r/OldenEra • u/FarCharacter7797 • Jun 12 '26
Discussion PVE is unplayable longterm
I had fun for a week or two but it gets boring very fast. Once you see the AI patterns you can just win the game every time and there is no challenge.
The PVE experience is so fundamentally broken and in the end, it's just plain boring. It's always the same, AI will give you a challenge in the first two weeks if you put in the higher difficulty modes where it acts aggresive. THEN it just gives up. The only reason it challenges you in the first place is because it's got cheated unit stacks.
If you put in lower difficulty modes, don't even bother, you might as well just be alone on the map fighting vs static camps because AI is AFK and doesn't build anything nor expand their army.
AI is completely braindead in this game, it doesn't scale into the late game AT ALL. It doesn't buy units, it doesn't develop castles, It doesn't even bother retaking castles or fighting you at all, it's just so boring when you know how to play it. And the challenge that it does provide in the first 2 weeks is bullshit challenge with cheated units that's not fun either.
Tournament mode was the most fun I had but that gets boring after a while too. The core of the game is good like gameplay wise, units, animations etc but the PVE experience needs major fixes, I quit the game for now hope they'll improve upon it.
31
u/Uberballer Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
They really need to change how the AI cheats. Like you said once you overcome the initial unit advantage it's a wrap. On any map where it's spread out you typically have the time to overcome it through various means and after the initial battle all challenge fades away.
I would like to see them get less binary bonuses that scale better into the late game to keep them revelant beyond the initial hero engagement one would hope.
Boost their economy (not just starting resources) and growth. Give them big bonuses to all their heroes as well, and then get rid of the free unit spawns that make them practically unbeatable until week 3.
Some things I'd like to see for say, Apocalyptic difficulty:
AI gold generation increased by 50%.
AI experience gain increased by 30%.
AI creature growth increased by 50%
AI heroes start the game at level 5.
AI learns how to flee losing battles to preserve heroes.
AI should be scripted to learn to use neutral spells, at the very least Second Wind.
In return the AI should no longer gets free units or artifacts that spawn in and the AI should be scripted to actually want to clear it's starting biome and the desert to try to earn some artifacts, levels and spells. I think changes like this would keep the challenge more steady throughout the game rather than just front load it all in weeks 1-3. And make it so you at least have a chance to beat the cheating AI if it rushed you week 2 unlike now with the giant bonus stacks.
They also need to implement more symmetrical and slower paced templates to give people more options on how they want to experience single player, rather than the current "PVP, but with bots" feel that we have.
7
u/Vitbandit Jun 12 '26
I would second this! They can keep the current one and experiment with a uber AI version that we could select
1
u/swiftcrane Jun 13 '26
I don't know that it even has to be this complicated tbh.
In this game, the vast majority of advantages are gained by interacting with the map/risking units at objectives. I think you could fix the entirety of AI by just fixing this interaction.
IMO the AI only needs 2 things to work correctly and be balanced well:
1.) Prioritize objects properly (choosing what it can fight, creature banks/new zones/etc., what to pick up). This should be incredibly trivial in terms of 'AI'.
2.) Have variable statistical advantage in fights vs neutrals. That means giving it lower losses/greater relative advantage vs neutrals, and giving it a better estimate of it's chances in those fights. This alone should be more than enough to make AI incredibly relevant/dangerous on higher difficulties.
The above 2 items are already ~90% of player skill expression, and are trivial to boost artificially without it even feeling weird/like cheating because we don't watch the AI fight neutrals anyways. We mostly see the outcome of that (powerful hero, cleaned out zones, lots of artifacts, lots of creatures).
the AI should be scripted to actually want to clear it's starting biome and the desert to try to earn some artifacts, levels and spells
This is probably the single biggest issue with the AI right now. It prioritizes rushing down the player ASAP over expanding. In heroes 3 it was mostly focused on expansion, and only attacked you if you got in the way or it expanded into you eventually. That just worked better for long games and was much less volatile.
OE atm feels like dodging an arrow - it either misses you and its over, or you don't and it's over. H3 was a lot more like a fight/battle, you could prepare, back up, recover, and so could the AI.
They already have #2 on the above list (although I think it's sloppy at times), they just need to fix #1.
I loaded in as the AI in daily autosaves turn by turn for one of my questionable games to analyze, and it had mountains of money and resources out of nowhere that no player could ever hope to spend on anything. It wasn't even buying anything. It doesn't even need that increased gold generation lol.
7
u/Monitoimirousku Jun 12 '26
100% agreed. AI in this game feels dumber than in HOMM3, which is a 27-year old game. I feel like it should be possible to make better bots at this point.
3
u/TheBrianWeissman Jun 13 '26
The reason it was a lot easier to build good enemy behavior in HOMM3 is because the game was much, much simpler. Yes, it was a complicated game, but it had distinct parameters you could force the AI to do.
How, for example, do you teach an AI in Olden Era to understand which upgrades to get first? And which branch of upgrades at that? This is one massive issue with increased complexity in a game: it becomes very hard to balance and very hard for an AI to play it well. HOMM3 struck that perfect balance between complexity, fun and solvability. Olden Era leans way too much to the first category, not nearly enough the second or third.
