Frogboy, what's wrong with monsters getting a "I'm extremely hostile and actively target any intrusion on my turf" radius?

Because they would quickly destroy the world in the early game?  

Though there must be a better way than for each monster to have a 10% (or whatever) chance of attacking a distant city.  Maybe two tiles from the lair/starting point, boosted up to 1 more when the lair upgrades or when sufficient time has elapsed?  And whenever a lair comes into a zone of influence, those monster's buddies will mobilise.  So if you make sure you don't build an outpost near a monster and you don't allow any city to expand to a monster's lair, you can still strategize.

Well, my problem with this is that many monsters, trained troops can't do anything against.  And secondly, I don't know why monsters would race to destroy cities anyway, and I don't think it would be more fun for them to attack more cities than they already do.  Especially when cities take hundreds of years to build up and can't defend themselves against large monsters, even with a stack of trained troops.

What about making an area of say eight tiles from the lair/placed creatures starting point that it will not go out of until later in the game, and keep everything else the same?  ie. remove the small chance of a monster departing to raze a distant destination.

Very annoying to wake up not only dragons, but medium or strong monsters...they are usually near of essence...so building there is almost suicide.

My suggestion:  determine if monsters freed from lair should return back,by making some path and or randomization at the movement calculation

Every turn, for each tile far from their lair add a ... maybe 10-20%? of returning to their original Lair.  So they will wander at around 5-10 tiles from their lair...Not much, but not few...

Or give them a radius of action (between for example 3 to 10 tiles) so they will not go farther than that.

No they won't. All you have to do is:

1. Turf centered on monster lair, not on current location (if lair destroyed DO NOT move turf... move monster to remains and have it sit there to rebuild).

2. Make lair turf visible to players.

3. Make the weakest monsters (wolves) not project turf at all.

4. Make initial settlement locations start out in small isolated "islands" of no-turf (which is rare!). they can have nearby weak monsters but nothing that projects turf.

Turfs, like mini wildlands? Hmm, Why not.

I'm also very unsatisfied with the random, mostly-harmless-but-you-cannot-predict-when-not behavior of monsters. My thoughts about that from more than 6 month ago are still relevant for the current beta, I think:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/416547

I think a strong monster should get enraged if influence projects into their territory.  The solution is not to build there until you can take out that monster first.

Don't they do that now?  

I juts see them randomly wonder around.

I do think if a monster destroys the source of its rage, it should wander around a bit, and if it doesn't find anything, it should make a new lair.

Monsters could use some more interesting behavior, but that's stuff for a 1.1 or 1.2 patch.

There is not going to be such patches if the game is a flop and it will be a flop if issues are not addressed.

FE is rife with unresolved issues and pretending they do not exist is a recipe for disaster.

I hate the current system. It's just too random. It encourages a whole bunch of stupid behaviours like building around monsters, and setting monsters and loose on purpose so they will leave. Not even the veteran players understand how it really works, it will do nothing but aggravate and confuse new players. It will never be fun to have the AI unleash a dragon that ignores him but decides to raze your cities to the ground for some reason.  Not to mention it makes the game a piooner spam because even if you build beside a huge monster it might just decide to wonder off instead of protecting it's territory. This is why there is so little exploration in this game, because monsters don't hold back player expansion at all. You can just avoid placing monsters directly under influence and if your area expands they will probably just wander off anyway so why not spam cities like no tomorrow?

If monsters were given a ZoC you couldn't build in or spread your influence through then not only would there be no random destruction of cities by stupid AI behaviour but player expansion would be more gradual. There would be real early, mid, and late game phases. Monster ZoC would make paths of non-settle-able land players could explore early to midgame. The RPG part of the game would shine through.

I wish I could mod this in at least. You can make monsters not be set free by ZoC but you can't give them their own. 

Edit: You should probably address this to Derek not Brad. 

Please all vote in my monster poll. I want to get a clear number of people who have a major problem with monster AI. I am assuming it will be 100% of beta testers.

link?

Monsters aren't uniformally distributed.  The AI ends up with a lot more monsters near them than human players.  So the behavior of monsters is a challenging thing.  They are individually random in but generally predictable.

I'm doing my best to find a behavior that will satisfy the most people. But a big problem is the plain erroneous analysis in the forums that gets a bit frustrating at times (monster killed me, no fair! must be cheating!11!).  I've had to deal with that since GalCiv.

But in this case, you have that plus the legitimate elements PLUS the fact that the monsters get stacked against the AI.  I think I may have a solution by this Thursday.

That said, world difficulty matters.  Don't turn it up unless you want to get mauled. I've gotten saved games from people complaining about the monsters who had it on ridiculous.  

I forgot about the difficulty setting thing. What tag in the difficulty setting is upping the aggression? Will setting the world difficulty lower and the faction difficulty lower make monsters easier and factions harder?

