Discussion Version 1.23 + Sorcerers & Dragons

[DeletedUser736]

These icons are now deceptive, because of the change. When I upgrade a sword dancer from the 1st upgrade (2nd level) to the highest upgrade (3rd level), it goes from displaying 3 sword icons against both mages and light ranged troops, to having 4 sword icons against mages and light ranged troops.

I feel you are nitpicking here. Those indicators were always meant to be a gross evaluation, and not a scientifically calculated thing. Each units have/will have 3 type, barracks get the 4/4 swords troops, and mercenary camp and training grounds get the 3/5, 5/3 one. That is pretty much clear to me. If you upgrade a unit to 3 stars, it might not get new bonuses against a particular type, but it certainly does get a stat boost (base damage, more HP) so it is definitely a better choice.

And I have to say, I really like how they changed this up. It means that now, certain 1 or 2 stars units can find a use in spite of having already the 3 stars one in the barracks. For example, my orcs warriors, 1 star, were used only in the tournament, when I did'nt have the hammers to build paladins. Now, if the enemy field mostly if not only light melee, they are now a legitimate choice. Not necesarly the best, but at least, it's not just plain stupid to field them anymore, over the Paladins. Only slightly stupid LOL. I've even begun training banshees for the very first time since they were introduced because now they are worth a try, given the right circumstances.

I quite frankly haven't played the tournament enough yet to make a final judgment on the new AI, but on the battlefront, so far so good, as far as I am concerned.

 

[DeletedUser]

When are you going to stop making unwanted changes to the battle system ? I was just getting used to the (old) AI but now I got my ass kicked in almost every tournament fight (4 star round / auto fighting). I did the same round on the Dutch server (with the old AI) and there I was still able to win most fight on auto.

The AI for battle has received a major update and should now be a lot smarter in battles. This will affect the enemy units, but of course also your own when you use auto-fight to complete a battle.

Really ? I looks to me like it has made my own troops a lot dumber on auto.

If it's true what Juni wrote then I get the impression that you are forcing us to use the merch units which I have no intention of making.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

When are you going to stop making unwanted changes to the battle system ? I was just getting used to the (old) AI but now I got my ass kicked in almost every tournament fight (4 star round / auto fighting). I did the same round on the Dutch server (with the old AI) and there I was still able to win most fight on auto.

Really ? I looks to me like it has made my own troops a lot dumber on auto.

If it's true what Juni wrote then I get the impression that you are forcing us to use the merch units which I have no intention of making.

Totally predictable, a smarter AI, makes a harder tournament, since tournament means fighting against the odds.

 

[DeletedUser264]

Without cerberus I was not able to complete third province on 4th star even while fighting manually.

 

[DeletedUser724]

Totally predictable, a smarter AI, makes a harder tournament, since tournament means fighting against the odds.

making tournment harder, mean we have to do manual fight
and it only implies we have less and less chance to go to round 6

I have no idea why
Inno make the battle change, but do not reduce the "16 hour cooling time" down to allow player to do more manual fight

to me
making tournment harder w/o "16 hour cooling time" down, it only means stop playing round 5 and 6 as I do not have any chance and method to go to round 6

 

[DeletedUser]

I guess Inno didn't think any FS would manage to get a blueprint. Now that some have they decided to make the fights even harder.

 

[Dhurrin]

I noticed this change in the tourney too. So now almost every fight will need to be manual.
Hellooooo....anybody else here with more than 1 job? One more reason to play less instead of more, because I just dont have the time to do that many fights manually so why bother doing anything more now than just 1 or 2 provinces.
I dont have the possibility to cater all I did fight in addition to those I did cater. And your trader mess-up made that already less possible.

And Im sure this has been mentioned by many players several times over: Its bloody well supposed to be a citybuilding game!
For over 6 months the updates have been about fighting and fighting and fighting. No building aspects at all. I dont want this to be a battle game, and its lame and slow in that aspect compared to real battlegames, so why is just about all there is to do in this game fighting tourneys?
And a better AI is great, but the squadssizes in tourneys were designed for the old AI. So fights just got harder. Havent tried it in the provinces yet, but it stands to reason thats the same. So very impossible fights there have just become yet more impossible. Great! Let me think, Im sure there were a few players too successful.
And perhaps you wanted nobody to actually win those blueprints, so since some few FSs worldwide did manage it just wasnt hard enough yet, so everyone needs to struggle harder.

@Marindor yes, yes, I know, Im not supposed to be sarcastic, but seriously, have you people ever bothered to think about how it looks from the players side? It bloody well does look like you re trying to chase people away.