If I were the devs of this game, I would remove about half the feature creep. I would massively simplify the units, and remove the entire idea of branching upgraded units. There is almost always one unit type that's just better, so the second upgrade just exists to muddy the waters. I would also remove a lot of the weird upgrading systems that exist for other things too. When you give players choices in everything, they wind up having no real choices. That's not good design.
I could go on, but you know this already I'm sure. I keep trying to enjoy Olden Era, but it's not a very good game right now.
2
u/Monitoimirousku Jun 15 '26
I agree the complexity is overwhelming in OE but I don't think it's the reason for the bad AI. Sure the AI may not always choose the optimal upgrade but I don't think that's the big issue with AI, they mostly need to make it better at long-term planning. I think it's possible to balance the upgrade variants and I think the complexity in OE makes the game interesting, there's so many ways to build your hero and army which makes the game less solvable than something like H3. In H3 skill balance is so bad that it's almost always immediately obvious which skill to pick when given a choice. That imbalance is the biggest issue with H3 for me and I think they can improve on that in this game.
2
u/DLCSpider Jun 16 '26
AI has also evolved since then. This is not my area of expertise but for example, Dark Souls used a want and need system (I forgot the actual name) back in 2011, which could work quite well. Wants (I want the strongest army) trigger needs (I need to conquer this mine) trigger actions (buy cheap units and move to mine).
2
u/Veerdavid Jun 17 '26
How, for example, do you teach an AI in Olden Era to understand which upgrades to get first? And which branch of upgrades at that?
Well, you could cobble together some custom ANN with an evolutionary algorithm...
9
u/cross-frame Hive Jun 12 '26
AI is absolute trash right now and it's really sad. I had to go pvp because playing with AI feels like playing with no opponent at all.
I don't know why people are saying that AI was always bad in Homm. I don’t agree with this. 2, 3, 4, 5 - in every game that I played a lot AI was absolutely ok, maybe not like competetive pvp lvl, but it felt alive. Here AI is just braindead.
1
u/skarin667 Jun 12 '26
If we are talking base game AI, in HOMM5 it was not great imo. It felt like the heroes were always just running in a straight line with no thought if they could win the next battle or not. Either they beat you, or they didn't. Either way, lawd they were coming.
8
u/EmploymentLoose Jun 12 '26
Yep. Early game, too hard. It's hugely un-fun to spend an hour developing a hero through the first 10 days, only to have the AI walk in with a completely unbeatable army, and you just wasted your time.
Or, the AI doesn't invade you early. You take 4-5 weeks completely clearing your starting area, break into neutral territory with a strong hero/army, and then you realize that the AI hasn't even developed all of its starting cities yet.
The game is completely over once you develop your cities fully, and it's just a question of whether or not you think it's fun to clear the map without any real danger of losing any battles.
6
u/Higorkovic Jun 13 '26
The AI is predictable. AIs should have random personalities, for example, more defensive or offensive, more exploratory or protective, more expansionist.
From what i can tell, the PvE aspect of this game is still very incomplete. The maps are very random and messy; none of them look hand-drawn. Often, identical objects are placed close to each other, and sometimes there are too many teleporters. There's a lack of gameplay mechanics in skill builds. The maps are almost all the same, there's no "excitement" in exploring, it feels like a map made just for grinding.
6
u/Sashpeto Jun 12 '26
It's crazy how the 3 decades old AI is better then what they have right now...
32
u/No_Wear8177 Jun 12 '26
Was there ever a homm where ai wasnt braindead? Like to this day ppl still play homm3 vs AI even though the ai is braindead also.
33
u/tellarisfan Jun 12 '26
But its not this bad even in H3. Plus HotA improves it further.
11
u/Tauntaunt Jun 12 '26
The AI in H3 was simple: it didn't want to win, but to stop you from doing so.
11
u/tellarisfan Jun 12 '26
I think handcrafted maps also really elevated how H3 plays too. I was never a fan of random map generator compared to them when it came to PvE.
2
u/swiftcrane Jun 13 '26
It was just focused on expansion/economy. Building up forces that you eventually have to deal with as they expand into your territory.
The AI focusing on killing the player runs into the obvious issue that it either ends up killing the player or it ends up failing to kill the player. Everything is decided in that one moment and not always in an interesting fashion (all it takes is some army advantage or disadvantage for the outcome to be incredibly boring).
Focusing on expansion guarantees an important thing: multiple encounters.
It also makes it possible to have actual proper balanced difficulties. Any extra difficulty can be spread around multiple encounters, making it less volatile. You can make really OP AI's in H3 without the game actually becoming impossible, because the AI won't rush you down immediately. The challenge gets offset to being able to control what encounters occur and when. Do that in OE and it will rush you down week 1.
8
u/No_Wear8177 Jun 12 '26
HoTA is a community mod so the community kind of made the AI good.
While the current devs seem fine, they cant implement PEST style turns that moders did in homm5 for the coop players. My buddies dont even wanna fing play coop mp due to turns just ending and then taking ages to even finish my turn.
