Lastly i come to my favourite Fantasy strategy game,but even here the same onld things happen.Even worse,ive seen other 'interventions' on behalf of enemy factions after doing a few experiments.

Once again sadly despite the excellent design and atmosphere,the same old things happen.Enemy factions see the whole map,get info on all your cities and units at all times,and get production 'bonuses' each turn the higher the difficulty level.Ive even seen enemy factions go around the map and dig up 'artifacts' without having all the map parts to find them. It was also clear that the old perenial of giving the AI factions the full map from the start AND all your city and unit positions was in play.Ī cheats delight.A specific example.One spell,i think it was bless,was castable only on humanoid units,a maximum of once.I had a small vallage on the 'darkside' ,recently taken and away from all enemy forces.Within 2 turns,a hell hound appeared,used the magical roads to cross half the map to my village,and took it on its own.This non human unit had FIVE bless spells cast on it.Įven worse was the apparent stupidity of the basic design.In one Medium game i had a small halfling village with two units defending (standard start).On turn 3 of this new game,four neutral Gnoll swordsman marauders appeared,stormed my city.Game over.WHAT WAS THE BLOODY POINT OF PLAYING.were my thoughts at the time. The games had cheat modes which were used in conjunction with scenario design.One function was to view other factions.I used this once in the middle/end game (1850) to view France,for she and others were consistantly outbuilding me.I found that EVERY factions (after viewing them all) production costs had been reduced by a third,regardless of the build. If anything the AI should have been better but the same old cheating went on.A specific example. The AI clearly cheated even at the lowest difficulty levels.For eaxample,you would be beseiging a small town which constantly churned out defenders,only for the end of turn results to state it had built a wonder.

As a long term player of many strategy games from the earlier Civ,Master of Magic,HoMM and latterly all the AoW series,ive come to a conclusion.That no matter how good the game design,and most especially AoW is damn good,they all ultimately fail due to poor AI programming.Here are a few examples.

Company if heroes cheating ai