 

[Marindor]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

 

[DeletedUser]

Since I do all my fights on auto these days (have lost interest to do it manually since the updates started and takes to long anyway) it's a bit hard to get any specific info. I only can compare the new battle AI with the old one on nl1. I have done the same 10 4 star tournament provinces here as on nl1 and while on nl1 I was able to win almost all fights on auto here with the new AI and using the same basic elven troops as I did on nl1 (no merch units or dogs) I hardly could win anymore. Some differences can occur of course because the layout of the battlefield will be different but with 80 fights in total it should on average give the same results. If you say the AI got smarter on both sides then on average the results should also be the same which it clearly isn't now so something must have gone wrong somewhere.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

Yes and often allready warned them that a smarter AI would make it harder in tournaments. When people say we want a better AI, they mean, we want a smart AI for our side, but the stupid AI for the enemy

But the fact that the enemy can bring 8 units to battle and we only 5, makes the tournmant a lot harder too, just by ammount of debuffs.
Also the fast that 5vs8 in a 100% difficulty batlle means that the enemy can bring 10M more units then us, also isnt fair (even more infair because of the extra debuffs)

 

[Dony]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

can you pass my question to developers? i am not going to waste my time with feedback if its not final state of this AI and we will get more improvements in future updates

regarding autocombat, its as easy as it was before, on live server its not old AI, on live server we have new AI introduced in 1.22
here on beta we have new AI introduced in 1.23

also magic dust is not easy tournament you should know that by now

with this update all not 3 star enemies got buffs, so it may appear that they are stronger, but so our not-3-star units are buffed

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

Just for you. Marindor, I wasted some troops fighting ina 0-star tournament province. So far I am not impressed by the new AI. It is a little better with staying out of enemy range (such as an Archer squad moving just 2 hexes instead of a full 3 hexes), but that's it.

Here are a few examples:




In this battle the Archers moved forward and attacked the Enchantresses, but failed to kill them all. After that they got slaughtered: First the Enchantresses hit them, increasing the damage my Archers take, then the Steinlings crushed them. After that the Enchantresses effectively removed the defense buff of my Treants, causing significant damage.

The cirrect move would have been to not attack and to just wait for the enemy to come to me, but that is clearly beyond the ability of the current AI.

Second battle:




My Archers moved just two hexes instead of three, leaving them within range of the enemy archers, but NOT within range of the Enchantresses. There were some bad decisions made by the AI during the battle, but overall not that bad.

In this battle I also encountered a weird graphical glitch (see third screenshot), possibly due to making a screenshot in the middle of combat.

Last battle:


Here there are 4 enemy units within the range of 4 squads of Archers. However, my Archers moved in such a way that they hit only three enemy squads (beause one of my squads blocked the movement path of my last archer squad). This led to unnecessary causalties.


Overall, the main issue with the new AI is that our Archers STILL don't know not to rush forward, right into the attack range of all enemy squads (like they did in the first example). Such a dumb move is bad on the lowest difficulty, and will be even worse at a higher tournament difficulty.

 

[DeletedUser607]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

I think, it's more complicated. in the past (a year ago or more), the AI happily walked in front of my units just to get a better position to shoot at one unit that was strategically irrelevant. this could be even exploited by using bait-units (all enemies wanted to try to crush the acrobats first, no matter if that actually was a clever move or not). in the last 2-3 months, especially with the shift towards the fs-tournament, the AI actually started performing rather clever moves (I guess, most people just didn't notice that some moves just weren't plain stupid). for example, if I have a treant on one position, and 2 fields away is an enemy-unit which is important to the AI and can be easily harmed by the treant (light ranged unit, light melee), the AI will now move another unit to prevent my treant from reaching its target.

what has happened now is, that the AI acts much better, and yet it has lots of extra units back from the days, where it was so stupid that it needed those extra units just to compete.

regarding the dogs, they are a special case: they have such an abundance of move-points that the AI just has no strategy to fight them.

 

[Marindor]

Hi guys,

Yes and often allready warned them that a smarter AI would make it harder in tournaments. When people say we want a better AI, they mean, we want a smart AI for our side, but the stupid AI for the enemy

Haha yes, that's not how it works of course

But the fact that the enemy can bring 8 units to battle and we only 5, makes the tournmant a lot harder too, just by ammount of debuffs.
Also the fast that 5vs8 in a 100% difficulty batlle means that the enemy can bring 10M more units then us, also isnt fair (even more infair because of the extra debuffs)

Yes, based on the level of the tournament province, the total army size of the enemy should be X percent of yours so when the enemy gets more squads, the amount of units per squad should be less. The debuff remark is a good one of course, we will forward that!

can you pass my question to developers? i am not going to waste my time with feedback if its not final state of this AI and we will get more improvements in future updates

You mean your question about whether or not the AI will be tweaked? That will of course depend on the feedback we get. Without specific scenario's and examples, we can't really give any good feedback for tweaking so your question basically works the other way around: If you provide us with valuable feedback and examples, we are able to look into that to see if we need further finetuning. If we don't get this feedback, we can't really investigate it further either.

