Free Dirt Road Construction For The AI Is Unfun And Uninteresting To Play Against

[Pewpewchewchew]

Got back into Shadow Empire recently, it's been fun playing on some tame worlds and relearning the mechanics. So after starting a "proper" game on the harder difficulties, I've found the experience to be quite unfun and uninteresting per the title due to how the AI treats road construction.

I want to make the case that the free road construction goes against the design rationale per the manual:

I also had to compromise on the AI design. What I tried to do is make the AI play by different rules whereever where making the AI able to play by the same rules would require excessive coding time with minimal gain for
the player experience. What has always remained important to me is that the core rules that actually decide defeat or victory (combat and economy), the AI plays by exactly the same rules.

Inkedbandicam 2022-10-23 00-20-15-883.jpg (1.78 MiB) Viewed 833 times

So here's an example-ish situation, I've rolled back the game and replayed it pushing my armor unit deep into the AI's territory. I didn't think to capture it at the time. What spurred me to post was actually the AI rolling out a series of roads going along the redline. Imagine my shock when the AI just can open up fronts where the terrain and game stage would dictate otherwise. That is going through several mountain tiles that would otherwise use an ungodly amount of IP. This is unfun because it is unrewarding to play against, I'm planning around terrain features and frontages and all of that is suddenly invalided in-front of me. Because the AI can ignore difficult terrain, I need to alter my strategy (setting up more security screens) and spend the time to set those units to accommodate the implications of this difference in rules. This is not a good player experience at all. I'm spending more energy and effort accommodating the AI's ability to open fronts effectively over mountains than playing by the core rules.

Furthermore, the AI makes a mess out of spreading its road network backed by free logistical points. Once I take this land over, I'd have to spend time and effort cleaning up its mess due to how logistical points branch and distribute over the road network. So, this is now doubly unfun and uninteresting. Rather than taking a purpose built road network someone had planned, I'd be left with this spaghetti road network that actually works to my detriment.

What I'd like to see instead is that the AI has a scaling subsidy going towards road construction at least around where the player may notice. So two things there. One, could each major AI faction scale off its free road construction as a function of the its powerbase, the global power level, and the turn count? Two, at least try to hide free road construction, maybe penalize its occurrence in the tiles the player can see plus n tiles so there's no magical construction overnight if I reclaim/review an area a few turns later. If the AI crept its road construction here a tile per turn or something here I found have felt immersed because the AI seems to be carrying out some in-universe plan rather than having magicked a highway.

[Elver]

I'd tend to agree with this. Even if the AI isn't being charged IP for building roads, it should have to consider terrain IP costs when building them and only be able to build so many hexes per turn. IDK how much worse that'd make AI calculation times, though...

[bobus12]

yeah, if i had known this i wouldnt buy this game, this is a major spit in my face feels like