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- Hero army growth is far less than you would expect -- even when the enemies have 3 cities (to your one), you seem to be able to outgrow the enemy heroes.
- This may be because the AI sets a target for army size -- when that's reached, it sends it off to "adventure". Once you are able to beat that army with negligable casualties, attacks cease
- AI doesn't seem to build up their cities very agressively, which may be a partial reason for the previous problem.
- AI is bad about collecting loose resources -- it isn't unusual to see unclaimed, unprotected, resources as late as the end of M 2 in enemy held terratory.
- AI is very conservative about evaluating the outcome of fights -- this may be beause the tactical AI is... Bad.
Overall, I would say the strategic AI is passable, but not award wining -- given the scripted advantages in the campaigns, it achieves its goal of making you work for success.The tactical AI, on the other hand, is awful by any defination:
- The AI never uses the wait command. You can, for example, always wait on your first turn to allow enemy melee to close the range so that you don't take the half damage penalty on your first shots at them.
- The AI never uses the flee combat command. Arguably, this is an improvement, as the AI fleeing is always very annoying... :)
- In castle defense situations, the AI is *very* aggressive about leaving the castle walls.
- Level 3 fortifications are far, far tougher than they have been in Heroes for awhile -- unless you have the skill that boosts siege weapons, it is a safe bet that you won't be able to get through the walls for 4-5 turns, perhaps much longer.
- The AI handles melee units adjacent to shooters *very* poorly -- 9 times out of 10, the shooters just defend. Tthey /should/ move away from the attacker, with a minimal goal of ensuring one melee attacker can't be adjacent to more than one shooter at a time.
- The AI doesn't have logic for "I'm going to lose this combat, might as well do as much damage as I can before I die" -- casting spells like stone skin on its last unit, rather than direct damage (if nothing else, the default hero attack) instead.
- The AI targeting priority is broken -- if the enemy has 1 stack of 500 skeletons on the far side of the board, and has summoned 4 water elementals adjacent to two stacks of shooters, the AI /always/ targets the elementals.
- Oddly enough, this "blind spot" is limited to the first, least powerful, unit (skeletons for Necro, Fairies for Sylvian, etc.) -- if you have a stack of 500 skeletons, 300 ghosts, and 4 water elementals, the AI will (more correctly) target the ghosts.
- The AI simply refuses to admit that the fire wall spell exists at all. Place it on several stacks of shooters for guranteed damage for the next three turns, place it on the map where you expect enemy units to move to (e.g. "max move towards enemy units") and they will reliably walk / fly / teleport into it.
Basically, the tactical AI is only a threat when it has an overwhelming force advantage to begin with (and, to its credit, the strategic AI only attacks when this condition is met -- if the AI attacks you, expect to take /heavy/ casulties). In the campaign, this is acceptable -- but in a skirmish map...http://eador.com/B2/viewtopic.php?p=253277#253277
Of course, highly subjective opinion :)
lol really ? i can'T say anything about the campaign because i haven't started it for obvious reasons (not going to play with gamebreaking bugs) but in skirmish the ai is the opposite of what you are writing here.. at least for me.. yesterday i did a quick skirmish on bad neighbours (1on1) against a normal ai with normal difficulty..
i build as fast as possible and as efficient as possible and nearly didn't loose any units on neutral enemy fights.. only lost like 10 units until i met the ai.
when i met the ai i had a few hundred of the base units and well as much of all other units as possible at this time and the ai still had like twice the army size i had !!
i killed an ai hero with 75% of my army size. then another one came immediately with like 50% of my army size.. then a third one with around 25-50% of my (initial) army size.. then a 4th one with like 25% of my initial army size. all of this was in the middle of a week and within 2 or 3 turns ! the ai couldn't get more units in the meantime and it was pretty clear that the ai hat far more units then i did.. an amount that actually was impossible without cheating. i barely made it through the game because of that (well once i had killed his bigger armies i ofc got the upper hand and finally won it easily in the end but still..).
