I'm going to write this post here because it's WAY too long for the Steam forums. I'm not telling anyone familiar with the game anything they don't already know, but if you're interested, this is about the game's AI.
I've been pretty routinely frustrated with the behavior of the AI. Here I'm going to try and lay out point for point what I think its current shortcomings and possible bugs are. Some of the these are my impressions of "how it feels" to play against. I've got somewhere around 100 hours with the game, maybe more.
post, with occasional dips into ranting.
#1. The AI acts like a killbot and little else.
Back in early Early Access, the AI used to take a long time getting to you. Like 7+ turns sometimes on the big Merchants Quarters maps. The AI only seemed to react to your presence when it had actually seen you. You'd spend a lot of time exploring the maps, planning ambushes that you eventually had to scrap and people rightly wanted things to go down quicker. Now, I feel like we're at the opposite extreme. The AI seems to zero in on your position intuitively. It's extremely noticeable with the Skaven warbands. The AI doesn't seem to care about its fighters as it will still happily engage your entire warband with one guy. This is one half of what's contributing to feeling like you're boxed in by the AI no matter what the situation is, and are unable to really play out maps as a result. More on this below.
#2. The AI acts like it's psychic.
This is probably the cause for a lot of my irritation, and the other half of what makes it feel like the AI is constantly boxing you in. The AI just seems to know where you are from the start of the match. There's no sense you're running into each other when Skaven leaders and heroes are charging into your warband on turn 2 on Rival In The Ruins.
It's even more obvious on Walk In The Fog. You have so much terrain blocking LOS that if the AI truly was using that to find you, they would not be zeroing in on your position that easily. It's not like WE can see THEIR spawn points. Yet the AI infallibly has at least one guy on you by turn 4 at the latest.
You can't really play out the map beyond a straight line between your warband and their's. Sure, it makes for fast-ish games but the first couple rounds are super critical for where the whole rest of the game is going to take place. People complained in mid Early Access that it felt like no matter how big the maps were, they were fighting the AI on Turn 2. I think that's because the AI just simply tells some of its guys to run straight at the enemy, and so many of the deployments place at least one of your guys within a turn of movement away from each other.
Rushing you with its psychic knowledge fine as one tactic for the AI to use, but it seems like the only tactic available to it. Things like running away from the AI, hiding, losing your pursuer don't happen unless the AI bugs out on some terrain or gets presented a new target that's closer and more tempting than the previous one. So every game turns into “blob all my guys together and wait for the AI” because it's too risky to spread out to any real degree. Players would have to search for you, take calculated risks on splitting up their forces. No such behavior from this AI. It knows who it's going after, with what, from where, to where. You? You know dick.
#3 The AI rarely engages you with its entire warband.
There are so many reasons there could be for this. Pathing bugs. Stuck units. Bugged AI. Inappropriate AI (like saying it's ok to loot chests instead of joining a fight.) There's times you can't see the AI fighters but, judging by how long their turns take its obvious they're just going into a stance whereever they are standing.
But visibly, there are lots of obvious things it's doing that keep its warband from coming at you full strength too. I've caught the AI just standing there sometimes, not doing anything in particular except waiting for me to cross some arbitrary line or end my turn in his LOS, even though he's easily 1 move away from someone they could attack. Maybe he's spending the time pondering the futility of his existence, doomed forever to just throw himself at the enemy time and again in the hope that, one day, something he does actually looks like it was smart and calculated...
I've also seen it run a guy back and forth over several turns along the same street, ending on overwatch because it couldn't or wouldn't try to take a shot at me. (I had a holed up in a house where my archers could look out from the second floor on overwatch. Maybe it knew and recognized overwatch and was torn between needing to attack and not walking directly into an ambush...(not that that usually stops it.)
(As an aside, I'm kind of afraid of what the game might be like if the AI truly got all its buffed fighters into the action as a cohesive group.
Behaviors like this are symptomatic of another crippling behavior in the AI, which is....
#4 The AI can be completely blocked from doing its job.
I've been paying a lot of attention to what happens to the AI when I decide to bottleneck in a really effective spot like the mansions in the Nobles Quarters. And here's what I've seen: the AI comes to almost a complete halt. When every reasonable entrance (i.e. the front door on the first floor) is covered your fighters' zones of control so that there's no gap, basically any AI that can't see you stops in its tracks. I haven't tested how long this will go on, but I've literally waited over 10 turns with nothing happening because of it. As a test, when I open up my lines so there's gaps for the AI to move through, suddenly, it wakes up. It's kind of funny when you consider I just got done complaining about the AI not giving you enough time to do anything.
