[halfzware]

I'm a big fan of MP games in general, but a D2 MP gameis a too much of a commitment for me, so I stick with SP. Currently SP has a lot of problems, so I was thinking about putting together a mod to address some of those problems.

The biggest issue SP games face is the weak AI. The AI generally takes the attitude that more has to be better, and as such produces a ****load of troops. The problem is that most of those troops suck.

With your basic two map types (wrap around maps with zero impassable squares (inland, eye) or your more choke friendly maps (paragnos) - you are faced with two crappy options. Either a frustrating game where maintaining a border is impossible, and the AI just throws 30-50 armies of 60-300 crappy units at total random -- or you get a dull game where you put a couple good armies at critical points and the AI just throws endless useless troops at you with no chance of winning. Both these options suck.

Ideally one could play one of the more choke friendly maps against the AI and have the AI be roughly capable of putting up a fight. I think the only way to remedy this is to manipulate what the AI builds.

I messed around a lot with two great mods, the recruitable rebalance mod, and the conceptual balance mod (national). Both of these seek to rebalance basic troops, but they both take very different directions.

CB basically slashes recruitment costs across the board.
RR basically buffs recruitable units.

A great example of both is javellen troops. CB reduces the cost to ~5. RR increases the damage and precision. Both make javellen troops useful early game, although in very different ways.

Although your multiplayer milage may vary, for SP - the CB approach seems better. The AI can already output huge amounts of troops, so reducing gold cost is not a good idea here - making more or less anything recruitable useful is much friendlier to the AI, and makes for a more interesting game IMO. The real key to any AI tweeking mod would have to start with improving recruitable units.


Gold and Resources
I also took a serious look at the effects of different resource and gold settings on the AI. Greatly increasing available resources had a surprisingly good effect. The AI produced much larger quantities of much better troops.

My guess at why this happened is: the AI wants to spend all its gold every turn. It buys a bunch of troops from its one fort, then spends the rest of its often sizeable income on whatever else it can buy once it hits the resource limit in capital.

So the more you increase its resources, the more it spends its gold in national troops - often mixing in healthy doses of high end troops. This is exactly what the AI needs to do to put together better armies, so its a step in the right direction.

Another nice thing is the split between resources and gold. A large increase in resources, with only a minor increase in gold allows the production of many higher quality national troops without the player being overly able to spam mages.

Scales
The AI takes seemingly random scales. That means that the more punishing the scales are, the more the AI suffers. The biggest problem with regards scales - and with regards to the AIs tendency to field HUGE armies is supply.

The easy fix to this is to just wildly increase available supply, while decreasing the effect that negative scales have on supply. The problem with this is players can abuse the hell out of this.

Since my goal here is to make the AI as competitive as possible, increasing supply, while slightly reducing the supply penalty for bad scales (perhaps which increasing other negative effects) is probably the best approach. If players want to abuse this, its their time and their game.

Summoning Spells
The AI likes summoning a lot more in recent patches. One of the problems is that it keeps summoning weaker low level summons till very late in the game. My guess is that the AI takes a more balanced approach towards research than your average player.

Early Game Summons
Early game summons suck. Even with the CB spell changes, many early game summons are less than useful.

Gem cost alone isn't the problem. Part of the problem lies with the cost of having an excellent researcher spend tons of turns summoning units one at a time.

Its my opinion that the early game summons (conj 2 for instance) would be balanced even with very low gem costs (ie: 3-5 gems). For one thing, in the early game taking valuable researchers off of research is a hefty cost alone especially when most of the time you are going to need to spend a minimum of 10 turns summoning in order to have a useful set of units. Is it worth while to spend 10 turns with a ~200 gold mage and 30 earth gems (before turn 30) in order to produce 10 cave drakes? Yes. Is it worth it spending the same amount of gold, but 50 earth gems to produce 10 cave drakes? Not unless you're desperate. Otherwise its better to wait till you can at least summon the troll kings court, or mechanical men.

Another problem that the AI has in this regard

Mid/Late Game Summons
CB does a good job with some of this. Giving the seasonal summons a little protection is a smart move. On the other hand, CB also seriously buffs Vine Ogres (!?). If anything in the game needs a buff, vine ogres aren't it. 1 gem for 3 or 4 ogres is one of the deals of the century.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the mid game summons. It seems to me that Legion of Wraiths is a little overrated, especially if you have Well up and running. Being able to produce 15 wraiths every turn for 30 gems is a no brainer every time.


Anyway -- this has gotten way too long. Anyone have any thoughts or comments?