SP AI definitely still questionable.

[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 ?

[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'.

[DominionsFan]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think that the problem is it runs like this...

Create ArmyA
Fill ArmyA
Send out ArmyA

The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.

I think that this could be fixes. Example: The AI shouldn't move his pretender to battle, unless it is commanding a very strong army. Let's say an army of 500 troops minimum. That way the AI pretenders wouldn't be killed like they are now [pretender + 15 troops are attacking a province what is defended by 400 troops etc.]
The other thing what is a bit weird still, that the AI sometimes attacking a province what is defended by 200-400 troops with like 3 commanders and 20 units. Imho there should be a code for this situation also. It should work like the code for the pretenders. IE...don't attack a province what is defended by many troops with a very small army.
Hopefully these codes can be added. That would drastically change this given situation.

Anyways regardless of these problems, the AI is much better compared to the Doms 2. AI already. We are on the right track lads.

[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

[Meglobob]

JaydedOne said:
Difficult AI. Normal setting.

There r now two more settings above this for the AI. I don't think u can complain about the AI until u can beat several impossible AI's in SP.

An AI is good if its a challenge to beat and keeps yr interest. No AI will ever be as good as a human, we learn, a AI just gets updates or patches. So is the AI challenging u and keeping u interested?

[Cainehill]

Don't think the issue with the AI not bringing troops has anything to do with assassination - in the game I saw the behavior, Abysia was the only nation with assassins, and it's the one that sent the Prophet and 5 infantry against 70 barbarians.

[DominionsFan]

Meglobob said:

There r now two more settings above this for the AI. I don't think u can complain about the AI until u can beat several impossible AI's in SP.

An AI is good if its a challenge to beat and keeps yr interest. No AI will ever be as good as a human, we learn, a AI just gets updates or patches. So is the AI challenging u and keeping u interested?

2 impossible AIs just kicked my butt in my first full SP game. I was with Ulm.
C'tis has moved like 1000 units to my capital at turn 36 in 2 turns, needless to say that my main armies were far away, since like ~1200 enemy troops were messing around at the north side of the island.
My SC pretender and 150 troops were massacred easily.
The AI is definitely much better now.

[Archonsod]

Gandalf Parker said:
The problem seems to be that if most of ArmyA is wiped out in the first couple of provinces, its still ArmyA. And that army gets sent out over and over until its gone.

Its the disband or refill code that seems to be lacking. Im not sure how often it checks its armies trength or rebuilds them.

I'm not so sure it's a problem. I've noticed the AI tends to move several armies into a position to attack the same province. While the small army attack isn't going to win, it can put you in trouble if you can't replace the troops it killed before the larger armies attack.
I've seen the AI use attrition type tactics against my better defended provinces a few times. I was quite impressed actually - the province it was attacking was essential to my supply lines to the South, and it repeatedly hit it over four turns. I had no castle nearby, so it ended up grinding down my numbers before launching a huge army into the province, well before relief could arrive.