jeff01
1701
Ah, thanks, that makes sense.
He moved forward and then tossed some type of bomb on me.
jeff01
1702
I prefer “build cities off” and I like this game mechanic of building forts to claim nodes and mines.
Have you ever seen the AI do this?
Not a summary screen, no. You can see a list of an AI’s cities by opening the Diplomacy screen, choosing Negotiate, then looking at the “Cities and Structures” tab up where it says “[AI name] Has.”
There’s also a semi-cheaty way to find out how much gold, mana, etc an AI has, even though there’s not an official display for it. Just demand a huge amount of the resource on the “[AI name] Has” tab, and the interface will round it down to how much they actually have.
robc04
1704
I think it’s only the cities you know about through, right?
Yep, I think it’s only cities you know about. Though it does give you a nice long list of every single treasure item the AI has.
robc04
1706
Thanks for the armored answers above.
As long as you can afford to build the necessary warlord buildings, have the research and can afford the cost and maintenance of the units themselves, there really isn’t any reason to build the human vanilla units vs their warlord counterparts, right? It probably does get cost prohibitive at some point so you need t decide where you want to use your best units and where to use lower quality stuff.
Class units are generally better than racial units, but that’s an extremely broad answer.
In reality, it depends on what you need. Need pikes to counter cavalry spam? Phalanxes are awful expensive, and halberdiers will get the job done just fine against t2 cavalry – and they’re cheap to upkeep, so you can leave them as garrisons without wasting money. T1 archers make wonderful garrisons. T1 infantry are way better than anyone thinks they are; wall climbing and pike murdering are both important duties.
But in general? Yeah, I build the hell out of some berserkers, me.
Mark_L
1708
Knights are pretty cool if you need cav. And early cav evolve into them. Human priests are pretty solid no matter what your class is, and divine damage can be tough to get outside playing a theocrat. Civic guards provide cheap city defense as well as nets if you get the racial upgrade, so still quite a bit of use for them imo. Add in what Adam said above and I think you can find plenty of use for normal human stuff.
Oh yeah, supports are generally useful no matter your class. If nothing else, you often need the elemental damage to clear out e.g. undead lairs.
On normal settings with King AIs, city settling on, and strong guards.
I won three decisive battles, one for each AI rival, and the last surrendered three turns before I hit my seal victory.
Yeah, I think strong guards screws the AI.
This is why Twitter continues to amuse me. No, I have no idea who this dude is other than someone who follows me.
Still laughing.
"
I lol’d, and then dude sent me this.
My night is complete.
robc04
1712
That is odd, and awesome!
Piemax2
1713
Thanks for the info. I’d like to know how fast I’m expanding compared to the AI, looks like I won’t be able to track that (unless there’s a way to see it on the end of game screen? By default that tracks the scores, and I dont see how to make it display number of cities…)
Clever trick with the diplomacy screen!
I think when you set the game up you can disable the need to explore, which I have never tried but I always assumed it was the fog of war - you could always try to turn that off for a game and watch what the AI is doing? Or, play a Team game and watch what your AI team mates are doing?
Edirr
1715
You can turn off exploration, but not fog of war, at least that’s the way it has been for a long time. In the early beta stages you could turn off both at the beginning, but fog of war returned as soon as you hit end turn. Then they disabled that, so even if you have exploration off, you still suffer the fog of war effects.
Chaplin
1716
After a long break from AoW, I plan to check out the new stuff as I was always a fan of undead, tigran, and frostlings. There is a lot of stuff to remember and new things to learn. To that end, I am watching/listening to Das24680’s initial Orc series. Is there another series that I might want to look at to catch me up on both expansion’s worth of mechanic updates?
robc04
1717
I just finished Game 2 since my hiatus. This time with Golden Realms installed. I played medium map, me + 3 AI, Lord difficulty, Seal Victory enabled. An AI that I didn’t discover got a head start on the seal victory and probably had 10-15 out of the 35 points before I found a seal. I found and claimed 2 and eventually caught up with about 12 turns for a victory. He lost 1 of his seals. Then all hell broke lose. The AI that was friendly with me declared war and sent over like 5 stacks and easily defeated my 1.5 stacks I had guarding the seal. Another AI tried to take a different one and failed.
At some point the other AI caught up and with 4 turns to go we were tied. I sent one of my stacks to his location hoping he didn’t have much guarding it. He outnumbered me and I almost beat him. Then a neutral army decided to take my other seal. Then the guards regenerated and took my last seal. So, I ended up losing, being 2 or 3 points away. It went to shit pretty fast.
I definitely prefer playing with the seals victory enabled. It’s so nice not feeling like I need to attack a heavily defended city. The seals were defended, but only with 1 or 2 fairly powerful stacks. I think I would increase the number of points needed to win a seals victory from 35 to 50. It seemed rather rushed once the first AI claimed the one seal, especially since I hadn’t even encountered him yet.
I played as a human warlord again since I had gotten used to that setup. I was hoping to get the victory, then I’d feel good about changing it up with a different race and class. I had the underground level enabled this time and only explored a tiny bit of it then ignored it.
fdsaion
1718
The one thing that still irks me is sometimes the random research really screws you over for class abilities. My current game has me staring at 10+ turn high tier techs where I’ve pretty much missed out on the useful low tier stuff. Boo.
Mark_L
1719
Cover greatly modifies damage, so standing on walls gives you significant defensive bonuses. As for rogue type versus warrior type units, fast irregular units can flank easier, giving them damage bonuses, and can more easily get the backstab skill, increases those bonuses further. Assassins and Rogue heroes can get a special attack that you cannot fight back against once per battle, too, giving them a strong first strike capability.
All in all, defensive positions and high def values definitely make a real difference. I actually really like them doing it this way, even doing 1 point of damage with each of 3 strikes is far more satisfying than doing 0.
The cover mechanic is the line-of-sight mechanic, where “straight shot” attacks like the Rogue hero’s blowpipe suffer -75% damage and “arcing shot” attacks like most archers get -50% damage. And you always suffer it shooting up onto walls, while anyone standing on top of a wall gets +1 range.
Which is all well and good unless you’re under siege by Tigrans, who couldn’t give less of a crap about your walls and will just pounce/fly/climb over them and murder you with impunity.
The new evil alignment specialization has a city enchantment – Embrace the Darkness or somesuch – that only costs 5 mana to upkeep and makes all units produced there Dedicated to Evil and Life Stealing. Then there’s a 25-mana global combat enchant that gives two random “darkness” powers (which are anything from Regrowth to Vigilant to Dominate or Throw Curse – it seems to pull from the whole damn list of unit powers) to every Dedicated to Evil unit.
Yeah, that was silly.