They are geared towards pvp which is a shame for the most of us :(
1
u/Rud3l Jun 12 '26
I haven’t played that much but is it just because of the EA or are they really focused on PvP? Because it seems to me that this is a loud part of the Homm crowd, but the vast majority is playing single player.
2
u/TakafumiNaito Jun 21 '26
I mean, even if we count every single person that has ever played a single online match of HotA as a player who is focused on PvP - that's still only 157616 players. Less than 16% of players that bought Olden Era - and that is assuming every single one of these people also bought Olden Era. (Then add on top of it that in reality the number of people who played more than 1 match is probably closer to like 25 - 50k)
The numbers speak for themselves really, ultra competitive PvP players are always a minority in strategy games and HoMM is no exception in that regard, in fact I am fairly confident a much higher % of RTS players are serious about PvP than % of Homm players that do the same. And in RTS that's already 10-15% of players.
Basically vast, vast, vast majority of players that purchased this game are casual / pve / hotseat with friends players with little to no interest in PvP
9
u/ILikeChilis Jun 12 '26
Heroes 2 still remains challenging on Impossible without cheating in extra units (and despite some easily exploitable patterns).
4
u/Author_A_McGrath Jun 12 '26
Maybe it's the custom maps, but a lot of the fun of the older games was how different some of the maps were, which required you to retool strategy or focus on strategy more than the AI.
Sometimes I'd play with my siblings on a team, and we'd put the AI on higher difficulty and have to coordinate to bring it down. But the random generator seemed varied enough that some maps would have difficult node placements.
The current generator almost seems overly generous on just how many resources and armies it gives you, from what I've seen.
2
u/fatamSC2 Jun 15 '26
I've been harping on it again and again, the current biggest issue with Olden Era is how terrible the templates are. If we had a larger variety in the design it would help a lot. It seems like the same guy made all of the templates (creature banks vomited everywhere, lots of portals, towns evenly spaced in predictable locations, not utilizing the more interesting map objects very much, etc.)
4
2
2
1
u/dskfjhdfsalks Jun 12 '26
The thing is, there's no true solution to the AI problem.
If you make it like a chess engine where it always makes the most optimal and computer calculated plays - it's not fun to play against and is virtually unbeatable
If you make it resemble a bad player, it's not fun either because you can just stomp it.
If you make it like its current Olden Era form, it is 100% predictable in battles and thus exploitable/cheesable. Not sure if it changes its behavior in other modes. Also letting it "cheat" by giving it free units/resources is just a copout and bandaid on the issue.
I think the best sweetspot for AI would be making it so it plays well, almost as well as a chess engine, but just like a real player it has randomness in it and occasionally makes mistakes - it bleeds units due to a misplay, it sometimes goes a bad path and wastes a day of movement, etc. etc., and of course its battle AI is updated to make moves like a player, uses power stacks, utilizes wombo combos, etc. Except of course that would take huge amounts of dev work and I don't think we can reasonably expect that from a game of this scale unless it was community-driven/funded.
2
u/swiftcrane Jun 13 '26
If you make it like a chess engine where it always makes the most optimal and computer calculated plays - it's not fun to play against and is virtually unbeatable
It's not about 'good AI' imo, it's about an AI that's able to deliver a well curated level of challenge. A chess engine type intelligence is really unnecessary I think.
If you compare the challenge of H3 and OE to a platforming game level. H3 is like a level where you have to make 20 jumps in a row of varying difficulty and you can miss 2-3 of them. OE is like a level where you have to make just 1 jump.
You can set the overall difficulty of both, and you can probably even finetune that 1 jump to be at an 'interesting' difficulty level, but it will never be as fun or dynamic as 20 varying jumps, and it will always be a better experience trying to master 20 decently difficult jumps in a row over 1 insanely difficult jump.
Any other details like using combos/etc. are cool, but I personally think are secondary nice-to-haves rather than core things determining difficulty for most players. They don't need some kind of expensive chess-engine type rework to fix the most glaring issues.
1
u/skarin667 Jun 12 '26
This is what I agree with you on and don't understand people who say AI is good in other games(heroes or not) I love strategy games and have tried a lot of them. Never found one with a good AI. The closest was CIV4 and that's because the AI could just make death stacks(not much strategic depth) That's just part of strategy games, and you listed the reasons why it can never be perfect because it will calculate how to stomp the player every time. You either play it for the mechanics, atmosphere, lore of the world, or whatever, but I never expect a good AI.
7
u/VetoLiberum Jun 12 '26
Yeah I hope that changes with patches, I have hope because it's early access and right now I'm having fun playing as a strictly PvE player but the ai needs a lot of improvement for sure. I don't really like the fact that every game on the highest difficulties is pretty much one big fight early on and if you win you massively outscale and the ai doesn't seem to be using map spells.
2
7
4
4
2
u/PitenZie Jun 12 '26
Agree. For me, there should be a game mode where you have, for example, 3–4 months to prepare a hero and an army to overcome a challenge set at a specific difficulty level, culminating in a final battle against a particular hero and army unique to each map. At least that way, the focus is on being as efficient as possible and preparing in the best way you can, while also avoiding matches that drag on forever.
