: Mighty Ai
 

They do get bonuses beyond pretender points - it was covered in another thread on the AI (there have been several). The benefit of a non-random pretender design is of little use compared to the bonuses they get at Impossible. The AI will still research at random, use troops at random, never follow a coherent bless strategy etc. So giving them your idea of a good pretender setup is less likely to increase their difficulty than just throwing bonuses at them.

People ask for a lot of features that can be contained within mods or even already are - just look at some of the nation requests. Improved core AI is not something that can be modded. Giving 'cheating' bonuses to the AI is entirely possible to mod, as has been discussed in the mod forum.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Modding is good, but the "official" game should not rely on the players to improve their base product. If simple steps can be taken to improve the AI, it should come as a patch, not as a mod by a player that 1 percent of the player base will download and use.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I believe you can setup pretenders in map files, although I've never tried anything like it. Presumably high-difficulty AIs with custom pretencders could be created that way. I still think that giving the human a bad setup might be easier though.

Improvements to the AI would be quite nice. Second to UI improvements IMO, but still quite important. We did see a big jump from doms2 to doms3. The AI is far more effective now.
AI coding is notoriously difficult for complex games and there are generally complaints about AIs for most strategy games. Things that seem obvious to a human can be very difficult to implement without adding new weaknesses for the computer player. There are very few games indeed which actually improve the AI at higher difficulty levels - unless the AI has been deliberately handicapped at lower ones (for instance, in HOMM4 the easy AI cannot use the 'wait' command in battles). Giving them bonuses and occasionally tweaks to aggression seem to be the way things are usually done. I wouldn't complain about the AI 'cheating'... anyway, it's hardly cheating if the human player has specifically requested a harder opponent.

I'd quite like to see some scenario-type map files that can challenge a human player... but most map files are quite large and I dislike playing anything much over 100 provinces so they probably wouldn't be for me.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

In a way, they kindof do.
In the case of mighty AI, they get more to play with but randomly a really crappy setup. In the case of a human player going AI then they get the same as everyone else but (we would hope at least) a much more logical arrangment. So I would consider someone turned AI to rate more like mighty than like a default standard.

Of course the best of both worlds would be to design the AI, and then set it to mighty. With map commands its not too hard, with mod commands its harder but you can do a LOT more unusual changes.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

No guarantees, but I will look into modifying my SemiRandom project to support adding custom gods and nation starts to existing maps. At least this way you could be guaranteed that an ai god would have scales appropriate to his/her nation. I am not into boosting starting sites and all of that myself, but no reason that it couldn't be designed to allow others to if they so choose.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Ive started a thread to come up with a better designed LA Ermor. I will probably release it initially on a map with a set position but you will be free to grab it and work what can be done as a programmed positioning. As for sites... well LA-E starts with only 1 site so there is room to specifically add 3 more. That could be interesting to choose

Re: Mighty Ai
 

The impossible AI has double the resources and gold of the normal AI (or a human).

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I've got so much still to learn... Thanks for educating me. With such resources, and however many design points you get on Impossible, you could be truly brutal. Makes me even more eager to be able to see the .trn and .2h formats, so as to experiment with new AIs...

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I have played quite a lot of impoosible AI games. It is challenging in the beginning with all those resources. It is still challenging when the top AI has an army doubles your size. My expensive SCs can get killed by armies of a few hundred units with fire arrows or some mages using special spells. It may be a matter of chance though. The challenge quickly disappears after you catch up with the army size. The AI can no longer mass archers and mix high level mages with hundreds of units. Getting the AI to fight SC more efficiently in the mid game seems to be the key to make it a bigger challenge.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I am playing a game on difficult, 275 provinces all the races, with my MA Pangaea/gorgon, against an experienced friend playing pythium. I smell some wrath of god coming soon, and i have no way to dispel it.

I had micitans main castle on about turn 12. It seems like the turns are taking 4-5 minutes to process(: Ulm put up more of a fight, but they are not long for the game. My friend, though, according to the score graph, is having his share of troubles with vanaheim. heh.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I started out playing at Mighty and finally switched to half mighty and half impossible AI. Random. Small map with 5 AI and me.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

I play the old faerun map (like 300 prov, 11 players, 110 prov to win). I tried with half mighty, half impossible...but one of the impossibles ran away with it. I'm even getting utterdarked http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Jotenheim is only a few provinces away from winning, but I might finally be able to stop him. Fun.

So, instead of letting the impossibles beat up on the mightys, I'm trying 11 impossible and actually finding it a bit challenging again, which I like. Frustrating http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif but fun.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

You cuold try the same settings and get totally different results. The AI setting decides how much it gets to work with, but much of their game will be decided by their randoms in pretender, scales, and starting position. Abysia on impossible might accidentally get everything right one time and run the board, but get everything totally wrong the next time and lose to a nation on mighty.

Re: Mighty Ai
 

yeah, its kind of disappointing sometimes. I actually just beat down ctis (or ulm..hmm) I think, and the pretender had W9N8... yet no sacreds in any armies. So, even if they get a good bless build, they might not take advantage of it.

Playing with all AIs at impossible is actually much easier, they can stand up to each other a bit more. So now I'm only fighting 4 wars, and no one is wildly overpowered.

It still annoys me when someone declares war on me and I haven't even found them on the map yet. Like turn 4 and 4 nations decide they hate me http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Mighty Ai
 

Ah, well you're always at war with everyone in Dom3. They just coded the AI behaviour in order to get it attacking indy territory before attacking you and getting wiped out.