I have to say, the new A.I. is very much smarter than before the Skirmishes have been added. Even the A.I. in the two dailies are smarter. Nice job OWLs! Do others think the same, or have I just gotten dumb and dumber?
honestly haven't seen much a change. they still can be tricked and lead into dumb things while I just laugh at them
For one thing, the A.I. no longer retreats back to their shrine when the last of the fonts have been taken. It will actually fight for the fonts and attempt to retake them. Haven't you guys played lately?
Secondly, the skirmishes, with the random battlegroups from the top X players, it is very much more challenging. I'm not saying it's perfect, but much better than before. I think it's going to really help the new player base because it will be much more challenging, but not seemingly unbeatable. It also provides more randomness to us single-player fans. Therefore, for those new players that have a goal of playing in Ranked and ruling the world will be much better once they move to that aspect of the game due to the more challenging and randomness of their practice single-player matches. It will take time for the Ranked veterans to see the fruition of this aspect, but if they can be patient and wait for it, they will have more opponents than we have seen in recent history, and hopefully than ever before. They need to understand that the new players will not go directly to Ranked and allow the veterans to beat them time and time again so they can stay in the top 50. For the new players that have the initial goal of competing in Ranked to stick, they need to believe it is achievable. The veteran Ranked players need to contribute everything they can in order to allow this to happen. This will require patience, teaching, kindness, and encouragement. The new players will play quite a few Skirmishes before they go all-in with Ranked. The veteran Ranked players will need to understand that first and foremost and understand what to expect before Ranked really takes off. Do not complain. Read this, expect it, understand it. In my opinion, adding Skirmishes are the best improvement this game has ever seen and the best thing this game needed. If anything, Skirmishes will be its saving grace. A close second is the higher gold and free rune acquisition rate and availability.
I don't think the AI has gotten any smarter, but the skirmisher decks are better, so it seems that way. I agree with Gaedel, though; since I play primarily PvE, I only saw a small subsection of runes, and so when I do play PvP, I lose a lot of games simply because I haven't seen certain runes before, and either don't know that they exist until they've already wrecked me, or I waste so much time reading their new (to me, anyway) rune that I make mistakes, or I do stuff like attack a 'new' rune that has arrow eater or magic immunity or something because I didn't know it had it. My fault, I know, but something easily fixed if I'd either had more time or more experience. Plus, free common runes from skirmisher never hurt, although I already have all the C/U/R so they're just 0.5% of an exo or whatever to me.
I still play the dailies. Prior to the Steam beta launch, when you overtake the last of the fonts the U.I. retreated back to their shrine. After the Steam beta launch, the U.I. does not do that. They try to overtake he font. Have you seen otherwise?
AI seems to have gotten a good deal smarter, I see them use a lot more abilities and move towards fonts more intelligently, they also no longer retreat as Gaedel said. The AI is still kind of dumb, but it's gotten to a point where skirmishes aren't quite as easy and therefore are really enjoyable.
a few improvements would be still: do not spawn over chasms and do not spell positive spells on the opponent.
Yes I too played dailies after release and saw the retreated once you capped all fonts. But maybe that was because it was older dailies?
The A.I. is actually AI now. The old "A.I.' were just pre-coded steps. The system actually understands enough to actually play the game, it's why we can have such a thing as skirmish mode now.
Currently they're not running away after a font is captured, so that's pretty considerable. But still a breeze, they just run in your face hoping to kill something.
I would say that for AI to be good they need to be extremely overpowered, because they can't use the classics like 0.000001 second reaction time and clicking in 50 places at once tricks in turn based games. Unfortunately that would be hard on new players, maybe add a mode like hard difficulty where AI gets double nora gen?
I just tested this with the first daily assigned to me today, "Defenders of K'thiras". This uses the KF map with the river separating the middle with two fonts. I took the closes font on my first turn. A couple turns later I took over the second font. The AI did not retreat, of matter of fact they moved in and overtook my original font and moved a unit to contest the other font. Congratulations on the UI! This is a vast improvement over retreating to the shrine. In my opinion, the "retreat" issue was the easiest way to defeat the UI in the past. Now that they do not give up, it makes the game more challenging. Will I lose to the AI? I haven't yet, but the games do last longer. EDIT: The next turn after the UI moved into their closest font to contest, they moved the same unit so they can be in range to attack (3-5 range), which consequently moved it out of the font and gave it back. However, they still did not retreat, they are fighting back. The UI has improved, but still needs a lot of work.
they do still cliffdive on deploy. Had that on Kthir Hill I believe. The one that baskitkase also remade. But the original version.