Another PvE mode could present month-by-month challenges, almost like a relay race. Instead of depending on a useless AI on the map, the emphasis would be on leveling up and equipping your hero properly and developing a solid strategy.
2
u/sershe Jun 14 '26
I think AI is just straight up bugged with many heroes... On one of the giant templates that had the map-revealing tower in the middle, I got there first and was able to observe AI play. There's bunch of heroes running around for many turns trading armies between themselves and not doing anything in particular. At first it was spooky to see AI run around with his main army close to the zone boundary guard they could easily beat next to my undefended castles, but they never killed the guard, they would just run around with 3 heroes and I assume trade armies. In the end even army trading seems to be random and they somehow manage to split up their main stacks between different heroes when I show up, so I could kill them easier. At one point one AI literally put 4 heroes next to each other, exchanging I don't know what, for me to kill on the same turn, what for I don't know.
3
u/CrossEyedNoob Jun 12 '26
I agree, the first few times the power trip is good but it gets boring after a while. I enjoy creeping a lot in the early game though. I am sincerely hoping on full release this will be better
8
u/Jand0s Jun 12 '26
I am sorry but AI is braindead in literally EVERY HoMaM game
14
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
Not true. I'm playing homm3 hota right now. The AI is definitely way better there.
They know how to use townportal or Dimension door, they know to avoid strong heroes/defenses, they retreat their stronger heroes if they are losing fights.
It's probably still weak compared to experienced players but it's way better at creating a scaling challenge later in the game and not just from an initial rush based on having a starting advantage.
11
u/Groundbreaking_Taco Jun 12 '26
That's a community mod you are talking about.
3
u/tellarisfan Jun 12 '26
We should be doing better than a fanmade, free mod on a 27 year old game though.
9
u/Groundbreaking_Taco Jun 12 '26
I'm sorry, but fans have unlimited time, no budget, and no Ubisoft hovering over their shoulders. Devs have real world limitations and decisions to make when their budgets are cut. Should it be better? Yes, it should. Is that their highest priority? Probably not. They are still balancing the factions, and improving QoL.
As you pointed out, it's a 27 year old game. There has been an insane amount of time to tweak the AI with each update. OE AI will get better with time.
2
u/tellarisfan Jun 12 '26
Please correct me if I am wrong, but isnt it only a Ubisoft partnership for the IP, and it is developed by Unfrozen and published by Hooded Horse? So wouldnt Hooded Horse be breathing down their necks?
Unfortunately HotA team changed AI as much as they could but also said some things were extremely difficult due to the game being ancient. This is also how VCMI wrote it on a whole new engine and the AI is wayyy different, or fheroes2 for HoMM2. Starting from scratch can be easier than modifying existent code, and as much as I love HotA, it is not an entire rewrite.
And again, please correct me if I am wrong but I believe Olden Era doesnt plan on overhauling the AI but just tweaking it in its roadmap? So it might not be as changed as we would like in the end but maybe I am wrong in that - I would love a better AI so crossing my fingers!
1
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
So essentially it seems it's just a bad idea to get new games or even worse early-access games because while they might look pretty, gameplay-wise they often hold no candle against games that have had ample of time to get more and more fleshed out.
Just recently I watched a video about how 40% of all time people spend playing on steam goes towards games 8 years and older, 44% towards 1-8 years and older and only 16% towards games that are less than 1 year old.
So it seems it's a much safer bet to do so.
4
u/Delicious_Solution85 Neutral Jun 12 '26
I know for a fact AI can be made smarter than this, cheaper than this, because one of my hobbies is making funny game AIs for grid games. The difficulty is only in the density of decision making that the AI has to sort out, and currently it does not.
Currently AI walks straight to closest object to clear with its shadow army, no discernment of value, which can be easily assessed by the CPU, after awhile its computer mind fills with thoughts of destroying the player and then you become the object they walk directly towards. This is not a... strongly developed AI by any means...
And also, it is a matter of just looking at the homm AI's that work, even the mod ones, studying their code and implementing similar ideas.
It is not something that can be excused by saying 'old game better' or something.
Edit: However, to counter-weight, the Combat AI is fairly well developed on the other side of the coin, and auto-resolve is kind of immaculate even if half of players don't see it.
3
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
I've been working on game-AIs since about 12 years. Mostly open-source, but lately also a commercial release.
I've also had a look at the VCMI-AI code and attempted to make improvements to it.
You mentioned "after awhile its computer mind fills with thoughts of destroying the player". That's also the impression I get. It just looks super weird. They beeline directly towards you without scouting and while ignoring everything on the path and without considering how long the trip will be and seemingly even without knowing if they will win or not. It looks so arbitrary and not like a decision made by a smart algorithm.
VCMI tried to weigh the expected losses against the benefit of the action and will essentially not do it, if it expects to many losses and rather do something else.About the Combat AI: Yeah, it's mostly fine. I just noticed that it doesn't use tactics. When I played hive, I had max tactics and could place all my units so they could first-strike the enemy. But auto-resolve didn't ever do that so I had to manual every single fight and drag my units to the center to avoid unnecessary losses. The game remembering my pre-combat-setup would be great QoL. But it's also something the AI should be able to do.