Here's what I think is going on: each AI fighter selects a target at the start of the game and begins moving toward it. As long as the AI can draw a nice, clean path with no obstructions to that unit, it will continue moving toward that unit. (Maybe rarely stopping to grab some wyrdstone.) As soon as you block the AI from drawing a path to the unit it's chosen (say by blocking a door with other fighters they aren't targeting) the AI comes to a standstill. Unless it can make LOS on another target, it will continue focusing on its chosen target, see it can't get there (easily, more on this below) and decide to just go into a stance. It's not choosing a new target when its chosen one (that it used its psychic powers to identify) can't be reached. It's getting to the point where if I choose to bottleneck the AI and play safely, games can take an hour or more as the AI tediously walks one guy to my position every 5 rounds or so.
What's truly weird is, it's not like there isn't a path to at least one of my units. Usually there are direct paths to at least 4. Yet as soon as I take up position in a house, the AI goes from rushing me with all its (not bugged) units to sending 1 guy at a time every fhalf dozen rounds. It's like, jesus, you can't even have an effective strategy in this game without getting punished for it some how! Turtling may work, but currently you spend an inordinate amount of time doing NOTHING because of it. Which is so completely counter-intuitive to how the AI has shown you it operates under normal circumstances, it boggles the mind. BOGGLES.
#5 The AI does not use all paths available to it, and is therefore bad at flanking.
Again I've noticed this a lot holeing up in buildings. There is usually a way to enter buildings from the top floor. But the AI doesn't seem willing to use those paths to get around my blockaded doorway unless the path is both easy to do and within 1 turn's movement. So they basically never try. Maybe sometimes this makes sense (guys who have a 10 to 0% chance to climb), but for example, the mansions in the Nobles Quarter? Lots of them have a fairly easy 1 to 2 story climb to reach the second floor. Does the AI use it? No. Does it even seem to treat it as a viable path? No, not unless you end your turn up there so the AI has a giant glowing sign pointing there saying "HEY, YOU CAN REACH HIM BY CLIMBING THIS THING." It's fine when you're fighting in the streets and the corner building has a way over or through it. The AI is happy to use those. But anything more complicated than that and it will suicide in the front door, or eventually just give up and go take a stance in a corner somewhere nearby. Then when you step out, it rushes out of its hiding spot and attacks you. It might seem like a real strategy to deal with an entrenched opponent. If it didn't reek of bugs and a lack of viable options for it to use, that is.
When you hold up in a building with 6 entrances the AI seems to do fine swarming you every angle. But as soon as you cut that number down to 2, the AI won't bother trying the other entrance 99% of the time. (Just had a game where, finally, a unit took the time to scale the back wall at about Round 15.)
#6 The AI acts like it doesn't care about its guys dying.
Rarely will the AI disengage its injured fighters and have them flee the scene. But it goes deeper than that. The AI does stupid things according to the game's own logic. It throws guys into fights where they're hopelessly outnumbered and it's painfully obvious before the AI even engages. It spreads its warband out into a giant line of guys with leaders/heroes and high initiative troops at the front and everyone else in the back. It makes for easy pickings when you play the waiting game. It's not a question of "will I lose this match" for the player. It's a question of "how many injuries will I get with my win." And the answer is: at least one because of crits. ><
#7 The AI doesn't voluntarily rout, even when it really, really, really should.
Because killbots don't run, right? This alone would make the AI feel more like a player, if it didn't fight (at higher levels) until literally 80% of its warband is dead due to passing rout tests. The game is basically just free XP, loot and wyrdstone for the player by that point. No human player would put up with the abuse the AI does, they'd slam that voluntary rout button as soon as it was available. The AI doesn't care one whit what happens to its fighters. Even if we don't have persistent warbands, at the very least we could have the illusion of our opponents caring. Consider that a) progression would take longer since we wouldn't be getting oodles of kill XP and looted items and b) games might feel fairer if the AI played a lot closer to how people do, instead of being a relentless, brainless killing machine who lives only for the salty tears they create by throwing guys at you non-stop hoping for crits and to catch you napping. (As an aside, the amount of quality loot you get off of enemies goes from meh at ranks 0 to 5, to FUCK YES from 6 on. Suddenly every guy is toting around blue weapons and cash is no longer a problem. I can pull 3x what I need to pay my warband out of normal missions before I even account for wyrdstone or cash loot, just off enemy weapons.
#8 The AI doesn't care about wyrdstone.
