Hello guys, joining the game experience discussion shortly.
First of all I don't care much whether the AI declares war or not since there doesn't seem to be much difference in it's behaviour, be it at peace or be it at war. Only real difference is that you cannot trade spells any more once war is declared. Many wars are phony anyways - the AI DOW you without being able to attack (lacking ships for example).
I mostly agree with what Pex said about the strategic weaknesses of the AI. In a game that I'm just playing Kali shared a continent with me and she could have just steamrolled over me with the army she had. I wouldn't have stood a chance. But she just didn't do it - even though she was quite aggressive right at the start. But when she had that killer army she did nothing - until it was too late for her.
That being said I still find the game does offer a lot of interesting situations. If you get delayed in your development the enemy wizards eventually do start to send stacks of doom (SODs). It just takes an awful long time until they do. So when you pick a race that is not easy to start with and pick some retorts and spell picks that turn out to be not much helpful at your random starting position, then things can get quite tough. I had a game where I picked Barbarians as my race and nodemaster as my only retort (which also means you go Jack of all trades, for you need at least one spell pick in four different areas to be able to choose nodemaster). Then the random map generator (RMG) rolled a map where the only two power nodes in my range were very tough ones - making my nodemastery quite useless for almost half of the game. And Freya started very close to me on that map - then she expanded very fast, making it hard for me to survive at the start. So that game was tough - although it was only normal difficulty. It would have been much easier with Halflings instead of Barbarians. Barbarians take longer to get strong - especially when your starting position is unfortunate. Btw. the only neutral city in range happened to be Halflings - and it had at least 6 units of slingers as garrison and I did not have Guardian Wind spell. I was really scratching my head on how to take that city.
In my present game marauders almost killed me twice. The first time they came for my main city (where my wizard fortress is) with a unit of Zombies just a few turns into the fresh game. I barely survived. Then quite some time later I thought I had protected that city well enough (playing Halflings in this game, Barbarians was the previous game). But then the Marauders came with a killer stack made up of one Demon (immune to missiles), five units of Skeletons and one unit of Zombies. My Slingers couldn't use their ranged attack neither against the Demon nor against the Skeletons - only against the Zombies. Fortunately I also had two Swordsmen units there. And I summoned a Fire Elemental in combat. Then I found out the hard way that Star Fires spell does not do much (or even any) damage to Demons (while it does hurt Ghouls badly...). So I had to cast Psionic Blast with the little remaining Mana. I survived that onslaught on a wing and a prayer. It was a very close shave. But it sure was an interesting battle. And this was on Arcanum plane - not even on Myrror - and playing at normal difficulty.
I'm still not very proficient in knowing what type of spells affect what types of monsters. Usually Star Fires should affect evil creatures but here it did nothing to that Demon. Also I often find that Fire Bolts sometimes work nicely and sometimes don't work at all. Psionic Blast seems to be the safest bet (hitting in most cases) but is quite expensive too (requires 2 additional Mana points for one additional point of damage).
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