i would say that the ai had at least 50% more units then i did at the same time.. with only one city for both of us and without me loosing any units really (well those 10 units aren't even worth mentioning compared to the hundreds of units that i and the ai had at the same time) it was absolutely impossible.
sure it definitely helped that the ai bought many heroes as the ai always does but then again the ai had to have more gold then i did because i played at the maximum and got down to like 100gold each time. i used the ressources as good as the game let me (which is not hard with only one city to manage :P).
it might be different in the campaign sure.. the ai might be mich easier in the campaign but in skirmish a 1on1 against a normal ai is pretty tough.. its in my opinion what hard should be. they did the same mistake than heroes 5.. easy is way too easy.. you steamroll the ai and normal is too hard for beeing called "normal".. normal should be renamed hard and in between easy and normal there should be another difficulty. exactly the same ♥♥♥♥ happened in heroes 5 too (at least in tote that i played unitl 2 weeks ago)
Also, as has been pointed out in other threads, diplomacy (the skill) is rather unbalanced, especially once you get to the expert (2nd level) skill that reduces the cost of neutrals to join you. I don't know if the AI can exploit this skill (probably not, honestly), but if it can then that would also lead to massive army growth.
But I conceed, I haven't played any skirmish maps and if the AI there is more argressive than that's a very good thing. :)
Agreed on all points -- especially the fact that the HOMM 3 AI was unusually good.
However:
The number of turn based combat games with an economic layer that /don't/ grant large, sometimes absurd, resource bonuses as an artifical way to increase difficulty can be counted on one hand. In fact, Heroes 3 did so as well (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/63965-heroes-of-might-and-magic-iii/faqs/2506 -- search for "EVEN MORE DIFFICULT THAN YOU HAD IMAGINED!") although the bonuses are very small compared to other games in the series.
Setting that aside, in HOMM rushing has /always/ (well, for the past 3 or 4 releases) been the name of the game. In a 1:1 game (human or otherwise), it is /very/ common for the game to be over once the two "super" heroes meet in battle for the first time. The winner will have an overwhelming advantage. When more than 3 players are involved the dynamics are considerably more complex, obviously, but even there the winner of the game will be determined by a single battle followed by a long running mopup phase.
Complaining that the AI is programmed to recognize and implement this strategy is... Well, pretty silly. :)
What I meant by "undisclosed" was the kind of garbage we've seen since HeroesV, that is rampant cheating in the form of hidden boosts that results in aberrations like the AI not clearing their home areas of resources/mines because they don't need to (and of course cuts down on AI programming to let the team focus on the superficial bells and whistles). The absolute pinnacle of this bull was M&MH VI.
That's true, but it used to be that it was all about the dance, the management and the positioning before the fateful meet of the uberstacks. That all changed with V. One of the earlier "bugs" was that you occassionally got a hero waltzing into your backyard with, say, 1,000 hydras. Turns out the cheating script wasn't fine tuned until the expansion. And then you'd have enemy heroes emerging from the FOW and running straight to your castle without deviating one bit.
I cast it on enemy creature and it just defends, doesn't even try to attack my creatures which enter the melee range.
Just an example, how horrible is enemy AI.
That /might/ actually be a reasonable tactic -- shooters don't do much damage in melee, after all. But even then, moving away (in the hopes that the melee attacker won't follow) is a much more reasonable option than "Defend".
No, for /really awful/ tatical AI you have to turn to "Fire Wall" -- cast it on shooters (and the fact that you can cast it directly on enemy units is itself a very questionable design decision) and they will happily remain in it, taking damage every turn, until they die. Worse still, cast onto the tile where the AI would move if you /didn't/ cast the spell (and the AI's movements are 100% predictable during the opening rounds of combat), and the AI will happily end its turn /standing on the fire wall spell/, ensuring that it will take two rounds of damage from the spell.
And the inability to use dispell magic at all.
And the inability to use the wait command, happily advancing melee units into a wall of shooters to take maximum damage when it isn't required.
And...
Well, you get the point -- the tacticial AI is just bad.