Oh sure, it will pick it up sometimes. But it will also run through a field of wyrdstone to reach your guys because what is its highest priority? ALL MUST DIE-DIE. I don't think I've ever seen the AI pick up more than 5 pieces of wyrdstone in a match unless they're looting it off my guys. Making the AI prioritize wyrdstone more would 1) increase the amount of time it takes them to reach the player, which 2) would let players have more time to get wyrdstone themselves which 3) leads to games where you have the room to strategize and try different things which 4) lets each game be different instead of it always boiling down to bottlenecking an overly aggressive AI 1 to 2 turns away from where you started. Really, if the AI actually claimed wyrdstone, players would have smaller pools to draw from when they win (since you only claim a portion of unlooted wyrdstone and stashes.) An AI that isn't looting wyrdstone is just putting that much more cash in the player's pocket at the end of the match.
#9 The AI does care about looting stashes, but at oddly inappropriate times.
It cares about it as much as wyrdstone I suppose. But the AI will oddly decide during a team fight where they're outnumbered, a reinforcement should suddenly enter a building and go all the way up to the 4th floor to loot something. While the player in me appreciates the fact they just neutralized one of their own fighters to my benefit and at no cost to me, the gamer in me knows it's like beating up on someone incapable of fighting back. It's just wrong.
#10 The AI never loots your cart or steals your idol.
Even though it damn well should sometimes. To be honest this sounds like a nightmare if they started stealing your idol or gold and stuff from your cart. But players would do it, in a heart beat! As much as it pains me to think about this happening (especially during ambushes), it's one more tactic the AI is simply blind to, even though there are PLENTY of reasons it should do it.
#11 The AI DOES care about looting back their fallen comrades' lucky charms, books and tokens, for some mysterious reason. Is it possible it can feel loss, remorse?!?!
I've watched the AI sabotage its own combat round doing this, choosing to walk into a fight and yet somehow still be able to reach down and loot rather than attacking. WTF is so special about these things? Why do they care that on a non-hit list mission these things get looted? If like, your token being unlooted at the end of the battle improved that fighter's chances of survival, that'd make sense. But it wouldn't for the AI, since it's not persistent! Stop wasting time picking crap you or I don't need up. It's just one more animation I have to sit through, and contributes to the AI seeming like a bumbling dope.
#12 The AI DOES care about looting YOUR fighters.
Because of all the things they do or don't care about, this one hurts the player immensely so it should be a priority, right? Nothing like having the AI loot enough wyrdstone off your fighters you miss the Wyrdstone Rush objective, or steal that prized weapon that you forgot about and then went into the next mission with a guy armed with a knife.....Don't get me wrong. This isn't actually a bad thing. More frustrating to know that this one specific, really irritating thing is accounted for SUPER well. And yet so many other basic activities that produce an enjoyable game are either unknown or vastly underprioritized or bugged.
#13 The AI still sometimes does the same thing over and over again for no sane reason. I'd blame the power of Chaos, but Chaos is rad and pointlessly wasting your time isn't.
Why did the AI keep wasting SP to try and climb a 3 meter wall with a stair right next to it, only to jump back down, run around the corner and end their turn? THESE ARE THE QUESTIONS THAT KEEP ME UP AT NIGHT.
#14 The AI hardly, if ever, uses consumables.
This is more of a flavor thing, but I know I'd be seriously annoyed if the AI was drinking healing potions or poultices. But I'd be annoyed in a good way, like I was fighting an opponent who was actually aware they were about to die and tried to do something about it.
#15 The AI builds strange fighters sometimes with poor choices.
Dagger and shield? Oooooook. Maybe for Skaven leaders and heroes but it's not exactly an effective choice IMO for most other fighters. It's especially not an effective choice for an AI whose primaray mission in life is ALL MUST DIE-DIE. I'm usually glad on some level they're not dualwielding or using a 2-hander. But it makes me question their wisdom of such a choice, especially in conjunction with the #1, #2 and #3. If they're intended as a fast fighter to tie up my guys, then they're not accounting for the fact that a warband which doesn't scatter will flatten them when they arrive.
And there's just AI builds that clearly are underwhelming, like when your weakest guy with 3 Int and no skills is taking 16 points of damage from Comet of Sigmar, cast by a level 9 Sister of Sigmar. Sometimes the builds feel random at best. I know it's an effort to have diversity, but it basically makes some opponents a joke other than their ability to crit. White daggers aren't going to do squat to a Rank 6+ fighter.
#16 AI dedicated archer units are a feckless lot.
