[HJ]

I've had quite a few call of the winds/wilds thrown at me from Pangea and Man. I also saw serpent fiends in Mictlan armies, and several of them to boot. I think it might be too early to see a lot of them at this stage of the game, as they require both resources and (in many cases)empowerment to summon, and the AI probably cannot play as fast as experienced and focused human player (I mean, I wasn't able to summon too many creatures either in demo games). The same would go for mages as well. They are around, but probably not in massed Groups as human player would use them.

However, there might be another problem. By looking at the score graphs, the AI always has a very low gem income. This might mean that it's not searching the provinces enough, and hence cannot summon creatures because of the lack of resources. The only times I saw their gem income increase significantly is when Pangea cast Mother oak global enchantment. The AI also gives a decent number of gems to its mages, which is not a bad thing per se, but may further limit the gems available for summons if they don't have a good income to start with. Furthermore, they are constantly moving armies back and forth in their provinces, which I also mentioned in the AI thread, so they might not be able to search them since they are not occupying them for two turns in a row. I guess they are moving the armies because of the starvation issues, which in turn may happen due to the large armies of cheap units that they muster, and they run out of supplies because they are far away from their home castle while they don't build any additional ones. So, this can all be hypothetically linked into a cause-and-effect network, but whether its true and which parts of it actually apply, that I don't know.

Btw, another thing that I saw in the score graphs is that the AI Mictlan is having real problems with their dominion. If I understand correctly, they need to perform blood sacrifices otherwise their dominion won't spread at all. Again, maybe it's still too early in the game, and it remains to be seen how easy it's going to be to do just that when human player plays Mictlan, but they do remain close to their starting dominion value even after 40 turns when everybody else has their values multiplied manyfold. Maybe this is the way it's supposed to be, I don't know. It's just an observation.

[ November 08, 2003, 19:07: Message edited by: HJ ]