Quoting Frogboy, reply 18I suck at tactical battles.
Brad, you're good at the TBS aspect of AI right? Then why not apply the same logic to the tactical battles? Instead of thinking of the tactical battle as something different, approach it the same way you'd normally approach the TBS portion of a strategy game.
Strategic != Tactical. Very different animals.
As for the Derek vs. AI, we quickly ran into some "world" settings issues. Basically, in 0.26 the seeding of monsters and such made expansion a bit of a luck of the draw. It's a balance thing.
If I get a decent starting point, I can absolutely crush the AI without batting an eye. If I don't, I get crushed instead.
When you guys get the beta, the first thing you'll notice is that nothing "spawns" throughout the game. It's all there on turn 1. The quests, the monsters, etc. They don't just "show up" anymore.
So for example, before you go and try for the ability to go on master quests, you should probably make sure you can actually get to master level quests because researching the tech doesn't just magically make said quest appear.
Now, the balancing part comes by deciding where to place these things when the game starts.
In the game I lost to the AI, what happened is that a large troll village was relatively near my starting point and when I walked too closely, they wiped out my key army.
After that, the AI had a big advantage over me.
In another game, the AI started out relatively close to the Wild Lands which are really dangerous to go too close to.
Getting that kind of balance nailed will be crucial over the next few months.