Seen almost exclusively with the Mercenary Archer henchmen, these guys are often useless to their teams. They'll find a spot somewhere, post up and sit there half the game. Even IF they arrive to fight, they'll often go try to find the high ground and watch the fight safely from outside your range and their's. I love it when Mercs have 3 archers: it's like figthing a warband 500 rating lower than your own. This isn't to say all the AI ranged is bad. It does OK on the ground near the rest of its fighters I suppose. But they do not put them to good use usually, sitting them behind their other fighters sniping you. More often they'll just run a circle around your fighters to shoot someone in the back, so you can then turn around clobber them on your turn. Basically the opposite of how archery is supposed to be used in combat. They basically approach combat in the open like a melee fighter who has to stand at least 5 yard away.
And when I hole up in a building, you know what would make it just a little bit tougher? AI archers sitting outside the front doors sniping my guys while my archers behind sit them with their thumbs up their butts, out of range. Instead, it's their archers sitting around doing that.
#17 It doesn't ever group up to fight when it needs to the most.
Sort of based on #2 and #16. When fighting a static defense where only 1 fighter can engage in a doorway, most other players would seek alternative routes or pile on as much indirect damage and debuffing they could. For the AI it might not deliver a win but it would make for a way more entertaining fight than just hammering 1 vs. 3 in a doorway for 15 to 20 turns. Other times you're clearly having THE battle that will decide the match in a random place. You're right on the edge, just one more unit could start a chain reaction of guys going down.....Does the AI gather all its fighters? No. For various reasons half of them are standing still somewhere, maybe even the next block over. Only if you're fighting in the open streets for 8 turns straight can you maybe expect to lay eyes on every single member of the warband in the same fight. As soon as you're fighting from a house or some other complicated structure, at least 1/3rd of the warband just stops doing anything (which is ironically just about the percentage remaining to them when they take their first rout test.)
#17 AI Leaders are suicidal
There's a 50% chance most of the time that they're my first kill in a match. They're faster than most other units and apparently are in a hurry to die. It's like the AI's instructions are “Take your strongest, fastest fighter and fling them in the player's face ASAP.” Subtle, it is not. This is most apparent in Rivals In The Ruins, where you are guaranteed to know approximately where the leader has spawned, eliminating any guesswork when they're the first to engage you.
Leaders are the kind of thing that should pile in when you're already engaged with their lesser units. That's the lesson players learn early on in the game. Leaders are way more effective when they're not the center of the enemy's attention. Meanwhile, if the AI has its druthers it will attack your leader straight away over other units. Again, it's the AI playing the game with an understanding of what will hurt the player the most but not even bothering to act like it cares about the same thing. To the AI, the leader unit is just a top notch assault troop like the rest of the heroes.
Just so this isn't a big bash on the AI, there are some things it does RIGHT.
#1 It's ruthless most of the time.
It knows how to pile on the misery. It will preferentially target stunned and low HP characters. Sometimes this is frustrating BS though when you combine in #2 from the bad list and a hero you hadn't yet seen comes from around a corner, weaves through your guys and nails the one guy in your warband they had an almost guaranteed chance of killing. It makes classic low HP and toughess casters in cloth a real liability sometimes, as the AI loves to pick on them when it can. The same goes for any low hp, hurt character.
#2 It knows an opening when it sees one.
I've seen the AI thread the needle of gaps in my zones of control, sometimes moving through an infinitesimal gap in the defensive line to plunge in and attack the characters behind. (Like my casters.) As mentioned in #5 on the bad list, if there's a close by and easy alternative route they can use in one turn, they will use to get at you from behind. And even though I've knocked the AI's archers, I've seen one climb up two levels of a building to look down at an almost impossible (but legal) angle through a window to shoot one of my most wounded guys, who I swore was safe from everything on the second floor of a building barricaded by all my other fighters. That moment.....*slow clap*.
So it's not completely without surprises but, as mentioned elsewhere, the nature of their surprise is almost always exploiting a mistake YOU made. Which is good and fun until you've had an entire match on lockdown and perhaps a positioning bug or simply inattention after 20 rounds of clicking through stationary guys, to have the AI exploit a gap, rush in and crit/take out someone, exploiting a hole in your defenses you can't even fit through as a player. Seriously, if I tried to thread the gap like they did I'd had instantly engaged an opponent without getting between them. My zones of control actually have to overlap to guarantee the AI can't get through.
