AI too Anti-Fun

[Doctor Proteus]

Does anyone else find the AI to be too efficient and anti-fun now? I am trying to do the first level of the Undergames with the Undead Underlord on Normal difficulty and I had to save and call it quits because I was nearing the 3 hour mark and getting annoyed. It's getting unbelievably tedious and hard to keep paying my minions now with Ritual of Avarice too.

The problem is that it's too hard and time consuming to claim enemy tiles. I am trying to claim the central area so I can gain access to the AI's secondary core shards, but it's just too time consuming and difficult to snake my way towards the enemy dungeon so I can undermine the obsidian to gain access to their second Core Shards.

It is taking so long to claim even just a few enemy tiles because my Imps are constantly getting zapped and bothered by never-ending barrages of enemy minions, even when I have loads of enemy minions imprisoned. If it's not lightning bolt it's the AI dropping minions and rallying.

I have to say, it's really not fun. I am absolutely horrified thinking about what the later levels are going to be like.

[♥♥♥♥ Goblin]

IMO, the AI is too worker happy (it is programmed that way) and it kinda ruins the game mode because you feel like all you are doing to fighting off enemy workers. However the devs have indicated they are bringing back worker mana cast cost, so this should help this situation. It gets worse on harder difficulties when you have to deal with endless minion and ember demon drops on that one tile you haven't reclaimed that is behind your defenses. (IMO, ember demons in UG shouldn't be able to be picked up because you can build rifts behind your energy door thing and thus the enemy/player can never destroy them)

Part of the problem is the first two campaigns (vanilla/hog), you didn't have to deal with enemy workers like this, and ultimately it didn't matter how long it took you to finish a level. And all the strategies you used in the campaign no longer apply to UG. If you decide to play slow, you likely will reach a really difficult stalemate where neither you nor the AI can progress.

Lucky for you, the AI has horrible gold smarts and if you can force them to run out of gold, then any damage you do will not be repaired as easily. Also the AI will never use outposts/rituals and you can use this to your advantage to claim artefacts or attack from behind.

[Stormfather91]

Personally, I found the first tier of missions to be the hardest for Lamash, mostly because Kasita and her endless horse of sentinels was such a nightmare to deal with. In other words: things will get better!

What I eventually ended up doing was setting up a prison, a sanctuary, and a spirit chamber, and just sacrificing both prisoners and my own living minions to raise a horde of vampires and then using the money I saved on wages to level the vampires up in the spirit chamber. Since you're virtually always in direct conflict with your opponent, the vampires will be able to merrily feed in combat.

Also, if you can get direct line of sight on the enemy core shard, just spamming improved banshees will usually do the trick too.

Also note that most of the later levels have access to at least one gold shrine, which will make living minions more viable.

I hope this helps! :)

[Woudo]

Spam worker rally in the areas you want to claim, and set down a few conduits. Worker Rally makes your imps a lot more focused.

If it's an exceptionally tight choke point and your imps keep fighting the other imps, possess one and claim the tiles yourself. (Stand on the tile and right-click, while you have "Work prop" selected).

If you have overwhelming force, you don't need to claim tiles. Just Rally All and flag the core directly. Your units will goon squad it and roll over anything in their way.

Enemy units in a prison do not count toward their unit count. In fact, it counts towards yours. Having a prison full of units doesn't mean anything.

UG1 and 2 are the only maps without a gold shrine, which makes the later maps a lot easier. Slap a conduit on a gold shrine and it'll bury you in money.

The last and second to last levels can actually be cheesed by grabbing neutral minions at the start of the game and immediately killing the AI.

[Clord]

I don't find medium difficulty all that hard but then again I have played the other campaigns. However, I agree that they made workers too easy to refill.

[Clumsy Vulcan]

Yup - have seen this feedback posted in a couple of places and we are looking into solutions.

Specifically, we're adding a difficulty-based cooldown to the rate at which the Lightning and Summon Worker spells can be used.

