Update: 

Hour long AI test video for the truly die hards who want to see all the mistakes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnPKHQIksrA&feature=youtu.be

I see all. I know all. At least, when it comes to this map.

In the top left we have Markin, leader of the AI civilization of Gilden.

In the bottom right, we have me, Draginol, leader of Pariden.

How many turns will it take me to wipe them out? What mistakes will the AI make that can be exploited (and fixed)?

First…some notes

This build is 0.911 which has some balance updates to make sovereigns and champions a little less powerful. The monsters are somewhat more aggressive and the AI has had some general improvements since 0.91.

Second…help me!

If you see me making a mistake, let me know.

Early Game:

I train up two pioneers and then the tower of dominion. I recruit a champion and send the champion in one direction and my sovereign in another.

(to be continued).

Othollo vs. Black Widow monster. Othollo has stone skin enchantment on him already.

Othollo wins.

Opinion: Level 1 champion shouldn’t be able to take out a black widow. Suggestion, Stone skin should do +4 defense plus +4 per earth shard.

Same issue:

My first level sovereign took out a troll by himself.

Opinion: Troll should get 2X more HP than it currently does.

AI Early game: Meanwhile…

Lord Markin just did the same thing. However, he isn’t using stone skin.

Opinion: Stone skin should be a “gotta have” for the sovereign.

Let’s look at the code…

Ok, this is where “strategy” comes into play in AI writing.  The code is very conservative about casting spells with regards to mana.  So at the start of the game, it doesn’t cast a lot of spells even though, IMO, it should cast some spells as early as possible even if it means lowering the available mana.

There are a few ways to do this:

1. Have an XML value for “Early Game AI multiplier” which tells the game to multiply the value early on.

2. Have the code take into account that the value of storing mana should be different at different times in the game.

3. Treat certain unit targets different than others (the value of a spell that affects a sovereign is different than a spell that might target a champion that is stationed in a city).

etc.

AIs in the mist

As you can see, the AI is intent on building a civilization. An admirable goal to be sure.  But not a good strategy.

By contrast…

My early development has focused on training up pioneers and now soldiers to go out and conquer.

With those units, I go out and level up:

By contrast, the AI leader is Soloing it:

Mind you, it’s not that I don’t think about sending units to reinforce the sovereign.  It’s always a balance between how far should it send them and how long should the sovereign wait around? What’s the attrition rate of units getting to the sovereign? Should I send the sovereign home or keep him in the field?

There’s a lot of tweaking that goes into this sort of thing that improves iteration by iteration.

Combining Heroes

One thing the AI does is that once champions get to a certain level, it will gradually put 2 in an army and potentially 3 or more depending on their level.

This is something I have to tweak almost every build because what is a “high enough” level changes.

Now, In this battle the AI is escorting pioneers with two champions and a Drolgard (a mid level Gildenian unit).

The AI (bpttp, left) casts stone skin on himself and then gift of iron right off the bat.

Gilden’s Drolgard unit is better than my Destiny’s Guard unit but he only has 1 of them (the other is a scout). But he does have two champions.

Let’s see what he’s done with his champions:

Yeesh. Level 12.  This is why I get nervous about changing the soloing behavior. Because there is a cost to having the AI wait around for escorts even if he does get killed a lot more often.  If sovereigns got injuries, I’d have to rewrite this.

His other hcampion isn’t that great.

vs.

It’s going to really boil down to whether I can take out his units and his extra champion I think.

On the second round, the AI Markin cast growth on himself. Then his champion cast haste on him. So this is not looking very promising.

The growth spell AI Markin has is self explanatory. And bad for me.

So if I should have done something differently there, feel free to tell me.

…later, Lord Markin is alone. How powerful is he?

This is a bit of an ambush but let’s see what I can do against him.

His first turn he casts growth.

His second turn he casts stone skin.

His third turn he casts gift of iron. Very wasteful. Will check his mana after the battle. But it’s pretty bloody nasty combo. He has a 63 defense.

Here is how the rest of the battle goes:

http://screencast.com/t/uuG8UvkqKO

He only has 65 mana left so he must have determined that he needed to win that battle.

…

So that’s enough for today.  Plenty to integrate in for this week.

As you may imagine, with each iteration, we internally pepper Kael with our own ideas and suggestions.  In no particular order these are some of the ones I’ve put in so you get a flavor of the feedback that poor Kael has to deal with daily.

• Every champion should have a unique ability – ex: give Baco “Destiny’s Gambler” spell where the player can spend 50 mana and get a random result, mostly good but some bad.
• Move random events away from being random and into being “choices”. For instance, an event that currently just random makes everyone go to war instead turns into a council where everyone votes on whether to have a war of finality or an emissary comes and demands you give them 10% of your income, if you fail fortresses appear on the map that begin attacking everyone.
• Have Civ techs that cause Outposts to get guards and expand influence so that you don’t need as many late game.
• Have weapons and armor that are “better” but cost significantly more resources so that the player with more stuff can fight a war of attrition.
• Have quests tend to give players access to more spells so that they’re more compelling. Getting a magic axe is less interesting and gets repetitive. Getting a random magic spell, by contrast, would make the finite # of quests have far greater replay ability.
• More terrain types (especially snow at the poles).
• Outpost specialization (late game, spend money to upgrade outposts that have an impact on the ZOC they control)

Now coming up in beta 4 is the new city system which will result in smaller looking cities (far fewer tiles on the map) but a lot more city improvements to choose from in total but fewer in a particular city (cities will specialize and that specialization will make available exclusive techs that require that city type). But that won’t be coming for awhile. But just something to remember when making requests on cities.

