Deadly AI / Branching Paths Map

[Crimson Behelit]

So I've been practicing against AI on this 8 person map increasing the difficulty every time. Every game above worthy felt challenging but still balanced except the last difficulty. My first two games against Deadly AI the closest enemy faction rolls up on me with a fully upgraded army and all research at round 21. How is that mathematically possible? Do the difficulties increase resource gain for AI or am I missing something?

[Vex]

i have a simmilar problem , i figured out like a jankish fix kkinda? which is to set the neutral pop (all the mobs round the mop) to 300% it slows down the ai growth because i doent just cuase all the enemies to flee and they have to fight and bleed troops . but yeah the hardest ai is hard af to beat , im still trying ms .

[Pythe]

The Ai gets extra resources and modifiers on higher difficulties. You can check how much exactly in your codex (Tutorials, all the way down under AI) Deadly is a massive jump up from overwhelming

[Naruto0408]

AI can be kinda dumb sometimes, so I'd say your best advantage is just quick expansion. Pick a strong magic wielder and only pick up what you need. Where as the AI is just gonna be picking up everything. People who play well breaking out before the neutrals get stronger. Garrison wielder in town and build guard towers can even out the enemies early troop advantage. At least this is what I've seen from more advanced players.

[Crimson Behelit]

I looked at the graphs after I beat it finally with Aleah, 60 hellroars, 80 muskets and some pipers around round 75 and yeah... 3900 gold income on round 1 vs my 700 is kinda insane lol. Neighboring faction had 376k army value to my 70-80k at round 35 after I put them really far behind by trapping their secondary wielder (2 wielder limit) in my main base region round 14 through 21 so they couldn't rally troops, gain xp or get revived in a settlement. By the end I was having to wipe their entire armies on the first round because they would come back with the same fully stacked armies every few rounds. So exhausting. I also tried setting the initial mob size to 50% so I could actually clear paths around the same pace as the AI in early game which helped immensely. I feel like doing that and lowering the wielder cap is the most logical way to make the difficulty at least playable.

[Crimson Behelit]

Originally posted by Naruto0408:

AI can be kinda dumb sometimes, so I'd say your best advantage is just quick expansion. Pick a strong magic wielder and only pick up what you need. Where as the AI is just gonna be picking up everything. People who play well breaking out before the neutrals get stronger. Garrison wielder in town and build guard towers can even out the enemies early troop advantage. At least this is what I've seen from more advanced players.

What I did is build 4x gold income buildings asap then spawn second wielder at secondary base to clear whatever neutral mobs are easiest and pick up resources. As soon as I knew they wouldn't be able to clear anymore with the troops they started with or picked up and would become a liability, I un-equipped their items and basically forced them to execute to a bandit hideout so I could spawn them in my main base to ferry troops and pick up more resources before the neighboring faction invaded there with their main wielder @ round 18. And I was doing this all while clearing essential neutral mobs in main base region. Built wood/stone buildings next to prioritize settlement upgrades for the large building troop powerspike (hellbreaths in my case). Since I had funneled all my resources into one army at my main (vet muskets, pikes, hellbreaths, artificers), I was in a prime position to dominate their secondary wielder that always invades rounds 12-14ish with a mid size army. Instead of killing them right away, I basically played around vision and then forced their AI to flee into a choke point facing my revived second wielder where I could keep them in my region and still expand and take their settlements with my first wielder. All that allowed just enough momentum to generate a lead, get some good artifacts and snowball, but even after all that work, it was still extremely difficult to maintain the lead.

[LymKaw]

The deadly AI has much more advantages than player compare to all other difficulty, it's still possible to beat them but sometime it needs a bit luck. I always practice my build against the deadly AI on some small 1v1 balanced official maps such as claim before storm, the deadly AI usually rush my base between round 12 to 15 with its main hero, I would say the hardest part of beating the deadly AI is to win the first battle against its main hero. For a small map, the first time your main hero see its main hero will very likely be either challenging or worthy difficulty even if you plan every hurting and movement well, so if you are playing a magical hero and the AI hero learns lvl 3 magic resistance you are very hard to win the battle whatever how efficient your start your map. So sometime it needs a bit luck to beat the deadly AI, for random map it will be easier as you have more resources on ground at the beginning, in official map most of the resources are guard by wild enemy so I think it will be a better practice for your build.

[yaeMhay]

For me at least, I am kinda used to beat Deadly Ai on 1v1, because I know what strategies to make, and best builds for almost all factions. And usually 1v1 battles vs Deadly AI are over around turn 15, because I dont allow Ai heroes to boost too much, I quickly expand and demolish them them while they are still low lvl and low army, but that kind of fights are not really thrilling for me, because I want to fight full armies clashes.

That being said, I tried to do couples of fights vs Deadly Ai on larger maps, were we both have time to upgrade all and have full armies, and that is impossible, and only factor why it so, is beacuse Deadly Ai get around 2x or even 3x attributes for their hero. So when I clash with my main hero vs Deadly Ai main hero where we both have full armies, and my Hero is like 1 or 2 lvls below, they mostly always win, because they have att and def like 150 both and my Hero around 80.

So in another word, Deadly Ai gets too much attributes for thier heroes (which is mathematically impossible) - there are no reasearch or items/buildings on map which would give Deadly Ai so much advantage.

it would be nice if makers of this cool game would give us more options to choose when picking AI diff, like I want to play vs multiple Deadly Ai-s and just to nerf that they get little more or same attributes like me.