r/OldenEra

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.

So a human settlement is destroyed by magic unextinguishable fire, and the Triumvirate decides to investigate. They do this by sending spies and a small military force into another faction's territory without their knowledge or permission. When the Temple tries to enforce its borders we kill them on their own land. Despite this being a fucking act of war, the game treats it like a minor nuisance and tries to tell me the Temple are assholes for not immediately trusting my foreign army. For all they know Alvar could be behind the fires. Am I crazy for fixating on this?

Had a recent discussion on how some games are built around single player but have multiplayer built into them (e.g HoMM3), and how some games are built on multiplayer but can be played solo (e.g Destiny 2).

For example PvP focused templates are vastly different from PvE ones, plus balancing can vary between the modes like how older games had some strats banned in multiplayer. This also means any new content etc.

What would you prefer the devs to focus on yourself and why?

View Poll

1. Grab thaumaturgy
2. Grab daylight magic (or build many mage guilds for +1 spell levels)
3. Learn Radiant Armor eventually
4. Manually upgrade thick hide and optical illusion and radiant armor in observatory
5. Have a phoenix in your army for max initiative to cast spells first
6. Enter combat
7. Cast Radiant Armor and Thick Hide (or optical illusion if enemy is heavy ranged)
8. You now have 70% damage reduction (which means 333% effective HP)
9. Bonus: Grab defense on the map for more damage reduction (it scales well)
10. If your opponent does not have max rank Wean, win the game

EDIT: The damage reduction is multiplicative, which is closer to 2.5x effective HP, but still pretty damn good

40% damage reduction is insane

but for ALL YOUR ARMY??

this is the strongest buff in this game by far

its purpose and thematic is to be the giga tank spell for ONE tank (your power stack)

It is Radiant Armor not Radiant Armors (plural)

Maybe make the upgrade path 30-40-50 damage reduction instead

Single Hero mode is becoming the "main" way of playing Heroes online it seems. Every YouTuber I come across strictly makes guides and tier lists ONLY about single Hero mode. When they talk about Heroes and Spells, they rate their usefulness exclusively on how it performs in Single Hero Mode.

Personally I think that's alienating a lot of what Heroes has to offer which a 2 Hero mode would solve. I think Duo Hero mode would have the best of both worlds. You don't need to micro 8 Heroes at a time like in Jebus Cross, but support Heroes would have a place to shine.

It would be nice to have a "Duo Hero Mode" as an alternative option in the future.