Since this will include some AI bugs, maybe it should be moved to “report a bug” all the games were played in AI vs AI extreme difficulty with the new Dynasties of India DLC, with a large map pool and pretty much standard seetings (just 1100 years time limit), I played around 130 games, and this is what I see so far:
Keep in mind this is a feedback, not a critique, I think they do a great job trying to implement this, but it has some flaws still (on point with this, the scouts snipping enemy monks if they see them, is a 10/10 feature, the AI do it really well).
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Walling problems with non-arabia looking maps, while they wall pretty decent in easy maps, they don’t take into account the map itself to wall it properly, in maps like golden pit they try to use the gold in the pit as part of the wall, but since they can’t make anything in the hill the AI just end with you extreme holes in the wall, in maps like Amazon Tunnel where you have an unique path to your base very easy to wall, the AI just try to wall as normal, making the wall inside the hole for the base and not even walling the only entrance.
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Small and big holes, no matter how they do it they always have some small hole here and there, sometimes are hard to see, but you just need to click in to see them, this is just a small problem, and happens in human play all the time too, so it’s okay, but most of the time they end with big holes too, first the AI don’t wall the “back”, AI starts walling in one side and move that wall to the front and the to the other side, but never reach the end, so the back of the base is always open, and secondly, when they add 2, 3 o 4 buildings at the same time to the wall, sometimes the vill making one of the building is obstructing the place of another building, usually after a few seconds, the obstructed building is canceled and moved ahead on the wall, but the hole left by canceling that building is never filled again.
Also at some point, making the AI erase a part of the wall, or a house to quickly move your army outside the base will be awesome, but I can see how this is very hard to implement, for now, sometimes the wall is making your own army to be late to respond a raid/attack, specially if the AI have slow units to defend, like mangonels.
Open Bugs:
- This happens very rarely (2 times in 133 games so far, maybe it happens a few more times and didn’t notice since it didn’t impact the game) but sometimes instead of trying to build a building next to the trees to make the wall the AI place the building inside the trees and the vill is stuck forever trying to reach a building that can’t reach, best case scenario you just have an idle vill forever, since they never cancel that building, but sometimes it ends the game.
It happened with Vikings in Hideout, the AI try to go FC, when it reached feudal it tried to place the market inside the forest, never been able to build it and get stuck on feudal forever.
It also happened with Celts in Yucatan, the AI tried to do two houses inside trees, it couldn’t and it never tried to make another house, so Celts got housed at 45 pop for the rest of the game.
You can cancel the building manually and they will find another good place to build it, but is not something you will do if you are also playing the game with or against an AI.
- AI ignore castles, especially with the last patches, the AI try to attack only drop off points and ignore everything else (the AI attack TCs, Mills and lumber and mining camps) which is better than getting stuck attacking any random building, even if some times they attack some mining or lumber camps that don’t have any more resources near ir, it also looks like if there is a tower or a castle they will attack both of them to make it easier to attack the drop off points, but the castle is ignored in some maps.
In maps with water, maps like Crossroads, Salt Marsh or Golden Swamp, and maps with walls, like Arena, Fortress, Hill Fort or Hideout, the AI will still prioritize to attack a tower, but they will rarely attack a castle, the AI may try to attack the TC behind two castles without trying to destroy the castles first, including putting the trebs in range of the castle, if one player is very ahead, the AI will eventually destroy the castles, since some rams or trebs will retaliate with the castles if they get attacked, especially if the TC is finally down, but this takes a lot and usually the other players is able to recover while the opponent army is being killed by castles over and over again.
This was a problem from more than a year ago, but since very few maps had this problem, wasn’t a big problem, but now that the AI makes their own walls, any map falls under the “maps with walls” category and you can have this problem in any map, so now this need to be fixed for sure.
In this pic you can see how a treb is ignoring three castles to go directly for a tower behind, the bombard cannon is doing the same, also in range of the castles, luckly a couple of rams got attacked by the castles and retaliate so, eventually they will go down.
- Unrelated to the new walling mechanics, but still a bug, Chinese civ is not working on Budapest map, chinese will only use one of the two staring TCs to make vills or make techs, both will be used to drop resources tho.
I tried this 5 times and all 5 times the same thing happened, you can even delete the TC they are using and they will never make any more vills or move to the next age, since they refuse to use the other TC (even using aegis, they endeed with more than 10k food, but still stuck at the same 18 vills and dark age they had when I deleted the other TC), even if the AI reach castle age and make a third TC, it will still use only the new one, and the same one it have been using all the game, but never the other one.
If this is because one TC is not giving the 3 extra vills from the Chinese starting bonus, this may also happen with mayans, I didn’t check it tho.
Well so far this is all I can say about the new walling mechanics, hope some of this helps and luckly the ignore castle problem can be solved, is really frustrating to see the AI lossing treb after treb from castle firing instead of just treb down those castles in a moment and quickly end the game.