Any hope in the "One Hope" scenario?

[tildatoo]

I'm new to Glest and not sure about the kinds of questions that get asked ont his board, but l'm wondering whether anyone has succeeded in the "One Hope" scenario?  I do very well against standard AIs, but in this scenario I'm stuck.  I've tried three different strategies:  developing my firepower (energy research, archmages), developing my resources (heavily producing initiates, starting a mage tower next to another gold deposit), and sending help to the  ally, but the outcome is always the same:  ally gets totally wiped out and then so do I.  Even after a short time in play, the opponent AIs are producing resources at several times the rate I am, no doubt because they've been given a massive resource advantage by the game.  I wonder whether it's possible to succeed.

[martiño]

Well, the first thing is that in this scenario, the allied AI is normal, and the enemies are Ultra, so it is quite difficult.

Also your ally is tech, and you are magic, so you should probably focus on battlemages and dragons, and let your ally care of the melee. The problem with archmages is that if not handled carefully, they can do as much damage to your troops as to the enemy, you really need to micromanage a lot.

They key when playing with an allied AI is to try to produce 2v1 situations. Any AI will send troops to defend you if you are engaged in an attack, so a good option is to send a scout to the enemy base, and when your AI launches all its troops try to join with it and attack the enemy.

[tildatoo]

Hi Martino:  Thanks!  The enemy AIs always attack my ally's village during the first night, which is very little time to prepare for the attack (no time to build dragons or archmages).  The ally generally doesn't build many battle units.  One option I tried was building a lot of battlemages first thing and stationing them in the ally village to defend it.  The result is the same as always:  by the first night massive enemy forces descend on the village and wipe it out, with my battlemages merely slowing the process a small amount.  Because I focused on battlemages, my development lagged appreciably.  So, by the next day the enemy forces overran me with ease.  

Another strategy I've tried is accepting that the ally will inevitably fall, ignore it, and build up my energy research and archmages.  Again, I was easily overrun.

I'm not sure it's possible to survive this scenario.

On the other hand,  the point about archmages doing damage to my own troops is an interesting one and may make a difference.  I'm guessing you mean that anything, including my own troops, who are in the path of an archmage energy attack will get hit.  I didn't realize this.  Does this mean that anything in the path of a battlemage's energy attacks, including other battlemages, also get hit?

[martiño]

No, only units around the area where the attack lands get hit, however even if the attack is targeting an enemy unit your own units might be nearby. Archmages are best at attacking enemy ranged attackers, and big slow units like Battlemachines and Behemoths.

[tildatoo]

Thanks for the tip!

[daniel.santos]

Note the way that splash damage works.  All units 1 space from the point of impact for an attack with splash damage will take 1 half the original damage.  However, larger units take up more than one space and will take 1/2 damage for each extra space they take up (well, that applies to units that are size 2x2).  Since they take up a total of 4 spaces, one of those will take full damage and the other 3 will take half damage, meaning that just having a splash radius of 1 will cause the large unit to take 2.5x damage.  Splash damage does progressively less damage the further from the point of attack you are (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc.). So it gets more complicated to calculate the exact damage multiplier for units size 3 and up because it depends on where the target is hit.  If hit in the middle of one side, they will take 4.25x base damage.  If hit on a corner, they will take 4.17x base damage and so forth.  So in short, splash damage is good for buildings and other large units.

Thus, even your summoner or drake rider with a splash radius of 1 can cause extensive damage to any behemoth, catapult, horseman, drake rider, air balloon, dragon, building, etc.  Drake riders don't take a terribly long time to get ready since all you need is a summoner's guild and a library and they can attack air units.  It should be noted that they die very quickly at the hands of air units as well, since their attacks have splash.  Also, their attack that has splash (flare) uses a good deal of eps, although it has a fairly decent range which will help to keep them out of the line of fire when there are other melee units involved.

Admittedly, I haven't played this scenerio.

