magical summons anyone ?

[PvK]

The most I've seen was while attacking an AI home province. There were a couple of Spine Demons there, and early in the battle, they blood-summoned four giant black bat-wing demon things with venomous claws, which picked off my prophet.

PvK

[Pocus]

yes, I saw these blood summons to (fiend of darkness is the name you are seaching for ).

But not a single one magical summon from gems. So something is screwed there IMHO.

[Nerfix]

The AI doesn't search magic sites?

OTOH i have seen gems on commanders and i am not sure if Celestials are summonings from spells. If so, i have seen Tien Chi often summoning Celestial Warriors.

In my latest game, Serpent Cult Pythium summoned Horned Serpents.

I have also seen C'tis with Longdead units couple times.

[ November 09, 2003, 08:07: Message edited by: Nerfix ]

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by HJ:
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.

I played one SP game with all races, and Mictlan died on about turn 5 from running out of dominion.

Sorry, that's a little off topic. I also have seen AI blood summons and undead, but no non-demon non-undead summoned units. In Dominions I there were a lot of gem summons in AI armies.

[ November 09, 2003, 08:08: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

[Aristoteles]

Originally posted by Pocus:
yes, I saw these blood summons to (fiend of darkness is the name you are seaching for ).

But not a single one magical summon from gems. So something is screwed there IMHO.

I agree, and this is already mentioned in the AI weaknesses list. IE. The AI won't use too much summoned units.
Barely it is using them, but it is quite rare.

[HJ]

I saw a couple of horned serpents and vine men today from Man. Maybe it's too early, and they use the gems they get for other things, like giving them to mages. The kind of gems they get in home province mimics the kind of mages they get from the start, so maybe they're pumping them up. I certainly saw that many times. Furthermore, this early without empowerment they cannot access other kinds of magic/gems, since their national mages can only find sites that will give the same kind of gems they have in the home province. Also, many magical summons require a fair amount of gems (drakes are 11, e.g.). Even if they find a site, it's going to take some time to accumulate the gems, unless they are getting +5 in the home province, so the first few turns might not be very representative. It remains to be seen how it's going to play out later in the game. I hope that both summons and alchemy/empowerment will work fine, and that we'll see nice and diverse AI armies/mages later on.

I was wondering what sort of info do other people notice on the score graphs with regard to the AI gem income? Is low AI gem income a more widespread phenomenon, or are the AIs in my games just unlucky?

[Pocus]

I can only say one thing : that in dom1 the Ai fielded many magical summons, far before turn 40, whereas in dom2 I never saw a single one.