I've always found early attacks far worse than late game (a single stack of sprites super early is worse than a stack of sky drakes when you have a hero that one shots them ) but to each their own. Not being able to do it means it doesn't matter.
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Game mechanics
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I suspect we can't fix this but, if we don't have enough mana for all our spells maintenance, can it auto drop spells that won't result in killing units first? Specifically, I only had 3 spells with maintenance - all wraith form - and it chose to dismiss the one on my hero, who was over water. But both other units with wraith form were on land. So my hero died.
(September 5th, 2016, 15:50)Nelphine Wrote: I suspect we can't fix this but, if we don't have enough mana for all our spells maintenance, can it auto drop spells that won't result in killing units first? Specifically, I only had 3 spells with maintenance - all wraith form - and it chose to dismiss the one on my hero, who was over water. But both other units with wraith form were on land. So my hero died.You are right, I don't think I can do this.
September 8th, 2016, 16:06
(This post was last modified: September 8th, 2016, 16:07 by Nelphine.)
As another topic that came up recently, can you give economic modifier based on how long you've owned a city compared to how long it has existed? Idea being to penalize conquering cities vs building your own. (This would be in addition to racial modifiers.)
(September 8th, 2016, 16:03)Nelphine Wrote: Almost certain you can't, but can the number of AI be increased? Was thinking if you could have 3 arcanus and 2 Myrran that would be ideal. Yes that's entirely impossible. Quote:As another topic that came up recently, can you give economic modifier based on how long you've owned a city compared to how long it has existed? Idea being to penalize conquering cities vs building your own. (This would be in addition to racial modifiers.)This would need free unused data fields in the city data to store the number of turns. It would also be highly counter-intuitive since there are existing game mechanics similar to it (racial unrest mainly) I believe the 20% building and population loss on conquest is enough penalty, if not I rather increase that number.
As an example of what I'm talking about in these few threads where I don't care about cities military power - my opponent has 4 or 5 times my army strength. their spell power and power production are 70-80% of mine. They have spells like call lightning and iron skin.
But i had 2 undead sprites guarding a nature node. I got attacked by 2 great lizards, 2 chimera, 2 orc hordes, an orc priest and.. an orc bowman I think. They killed one sprite. I got 3 orc units back to replace it. My magical ability, and ability to tailor combat spells to the battle at hand means that at a certain point certain units become non threats. Having hundreds of halberdiers and hordes and wyverns running around doesn't make the AI scary - it means I have free unrest reduction at any city I capture with death magic. The AI spending lots of resources on these things means it's NOT spending it on high end magic that could actually threaten me. But if the AI would literally send 2 dozen stacks to attack me simultaneously, even if it was halberdiers, well that would be scary - it might saturate my mana. Especially if he razed all the cities he took because I use them more effectively, so letting me re-conquer them is a bad idea.
I think you might be asking more of the ai than strategy video games give. They're just not as smart as a human. If the ai is making the blatantly wrong choices, pour over all of seravy's numbers on spell casting priorities in the AI thread and suggest other values for them.
The situation you're describing doesn't really tell me much about the uselessness of cities. Perhaps there are 10-20 city locations you could settle that are all awful with a max population of 5-10 and no bonuses. However eventually if they all had an amplifying tower they'd be worthwhile to settle. By the time the AI in 2nd place and is at 70-80% of my power... the game is basically won. The ai cheats, and gets out to a lead usually on say extreme or impossible. Often the ai is at 300-400% of my various power bars. Once you've conquered 30-50% of the world and are in #1 first place on the power charts, even with the ai cheating by 300%.... you shouldn't be playing anymore, you should march a doom stack onto their fortress, banish them, and then start cleaning them up when they have no magic to fight back. Another advantage of settlers is that if you're somehow NOT at war with an ai, you can just rush out a bunch of settlers even just to prevent him from taking those territories, making it so when you do finally sneak attack his fortress there's less to clean up. If you find settlers and city micromanagement boring, perhaps you should play stellaris, or civilization 5, games with mechanics that prevent you from ever having to micromanage more than 5-7 cities all game long. Smaller landmass in MoM can also help with this. I've absolutely had the ai attack me in 10-15 different locations in the same turn, it took me about 20 minutes between turns. It absolutely happens, often every single attack is poorly thought out and with the wrong units that won't win, but they absolutely can attempt to swarm all over you. So I am not sure what you're getting at here.
September 8th, 2016, 23:46
(This post was last modified: September 8th, 2016, 23:48 by Nelphine.)
Hum. I'd like to see the swarm attack. I think that would make a very different strategy than my usual to defend against.
Er, the point of my story was that magic overcomes standard units. So building more of them doesn't matter. And if it overcomes hordes and chimera I don't think there are any normal units (magicians/warlocks might be an exception) that will help. So all that military resource could be spent on more magic, so the AI can get very Rares faster. Even Rares often can't be defeated purely through magic, you need some form of strong base unit (not just sprites) to act as a base for your magic. |