Mind you, these are just suggestions and may never make it in.  There are a lot of good ideas that get made everyday but there’s finite time and budget and the game has a very specific design that is being carried out on schedule that has done well so far.  But as we do iterations of a beta, there’s room for adjustments still.

Elemental: Fallen Enchantress beta 3 has been out a few days now, long enough hopefully to start getting impressions.

If you’ve had the opportunity to play it for at least 2 hours, please vote in the poll to let us know what you think:

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Thanks!

Let’s see how much the results change based on how we fight this battle against a bone ogre:

Auto Resolve results:

Next: Into Tactical and just hitting the auto-play:

Next: I personally play the tactical battle to see if I can do better

Now, I burned a ton of mana in my battle but suffered no damage at all.

So the question is, why did auto-resolve do so poorly? We’ll have to evaluate that as we go on.

From the day we migrated from OS/2 to Windows, every new version of Windows meant Microsoft was going to lift some ideas for the next version of the OS from Object Desktop. And we would have to adapt. 

Think I exaggerate?

Look at Object Desktop for OS/2 (which was developed prior to Windows 95) with its ZIP files that worked as folders, DesktopX with its widgets and gadgets, Control Center with its side bar of “gadgets”, GUI Skins (where uxtheme.dll so blatantly borrowed from that it until Windows 7, it had bugs that were carried over from an early version of WindowBlinds in how it did hooks), Smart File Dialog which allows users to add short-cuts and favorites to their file dialog, Enhanced Folders which added an address line to what we today call Explorer windows, and on and on and on. And that doesn’t begin to touch what they borrowed from MacOS.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not complaining. When you make successful OS enhancements, it’s natural that some of them will wind up in the next version of the OS.  As some OS/2 users may recall, Stardock designed the OS/2 Warp 4 desktop for IBM even though we knew we’d have to release a new version of Object Desktop since were were obsoleting ourselves.

Based on Windows 8, which no one can doubt is very much pure Microsoft innovation, we’re going to really miss the days of embrace and extend.

Screenshots

Object Desktop for OS/2, first beta release – 1993 and Object Desktop 2.0 in 1996

Microsoft Windows in 1993 and Windows 95 in 1996.

Windows 8 Preview: It’s certainly…original

Object Desktop has evolved greatly over the past two decades.

In its original OS/2 incarnation, it was designed to be a subtle, but important, upgrade to the OS. 

When it migrated to Windows, it helped spark the “skinning” revolution where users used it to radically alter the look and feel of Windows.

Here in 2012, Object Desktop has again begun returning to its roots of providing important but often subtle improvements. Let’s look at the above screenshot:

• WindowFX 5 will provide, amongst many many other features, the ability to hide icon text for those who want to get rid of “screen dirt”
• Fences 2 will let users have folders displayed as Fences on the desktop
• DeskScapes continues to let users have visually more interesting wallpapers that animated, change based on time, or are enhanced visually in other ways
• Tiles takes the concept of “virtual desktops” and merges it with the better design concepts of Metro to allow users to create “pages” of tasks.
• and of course WindowBlinds allows users to change the look and feel of the Windows GUI. You can still make radical changes if you’d like (make Windows look like a Mac, for example) but most users these days use it to simply make Aero a bit more usable and personalized.

Visit www.objectdesktop.com to learn more. When you buy Object Desktop, you get everything that’s in it now plus all the things we make new for it or update for the forthcoming year.

I got my Chevy Volt last year. And 3,000+ miles and 6 gallons of gas later I had to fill it up today. I still had nearly half a tank.

Today, when I went to drive to work, I got a warning that my gas was going stale and that it would burn the remainder of my gas.  This was different from previous alerts that told me it was going to run the engine to keep the gas mixed.  So it turns out that the gas only will stay in there for about a year (it was the gas I got from the dealer when I bought it in April 2011).

Love the car.  It’s so well engineered on the interior, I wish my other cars had interiors as well done as the Volt (other cars being a BWM X5 and Porsche 911 Turbo – 997 edition).  With its seamless iPhone integration, terrific navigation system – colorful map supports both touch and panel control, middle drawer that has a hole sized perfectly to fit an iPod coord through, and a hatchback perfect for taking cargo.

The Volt isn’t a hot rod by any means but it is very peppy, far peppier than most cars in its price range. Great car.

Here are some screenshots of fantasy strategy games that I’ve played over the years (or ones I’m interested in). What is cool is how visually different they all are from one another.

Fallen Enchantress (beta):

War of Magic:

Fall from Heaven:

Warlock: Master of the Arcane (beta):

Heroes of Might and Magic VI:

Conquest of Elysium 3

Disciples 3: Renaissance

Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic:

Dominions 3:

Master of Magic:

I’ve spent weeks trying to figure out why I was getting “Error downloading content” messages from Apple TV as well as aborted download attempts on my iPad and even my Mac and PCs.

Eventually, after a lot of effort, I traced it to the IPS feature on my router.  Disabled that feature and all worked well.