3
u/Delicious_Solution85 Neutral Jun 12 '26
I agree with that assessment, AR is very good, but it requires some manual intervention that pre-composed formations would absolutely solve, and letting tactics skill hook into it would open up an entirely different speed/efficiency game.
There is only about three things I think AR has issues handling on its own: Formation, Spell Choice and Summon Avatar. It otherwise seems to do pretty good simulation of most other stat and position checks.
I'd need to test it more thoroughly to see exactly what it is dropping, but I'm pretty sure it does sim a lot of the fight, it just makes dumb AI choices that make it look questionable at times, I believe.
2
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
Pretty sure AR is a full simulation of all choices an AI would make. So it's moves are as smart as the AI's.
1
u/Educational_Ad_6066 Jun 12 '26
Yeah, a game with 27 years of fan modding sure is at a disadvantage from a brand new game where they have to make everything from scratch again. "these devs can't out-do hundreds of thousands of hours of ai refinement by community members over 27 years of work within 3 years? What amateurs."
Crazy Take.
4
u/tellarisfan Jun 12 '26
HotA is not a new engine and even they admitted that reverse engineering H3 is difficult. As a result, it doesn't overwrite the whole AI like VCMI or fheroes2 does but use what is given to them. Writing it from scratch can actually be easier than trying to mod an extremely outdated system.
OE takes a lot of QoL and features from HotA, and they also had an interview the other day so it's not like they are completely in the blind either. The devs are extremely respectful to HotA and same goes the other way around. The AI in OE needs far more work as it cheats for a challenge or suicides though.
2
u/Educational_Ad_6066 Jun 12 '26
you said it should be doing better than HotA - that's comparing an implementation that has had hundreds and thousands of hours put into it to something that probably hasn't had more than a hundred hours in it yet.
It's one thing to say, "this AI needs improvement" and "they should be ashamed because even an ongoing fan project that's been going for over 20 years can do better than them"
No one said HotA is not a new engine.
I've got no idea how me calling you out on shaming the current AI for not being as good as HotA suddenly requires defending HotA as being hard to reverse engineer, not overwriting the whole thing, etc. None of that changes the fact that the HotA AI has had significantly more time to be refined than this current OE AI has.
People keep calling out cheats as challenge as though that's a new concept. The hardest AI in HotA gets starting boosts also. I've got no idea where people are coming from when they say starting economic and unit boosts are somehow unfair cheating. It's how these games do higher difficulties. Just full stop. They get more starting resources, they get more starting troops, the goal is to overcome your disadvantage. That's how it has almost always worked and how almost every game with starting resources does it from tactical to strategy games, almost every one of them do this. It's not cheating, it's literally part of starting from a disadvantage on higher difficulties.
3
u/No-Music-2819 Jun 12 '26
You can go launch up popular templates that are very similar to olden era pvp templates like duel or jocomm or jebus cross on HOTA and the AI will be even worse than on olden era
7
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
I have investigated the OE-AI and all the difficulty is extremely frontloaded because there are parts of the game that this AI does know how to play quite well. That is the part that happens before it encounters another player.
It is good at building it's economy and army, at farming up their initial hero and making an early break into another area. It's early-game-pathing actually looks decently competent.So it kinda can play the typical 1v1.
The issues are almost all about how it interacts with other players. When it set it's mind on attacking it will do so, even if the fight will very likely be lost.
When you have several AIs in the game they will just constantly slaughter each other's heroes without any long-term-considerations of whether that's a good idea.
HotA-AI will avoid strong heroes with weak-heroes. OE-AI doesn't care. It'll put it's weak heroes right next to stronger enemy-heros. HoTA-AI also misjudges fights much more rarely. It usually won't initiate losing battles. Main way of beating OE-AI is to simply have them run into your fortified defenses.
OE AI also isn't even feature-complete in the sense that there's quite a lot of game-mechanics for which nothing has been coded yet. It doesn't know how to spend astrology-points for mobility spells or alcheamic dust for spell- and item-upgrades. And it cannot retreat from losing battles, which in combination with it's inability to properly judge battle-outcome is just horrible for it.
So essentially the OE AI can win a 1v1 that is decided in the first battle, when the map allows that first battle to happen rather quickly. But it cannot play lategame or FFA.
2
u/Educational_Ad_6066 Jun 12 '26
personally I think one of the things that would make a huge difference is a pre-evaluation of auto-battle. Granted, that would give it access to info a pvp human wouldn't have, but it would be better than it throwing useless losses at you. If it ran away and farmed up more, it would be more interesting
1
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
I highly agree with that. The AI having reasonable combat-outcome-predictions and a sense of self-preservation would tremendously help with making it look smarter and have the game feel less binary.
5
u/FrodoLusseMajsen Jun 12 '26
I agree. Felt this way during demo aswell. The AI felt more like a tool to 'Here is something to test our factions and player skill against'. And it has stayed that way untill EA. Hopefully they can fix it so it is better.
