Spell casting routine is seriously screwed?

[konming]

In one test game, I have an E6 guy scripted to cast army of lead and an A6 guy scripted to cast fog warrior. They both have plenty of gems (I do not know how to put more than 30 on them ) and the opponent army is also huge. Well, the E6 guy casted army of gold instead and A6 guy casted arrow fend instead.

Why does this happen? What's the point of scripting commands when computer just blatantly ignores it? Of course arrow fend is not equivilant of fog warrior and army of gold certainly does not help against shadow blast.

I want to know if this is just AI sucks (as usual) or due to some mysterious reasons works as designed?

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Well, I see no reason you'd be unable to cast the spell. If its some rule you've overlooked, I can't figure out what it might be.

Casting AI does suck, but I'm still surprised it ignored these spells.

[Shovah32]

I've had something similar happen recently in a multiplayer game. My pretender and a few other guys teleported/astral traveled into battle but, instead of casting will of the fates(he had plenty of astral magic and gems to do it) my pretender decided to buff himself..

[lch]

Unless it's a magic/gem issue, they usually do this if they either think that the opponent's army is unworthy of said spells and go for a less gem-intensive solution or if your units wouldn't benefit as much. Turn on heavy debugging (-ddd) and rerun the battle again for their decision making process.

[Sir_Dr_D]

I don't think gems so much make an impact on the decisions making process as fatigue. Often if the opponent army is small the mage will cast lower fatigue spells, but still waste all the gems you gave them.

[QXel]

Yep. This IA isn't very smart ...

In an SP game I am running these days, I have my EA Arcocephale 3A 1E 3N scripted as "Eagle Eye/Lighting Orb x4/ cast spells" for some [Medieval Fantasy réplicas of Katiouchkas] casting 'breath of the Dragon' in my war against ... C'Tis !!! (at list 50% Poison resistant Lizards ...)
Very, very, very irritating (at most ...).

Also, as other threads allready complains, the horrible "'touch of madness' 3N mages illness" ...

The same with magic items management.

Two examples : an IA mage going into battle with a the 'research skull' (forget the name) and the biggest joke the game made to me : my Abysian fire mage with an eye of aiming picking up after killing an enemy mage ... another Eye of aiming !!!

Well. This is not very often, so, I don't complain a lot ...

But still, a little cleaning in the routine code will be welcome ;o)

[Meglobob]

I have had this a couple of times I script a battle winning spell and my mage ignores it, to cast something totally useless.

Its not just small battles, its happening in, its big decisive, war winning battles. So turns of planning fall apart because your mage ignores your scripting.

[thejeff]

Lightning Orb is short range. If no targets were in range it would have to ignore the script.

[autumnalcentaur]

I've had this same problem, but have generally been able to get around it by scripting one buffing spell for the mage first, and then scripting whatever I want. It seems that the mages _always_ try to cast a buffing spell if they can as the first thing they do in combat.

[Edi]

If they don't have anything with the range to hit the enemy, that is.