The AI definately cheats bigtime.

[Angeljoe2000]

So I am doing "The Cultist", a Dungeon mission from campaign 4.

I never save/reload during a map which I perhaps should since its ALL about luck and no skill whatsoever.

My hero gets through the first 72 Blood furies almost unharmed, 1 move later a Hero comes along and inspite of all my effords he does get a couple of fireballs off decimating my troops.

I now have to take a castle with full towers with minotaurs and a few scouts, the castle has about 90 defenders taking time to kill and slowly the towers and opposition decimate my troops ...

To the second castle since time is of essence. Another hero is awaiting with about 40 troops, not difficult but it still reduces my troops .. and I took diplomacy for ABSOLUTE zip, nobody joins.

After the second castle I am down to nothing .. can I take ressources? no, can I explore? one should think so since I just handled 3 heroes in a matter of 3 days .. but I need more troops to take care of any mines so I ll have to wait till the end of the week.

The end of the week arrives and as I plan on taking a couple of mines I am attacked by 4 heroes within 3 days ... I loose the last battle.


Is this a challenge? I call it absolute idiocy on part of the devs .. I can not silence the opponent hero, he has absolute no meaning to the AI .. so they can use them as spunges since they will most likely enter the battlefield just to cast a couple of fireballs and slowly decimate my meager troops.

I did EXTREMELY well under the circumstances.


Luck is relative, I had a vastly inferior army but with summoning and luck was 4-3 in my favour. Their assassins hit my dragons which I kept raising from dead 18 times in a row, 18 BLOODY times .. and when I was lucky it was usually either my ballista or a totally useless luck strike.


I repeated this battle 7 times, luck was on AI side 72% of the time .... 72 freaking percent.

Not once in those battles did I get a single vital lucky shot of inspite of me having the better luck factor .. its always when there is one left of a stack where things dont really matter anymore that they start getting lucky.


......


My second attempt at this map ... nothing happened, I didnt meet the same opposition, no heroes came around early in the second week to annoy me and I could continue, so the first try was a HUGE waste of about 2 hours.


I wish they had time to actually test these maps themselfs before releasing the game.

[Celebrimor85]

I guess that you were really unlucky, but this does NOT prove that the AI cheats. I have sometimes had luck with almost every attack and so on.

[akrav]

the a.i cheats in this game(maybe not in the luck thingy, but in many other areas), take it as a fact, all nival games have a.i that cant do a thing without cheating.

not sure why your defending the games lack of a.i, when its obvious from tons of mp games that the a.i cheats(most ppl observed it in some form), in the campaign you can just open lua files and see the scripted cheating, its no secret..

[Celebrimor85]

Akrav, the campaign is SUPPOSED to be scripted were the ai gets troops, thats usual for campaigns.

Besides i havent found that the ai starts with an enourmous advantage on any campaign map, and its possible to finish most of the campaigns with auto combat only.

[KingAlamar]

Originally posted by Celebrimor85:
Akrav, the campaign is SUPPOSED to be scripted were the ai gets troops, thats usual for campaigns.

Besides i havent found that the ai starts with an enourmous advantage on any campaign map, and its possible to finish most of the campaigns with auto combat only.

Am I the only one that believes that there should be minimal scripting in a campaign. I don't mind it if the scenario is set up where there's an existing large army or whatever but once the initial conditions are set both sides should more-or-less have to play by the same rules.

[akrav]

Originally posted by Celebrimor85:
Akrav, the campaign is SUPPOSED to be scripted were the ai gets troops, thats usual for campaigns.

Besides i havent found that the ai starts with an enourmous advantage on any campaign map, and its possible to finish most of the campaigns with auto combat only.

theres a bug were it goes into a loop with one of the scripts, making it add the same amount of creatures each day to a hero, so he can end up with thousands of archangels after a few weeks.

[syth773]

i have noticed that if you leave an AI player alone for a period of time on custom missions he will build up a huge force over time, it's frustrating because i find myself having to beat the AI early on to insure victory otherwise his army simply grows to huge to beat later in the game.

[finkellll]

thats just a matter of building up ur own army... how bout we stop complaining about the cheating ai and just find a way around it.

[Cironir]

thats just a matter of building up ur own army... how bout we stop complaining about the cheating ai and just find a way around it.

The AI is an essential part of a strategy game. If the AI is hopeless, the only way to work around it is to play only online.

[UrbanRanger88]

frankly i think the AI cheats, shroud of darkness in heroes 3, fog of war, and the like mean nothing to the means of the computer , i know it...

[Khelavaster]

Originally posted by KingAlamar:
Am I the only one that believes that there should be minimal scripting in a campaign. I don't mind it if the scenario is set up where there's an existing large army or whatever but once the initial conditions are set both sides should more-or-less have to play by the same rules.
You're certainly not alone!!!
Scripts are ok when they define certain broad aspects (btw, did the "Builder", "Explorer", "Warrior" ratings AI heroes got assigned in HOMM2 actually meant that?) but when they're used to lead the AI by the hand is simply stupid and lazy.

Khel.

[ST_Ghost]

There was a post back a while ago that said how the AI would repeatedly use the water whirlpools to travel and thus sacrifice a lot of troops.

I made a scouting hero to watch that and what do I see? He takes the whirlpool up to 3 times in a row and loses NOT A SINGLE TROOP. Now thats called cheating.

Also in other posts I mentioned that the AI:
does not require resources to build
does not require resources to hire troops
sees the entire map and all your town stats as if it owned it
has some power form of diplomacy that can make it chose whether a troop joins or just flees even when their army is much smaller

[malis_]

Well campaigns are scripted and ai mostly has alot more trops at start,but on the other hand you have an overpowered hero, so the easyest way to finish em is to pump up your hero whit stats in each mission. In this particular mission my hero had ~800-900dmg meteor shower and 1.3k implosion,didnt need much troops at all, hero nuked all
But also had some trubels in campainqn 2 just cus i gimped my hero and took wrong skills