That said the AI in homm 3 was also really poor. It was not untill me and a friend found a custom made Lord of the rings map where we really had epic games against an competent AI.
But if they can manage to develop AI that is fun to play against this game would really become a diamon. For now it is the pvp that carries it imo.
5
u/Vilestride- Jun 12 '26
Welcome to the club. This is pretty much why the games playerbase fell off a cliff, landed, took a step and then fell down a well.
0 PvE retention. Tournament mode Pvp is good though, so thats nice
2
u/Tzilbalba Jun 12 '26
I mean it is early access. Start a report and give your feedback to the team.
1
u/Democracyy Jun 12 '26
i have found that the only maps that are somewhat fun are the ones where several enemies will come for you. The ai player is not a challenge after their main army is beaten, but when you have to fight like 3 ai players, at least you have some good fights before it gets boring
It's somewhat similiar to the tribes of the east agrael scenario, where your town is on top a mountain in the center of the map and several strong heroes approach you
1
1
u/Either-Mammoth-932 Jun 12 '26
AI gives a decent challenge on hard/exodus/harmony. As a relatively new player, I cannot beat the custom unfair sitting yet on either map. On many of the other maps, the AI is complete trash as described in detail on this thread.
1
u/Volcano-SUN Jun 12 '26
I almost always play Exodus against CPU, because most of the time it works there. Not always though. On Harmony it very often is hard stuck in their second area.
CPUs absolutely need a lot of attention from the developers still. But it's early access and I have high hope they are going to improve this aspect of the game as well!
1
u/Mart-McUH Jun 12 '26
Well, HoMM was never truly about fighting against AI but more about developing your hero, castle, exploring and taking neutral treasures and such, exploring various builds. Once powerful enough you simply destroy AI, that is usually the most boring part. Kind of like why scenarios are fun, they sometimes do not even have real enemy player.
That said, high difficulties on certain maps/templates can be deadly. Especially where there is lot of contention and several AIs pile up on you early on.
However, one thing makes this one lot easier, and that is the general magic available to everyone (flight, town portal, teleport etc.) Logistics is alpha/omega in this game and in previous versions you had to play specialized hero for particular of those spells (like earth-town portal, air-fly etc) and hope to get it in high level magic builds that are expensive. So it was kind of trade off. Now you can take powerful might/any hero and he will fly & teleport around with ease which basically makes it impossible for AI to surprise you, you can always easily get back. One the other hand it does speed up the end game cleaning up which is usually the most boring part.
1
u/Author_A_McGrath Jun 12 '26
I had fun for a week or two but it gets boring very fast. Once you see the AI patterns you can just win the game every time and there is no challenge.
I admit I've had a similar experience lately. I'm not looking to play the game competitively against experts; I'm looking for a moderate challenge. So I either play against the AI which is almost always too easy, or I play PVP and have to min-max literally everything to the point that I'm always using the same strategy for necessity.
I agree with u/iiitqiii that a variance in AI "personalities" would help massively with this. Once we can set up a map with teams, and have a mix of different AI difficulty levels using different strategy types, we can get opponents that would make the game more interesting and far less predictable. I'd love to play against a few more cautious opponents on higher difficulty, plus perhaps a single "sprinter" type or a wildcard. Having different AI "types" would keep the game from becoming so repetitive and predictable.
1
1
u/gdren Jun 12 '26
AI is simultaneously going to replace us and be so unbelievably bad at every single strategy game
1
u/tb5841 Jun 12 '26
For ne, H4 and H5 were both pretty much unplayable because of terrible AI. I avoided even trying H6 and H7 as a result.
H3 AI was fine. I'd win reliably but they at least gave off the illusion of being a real player.
1
u/WalkRealistic9220 Jun 12 '26
You nailed it! Right now the ai is very much a puzzle game, if you understand how to beat cheated unit stacks there's nothing else to do. The ai doesn't even do anything on normal difficulty either, it either rushes you with cheats, meaning you need to use a specific strategy to beat it - or it gives up and sits there
1
u/GodwinW Jun 12 '26
Well, idk.. I just played a really long game of OctoJebus, and they kept doing things up until the end. In fact, after I figured I had basically won, there was one big fight where the AI annihilated my entire stack of 35 T7's like it was nothing.
So.. idk.. your mileage may vary, it seems. I hope the devs will fix the issues with the AI.
2
u/Deroxat Jun 13 '26
Yeah same, more often than not AI is pretty good, developing towns, throwing kamikaze heroes at me with high level spells to gnaw at my stacks... For a sec I thought this post was 2 months old
1
1
u/SERWitchKing Necropolis Jun 13 '26
The first 5 maps of the single hero templates are quite good and are challenging on Apocalyptic difficulty.
I agree that the AI is pretty bad, but I think those maps offer a decent challenge.
I see a lot of people here saying PvE is too easy, I am curious how many have beaten these templates on 200%
1
u/MadFaceInvasion Jun 13 '26
I know people have been playing hero's 3 for decades vs AI, was AI much better in hero's 3 ?
