Hot Seat AI

[thecheese]

Alright, I noticed playing a solo hot seat game that the computer rarely seems to do much of anything, often never progressing past tier 2 troops. This doesn't tend to be the case with premade scenarios, but I was wondering if for hot seat this is merely an issue of computer difficulty levels, or a game issue entirely.

[Ethric]

Playing hotseat on the multiplayer maps, the AI sometimes seem to act similarily to the AI in H4: just sitting in town leaving resources etc in the area untouched, even unguarded stuff. Or it sends waves of level 1 heroes out into the world as targetpractice. Then other times it seems to do ok, sending armies out to conquer. But it isn't consistent for sure.

That's on normal though, crank up the difficulty and it gets much more aggressive, though there is quite a bit of cheating involved there if I'm not mistaken.

[Rapier]

Playing Hotseat on Heroic, with 2 or 3 people... I've had ai which just sat in it's base area on Warlords, never getting as far as it's garrison or mines. (Thanks to the cheating it still had a relatively decent town/army though).

I've had AI which sent out one decent hero, playing like a player would, get it's first hero killed, and then sit in fear at it's base building up... that one hadn't taken it's mines either.

The AI which starts without a player on the same island seems to do a heck of a lot better... it's as if the player inhibits the Ai's calculations (which if it's true, is a serious problem).

[thecheese]

So basically, my best bet is to crank up the difficulty? And even then, it could be a crapshoot/cheatfest.

Now that I think about it, I did see a ranger just pull a unicorn out of his ass, then not have the building built when I took his town...so, yeah, I guess that will happen more often. =P

[5il3nc3r]

Now that I think about it, I did see a ranger just pull a unicorn out of his ass, then not have the building built when I took his town...so, yeah, I guess that will happen more often. =P

You sure it wasn't the Unicorn Maiden? She starts with a unicorn because of her ability (increases unicorn/silver unicorn attack/def by +1 per X level)

Maybe that's what happened.

5il

[PhoenixReborn]

Is this pre-patch or post patch?

[thecheese]

Now that I think about it, I did see a ranger just pull a unicorn out of his ass, then not have the building built when I took his town...so, yeah, I guess that will happen more often. =P

You sure it wasn't the Unicorn Maiden? She starts with a unicorn because of her ability (increases unicorn/silver unicorn attack/def by +1 per X level)

Maybe that's what happened.

5il

Actually, I didn't check. Either way, I figure they have to be cheating in some way on any difficulty. I mean, the one guy got by a garrison with lots of every elemental with nothing but skeleton archers. I don't think that's quite legit. =/

[shinyori]

I you want to have a good fight with the AI just put all the AI players into the same team... If they are left in different teams, sometimes some of them are very cautios and just stand by their castle, but is you put them into the same team they will be more aggressive.

[JamaY]

Well, if they're all in the same teams they won't attack each other and won't become as strong as a player with 2+ cities. The only times I had trouble wth the AI, was when one AI player conquered 3 or 4 of the other 6 AI players while I only conquered one or two...winning a battle when you're outnumbered 2:1 sure is fun

[1979]

I've played two hot seat games. During the first one, we didn't notice the enemy hero enter my land, and so it was a bit of a nasty surprise when all of the sudden a battle scene pops up and I realize it's my castle, defended by nothing but a level 1 hero and a single golem... But I got my castle back and we were more observant after that. In both games we found when we reached the enemy's land that he left piles of unguarded resources sitting out. Both games were on normal difficulty, but even with normal difficulty, one would assume that the hero should pick up an unguarded pile of gold. Obviously the AI needs some work (when it's not being scripted and receiving outrageous amounts of resources and whatever else).

[Asjo]

The AI should play to its best as normal difficulty, it just doesn't have any starting advantage. I think playing multiplayer maps in hot seat (you have to play hot seat to be able to play the multiplayer map) simply shows you the "normal" AI. Maybe that's the reason Ubisoft didn't want us the have a map editor to make single player scenarios ourselves; the normal AI is terrible. It is more agressive than the Heroes 4 AI, but still very stupid. Refer to my topic "list of AI flaws".

The reason that the AI plays better on single player scenarios, if so, would be that they were scripted to optimize AI performance. So, basically, the hotseat AI on multiplayer maps is what you should expect unless Nival get their act together and start fixing things.

[PhoenixReborn]

The reason that the AI plays better on single player scenarios, if so, would be that they were scripted to optimize AI performance. So, basically, the hotseat AI on multiplayer maps is what you should expect unless Nival get their act together and start fixing things.

Have you played the multiplayer map divided loyalties? I keep getting destroyed. Same with Neighbors. The AI may make mistakes but it CAN put up a fight.

[Asjo]

I played the maps Warlords and Heritage, and for both maps the "AI flaws" of my other thread still applies. As I've said, it's in no way Heroes 4 AI, but it's very stupid in many errors. Just like in Heroes 4, it seems like there were certain things the developers just tried to avoid or didn't feel important to work on. Of course, Heroes 4 development never continued as the company went bankrupt, so at least they had a good excuse.

At first I found that the AI would be fairly decent with a few fixes, but after trying hot seat multiplayer I simply find it unacceptable. I tried to just explore the whole map and defend in my own castle to see what the AI's would do. Indeed, the strongest ones did use their strenght to take over the map and were very aggressive at times. But it seemed extremely random and they made countless mistakes. And during most of the game, even fighting one vs. four castles, I could have found any one of the AI players and won, especially because they were so bad at re-inforcing/re-supplies their main heroes. Basically, the way players caught up to the strong ones so slowly that one strong and dominant AI heroe with a solid army almost always took over the whole map with virtually no casualities.

Only in the beginning of the map warlords I was actually slightly afraid of the AI. I had focused on getting a citadel in the begging and the orange player was all around the area of my town with a stronger army as he had two different units whereas I only had my scouts in the dungeon army. However, after about a month this changed, and he hadn't renewed his army, while I had four different unit stacks, having recruited all the units availabe in my town.