[martiño]

Very good explanation, however the damage a 2x2 unit takes form splash is:

1x - the main cell
0.5x - top/bottom and left-right cells (distance is 1)
0.41x - top-right, top-left, bottom-right or bottom-left (distance is 1.41)

a bit like this:

Code: [Select]

|1x  |0.5x |
|0.5x|0.41x|

so in total = 1 + 0.5*2 + 0.41 = 2.41x

Just to clarify, units with splash damage are (radius is in brackets):

Summoner (1)
Archmage (Ice nova 4) (Static fire 5)
Drake Rider (1) - Flare attack only
Dragon (1)
Tower of souls (3)

Catapult (2)
Air Ballista (2)
Technician (1)
Battle_Machine (1) - Arrow attack
Ornithopter (1) - Both attacks
Airship (1)

Splash radius in general:

C=Center
X=Damage
O=No damage

Code: [Select]

Radius = 1

OOOOO
OXXXO |0.41x|0.5x |0.41x|
OXCXO |0.5x |1x   |0.5x |
OXXXO |0.41x|0.5x |0.41x|
OOOOO

Radius = 2

OOOOOOO
OXXXXXO |0.19x|0.3x |0.33x|0.3x |0.19x|
OXXXXXO |0.3x |0.41x|0.5x |0.41x|0.3x |
OXXCXXO |0.33x|0.5x |1x   |0.5x |0.33x|
OXXXXXO |0.3x |0.41x|0.5x |0.41x|0.3x |
OXXXXXO |0.19x|0.3x |0.33x|0.3x |0.19x|
OOOOOOO

Radius = 3

OXXXXXO
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXCXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
OXXXXXO

Radius = 4

OOXXXXXOO
OXXXXXXXO
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXCXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX
OXXXXXXXO
OOXXXXXOO

[revel]

I have won this scenario multiple times. It is quite interesting and entertaining.

First of all, I think there is no 'development' way of winning against two allied ultra-cpus. IIRC they harvest 3x more resources than normal cpu/player. So the only point in game where chances are equal is the very beginning. In other words, the point is to eliminate one of the ultra-cpu very early. Mages are good for this task because they do not need building infrastructure to produce combat units. Make 5 battle mages right away (leave 1 mage harvesting gold) and go finish off tech cpu. Kill off his initial troops and destroy the castle before his allied cpu sends reinforcements (place battlemages out of range of the guarding tower).
Now retreat a little and leave this opponent alone. It's finished. Take care of the ther one.

I'll stop here and let you enjoy finding the way of killing the other ultra-cpu. Good luck and have fun  

[daniel.santos]

nice revel.  I used to like to do an early kill to the tech faction because they only have 3 fighter units when the game starts and you can produce daemons and battlemages very quickly, at the cost of a slow start on resource building and infras.  I would often try to park my battlemages just outside of the range of the archer tower so I can nuke their workers and prevent them from building a barracks.  If that doesn't work, I try to get reinforcements there as soon as possible to do the job.

Unfortunately, with recent AI changes I made to GAE, this doesn't work anymore because the workers hoard to the new buildings and they repair it faster than I can do damage, so I've had to try to work out new strategies.

But I also wanted to comment that I won this scenario by sending units as quickly as possible to help defend my ally, but backing them off if they get close to death (micro-managing) and leaving them away from the action to heal up.  This was very difficult, and they did substantial damage to my ally's barracks, but it didn't get destroyed, they got it repaired and I was eventually able to mount a real assault.

I really enjoy that scenario!

[revel]

Interesting strategy against mages is to bind them in combat / pursue. Harvesting mages can attack and defending cpu uses them thoroughly, to the extend of completely stopping gathering resources. It is absorbing and time consuming because requires micro-management, but works nice against mages (AI bug? )

[tildatoo]

Hey folks:  Thanks for all the great tips!  Hadn't checked in in a while.  Good to hear it is possible to win.  Hadn't thought of a really aggressive strategy.

[tildatoo]

Ah, the smell of sweet victory!  I finally won that scenario using the attack the Tech faction very early solution.  

One thing I should mention that's problematic about the game.  When I run it, my CPU frequency goes to the maximum value and stays there the whole time and my computer fans start blasting away, which is quite noisy.  Yesterday, I used some code in Ubuntu to force my cpu frequency to stay at the lowest level (1GHz).  Interestingly, I saw absolutely no reduction in game performance, and my computer doesn't sound like an asthmatic after a 1000 meter sprint.  In fact, no uptick in the fan use.  (Am running 2.2GHz AMD dual core, 64 bit).  The game doesn't need the kind of processing power it's trying to suck in.