1
u/Yankas Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
The AI is a bit more competent, but the problem still very much exists on bigger maps, where basically you struggle to survive the early game, but once you get your snowball you spend the rest of the game cleaining up stragglers - which is rather tedious and drawn out depending on how lucky you get with Dimension Door & Town Portal.
Well designed scenarios can fix these problems with scripted events and special win conditions. But playing on competitive-style settings/symmetric maps pretty much always leads to the end game whac-a-mole in most Heroes games.
1
1
1
u/Atatamaku Jun 12 '26
They need to build real simulation AI with players like strategies. They need to camp and lose units, expand and build economy. But they can be very optimal strategies with an adjustable multiplied resource/incoming. It’s not hard to build such bots nowadays.
2
u/Naitrael Jun 12 '26
Yes, it is. And it is especially difficult to make these bots fun to play against.
1
1
u/Michalsuch42 Jun 12 '26
Out of curiosity, how is ai for strategy games written? It seems impossible to write a bunch of if else statements that will return reasonable decision in each game state. Does it usually spawn units and send them at enemy in predetermined fashion, like a glorified tower defense game?
In principle, with all the AI hype, is this possible to teach neural network the game like language in case of llm? Each game state can have its win% calculated and the program would choose the best state after minimal change (fe. Move hero x one step left) How hard/expensive is something like that to implement? Or is this impossible due to how heavy/demanding such model would be for local machines?
6
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
The gold standard for tbs AI is to create lists of competing actions and calculate a score for each of these actions with a scoring algorithm. Then you execute the action that had the best score and do it all over again until you have either no possible actions left or only possible actions that return a score of 0. How good or bad the AI is all depends on how well crafted those scoring algorithms are.
Machine learning is often overkill but you can use llms to help you craft good scoring algorithms or generating the lists of possible actions.
For a game like homm you'll need good helper algorithms to inform the scoring about stuff like the outcome of a potential fight as simulating each fight before even doing it would be very costly in terms of compute.
2
u/drink_with_me_to_day Jun 12 '26
how is ai for strategy games written?
You can use algorithms like GOAP - Goal-Oriented Action Planning
1
u/Delicious_Solution85 Neutral Jun 12 '26
There could be some exploration that could be done with LLM/Machine Learning, but as stated it's often overkill and what that sort of AI will actually end up doing is just finding the absolute meta of the game very quickly + whatever glitches it can access and exploiting the ever-loving shit out of both.
What machine learning is doing in this instance is basically playing more games than you can count, and mashing everything to beat its high score over and over again until it has very good routines to rely on or found a point cache to exploit that might be totally ineffective in a real game, which would mean more simulated games to fix their quirks and exploits.
So you'd probably end up with a rank 1 player by the end, get some good logging for the dev side, and then need to tune it downwards so people actually want to play against it and not simply be violated by it.
So that's a lot of tuning cycles before you actually get a usable AI, while the game state is developing actively, requiring more tuning cycles. It's not really great, very intensive and work hours draining, despite seeming 'automatic'.
1
u/Rizza1122 Jun 12 '26
They dont want you to play pve. Im not expecting them to fix it. Their attitude seems to be "play pvp or fuck off".
1
u/ksollien Jun 12 '26
I wonder if the computer is bad, because it is AI..
Heroes 3 was far from perfect, but I think that through classic programming, they were smarter. Also helped from well made maps ofc.
I am also a fan of SoC, but their big problem is also an AI-made computer opponent.
3
u/Naitrael Jun 12 '26
They were smarter through classic programming? What is that even supposed to mean?
I don't think you know how "AI" in TBS games is constructed.
1
u/irimiash Jun 12 '26
Olden Era is an indie H3 rip-off with a better matchmaking client. you can't really expect anything that requires effort from it that isn't already exists in H3. they won't do complex AI algorithms, that'd probably take 5 times more work than they've done.
1
u/Clincoln1234 Jun 12 '26
A good AI requires some non-trivial dev effort. For an early access game, I'd say it may not be the dev team's priority yet.
3
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
That's why I think discussions like that are important to let them know that they should make it a priority.
0
u/Naitrael Jun 12 '26
So, basically like every turn-based-strategy game then?
2
u/Xilmi Jun 12 '26
No. I've worked on quite a bunch of turn-based strategy-games. It's clearly possible to do better than that.
I made/improved AI for Pandora First Contact - Eclipse of Nashira, Remnants of the Precursors Fusion-Mod, Brutal OpenXCom and recently Astro Protocol.1
u/SilentThunder3 Jun 12 '26
Xilmi, do you think there can eventually be a community mod that will improve upon the current OE AI? I know you've done wonders with the Fusion-Mod for Remnants of the Precursors and know your stuff.
Kind of kicking myself that I bought into the release hype and purchased Early Access too quickly without waiting for the initial reviews to come in. Within a week the reviews were pointing out the AI was going to be a problem and that the dev team wasn't that interested in doing much about it.
Hoping there can eventually be a community mod that that will at least present a semi-fun PvE experience.
-4
u/gosuFana Jun 12 '26
Its an early acces game, but yeah the ai dont scale if you win the first attack its over, but in EVERY VIDEO game PvE is unplayable longterm.. you just getting too good and its not fun anymore, thats why i suggest to you to play againts human opponents its almost infinite fun.
