There was an AI update on June 12, I wonder if that broke it?
I was just wondering the same thing. The behavior @Fifth_Fret is describing is completely incompatible with my own experiences with the game, so I figure something must be broken.
I sure hope it’s something that can be fixed! I was certainly hoping for more of a challenge based on reviews here. I’m sure I can nudge the difficulty up a bit; the behaviour seems fine, it just seem short on material.
I haven’t seen anyone talking about the recent patch breaking the AI on the forums, maybe you are just some sort of Relics of War savant?
You’re not setting yourself to a level that’s giving you an economic advantage, right? The difficulty adjusts the AI levels but you can independently tweak yours - make sure the setting in the red oval here isn’t giving you bonuses:
Counterintuitively, higher ranks for your own character make the game easier for you. Check the rollover if uncertain.
I’m pretty sure I’m not (I did notice the ability to give yourself a handicap, which is probably nice for preventing buffing the AI to the point of a map covered in its units). But I’ll double check. It might also be that Orks are not very good, especially for the AI.
I haven’t played since last year and you guys made reinstall it. I played around 10 turns, and noticed that a few cultists not attacking and not retreating until I kill them off.
From the release notes:
AI is now better at closing in to utilize melee and rapid fire weapons.
Maybe related?
Give us Eldar already!!
Wow - either that guy has outlandishly freaky long arms or his head is 3 sizes too small. Either way love the cognitive dissonance.
One important thing to pay attention to is that the AI don’t seem to consider the player special, so unless you put them on the same team, they could attack each other and end up with nothing left to face you. It happened to me a few times:
The AI were so busy killing each other that they had nothing facing my own units and I could steamroll them easily.
It mostly depend on where you start relative to the AI. Putting the AI on the same team makes things much harder but much more consistent.
I picked this up during the Steam sale, perhaps I should wait to install and play it? My backlog is big enough that I have no rush to do it.
Gladius is one of my favorite games. I keep coming back to it. It is a very enjoyable and WH40K experience. I just really enjoy the war only 4x gameplay. I also just played the Tau again with the newest upgrade pack and fell in absolute love with the Tidewall Gunrig. Each of the factions is pretty unique too. It sort of reminds me of board game design where Gladius has a ruleset, but each faction breaks the ruleset in one or a few ways.
Why wait? Because of the AI discussion up thread? The AI has been very very good in this game, I think the game in question may have been a fluke since it doesn’t sound like it was corroborated on other forums. The AI players may have beat each other to a pulp. The game kicked my ass when I played it last, which was their most recent DLC.
I have seen the AI wildly swing in difficulty during the release of the game. They do tend to muck it up just after a major DLC. I played a game just last weekend and the AI seemed suitably good. Sometimes they are bad. In the past, the main consistent issue seems to be the AI is iffy with handling challenging neutral dispersion and sporadic in its performance in allied games.
Yes. It’s great fun. The AI is not human quality, but it’s fine for enjoying the game. It uses units right, and makes use of abilities.
(It also tries to eco boom, which given a small advantage will probably crush many players - I’m guessing I play this more aggressively than most, as such a strategy leaves it quite vulnerable to having its HQ overwhelmed by many Imperial Guardsmen with early krak grenades! But given some space, it’s churning out units and sensibly moving then around by the midgame).
Playing a typical game with 4 or 5 AIs that I don’t know the location of and with NPCs harassing my starting position the odds of me finding and crushing all of them early isn’t in the cards.
I just finished a 4 player game on a medium map (all normal settings; AI has the first level of buffs). You can roughly intuit locations (4 corners!). I was in the SW. I found and was driven back by the NW AI (no losses of note), and went to the SE corner where I was able to push through. I then pushed up the middle of the map - the NW and NE seemed to have been engaged in quite a battle, and in combination with a flank along the NW I managed to overwhelm.
I then had a pretty long drawn out engagement with the final NW AI (also Imperial Guard), but my production and income was just too much and I won the war of attrition. So many dead guardsmen…
I did build some more cities, but only after taking out the first couple of AI. It’s a big investment to get new cities - research, a building, a unit, the city, the city infrastructure - and they payoffs seem quite a long time in the future. I suspect larger maps they might be more important.
I agree you can roughly know where the other AIs are, but I don’t find I can get to them fast enough to knock them out before they’ve gotten better units. Least not all of them. And so I spend time developing and recruiting better units to deal with their’s
It works out well at least from my perspective because I would have been been a bit disappointed and stopped playing this one earlier if I’d consistently succeeded in what it sounds like you’re pulling off with knocking them all out quickly.
I can’t knock them all out quickly at all! I suspect if the two AIs hadn’t been involved in a stalemate war with each other my rush would have backfired.