[Ryo]

The AI became challenging.
As an example, you cannot take over a single room with your imps on master difficulty. Exactly within the millisecond your imps should occupy a room, the AI is selling exactly the tiles of the room your imps are standing on. And this happens simultaneously all over the map. Simply not possible to challange with that as a human being.
Instead you have to use Voltas strom vortexes to defend your imps and occupy the room tile per tile. If the AI notice that its loosing grounds it will rally the spot and will take all tiles back within some seconds.
I have done all levels of The Undergames on master difficulty now and its always the same, you cannot challange with the AIs micromanagement but you can still suprise the AI easily by rushing their core shards or cores when the AIs is trying to break through you line of defense on the other side of the map. Furthermore, the AI can't handle soul wells behind augrum walls. Sometimes it tries to break through using more than six underminers but it starts to rally the minions after the breaktrough, giving you enough time to build new augrum walls. The AIs offenive play is sometimes superb, but its defensive play is sometimes really bad.

[Doctor Proteus]

Originally posted by Simburgur:

Yup - have seen this feedback posted in a couple of places and we are looking into solutions.

Specifically, we're adding a difficulty-based cooldown to the rate at which the Lightning and Summon Worker spells can be used.

That is good to hear.

[♥♥♥♥ Goblin]

Originally posted by Ryo:

The AI became challenging.
As an example, you cannot take over a single room with your imps on master difficulty. Exactly within the millisecond your imps should occupy a room, the AI is selling exactly the tiles of the room your imps are standing on. And this happens simultaneously all over the map. Simply not possible to challange with that as a human being.

Worst yet is on maps like map2 where you have water. The AI will insta-build a bridge to whatever area it wants to capture. When you try to claim the bridge, it just sells one tile at a time, meaning you have this bridge that can be used to spawn/drop workers/minions at any time and thus you need to use defenses/whatever to make sure they don't attack from the bridge.

Another thing I've seen the AI do is what looks like worker scouting. They spawn 3-5 workers and they run into your territory, ultimately dying to your minions/defenses. I don't know if this is intended or not, but the times I've seen it, there was nothing to be gained (no gold veins, artefacts, dead bodies, tiles to claim, etc) for those enemy workers to target / run to.

[Doctor Proteus]

Originally posted by ♥♥♥♥ Goblin:

Originally posted by Ryo:

The AI became challenging.
As an example, you cannot take over a single room with your imps on master difficulty. Exactly within the millisecond your imps should occupy a room, the AI is selling exactly the tiles of the room your imps are standing on. And this happens simultaneously all over the map. Simply not possible to challange with that as a human being.

Worst yet is on maps like map2 where you have water. The AI will insta-build a bridge to whatever area it wants to capture. When you try to claim the bridge, it just sells one tile at a time, meaning you have this bridge that can be used to spawn/drop workers/minions at any time and thus you need to use defenses/whatever to make sure they don't attack from the bridge.

Another thing I've seen the AI do is what looks like worker scouting. They spawn 3-5 workers and they run into your territory, ultimately dying to your minions/defenses. I don't know if this is intended or not, but the times I've seen it, there was nothing to be gained (no gold veins, artefacts, dead bodies, tiles to claim, etc) for those enemy workers to target / run to.

I don't think the programmers were looking at the big picture when they made the AI supercharged. We are just Humans, not omnipresent AI's thinking and reacting at light speed.

[Woudo]

Originally posted by Evil_Lord_Proteus:

I don't think the programmers were looking at the big picture when they made the AI supercharged. We are just Humans, not omnipresent AI's thinking and reacting at light speed.

Which is why we are destined to fail.

[Doctor Proteus]

I keep loading up the same game-in-progress(first Undergame level, normal difficulty, undead Underlord) and I keep having to quit within 5-10 minutes because the game just makes me absolutely furious. Both AI's are attacking on multiple fronts, claiming my tiles, destroying my defenses, claiming the shrines, etc... while my own monsters bumble around and get zapped by their Underlord spells and wandering into enemy territory where they get killed. The AI's are able to perform multiple complex actions at any number of points across the whole map, while we mere mortals can only react singularly as a mortla can.

This expansion is an absolute nightmare. It's been a long time since a game made me this angry.

When you make a game for your customers to enjoy, their enjoyment should be a factor you take into consideration, and you should not actively go out of your way to completely hinder, empede, frustrate and annoy the customer. It's like if someone buys a game the creator has told them is fun, but when they try to aply it, all that happens is that a hammer keeps smashing their skull in.

What's worse imo, is that you ensist on hiding the dungeon themes behind things. People are paying for content they may never aquire.