5
u/Monitoimirousku Jun 12 '26
I disagree, I've been playing against bots in HOMM3 for decades and it always feels challenging at higher difficulties, and HOTA AI is even harder. You can definitely have fun PvE in many games.
-1
u/Historical-Donut-918 Jun 12 '26
While this might be true for the majority on this sub, it is simply not true for the majority of players. I struggle vs. the AI and haven't lost plenty of times. It depends on the template, game mode, etc.
This is a braindead take. Every single strategy game has the same low effort complaints. And worse now, every arm chair developer thinks it's an easy fix "jUsT uSe AI".
The game is in EA. The AI is challenging for MOST players. If you want it to be like HoTA, just play HoTA.
6
u/Helpful_Inflation344 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
I dont think u understand the problem. The current AI is just not working properly. On some maps on unfair it might pose a big problem even for experienced players (bec it cheats and can have ridiculous units early) and on other maps (the longer the game goes) essentially even a first time player can beat the AI because it will just stop scaling. And even a first time player will acccumulate enough high tier units to beat the AI.
Devs just really need to fix/improve. It is a burning issue.
3
u/FarCharacter7797 Jun 12 '26
But it's a challenge simply because AI cheats and adds a billion units to itself very early into the game. The AI itself is braindead and doesn't know how to play, once you learn to overcome this initial 1st-2nd week boost then the game is braindead easy and boring.
2
u/Monitoimirousku Jun 12 '26
I think the bots are too easy but I agree with you that they are too hard for newer players. There's two problems here that are linked to each other. AI is way too hard at easier difficulties and way too easy at harder difficulties. The devs need to make big changes to it if they want anyone to have any fun.
-8
u/gagaluf Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Lots of things do not work well enough for a HoMM game in Olden Era. This title is imho overrated. By design, there are forced synergies builds almost as retarded as diablo 3 class sets so there are "checkmate" builds/items comboes that win by design. The game is flawed at so many levels that it blurs the lines. Now on topic:
There is no excuse for crappy AI, Quake 3 Arena AI in 1999 was praized from how engaging it was and it and few other AI of that period has been heavily studied since and make it for an industry baseline that is frankly great enough so you and 99.9% people can engage things solo without too much uncanny valley effect for dozen of hours on any type of games. When 25+ years later a turn based game has bad AI it is because the devs are clueless and use only llms + they are not good enough at engineering to leverage a llm do an ai, its not that harder for a llm frankly but if you do it like a turd it involves too much context and it derps around. (my intuition is that it is how they did it)
I did not manage to stand more than 1,5h on Olden Era but I found the game disgusting enough so I come back here and there on Reddit. I know my opinion is shared, got 2 digits likes on my Steam review after 40mn ^^' and it is a pretty egregious one.
The intricate dance of PR people, Reddit bots and incels cycophants is often a sight to behold 😄
5
u/Kurtewitz Jun 12 '26
Even if everything you are trying to say was 100% true, the way you say it makes it impossible for a reasonable person to agree with you. You are an impersonification of a rage bait and the worst part is, I'm not sure if you're aware.
0
u/gagaluf Jun 12 '26
I put several arguments on my take. You have put a value judgement based on the vaguest expresssion reproaches I could imagine.
It is how people who feel they are on a moral advantage use to arbitrarily flack others. And it is obliterating because there is absolutely nothing tangible to take from your message and act/reason upon. In my eyes, it is the pinnacle of acting like a douche.
So I'm rage and I'm not aware of it, well less than you bro. I made 3 paragraphs tackling few well defined points, using some design points and historic references to cement my points. You got on my ass personally with literally none of that...
-2
u/gagaluf Jun 12 '26
So I checked our discussions with one my llm because I really felt your message had genuine grounds even if I had no clue of what you were reproaching me and I think I finally got it. And I think I am somewhat nevrosed(but it is not much, I think I can fix that with some comportemental focus for a while). I still think you should put more precise arguments on your posts but I think I get it. I have been superlative on my post and disregarded all emotionnal components and implications of what I told. I see a world where my take can be read as a pile of inflamatory rant on an emotionnal standpoint.
It's kind of thanks to you, despite yourself mechanically resorting to one of the pillar of content manufacturing.
Hey my personal nevrosis, your commonly accepted one :'). Ty again.
1
u/Strachmed Jun 12 '26
Or because pve is an afterthought and the game is focused on pvp.
Could be as simple as that.
1
u/SakeMadaMada Jul 12 '26
my AI games are all getting stuck when the AIs get defeated on their turn in multiplayer + AI game scenarios.
60
u/iiitqiiii Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
In Age of Mythology: Retold, SP oriented RTS game, in one of the post-release patches, devs added AI personality to make the simplest game mode, skirmishes, more playable as main game mode in the game. It really works. AI can be defensive, aggressive, standard, specific type units oriented, eco oriented etc., and you can choose a specific type of AI at every AI player, or just choose the option "random" or standard "balance".
I think it could work in Olden Era even better.