Ermor balance?

[Agrajag]

Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

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The unbalanced Umbarthium mod (I should get to work on 1.03 already =P) isn't that good for the AI...
He is too dumb to use the really good (AKA Gifted) troops...
I beat the crap out of him in a game that I tested against my mod =P
An overall overpowered mod will give the AI enough power though, you can just mod half price for a certain nation =P.
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.
Which is bad! Because it means the developers are too lazy to program a good AI that they have to give it cheats to be worth something...
SO if you give the AI cheats by yourself, you are going against everything that is good!

[Boron]

Originally posted by Agrajag:

quote:

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Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

---

The unbalanced Umbarthium mod (I should get to work on 1.03 already =P) isn't that good for the AI...
He is too dumb to use the really good (AKA Gifted) troops...
I beat the crap out of him in a game that I tested against my mod =P
An overall overpowered mod will give the AI enough power though, you can just mod half price for a certain nation =P.
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.
Which is bad! Because it means the developers are too lazy to program a good AI that they have to give it cheats to be worth something...
SO if you give the AI cheats by yourself, you are going against everything that is good!

---

hm i am looking after a new game for sp with really good ai which i can play a bit too .
unfortunately i know no game with good but not too serious cheating ai do you know any ?
has space empires IV gold a good ai i don't own that one . or galactic civilizations ?

SEIV Gold has a failrly rubbish AI - OK for learning the game but not really challenging once you're up to speed. However there are a couple of mods which have made the AI opponents pretty tough. And they don't rely on cheating.

GalCiv's key feature is its AI. It's the only game I've played where, when you increase the opponent difficulty level, your opponents actually get cleverer and sneakier. On the downside, it lacks the complexity or flavour of either DomII or SEIV.

[LintMan]

[quote]Originally posted by Heironeous:

Good point. I was reluctant to do this because independent priests only have holy-2, which is fairly limited. If I'm going to spend my gold on priests, I'd really like to get holy-3 for Sermon of Courage. However, if I could go back I'd definitely bite the bullet and build an indie priest banishment squad to counter Ermor's rapid rise.

Some other things to consider: if your Ermor opponent is hiring mercs, he probably doesn't have much money spent on temples and castles to protect those temples, since Ermor has limited access to gold income once it kills off its province populations. Further, Ermor's priests are unholy and can't preach, which makes it a fair bit harder for them to undo enemy domain quickly.

So you can take advantage of this by building up a strong dominion yourself to push your dominion and keep out his dominion, and also you can conduct raids on his templed provinces if he's not castling them. Low dominion for him means less auto-summons.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Mark the Merciful:
SEIV Gold has a failrly rubbish AI - OK for learning the game but not really challenging once you're up to speed. However there are a couple of mods which have made the AI opponents pretty tough. And they don't rely on cheating.

GalCiv's key feature is its AI. It's the only game I've played where, when you increase the opponent difficulty level, your opponents actually get cleverer and sneakier. On the downside, it lacks the complexity or flavour of either DomII or SEIV.

Boron, as a second opinion, I concur 100% with Mark's assessment of both SE4 and GalCiv. I have not tried the new GalCiv expansion (yet), so I don't know if it improves the game in any significant way. Perhaps someone else who's actually played with it might be able to give an opinion on the GalCiv expansion?

[Agrajag]

Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by Agrajag:

quote:

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Originally posted by Boron:

quote:

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Originally posted by NTJedi:
There should be one or two nations more powerful then all the rest so the AI opponents can actually be more threatening during a single and multiplayer game.

you can easy achieve that :
use impossible ai with cohens crusaders and Agrajags first Version of his umbarthium mod which wasn't balanced .
this way you will have really scary ai opponents

---

The unbalanced Umbarthium mod (I should get to work on 1.03 already =P) isn't that good for the AI...
He is too dumb to use the really good (AKA Gifted) troops...
I beat the crap out of him in a game that I tested against my mod =P
An overall overpowered mod will give the AI enough power though, you can just mod half price for a certain nation =P.
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.
Which is bad! Because it means the developers are too lazy to program a good AI that they have to give it cheats to be worth something...
SO if you give the AI cheats by yourself, you are going against everything that is good!

---

hm i am looking after a new game for sp with really good ai which i can play a bit too .
unfortunately i know no game with good but not too serious cheating ai do you know any ?
has space empires IV gold a good ai i don't own that one . or galactic civilizations ?

---

(Pffft, lots of quotes)
I don't know the games you are talking about, but in many games you can observe the computer cheating, and in many ways:
1. He has more units than he could afford with his current mines/income.
2. A vastly superiour army of yours "somehow" manages to lose to his inferior one (sometimes its just luck though :\)
3. In certain games the AI may get better starting units.
4. He acts REALLY dumb and still wins =P

[Curath]

Originally posted by Agrajag:
(Pffft, lots of quotes)
I don't know the games you are talking about, but in many games you can observe the computer cheating, and in many ways:
1. He has more units than he could afford with his current mines/income.
2. A vastly superiour army of yours "somehow" manages to lose to his inferior one (sometimes its just luck though :\)
3. In certain games the AI may get better starting units.
4. He acts REALLY dumb and still wins =P [/QB]

Heh, most of these "seem" to fit Civilization 3, which is a pretty good game too. The AI shuffles around troops that makes no sense whatsoever. As to number 2, it's actually a fault of the game mechanics. A tank division losing to a phalanx of spearmen isn't even bad luck as such. With all sorts of defensive bonuses the phalanx has something like 1 in 3 chance of winning a combat round, and all units have just a few "HP", enhanced with experience (unlike Civ 2 where more advanced units had lots more HP too).

If I recall correctly, in Civ 3 the highest difficulty gives the AIs a slight technology research advantage, plus they're generally more aggressive towards the player. Third highest difficulty the tables are even.

[deccan]

Originally posted by Agrajag:
The one thing I hate about those things though is that most computer games (I think that doesnt include dominions) use cheating AIs anyway, if you played the RTS game "Blah blah's city of Evil" (fictional name, DUH) when you put the AI on "Super Tough and Impossible to Beat without Resorting to Reprogramming of the game" difficulty, it would just get half prices for all units, or free income, or double stats for units or any number of other things.

Does anyone know for sure how the AI gets more difficult in Dominions 2 at higher difficulty levels? Does it get smarter or does it get bonuses?

[The Panther]

I think the main reason the AI opponents cannot handle Ermor is because of the simplistic way in which the game measures army size:
One troop of ANY kind = 1 army in the graph.

This is clearly bogus. I mean, 1 hydra = 1 militia? Not hardly.

So, the AI sees Ermor growing huge and is afraid to attack it. The human player knows that Ermor needs 2-3 times the army size just to be close to even. The AI has no clue on this. The AI then picks on Ulm, seeing the small army in the graph. The AI refuses to declare war on Ermor, thinking it has the baddest army, even though it is mostly paper thin. Eventually, since ermor is left alone, it DOES get the baddest army.

Also, the simplistic way in which the game keeps track of armies really warps the army size graph. Ermor is so much higher on the graph that the other races tend to squish down into the bottom of the graph, making it hard to see who is really doing well.

All they need to fix this is to modify the army size to make a troop approximately worth its true value. Something like 1*gold + 2*resources + Bonus (like for sacred) for each troop. A lot of programing perhaps, but far more realistic than what it does now.

Does anyone know for sure how the AI gets more difficult in Dominions 2 at higher difficulty levels? Does it get smarter or does it get bonuses?

It gets more Dpoints (Design Points) to create their pretender is all.