Ahem. Anyways, questionable bugs aside, the AI knowing how to exploit an opportunity is definitely a plus. If it routinely missed big, obvious opportunities I'd have given up on it long, long ago. But it definitely requires you to be on your toes and pay attention. It's not that the AI is straight dumb. It's just very blunt and simple minded, until, once in a rare while, it pulls some truly clever shit.
#3 It knows the rules of the game enough to tie up your fighters in ways that are inconvenient or you.
My example would be tactically using ambush stance to prevent your fighters from getting away, or moving to where they need to go. Another is using Taunt, Numbing Poison, etc...on the right characters like wounded ones to keep you pinned. Stuff like that amps up the drama of will they/won't they make it.
#4 It knows how to use mages failrly well.
A couple times i've had the merc mage run into the middle of my warband and just start casting every AoE they can, to the point even their curses become my problem. While not super effective most of the time (they die immediately afterward) it's the kind of thing that at the wrong moment can completely unravel a defense.
#5 It does occasionally run away.
Which is good, because it makes you the player try and chase them. And it gives the illusion the AI cares about keeping its fighters alive. The problem is they usually come straight back to the fight next round. I'm not saying I'd enjoy having to chase all the AI down, especially Skaven. But, you know what really fucks with nice static player defenses like mine? Having to blindly chase after an AI, where my guys get spread out and are vulnerable to ambush, prowl, etc....
I think that's about it for the list.
I appreciate that the AI for Mordheim is complicated on a lot of levels, but TBH I almost prefer the chillaxed “come at me bro” AI of Early Access. At least I could relax and explore in addition to beating up the AI. I feel like now I usually have to go to extremes to avoid OOAs due to how the AI behaves now. Games are tense! For sure! But they're also super-predictable in how they play out, and there's a laundry list of unfun things along with it. The game's AI has produced some boring counter play the it doesn't have a remotely good answer to, we barely get to use ¼ of the map, there's no spreading out your fighters into the level unless they have a death wish and the AI generally flouts all the concerns players have like looting and keeping their dudes standing upright, which makes it even more obvious you're playing an AI and not some cunning warband. There's rarely cool moments that don't feel like they're exploiting the AI's basic shortcomings in some way. There's no cat and mouse, just the occasional “how the fuck did you get here so quickly ”or the “so you came from the left, huh” moments.
If your reply is “well go play MP if you want all this stuff” it isn't worth posting, because I probably won't and that's not the point. This game has so much potential in SP I could and would live happily there for the rest of time. But the SP experience is severely hamstrung by how the AI acts. It's overall strategic goals are simple (ALL MUST DIE-DIE) while players have a lot more to care about. While you can argue it's all part of a risk reward thing (and in fact you can survive ok just on your straight battlefield rewards, albeit poorly) it's not a fun sandbox to do so in. There's no real surprises, just the promise of a serious ass whooping coming for someone in 1 to 3 turns.
The devs have my sympathies for how complicated and well-crafted an AI their game demands for it to reach its full potential. They really do. But if this is basically as good as it's ever going to get (really looking forward to those pathing obstructions getting fixed in the next patch) I don't know if I'll ever be able to recommend the game to people on a long-term SP basis. The game is doing so much right, but so often it is straight wrecked by the AI and its failings. What makes Mordheim hard at this point is a) being severely taxed by the AI for your mistakes in planning and execution and b) guys who hit you for half to three quarters of your life total in a single turn in the late game and c) all the buffs the AI has gotten as a bandaid to all the issues I've listed here.
And to be honest that kind of fun wears thin after awhile. There's so much more fun and drama that could be had with a better, sharper, more flexible AI, that is not being had by beating up on what is a borderline incompetent AI, who when you win against it you almost feel bad for being proud of it. Because you know you only won in that way because of the AI's self-inflicted handicaps.
In answer to all these problems in Early Access the AI got a ton of straight, boring buffs to compensate, (More HP, More damage, the go-to difficulty tweaks of all RPGs and strategy games) so we've arrived at the place where when YOU make a mistake, the AI makes you pay dearly for it. It's essentially combining two things which don't go good together for people who have put in the time with the game: boredom waiting for a flawed AI that routinely makes stupid decisions in your favor, and punishment for a lapse of attention or judgement about how to handle this weird dance with the AI. Meanwhile new players are left going "What the fuck is happening??!?!?!?!?" because the haven't played long enough to know how the AI is wired so the game is actually playable on some level.
I really hope you guys are willing to put the dev time into bringing the AI closer to being both truly fun to play against and competent. Because there is only one true black mark I can give this game, and it is this:
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Topic: Mordheim - City of the Damned. Team-based looting and murder simulator. (Read 60920 times)