u/bohohoboprobono

After another suspicious rush on week 2, I downloaded a cheat addon for BepInEx to watch the AI play and see how it behaves. Did they get lucky with Pandora's boxes or Artifacts? Do some fancy hero chaining?

Nope!

How the AI "cheats" is pretty simple: They can't lose units while fighting neutrals. Not a single one. For instance, I observed Week 1 Hive heroes run face first into archers and not lose a single unit. As anyone who's played Hive knows, that's not possible.

And before "they probably used magic or had some badass scroll" - nope! I inspected their starter areas. I observed the same behavior in 4 different AI Heroes. Not only were at least half of them Might heroes, Magic Heroes can rarely do a perfect clear in week one anyway. Not only are your spells too weak to wipe the bad guys yet or last long enough for you to crowd control, Archers will get shots off.

The AI doesn't just attack anything though - they do obey some kind of logic where their army has to be sufficiently strong before attacking a neutral stack. But since they never lose anything, their snowballing is literally perfect.

When you encounter the AI, their hero hasn't lost a single unit since the game started unless they moved them to a different hero or encountered an enemy hero. That's why they have heaps of artifacts and 2-3x the Tier 1 units you do: they can't suffer any incidental attrition from clearing.

With no attrition, they hit the critical mass of units required to break pretty quickly - and lose nothing in the break. Their next move is then to break into the following zone - which is sometimes the one that leads to your base.

Now, why do I put "cheats" in quotation marks? Because there's a pretty good chance this is a bug. There are way cleaner and much more believable ways to help your floundering AI than to simply disable losses in battle - that leads to unrealistic army sizes, like we're seeing now.

The theory this is a bug is also supported by the fact it happens on all difficulty levels. I could see this as a feature of Unfair, which is outright described as cheating, but Normal and Hard? It doesn't make sense there.

So yeah. As far as I've observed, the AI is absolutely cheating. I just kind of doubt it's actually intended to be cheating in this way.

Normal is too dumb. I don't want an AI that pilots its main hero like a stolen car, swerving into head-on traffic (me) and then exploding in a blaze of glory instead of Fleeing encounters he's sure to lose in order to protect his Hero's XP and artifacts.

• My ideal AI would play as if "Lose Starting Hero" was always the lose condition, since it essentially always is in Heroes games anyway.

Hard is too serious. I don't want an AI that micros like we're playing Jebus Cross at 2200 ELO. Having secondary heroes ferry units? Sure! Using Remote Footholds, Recruitment, and Astrology spells? Yes! Full blown hero chaining and ghetto Town Portaling so they can pop their third creature bank on turn 3 and break on 117? Fuck that noise. I know where to go if I want that, and it sure as hell isn't single player.

• My ideal AI would play like a hotseat buddy - smart, skilled, making good decisions and taking calculated risks, but always well aware the other players will smack the crap out of the back of their head if they start trying to do tedious cheesy nonsense. I definitely don't want an AI that plays like some stranger on the internet who smokes four packs a day, has a causal relationship with cocaine, will send me angry messages in a language online translators can't confirm actually even exists, and just wants higher ELO.

Easy Prey gives +2 Initiative for a single round if an enemy unit Waits. It doesn't stack.

I'm genuinely not sure what the intent for this ability is. If it were Speed, it'd make sense - someone Waits, your superior Tactics gives your units are given the chance to lunge at the opening. But since it's Initiative, the behavior is just... odd. If your creatures' initiatives are very close to enemy creatures' initiatives, the turn order will be addled until the end of the round. Assuming anything changes at all, there's no guarantee that these changes will be beneficial to you - sometimes low Initiative units are simply slow, but other times they're intentionally low Initiative to let them fill a more reactive role.

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