is the AI any good in this?

[BasiC]

is the AI any good in this?

[Mormacil]

Define good, it's on par with Total War AI. I can't tell you if that's good in your eyes.

[Sombre]

I enjoy playing against it. You won't get a deep and reactive challenge from it, but it knows how to make armies, fight you over provinces, research spells, use some of those spells overland and in combat, etc.

I'd say it's ok for the genre.

[Morgan]

You can trivialize the AI's challenge by focusing on strategies that you know it won't be able to counter. Otherwise, I'd say it does a good job overall.

In Dom 6, the AI's army compositions seem stronger than in previous versions.

[MaGicBush]

It's pretty bad compared to other 4x games I have played, and much worse than total wars AI I have no idea what mormacil is on about. It does okay when your new, but after you learn the game it doesn't challenge you at all and makes bad mistakes.

[Zane87]

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

It's pretty bad compared to other 4x games I have played, and much worse than total wars AI I have no idea what mormacil is on about. It does okay when your new, but after you learn the game it doesn't challenge you at all and makes bad mistakes.

I cannot in good conciousness agree with this. TW's AI is pretty hillariously bad if you are not playing on legendary and offers rather little challenge.
Dominions 6 on the other hand at least will challenge you, very much so in the early game, while still being annoying and sometimes surprising in the mid to lategame.

Especially given that the very same of your comment is even more so true for TW games, after knowing how to play the AI it becomes trivial and predictable, much more than Dom6 (both still can be a ton of fun though).

That being said, neither can compete with a competent player but that is to be expected. At least in Dom6 you can tailor the AI to your liking with disciples games.

Also, which TW are we talking about here anyway, and do we factor in battle competency as well, because in this part neither series is comparable...

[Mormacil]

Originally posted by MaGicBush:

It's pretty bad compared to other 4x games I have played, and much worse than total wars AI I have no idea what mormacil is on about. It does okay when your new, but after you learn the game it doesn't challenge you at all and makes bad mistakes.

The TW is entirely incapable of playing the game. I genuinely never seen Dom's AI be worse than Total War or even Civilization. Both of those other games have AI that ♥♥♥♥ up on the regular and can be easily outplayed.

[AN]

It's competent but abusable, Dominions is a very complex games and it can't pull off a lot of the more involved strategies, or adapt to them. It can have trouble expanding at basic resource levels, but so will you at first.

[JeremyPVP]

Doesn't the AI still research construction just to give random commanders random items?

[Draken]

Originally posted by JeremyPVP:

Doesn't the AI still research construction just to give random commanders random items?

I think I actually saw some enemy commanders equipped with pretty reasonable items. Or at least I got that impression.

Any AI will always be exploitable, unless it's a super advanced adaptive one, which would be ruinous to put into a game as well as kill any performance. Ever.

For comparison, the very good Star Craft 2 AI Alpha Star that could beat pro players could still be cheesed if you went for unconventional tactics that no one would use because it just didn't know how to deal with those. And it couldn't adapt during the game itself.

[MaGicBush]

I have played every Warhammer game and the AI does much better in those so I am not sure what you two are smoking lol. There is also multiple threads since this game launched about how bad the AI can be. I tend to prefer Conquest of Elysium since the AI can actually play that more competently as it's much simpler.

[DasaKamov]

Originally posted by Mormacil:

Define good

This.

The AI *can* be challenging, and generally is fun to play against. The latter is certainly the more important aspect out of the two, for me.

[Sombre]

I would agree with others the TW AI is not better than the Dom6 AI. The TW AI has the added problem of battles accepting real time inputs of course, which Dom6 does not.

Both AIs are capable of making armies and moving them around and being somewhat entertaining to fight against.

[Quillithe]

Dom6 has more absurdly strong strategies the player can use the AI can't handle at all than TW maybe, but I'd say the TW AI fails more at playing the game competently in general.

It might stand out more because there's a lot more competitive multiplayer focus for Dominions than for TW, and the TW AI is more designed to aggressively gang up on you specifically

And that's not getting into the Civ 6 AI - the whole game is based around super strong civ bonuses and synergies which it doesn't engage with at all.


Anyway I think the AI here is fine. It's really fun to play against if you RP a bit. If you just rush it with ethereal sacreds or something it's pretty likely to die though.

[voronin_mike]

I'd have to agree with Sombre again.
More interesting question in my opinion would be how much it changed from the previous incarnation. On the one hand, it was somewhat learning even at Dom3 times: I still remember how after getting beat with cavalry flanking the AI started to put cavlary flankers of its own immediately. On the other hand, it sometimes used some completely random moves making it difficult to predict with actual logic and necessiating WW1-style front lines of provinces and advancing only with SCs... %( This, at least, seems to be left mostly behind and we can see what it's aiming for. But would like to compare notes or get devs answers in this respect.

[knowthyself2]

It likely depends on how you're playing. If you're min-maxing on a small map you may well destroy the AI very quickly. I'm currently playing on a much larger map as MA C'tis and I'm playing rather thematically and I'm facing a vigorous challenge from Nidavangr and Arcoscephale. I think on big maps AI nations will have time to create ridiculously huge armies and the game's new focus on armies over mages helps make that a competitive strategy