Too many lizardmen!

telex4 · Post by **telex4** » May 16th, 2004, 11:25 am

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but lately when I've been playing multiplayer games against northerners, the AI recruits nothing but lizardmen for the first few rounds, and then continues to recruit them heavily throughout, to the neglect of other units.

Maybe they should be made a little more expensive, or a little less effective, so the AI will recruit more of the other units?

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » May 16th, 2004, 11:29 am

That's just cause the other races all recruit calvary the first turn, and effectivly lizardmen are the only ones effective against them from the northens 'point of view. you should see if they'd use that many(if any) lizardmen at all against undead and if they do, they recruit them simply for their speed.

Post by **Dave** » May 16th, 2004, 2:12 pm

Indeed...if your enemy recruits lots of horse-based units, lizardmen are one of the best units to recruit to counter them.

Making them more expensive wouldn't change the way the AI perceives them, although making them less effective would, but I don't necessarily think that that is A Good Thing to do.

I think that if your fighting an enemy that recruits many horse based units, recruiting lizardmen instead of wolf riders is simply a smart move.

David

telex4 · Post by **telex4** » May 16th, 2004, 3:58 pm

I can see the rationale, but I just think it's a shame that they only seem to recruit loads of lizardmen, a few assassins and orcish archers, and the occasional troll or wolf rider.

Post by **Darth Fool** » May 16th, 2004, 7:12 pm

Actually, I find using the AI as a unit balancing tool to be quite handy. The fact that it recruits lizardmen to counter cavalry is a good thing, since that was what the lizard folke were meant to add to the northerners. Still, telex4 has a point. Maybe a flag could be added to the ai (set in the scenario) which would limit the fraction of any one type of unit that the ai recruits to force it too provide you with a variety...

Bander · Post by **Bander** » May 16th, 2004, 8:26 pm

It could be like heroes where you could only recruit say 3 of each type of unit each turn. But that is kind of restrictive. And hordes of lizardmen are just too cool

Post by **Darth Fool** » May 16th, 2004, 8:40 pm

I was thinking more on the lines of a scenario designer deciding that an orcish leader wouldn't recruit only lizards and so place a limit on it (say 50%). If the lizard men were getting slaughtered left and right, but the non-lizard men orcs and goblin were surviving for some reason, the ai could still recruit all lizards too fill out the ranks. This would basically force the AI to use more than one type of unit. granted, it would perhaps be sub-optimal for the AI in terms of making life hard for the player, but it might fit what scenario designers want for a particular scenario. but, maybe not...

Post by **Dave** » May 16th, 2004, 8:48 pm

Darth Fool wrote:If the lizard men were getting slaughtered left and right, but the non-lizard men orcs and goblin were surviving for some reason, the ai could still recruit all lizards too fill out the ranks.

So this basically means that it would recruit the units that are dying the most easily. This sounds like the reverse of the kind of thing a 'smart' AI should do

---

I will have to test the Northerners further, but of what I have seen so far, the diversity of the AI's unit selection depends very heavily on the diversity of the human's unit selection.

Sometimes the best strategy is to recruit mostly one type of unit.

David

Insinuator · Post by **Insinuator** » May 17th, 2004, 2:37 am

Yes, making stupid AI, is, well, not smart.

And we certainly would not want to limit the number of strategies one could have, do we? Even if those strategies may seem boring or routine, if they work, then whatever!

Bander · Post by **Bander** » May 17th, 2004, 7:14 pm

It might be a good thing to have a stupid AI on easy difficulty levels. As it is newbs have no chance, unless they learn to manipulate the AI aka assanate the leader.

Post by **Dave** » May 20th, 2004, 3:23 pm

Actually I found out that there was a bug in the AI code that caused them to recruit too many scouts in general, especially if they started the scenario with lots of gold. This could include lizardmen in the case of Northerners.

This has been corrected in CVS (not in 0.7.7).

Shundread sent me the attached cartoon which I think is amusing

David

Post by **erl** » May 20th, 2004, 4:39 pm

Class strip Shundread, good work

. I'd love to see more wesnoth strips

.

miyo · Post by **miyo** » May 20th, 2004, 5:04 pm

I quess we could show that when doing Wesnoth presentations... in various events.

- Miyo

Post by **Darth Fool** » May 20th, 2004, 8:54 pm

erl wrote:
Class strip Shundread, good work . I'd love to see more wesnoth strips .

perhaps there should be a forum on Wesnothian humor

. other jokes/strips would, of course, belong in the off topic thread...

Kamahawk · Post by **Kamahawk** » May 20th, 2004, 11:39 pm

Oh god, I think we might have just seen the birth of another sprite comic...