Glad to hear it... since Gal Civ you've never taken the easy way out most developers take to increase the difficulty (nerf the player, boost the AI) that every other developer takes and I enjoy playing against AI's that mimic a real player a bit more.

anyway. it may be better rather than change the monster AI rather to change the Player AI to not be so cavalier about building near monsters. as a player you take care where you place outposts and cities to not tick off the dragons.  It' a little annoying when an AI builds an outpost in the middle of a monster infested wilderness zone just outside your borders and then have all the monsters stampede through your cities.    again you don't want to create an exploit where a player can use a sacrafical scout to wander through a more powerful enemies kingdom and then use arcane monolith to set off a monster free for all bomb.   (although that would be extremely entertaining to watch from a distance. )

If it's normal or below I stop the monsters from doing very much.  If it's above that, the dice start to roll and the monsters start to get less aggressive towards AI players -- that's a recent change.  

Originally, the monster AI didn't know who was who. But when I fixed the simultaneous turn thing it caused AI players to get massacred on higher world difficulties because the monsters get disproportionately placed around AI players.

Now, in some future future version, we can have some sort of crazy advanced set of options that let players really go to down on this kind of thing.  In GalCiv: Twilight of the Arnor, we eventually let players determine which AI personality and how much CPU was made available to calculating so if FE's a success, I wouldn't be opposed to doing that.

It'll be interesting to see how people feel about Thursday's build.  What we don't want happen is for players to see their kingdoms wrecked by monsters unless they've explicitly turned up the heat.

Frogboy,

Monsters don't need to be randomly distributed.  That's part of the fun of the game.     Sometimes I start a game by a dragon and sometimes I start a game by bandits.     That helps replayability.

I agree that if the difficulty level reduces the number and aggressiveness of monsters that mechanic is as it should be.  Some % of the time (impacted by game difficulty) monsters should wander from their lair and attack things they find.

Recently I have been playing FE at normal difficulty.    When I can see what is happening I have never seen a monster attack an ai city or army.   I can't speak for when I can't see (which is often most of the map).    This creates the impression that there is a problem - even if this small sample is not representative.   However, this does not stop me from liking the game.

I enjoy the game a lot - it's fun and appeals to exactly the niche that I like in gaming.    What I would like to have in this area is a little better understanding in basic terms (I am not a programmer) of how the monsters movement is determined.   

OK, while I was typing you answered my question.   Thank you.

I understand less aggressiveness might be needed, but it doesn't feel fair. You need to make sure there isn't any of the Storm Dragon sleeping peacefully right next to AI-players' cities situations.

Would it not be better to also thin out monsters near the AIs' starting positions?

Get out of my mind!

The solution we're playing with for Thursday is for the super powerful monsters that spawn next to the AI to commit suicide at the start of the game. And make the AI hella smarter about founding cities near monster lairs. 

Actually monsters being less aggressive to AI isn't a problem.

Strong+ (and stronger) Monsters who start randomly wandering the map and attacking player cities before turn 60 or so because the AI pissed them off by placing a settlements/outposts is the issue. 

I don't mind the monsters wandering or even attacking my moving armies or improvements that just adds to the fun... its the cities that are the issue.

My current game on normal Diff, Tarth (i think) put an outpost in the middle of about 6 monster lairs about 5 squares outside my border to get at a wilderness shard.  several of the monsters (including a Strong/Deadly Elemental led Army) is now stampeding through my core cities.  This is early game still around turn 50 or so... my Sov and champion are still under level 10 and I'm currently starving off the inevitable with "tremble" hoping I can recuit research Beorn's letters and get a third high level champion before i run out of mana. There's a wolf pack that for some odd reason I can't defeat wandering around as well causing issues.

(I already tried massing spears in the cities to defend but that didn't work out very well. (just got clobbered... I'm working off an earlier save at the moment. and the issue repeated itself almost exactly.) 

p.s. while I was concentrating spears in the nearest city at threat I had a bear wander through and destroy a level 2 city.  that just seem wrong to me.  

And if they commit suicide, I hope they take their now unguarded treasure with them!

Ahh See???  I must have a future as a game designer.  

Ummm not... I doubt Stardock could afford me... Oil companies pay better.

anyway 

I don't think commiting suicide is absolutly needed. can you just nerf thier overall tendancy to wander from thier lair... nerf as in remove entirely while they are in a AI border zone?   if the AI zone of control disappears then they then can revert to normal behavior?  In late game wandering around killing epic's is fun.  I wouldn't want them to disappear entirely.

or are the suicide monster just apply to the ones at the starting position?

good luck with Balancing the AI city founding... I hope the new AI doesnt just force them to sit back and turtle .... Ahhh you'll get it right... it'll be great