[Suggestion] Neutral army behavior patterns

from Elemental Forums

I really like the game-play so far, but I think I identified an area with improvement potential: movement and attacks of neutral armies/monsters on the strategic map!

My observations in this regard:

  • Most of the neutral units on the map seem to be tied to some kind of lair. They stay near that lair and don't stray farther than like 2 tiles away (at least in the early game).
  • Others seem to patrol the wild lands. never seen them more than 1 tile from border.
  • They don't attack that often, even if next to an undefended city (this probability seems to rise with difficulty and progress of the game but is sill very random).
  • They don't seem to really react to other units near them, sometimes they seem to follow one of my units but that might be per chance, (there are only 8 directions to move in ;)
  • When they attack a city:
    • this is often quite unexpected after dozens of turns of aimless moving around
    • If you don't have an army strong enough to hunt them down in the first place, chances are you don't have spare troops strong enough to defend the city. Militia are a step in the right direction but easily outclassed by high level monsters.
    • The result is disastrous: the city is destroyed.

 

For me this situation is a bit unsatisfying. These wandering monsters feel very unresponsive and unpredictable in a unfun way. They mostly do nothing, sometimes do something very disastrous and either way I don't see what I could have done different besides killing them with my stack of doom earlier.

Some proposals:

  • Better explanation of their patterns: It's hard to appreciate neutral monster AI if we don't understand what they are doing and it just looks random to us.
  • More diversified behavior: bandits, wildling armies, elementals, wild animals or demons, they all behave the same (or seem to). I think a more diversified set of behaviors would result in more interesting game-play on the strategic map and help to give more personality to the different unit types. Some possibilities for diversity:
    • distance to lair a unit will move to
    • having a lair at all
    • fleeing from stronger armies
    • attacking everything in its territory
    • attacking only weaker armies
    • ignoring single unit armies
    • never entering influence zones
    • always attacking the source of influence zones (citties/ outposts) once they see it
    • a guardian never leaving its lair at all
    • always attacking adjacent armies but never approaching or following them
    • following enemies for different distances
    • following but never attacking
    • patrolling nearby resource locations and raiding improvements
    • having events spawning new armies on certain locations or changing behaviors (invasion of the wildling hordes!)
  • These could be made explicit similar to traits for tactical combat or the personality traits of the AI sovereigns
  • Give us more opportunities to influence their movement/attack triggers. I want to be able to
    • lure neutral monsters near other nation's outposts.
    • be followed by an relentless predator across the map but be able to distract it by leaving behind a single unit
    • lure them away and then plunder their lair
    • have a guarding unit that lost its lair to switch to roaming
    • etc.
  • regarding defense of cities
    • instead of razing a city, just have it lose some population and buildings. That way losing a fight in one of your cities becomes acceptable (one less reason to load a saved game or play boringly defensive)
    • increase the incentive to station units in cities, like a decreased wage

 

In summary I think he current neutral monster behavior on the strategic map is very unpredictable (you never know whether they will attack, can't plan ahead), restricted (will never move very far), unresponsive and uniform. There is not much possibbilty for interaction with them or planning around them (besides killing them all, but no monsters is even more boring than a monster walking around randomly).

I apologize for all the sophisticated behavior already there that I might have overlooked (but again: if it looks and feels like random behavior, it is not much more fun to play against than random behavior ;)), and hope my proposals are of use.

 

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that the current monster and lair mechanics need more work.

I think lairs should be heavily defended, and have a lot of loot. The defenders do not move, so that you can't steal the loot without doing any fighting.

The lairs spawn weak troops in the start of the game, later on stronger and stronger units. These spawned troops behave somewhat like the current guardians do. They move around and attack nearby units. I think the most important thing is to get the balance of the spawns correct. Spawn too weak units too often and it will just annoy the player without adding anything to the game. Spawning too strong units unexpectedly will result in luck being the determining factor. I hate it when my city gets destroyed by bad spawn roll.

One possibility is that the spawning rate is dictated by how much you distract the lair. If you move a lot around the lair, of if your city is near a lair, they will become more aggressive in spawning monsters.

Whatever you do give players clear UI feedback of what is happening.