Deity Empires

Yes, in a manner of speaking, there is. Once the battle starts change the battle delay setting down to 0 from 100 (bottom left) and then click the auto-battle button. The battle will resolve instantly. Just as good as auto resolve in practice.

Control + Right Click cancels the build order.

The first thing I do when I found a new city is turn off auto-build of settlers.

You can change the radius of cities to whatever you like at new game start. It’s a starting option. You can also set a limit on how many cities are allowed to be built in the game.

If you want a tall game without a lot of city spam then set the city radius to 4 or 5 and set the max cities allowed down to something like 5 for you and the AIs. Or, I guess you could limit yourself to 5 and allow the AI to build as many as it wants for a challenge.

Thanks. Did not know you could turn off auto-build of settlers. I did know you could set the city radius in settings. I wish they showed it on the map.

You can see the radius when you bring up the city screen but yeah, I know what you mean. A color overlay, shading or something for those hexes on the main map too would be sweet. I know it’s been requested so maybe it gets added. Meantime, I think a mod could probably do that if someone gets interested enough.

Thanks, agreed. Great game, but it still needs a bit of work.

Well, what do you know… I created a post to the devs on the Steam forum requesting that they add this and it turns out it’s already in there. A dev replied in the post and said hit the F5 key to toggle through the display options and one of them shows the radius.

The only thing is, I don’t like that it’s a solid color because you can’t really easily play with it turned on. So, I asked if they could make it an outline instead. We’ll see what they say.

And here’s the developer’s reply to me last night after I requested a radius outline instead and pointed out you couldn’t actually play the game with the current city radius display mode overlaying everything under it:

Ah I see. We will try to get that into the update after the next

That’s why I love these guys.

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Yeah, these devs are great. It’s why I didn’t hesitate to pick this up. I’m really looking forward to see how this game progresses, especially since it’s in a good state now. And thanks for the F5 tip.

Next sale, I am so buying this game!

How do you do that? I was reading on the forum that if you turn this off the city continues to build settlers it just doesn’t finish them and you have to do something in order to finish them and put them in play.

Open the city screen. At the bottom left of that screen click on the ‘city options’ button and then uncheck the auto build settlers box. The setter will continue to be produced from overflow population but it will not actually be completed. Once you’re ready to actually build it, click on the settler on the upper right build panel on the city screen (just like you build a regular unit). The settler will then instantly be built and ready to roll out.

Nice!

I put an hour or two into this earlier this morning and I really like the feel of it. Now I just need to read a bit more of the strategies listed here and make a better attempt at next game.

The AI handed me my butt on the normal setting today. My wood elves got creamed by the Blood Orcs. Their deity Zinfek materialized and it led a couple stacks of units and marched through my territory and gutted my empire.

I had cities with tier I walls and full of the maximum number of units, but when two or more enemy stacks work in tandem it’s lights out.

It’s been a while since an AI did that to me. Normally in other 4Xish games a doom stack appears, causes some harm then wanders off. Not here. It was relentless and pressed its advantage like I would.

Duh! How many hours have I looked at that button and not seen it. And I see you can specialize cities. Accuracy seems crucial as my units can’t hit shit when they are level two.

Indeed. I had my butt handed to me in a game last week on hard difficulty and I immediately set it back to normal difficulty after that.

The AIs are relentless. They just keep coming. In that game, I was hopping my best 3 stacks from town to town trying to keep them from taking them and I held back the tide for a while and killed zillions of their good units but it was hopeless. They got too far ahead of me in population and production and went for the throat. They had a lot of high level units which really made it tough.

This really is the best AI I’ve seen a a long, long while in a strategy game.

Yes! I always stick +accuracy equipment on new units.

It’s an interesting decision whether or not to materialize your deity. Not having mine materialized saved my bacon today. I had my main army far away from my empire taking out an AI when another AI showed up. A combination of my deity’s fireballs, towers and archers easily held them off. If they had their deity though it would have been a different story. The AI was real smart in avoiding some of my more defended cities, it goes for your weaknesses.

I am already thinking about my next game. I’m thinking of starting with a lot of spell books in a single path to get more powerful magic sooner. I went 4 3 this game, combine that with not knowing what I was doing and my tech was limited. I am still not at any summons.

My strategy these days is to start off etherealized and support my main stack while they look for items and spellbooks in lairs/dungeons. I like starting that way because it costs 5 deity ability points to start materialized, which is a waste of starting points, imo.

Once I have some basic offensive and cc spells researched and enough meditation and battle mana points built up, my B unit stack is about ready to roll out and my A stack is strong and has magic user units that can cast spells on their own. So A stack deity support is not really needed anymore.

At that point I materialize and use my deity to level the B stack and himself up to around level 5. At any point if I need to defend my cities or my A stack, I can just cast etherealize (which is instant) and on the same turn I can defend or whatever. Or, I may also decide to etherealize again if I find some new spellbooks and want to research the juicy spells inside. Then once I do that I materialize again. So, I bounce back and forth between the two states a lot after the first 100 turns or so depending on what I need my deity to do at the moment.

About the starting number of spellbooks: I never bother to research the spellbooks themselves, just the spells in them. It’s so much faster. For that reason I only start with 2 spellbooks. One of each spell school I want to start with. Then I pick the ‘meditator’ and the ‘battle caster’ deity abilities. They give a big boost to the speed of increasing meditation and battle mana. I can always find the spell books in-game but I can only get those sweet boosts at startup. As an example, I started with 1 fire and 1 holy spellbook in my current game. Now, at turn 385, I have:

21 Holy
11 Alteration
9 Energy
8 Fire
6 Poison
3 Arcane
3 Cold
2 Nature

So, I’ve found all but 2 of those books in dungeons. I spend so much time in dungeons looking for old books that I’m a regular Indiana Jones.

I used my fire books to summon a baby red dragon early on and put him in my A stack. He evolved into a young red dragon which are great because they get the fireball spell at level 5. He’s 5 levels away now from evolving into an adult red dragon which will be pretty fun. From the Holy spellbooks I learned summon angel and have one of those in my main stack too. I takes forever to evolve them to archangels but I just found enough Holy spellbooks to get the summon archangel spell so I’m currently researching that.

Archangels are great because they can summon angels. And angels can summon lesser angels. And all of them can heal.

Is the ai competitive because it is smart, or do they get advantages such as knowing which cities are defended well, or see into fog of war?

To me this sounds like AoW and Dominions had a baby?

(Aka the game I have been dreaming off since I fired up Dominions and thought how cool it would be to have your player character in an AoW game be an actual Dragon, or lump of rock, or Giant Monkey…)

Not as ugly as Dominions, not as pretty as AoW, a different but equally good combat system?

Colour me really really intrigued.

Going to play a bit of devil’s advocate here.

An opponent who has more population, a larger economy, a larger military etc relentlessly grounding you down isn’t good AI IMHO.

Fire up Aow3, go on an extra large map, play the game normally, typically you’ll take out 2 or 3 AI before the remaining ones are so much larger than you, and have so many armies, that the game becomes a bit of a slog and you eventually die, because you are fighting one or 2 epic fights every turn, for easily a dozen plus turns.

That said, the fact that the AI here at least recognizes it’s numerical advantage and comes after you is not a bad thing at all.

All the more if it works consistently along all game settings, because it certainly appears there are plenty of ways to set a game up.