FE: Random video tests of 0.87

Nice, you made the AI pioneers and stacks yummier (that's an XML modifdier, right?)

I love an aggressive, hostile world, as long as we are all equally tasty!

Was the AI hitting the forest drake with spells with multiple small stacks, or was that part of what you fixed?  (AI not massing sufficient troops in an army to defeat an objective).

I'll brew you some good coffee to keep up the good work!

It looks like you will have to make the AI more cautious about losing that many units to monsters. Unless you expect players to lose that many units as well...

Overall though it looks good... and its running pretty well all things considered. 

Brad was jammin' to something in that 2nd vid!

Looks like you still get to see the movement path only after you've started moving

Hey Brad !!!

Just a quick question , are you guys planning to redo the fallen races face??

Because aside from the gameplay i must admit that eyecandy wise the fallen race ingame rendering was a big letdown in WoM , they were truly uncool and ugly looking , but this magnar guy is finally looking badass !!! wich is feeling me with joy !

So do you plan a visual pass on every FE faction , in particularity the fallen ? and what about Sovereign creation options? ( haircuts , tatoos , skins etc )

I'm all for gameplay > visuals but the art environement , monsters are really nice looking in FE but human / fallen faces and armor ( aside from a few very cool looking ) especialy helm has been somewhat underwhelming.

thank you for your answer !

LOL

I guess Gilden doesn't get by drakes with a little help from their friends...

I have been looking at the same issue. Why doesn't the AI have as good of an army as me and how did they get past all those monsters? They seem to just spam units and hope some of them get through. That kills any chance of high level regular troops and gives their heroes too many injuries. I tend to make one maxed out army and slowly take on monsters only when I know I will win. XP is the only good reason to fight. In the midgame this means the AI will not be competitive with my army. I will have much better units and can simply capture all those cities they painstakingly spammed for. It would seem that the AI needs to learn some better tricks. one thing it could do is send two pioneer armies through that area and assume one will die as the other makes it through. Nothing wrong with baiting. But first teach them to make a nice army to clear the area.

Nice to have some music playing for the video. Always a fun show. 

Magnar looks a lot more cooler!

What AI difficulty were you testing on? Some of the AI reports about monsters not attacking may have been at lower difficulties (assuming you were testing on something higher).

Seems that threat assesment might need to be adjusted a bit.

In the second example of the first video, it seems that the AI was hoping on luck to be able to out-maneuver the monsters based on a number of variables all of which were difficult to predict. But in the first example (the drake), the AI had ample, simple and, it seems, fairly consistent and unambiguous information available to it but did not assess the situation correctly.

Looks good, but shouldn't the AI figure that more firepower is needed sooner?

Did you guys read the OP at all?

"I even found a bug with regards to the AI going after "goodie huts” (which is ironic because the AI is supposed to look at whether there’s danger around it)."

That's a comment about the way the AI acts against the drake in the vid.

I see that the scout trait now ignores movement penalties in forest, hills and swamp. 

I'm all for faction differentiation, but if Magnar is feeling people with joy, I am staying awaaaaaay from Magnar!

filling me with joy ! sorry for the typo.

And the fallen races look was really anoying me , and i wasnt hoping for a visual pass on them , so i am really happily surprised !!

Now im only hoping that there will be a nice visual faction differenciation and that the human fallen rendering will be on par with what the new magnar look likes.

It's like watchin a movie, anyway we could have an option like that, where we could start off playin, turn our guy loose for a bit, then take back control.  Woud be sooo cool!! And would really help someone like myself balance a custom map as we make it

"If it seems slow it's because I'm videoing"

You are playing a complete turn every 2-3 seconds.  On my machine it takes 2-3 minutes sometimes, so no, it doesn't seem slow.

That's great to see that the AI has to deal with avoiding monsters. It was highly annoying when playing with dense monsters that the AI could march armies all over the place and I couldn't until I cleared out space.

Beta 3 Question: Does a non-moving unit without shields gain a bonus against ranged attacks? I would think not.

Hey Brad,

Are you sure that tests the issue properly?

I've seen lots of AI heroes with wounds from lost combats etc.

What I noticed when playing 0.86 is when there were player units and AI units both near monsters, that the monsters would never go after the AI units.  Also, the defenders of goodie huts would ignore AI units more often.

If you play an auto game with all AI players though, you wouldn't see that differing behaviour as the monster AI would weigh all the AI empires equally.

My observations aren't that the monsters don't attack players at all.  It's that the monster AI seems to prefer player units over AI units, to the point of ignoring AI units entirely.

Thanks, Mr. Wardell, for posting the random video tests of FE 0.87 -- the ( hopefully ! ) soon-to-be-released Beta 3.  They really do look interesting, and are helping to keep my appetite whetted!

The real-time Bug testing video particularly caught my attention, because you seemed to move your units so quickly; and the whole pace of the gameplay was very fast ... at least compared to my experiences thus far with FE 0.86.  Of course, you undoubtedly were using a PC that is considerably better than mine.  But that said, I noted another thread (the Beta 3 Status Update, Original Post, paragraph #10), in which Derek Paxton stated that  your work  with program threading was  markedly  improving the performance.  Can we expect the Beta 3 to operate significantly faster ? 

I realize that might be hard to describe, but could you perhaps say that the program speed is 10% faster, or 20% faster, or 50% faster (     ), or something like that, when comparing FE 0.87, with FE 0.86 ?  News, along those lines, would be great news, indeed !!