AI lord strength/tier

[Panbutt]

I asked this in the AICE thread but it was suggested I make an actual thread for it;

Can the in-game strength of the Lord be changed? IE: Rat has five yellow dots and is extremely weak, however Wolf has 5 blue dots and is the strongest lord in the entire game. Can these be changed at all? (I'm gonna use + and - for further reference.)

IIRC there is no -4 Tier lord in the game. Rat is -5, Snake is -3, Phillip is -2 and Sultan is -1. I believe Nizar is the only +3 lord in the game as well. Just things to consider if new lords can be a thing.

[PitchNeeded]

It would be good if this could be changed, although lord strength sometimes doesn't matter so much now for some AIs (and most AIs in my apothecary vanilla AIV edit) because lords can be healed now.

[DarkThief-Darek]

It does matter how much melee strength you need in order to kill the Lord in one attack. So yeah, changing this value is a great way to make a stronger or weaker lord for custom AIs.

[Rakso69]

Would be cooler if that one could be changed for whole AI, so it wouldn't need to use good factor things, that weaken their economy, or would have regular-streght troops while running on the -5 ff. I'd love to boost a Wolf AI of mine to have +5 ff strenght on all units without the need of building good things. Just regular economy, but strenght of army of a +5 ff. That would be great!

[DarkThief-Darek]

@Rakso69 Hmm, interesting idea. But I guess it would be difficult to implement visuals for that in the game. I mean, you have to tell the player if they face a regular swordsmen or a buffed one. The green and red dots are already in use for the fear factor, so you would need something else.

[Rakso69]

@DarkThief-Darek Won't the dots be visible? They will, so what's the problem? lol I don't renember the Wolf Lord dots colour, I think it was yellow, while Rat's lord had brown ones... maybe. Doesn't that sign already something is not right with the troops? Nevertheless just rush into the soldiers with your own and see if your win easy, or get own... few troops will die, but you already know what you're up to, so why does that need any sort of clarify? Anyway - who the hell needs weakening dots? Those are useless - except for Lords - still I see no reason why would it be interesting to make a lord way awful than the regular one.

[DarkThief-Darek]

@Rakso69 We are talking about Reverse Engineering the code. I guess it would be difficult to implement the visual dots for troops aside from the already existing green and red ones. If you want to add the yellow dots from the wolf to his regular swordsmen AND have him the green/red fear factor dots, that needs to be visual over the health bar all at once. Just changing troop values for some AIs without any visual indicator is stupid game design. You can't expect players to try to waste their units just to see if they are strong enough.

And who talked about weakening dots? ... But if you want to couple the strength of the Lord to his troops then you would have extremely weak troops for the rat, because he has weakening dots.

[Sh0wdown]

I checked it, it's not possible to change this through an AIC edit.

[GRhin]

This can be done in the new release inside of the startunits files.