Pebbles in the Flood - Can hold out to infinity

[tekelili]

If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting to evaluate an attack the way you suggest (which sounds perfectly reasonable), and then compare it to other attacks as evaluated by the standard combat candidate action.

You undertood me well, I am talking about fire an alternative damage evaluation when normal function returns "unit level", because I guess AI understand that as "damage zero", and in fact it is doing some kind of "damage" to enemy army by removing "unit shield".

[zookeeper]

Good news: mattsc's work is now in meaning that in 1.13.6 and later, this exploit (or whatever one prefers to call it) should no longer be abusable.

[taptap]

I approve of AI getting better, but please remember how this affects campaigns. When the AI becomes semi-decent it will wipe the floor with players almost everywhere with the current balancing.

[mattsc]

I approve of AI getting better, but please remember how this affects campaigns. When the AI becomes semi-decent it will wipe the floor with players almost everywhere with the current balancing.

Yes, absolutely. This addition does not make the AI better per se. It eliminates a bug of the AI that could be exploited by players to make scenarios easier than they should be balanced for.* So balance should not be a concern here.

[ * This is based on my personal opinion that if a scenario is balanced so that you can only win it if you have a unit 1 XP from leveling that can be used to block a vital passage and have the AI never attack that unit, then something is seriously wrong with the scenario design. Anybody is free to disagree with me on that, but you won't be able to change my mind on that. And in any case, if that were really vital to a specific scenario, the new candidate action can easily be excluded. In the meantime, it fixes a bug that can affect all scenarios. ]

[zookeeper]

Yeah, this change really doesn't have anything to do with making the AI better in general.

[Inky]

That's great news.

There's a similar "exploit"/issue where the AI never pulls back weak / wounded / slowed units to make room for healthy powerful units. So especially in defense scenarios you could deliberately leave weak units alive, or slow/heavily injure enemies but not kill them so that the enemy wouldn't use that hex for more dangerous units.

Unlike the 1 XP issue though, changing this would make campaigns much more difficult, since slowing adjacent enemies is an essential tactic for defense scenarios.

[mattsc]

Hi Inky. Yeah, that's all very true. In addition to the balancing issues it would cause, it is also quite a bit harder to code. However, some sort of approximation might already be doable by setting up a simple_attack Micro AI for strong units, if this were particularly useful in specific scenarios. That one does move weaker units out of the way first.

FYI, I am also working an another AI (called Fred) that replaces all default AI behavior and emphasizes a more defensive play style. It's only semi-working in one MP scenario (Freelands) though at the moment and I am not sure if I will ever get it to a more generally usable stage. I've been stuck on this for a long time now and the current version has a lot of serious issues. But even if I managed to figure it out, I doubt very much that it would ever replace the default AI.

[WanderingHero]

I pointed this out years ago in the scenario feedback and it was never fixed. I assume they just don't think its important enough?

And in fairness, all it means is that you can cheese one scenario and use units 1 exp from leveling to stall. I guess they don't want to spend time fixing it, because the overall impact is small to none