AI cheating in Tzeentch's Realm

[Guy]

Currently playing as Kairos, No mods and i just started this campaign yesterday (1.1)

I'm standing onto of a teleport point which i just entered, so it leads backwards. The A.I. is entering this teleport point and it connects them to the final citadel location. When i enter the teleport point, i do not get connected to the ending location, i instead get ported back to the island where i was last turn.

I noticed that the A.I. will ALWAYS take the most direct route through the portal points, and does not engage any of the armies in the way, even if the player is forced to engage these armies to progress. It will take the A.I. at maximum 5 turns to navigate Tzeentch's realm, while it can take the player on average 10-15 turns.

The A.I. uses these cheats no matter the difficulty setting. They will ALWAYS take the shortest route to the citadel, or just straight up ignore the realms mechanics and get a free pass to the final location. The only way to counter this is by manually intercepting the enemy army, and hope that you don't have any truces with said faction.

How is this good game design? >inb4 "neckbeard whining git gud scrub" >mfw 2.5k hours in WH2 and 1.7k hours in WH1

[Enelith]

Here we go again...

[Trivial]

i had a mod for my game which made the chaos realms appear only for 1 turn for the entire campaign and 2 AI managed to get a soul, so they most definitly do cheat/cheese it

[brownacs]

My understanding is that the AI has to go through a set number of portals (I wanna say 5 but don't quote me on that) and once they've gone through that number, they go to the end.

[Revelation]

who cares we have mod disable that realm ♥♥♥♥

[Zane87]

Tzeentch realm is not a good game design.
And the AI will not take at maximum 5 turns, they take exactly 5 turns, as their portal pingpong is scripted.

Furthermore the design does incentivize save scumming, further making it a bad design. Player needs at best 4 turns to reach it, AI exactly 5, so you either enter early, you save scum or you hope you can intercept and kill the army in battle, knocking them out of Tzeentch's realm (the latter was my to go option).

[DragynDance]

So for one thing, Tzeentches realm has a different portal pattern for every faction, so even if you played in multiplayer, you and another player would have portals go to different places. However, AI do get cheats in Tzeentches realm, they have a predefined path they will take, and the fifth jump will always take them directly to the boss.

[Nearlydead]

the teleports are randomized for every faction.

[Jimmy]

Noticed the same thing, I went through the hoops to reveal the sigils while the mongo AI just walked in several turns later and randomly teleported to the final platform. It's infuriating

[Beytran70]

Originally posted by Nearlydead:

the teleports are randomized for every faction.

They are randomized for the PLAYER. It has been pretty conclusively proven at this point that it is not random for the AI, they know exactly what route to take as soon as they enter.

[Jerroser]

Originally posted by Beytran70:

Originally posted by Nearlydead:

the teleports are randomized for every faction.

They are randomized for the PLAYER. It has been pretty conclusively proven at this point that it is not random for the AI, they know exactly what route to take as soon as they enter.

It kinda is randomises in the sense that the Ai basically just gets ping ponged around random portals on different islands with no real pattern, then on the 5th portal they are taken to the soul.

The player on the other hand, has as different preset route for each faction they could be using and the portals are completely fixed. So if the player and the AI go in to the same portal, they would be taken to completely different destinations.

[VoiD]

From what I read here's how it works:

The player gets a set map of the teleport locations, all the teleporters are set and you can get a clear path from just 4 teleports, but most often you'll take 5 to reach the destination if you don't take a wrong turn at the island with 3 choices (the one you came from +2).

The AI map, however, is nothing like yours, and none of the paths will ever lead to the final destination, instead they just enter random teleports and after 5 times they just appear at the end.

There is/was a bug, which I don't know if it was fixed, that made it so the AI won't reset it's counter, so even if you kill them, and then you take too long the same lord can return to tzeentch's realm and teleport the remaining number of times he needs to get to the center.

[Beytran70]

Originally posted by VoiD:

From what I read here's how it works:

The player gets a set map of the teleport locations, all the teleporters are set and you can get a clear path from just 4 teleports, but most often you'll take 5 to reach the destination if you don't take a wrong turn at the island with 3 choices (the one you came from +2).

The AI map, however, is nothing like yours, and none of the paths will ever lead to the final destination, instead they just enter random teleports and after 5 times they just appear at the end.

There is/was a bug, which I don't know if it was fixed, that made it so the AI won't reset it's counter, so even if you kill them, and then you take too long the same lord can return to tzeentch's realm and teleport the remaining number of times he needs to get to the center.

It seems like such a strange way to do it, but I guess CA made it that way so it LOOKS like the AI is actually doing the mechanic but they're not.

[Jerroser]

Originally posted by Beytran70:

Originally posted by VoiD:

From what I read here's how it works:

The player gets a set map of the teleport locations, all the teleporters are set and you can get a clear path from just 4 teleports, but most often you'll take 5 to reach the destination if you don't take a wrong turn at the island with 3 choices (the one you came from +2).

The AI map, however, is nothing like yours, and none of the paths will ever lead to the final destination, instead they just enter random teleports and after 5 times they just appear at the end.

There is/was a bug, which I don't know if it was fixed, that made it so the AI won't reset it's counter, so even if you kill them, and then you take too long the same lord can return to tzeentch's realm and teleport the remaining number of times he needs to get to the center.

It seems like such a strange way to do it, but I guess CA made it that way so it LOOKS like the AI is actually doing the mechanic but they're not.

The best explanation is that there was no way to program the AI to uncover the path and sus out the route in the same way they expected the player to do it. Might also be this was the best alternative they could think of that didn't involve just having them share the preset route and the AI always knowing it.

[Maximum997]

Originally posted by Beytran70:

It seems like such a strange way to do it, but I guess CA made it that way so it LOOKS like the AI is actually doing the mechanic but they're not.

It is the easiest way to do it with such braindead AI.

[Lady MacBeth]

Originally posted by Trivial:

i had a mod for my game which made the chaos realms appear only for 1 turn for the entire campaign and 2 AI managed to get a soul, so they most definitly do cheat/cheese it

Um you can do the same thing. Portal open for one turn, go in and claim a soul. No one gets kicked out of a realm until the soul is claimed or their army is destroyed.