SP AI definitely still questionable.

[JaydedOne]

I -was- assassinating commanders in an adjacent province, but it seems strange to me that the AI wouldn't think to maybe bring more than one commander as back-up. ;-)

[Ballbarian]

In my current game, the AI player used Faery Trod to take a forest province right next to my capitol! I don't recall ever seeing the AI use that spell in Dom2. Correct me if I am wrong, but I was impressed. My main armies were rampaging through Arco's lands and readying to siege his capitol when suddenly a hefty chunk of his army was on my doorstep.

[Hammerstein]

Im currently trying the demo (oh god why isnt my copy here yet) and have cranked up some province defenses to 50, which gives you quite a lot of troops. What I noticed is that the AI will throw wave after wave of units against highly defended provinces and often take horrible losses.

Yet it manages to get another another huge army up by the next round. Obviously the AI uses every resource in every available province to ship troops to the front. I still hate this part of the game, if you do this as human opponent it takes an ungodly amount of micro-managing to achieve the same, once you control 20+ provinces it takes forever to ship your units anywhere.

So was this changed in DIII or do you still have to do all of this manually to counter this AI strat ?

[Arralen]

JaydedOne said:
I -was- assassinating commanders in an adjacent province, but it seems strange to me that the AI wouldn't think to maybe bring more than one commander as back-up. ;-)

Of course there are surely some bugs left in the AI, as those are the hardest to track down and squash completely.

But in this case "bringing a back-up commander" wouldn't have helped, as it doesn't work that way, and you should know that, as it works for both AI and human players the same way: Units are moved in squads, and squads are assigned to commanders. If you assassinate a commander on the very same turn as the AI moves its army, the assassination will happen directly before movement.

Therefore the AI wouldn't know about the dead commander before the next turn. And all squads assigned to that commander will be left behind in the movement phase, as there's no way how they could get "auto-transfered" to another commander.

Instead of whining about an AI bug you should congratulate yourself on the perfectly timed assassination!

[JaydedOne]

Arralen,

I think you misunderstand my point. By back-up commander, I mean that he had roughly 200 units in nearby provinces. I assassinated a single commander. The AI brought the Pretender and another two commanders without squads, ending up with about 12 units against my 120. I don't know why it didn't split squads up between commanders (as most players I know usually do).

Furthermore, I'd been consistently assassinating in the support province for about three turns. So it wasn't a complete surprise, although I wouldn't fault the AI for not being able to root out assassins or anticipate future attempts.

So I'm not "whining" about a bug. I just feel that my assassination, decent as it was, shouldn't have yielded the surplus results that it did. Particularly since the AI called the God back within about three turns and then proceeded to do the exact same thing all over again.

[Taqwus]

Fairly odd choice of items: the LA Marignon Bahomet that my Starspawn killed lately was wearing a fire-resistance ring, giving it a rather high Fire Resistance of 200. *shrug*

Odd choice of spells: watching a Starchild, fighting solo in an assassination, cast 'Communion Master'.

[Twan]

Real AIs (AIs who learn after a mistake and adapt to your strategy like a chess bot) are very rare even in big budget games. So I think you shouldn't expect the dom AI not to repeat the same errors. Games AIs don't think like humans, and the dom AI certainly don't have a memory to remember past failures to take a province or past assassinations.

Anyway to make assassinations less effective, the AI may be coded to split armies between as many commanders as possible each time several commanders moving to the target province are available, or may be coded to evaluate more efficiently province defence ; but don't expect it to ask itself "why did I've failed" then adapt its strategy.

[Agrajag]

Maybe the AI is trying to use his pretender as an SC, but isn't very good at it