I remember really loving all the Heroes games, I had so much fun with them, loving all the crazy ways you could upgrade your character with development techniques and spells and items. There were so many possibilities.

In the end I stopped playing (after I'd beaten all the quests and would do custom map battles) mainly because I didn't find the computer intelligence challenging enough.

I'd give them I don't know, a ton of items and stat upgrades and a huge army but the enemy computers were so retarded with them that I finally got sick of it.

It's still cool multi-player but who has the time to sit through 3 people's turns for it to be your turn again.

I wish the computers were smarter. Maybe if they could adapt like in Chessmaster games or something. I was just way too good at kicking their arses and it got boring.

I've never played Heroes V even though the graphics are way better looking because I don't feel challenged by my computer opponents, that's pretty much my only complaint but it's a big one.

All the different types of monsters were really cool though and I loved how you could advance your heroes and all that.

I liked the all the stories too.

I just thought of it because my younger brother was playing one of my other favorite games, Yuri's revenge, and then he brought up the topic of heroes.

So next time you all make a game if you say the computers are way more brutal and intelligent in it this time then I may buy it but until then I'm abstaining.

-Jason

I find one on one online matches very challenging. I've also heard of people doing 2 vs. 2 matches. Apparently it is very fast in heroes 3?

I hear Galactic Civilizations 2 has a 'tough brutal' AI but I've never played it.

AI is so hard to program. Chess is different since it's fixed, the board is small, not a lot of options. A computer learning chess keeps playing against itself or a human, building up a statistics database. When it starts out, the database is small and will say "looking up the current board configuration in my database, I have come across this configuration 50 times. The move that most likely resulted in a win was moving this piece here". After playing more & more the database grows and it is able to say "in my database I have come across this configuration 50,000 times and the move that most likely resulted in a win was moving this piece here". Making it much smarter through sheer statistics. If it loses, it records the moves as a failure lessening the chances of it picking those moves in the same way in the future. If it wins, it increases the stastics and will more likely pick those moves if it comes across it in the future. It's all about statistics with computer chess, and with the above that means if the computer comes up with a super-move it's inevitable people will catch onto it and make a counter and as the computer starts losing performing the super-move it will catch on that people are onto it and it start doing something else. It's cat & mouse.

That kind of logic can only be applied to fixed games like chess, othello, card games, etc. but can't be applied to Heroes. A computer would have to play the same scenario trillions of times before it could build up enough statistics to offer "efficient ai" about which hero is most likely to succeed, what options chosen during level-up most likely results in winning, what buildings and when resulted in the most likely win, what army is likely to win, in battle which spells were most successful and in what order, when using creature abilities which was most helpful, which army configuration, in Heroes there's so many options even the smallest maps will likely take a computer years to play it to build up sufficient statistics and you'll start to see things like the computer bee lining to all the mines, resources, & artificats in a most efficient manner and people will scream "the computer cheats!".

Anyway, AI fascinates me... it's a good field to get into if you're interested in it and you quickly come up with creative ways to make the AI smarter (such as telling it the order of the buildings to make so it doesn't have to "calculate" that).

Thanks for the replies you two. Sorry it took so long to get back here.

Well my bro suckered me into (yeah like it's all his fault, lol) playing one of the old Heroes games again, Winds of War, and I noticed two things right off the bat that I think would be easily correctable.

The first was they didn't take into consideration the morale of their armies. They were chaos and incorporated weak life units into their armies which only weakened them severely by screwing up the armies' morale.

The second was they did not prioritize who commanded their armies. They had some very high level heroes that they just sent to my castle, in effect sacrificing them. And when the army attacked, the heroes of that army were weak. I'd have had a much tougher time with it if the powerful heroes were given the powerful army to command.

Just those two factors would make a big difference with the AI abilities.

-J