Overall, the main issue with the new AI is that our Archers STILL don't know not to rush forward, right into the attack range of all enemy squads (like they did in the first example). Such a dumb move is bad on the lowest difficulty, and will be even worse at a higher tournament difficulty.

Thank you very much, this really helps! Very strange that in your second battle the AI for the archers made a different choice than in the other 2 battles, so we might want to look into what caused that difference. We will certainly forward that! Is this problem only occuring with archers?

 

[Dony]

my question was if the work on AI is done (if you wont receive any feedback you wont change it)
or we are in the middle of the progress of improving AI (you already have plans how to improve it and it will be done in next updates)
i can of course start giving feedback if its done, otherwise i will wait for final tuning

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

Thank you very much, this really helps! Very strange that in your second battle the AI for the archers made a different choice than in the other 2 battles, so we might want to look into what caused that difference. We will certainly forward that! Is this problem only occuring with archers?

The reason my Archers behaved differently in the second battle is quite simple: There was NO enemy unit within their range (there was an obstacle in the way)! Since they could not attack anyone there was no reason for them to rush forward, and so they stayed out of range of the Enchantresses (who in turn moved in such a way that they ended just within range of my Archers). In the other two battles there were enemies within range, so my Archers rushed forward.

It's most obvious with Archers since they move first (due to high Initiative), but it's usually the same with all units: If they can attack an enemy they will even if that leaves them in a very bad position and not attacking would have been the smarter move.

 

[Marindor]

my question was if the work on AI is done (if you wont receive any feedback you wont change it)
or we are in the middle of the progress of improving AI (you already have plans how to improve it and it will be done in next updates)
i can of course start giving feedback if its done, otherwise i will wait for final tuning

It depends: If players are happy about the new AI and it works in the right way, we're done. If players are unhappy and some things are still not perfect, we will look into improving it further, based on the specific examples we get

 

[Dony]

thats what i wanted to hear, thank you

 

[DeletedUser1882]

Guys, for a long time you have been complaining about how dumb and bad the AI was. Now it is improved, works smarter and now you're complaining it's too hard for you to win battles? Please in that case give us feedback in detail about in which situations you'd like the AI to work differently and how exactly, would be best in your opinion. Just saying you can't win a battle anymore, doesn't really give us much insight into where it goes wrong for you so to be able to process your feedback in a valuable way, please give us some specific examples including how you would like the AI to react in that situation, preferably with screenshots. Thank you

I don't think this is a problem with the new AI. It's a problem with the new *balance* of combat, and tournaments in particular.

Previously, players had 2 ways to overcome the massive numbers deficits in the latter tournament rounds. 1) They could choose units appropriately and 2) they could out-maneuver the AI on the battlefield.

If the AI is now less-incompetent, then the second of two tools just got nerfed. This changes the balance of the tournaments, making it much harder to win in the 3rd and following rounds, when players are outnumbered. For players to have a chance at similar results, the tournament would need a re-balance where the numbers of enemy troops are brought down by some amount (as has already been done several versions ago).

This is compounded by the fact that many later-game players are sending 3-star troops to fight. 3-star troops have not gotten any improvements in this update. But the AI is sending 1- and 2-star troops to fight in the earlier provinces of the tournament.

Yes, players who have sent appropriate units will see that the *majority* of enemy units don't really benefit from the change in the recent update. But when the enemy sends 2 mages, 2 archers and 1 steinling to the battle, there will be *at least* one enemy stack who is specialized against at least one of the player's stacks. And that unit just got a very significant buff. Meanwhile, the player sending 3-star troops got no buff.

This second effect makes the lower tiered provinces harder to fight with 3-star troops (and lots of people would rather use sword acrobats which are free at the bulwark to using dogs which take a long time + lots of supplies at the training grounds).


In sum, this update contains 2 combat changes. One of them makes any battle where you're outnumbered more difficult - this influences tourney round 3+. The second raises difficulty on any fight where you are sending 3-star troops against a rainbow of enemy units at two or fewer stars - this makes tourney provinces 1-12 or so harder for those who use barracks troops and are past chapter 4.

Two different effects that both hurt the player's results in the tournament in the same update? Yes, you should expect some significant unhappiness. More dead troops to replace + fewer rewards = less player satisfaction.

 

[Dony]

1) They could choose units appropriately and 2) they could out-maneuver the AI on the battlefield.

both cases still works

there will be *at least* one enemy stack who is specialized against at least one of the player's stacks

this was present in tournament all the time

If the AI is now less-incompetent

it is not