I am angry. So very very angry. I am boiling with an intense hatred for the Undergames. Hate. Hate. Hate. Oh god help me. D:

[Woudo]

Cool your jets maverick. Neither Brightrock nor the game are out to get you, and Brightrock has a habit of nerfing any semblance of difficulty deep into the ground as soon as one person trips and stumbles. I'd hate to see that happen again.

You've probably just snookered yourself before you saved the game, and now you're repeatedly loading up a game that has already snowballed out of your favour. Start the level again and try it with the easy underlords, Volta and Kasita.

And I do enjoy the DLC. I enjoy it a lot.

[Doctor Proteus]

Originally posted by Woudo:

Cool your jets maverick. Neither Brightrock nor the game are out to get you, and Brightrock has a habit of nerfing any semblance of difficulty deep into the ground as soon as one person trips and stumbles. I'd hate to see that happen again.

You've probably just snookered yourself before you saved the game, and now you're repeatedly loading up a game that has already snowballed out of your favour. Start the level again and try it with the easy underlords, Volta and Kasita.

And I do enjoy the DLC. I enjoy it a lot.

I can't calm down, this expansion has caused me too much pain. From stupidly powerful AI, unfair and frustrating design, to bugs, glitches and my dungeon core literally exploding when I try to load my My Pet Dugeon(meaning I can't even play My Pet Dungeon), the expansion so far has been nothing but a total nightmare.

And also, I disagree. The general consensus is that the AI is too reactive and efficient. If you're going to Yes-Man when there are problems then the game will only continue to decline. Remember, they are trying to sell this game to people.

It feels to me like the game is trying to pander to the 1% Super Elite "probably cyborgs" e-sports gamers. Reminds me of Wildstar, which tried to cater to the 1% Elite Raider crowd and pushed away the other 99% of the playerbase.

Until further notice, I consider the game ruined. It's funny, Stellaris ruined itself with a 2.0 update too, and I loved that game as well.

[♥♥♥♥ Goblin]

@Evil Lord Proteus:

I liked WildStar too until they merged the servers and started will their free to play crap. I returned a few months later to find the rune system had changed and would require so much grinding to re-rune all my gear. So disappointed.

On Topic:

I really enjoy all aspects of this game, but the new UG expansion requires a different type of play style to enjoy. I can play the vanilla and HoG campaigns for hours on end, but can only enjoy UG for 1-2 hours max before I feel overwhelmed. The reason I feel is that the campaigns are designed generally as "your own pace", where as UG is designed as "improved skirmishes". If you don't enjoy skirmishs, you are probably not going to enjoy UG.

With that in mind, each Underlord has a specific playstyle due to the limits (ie. spells/rooms/etc being locked) and one playstyle may not work for every Underlord. Even if that Underlord's abilities intrigue you, the intended playstyle may not, so if you aren't playing a specific way, you may find it more difficult than it is.

My breakdown on Underlords and playstyles:

Volta (Siege Tank Turtle): Slow and steady. Good for people who enjoy building up their defenses/army. Bad for people who want to rush to win (no beast den or quick ways to get gold/units). Good for casual playstyles or people who like turtling.

Shale (Zerg Rush): Opposite of Volta, Fast and Unpredictable. Good for people who want to fight a lot and not care so much about mistakes made as you can easily recoup your losses. Works good for aggressive playstyles.

Kasita (Protoss Deathball): Planning makes perfect and Kasita is all about macromanagement (economy, keeping units alive). Sentinels are desireable but can work without them. I find this Underlord excels when you make use of the game mechanics (ie. fortified foundry) to rush out sentinels / beasts to overtake your enemy. They have some defenses but not as useful like Volta. This playstyle is for people who like the power progression since you start out weak/slow and eventually become an unstoppable force.

Lamash (Boxer): Micromanagement for Lamash is key (doing as much as possible with everything you have available). Lamash plays well if you can micro your necros and crypt/bodies to maximize your army size. It isn't about rushing or being aggressive, but about making the most count with all your units. I find that I micro the most with Lamash (ie. fill crypt with bodies -> drop necros on crypt to make sure they have max ghouls -> attack with army). This playstyle requires a lot more focus to succeed and micro'ing all your units/rooms/unlocks to maximize your success.

[nutter666]

Out of interest, what difficulty are you playing it on? because you have the option to lower the difficulty settings...