Strategic AI + memory leaks: worrying stuff

[Romanov77]

Copied and pasted from warez forum:

1)
Anyways from the custom game i played the AI was pretty shitty. Also the options for a custom game is shitty, you cant custom certain AI, nor can you make teams etc. Kinda stupid. Anyways in my custom game of 8 players, 2 AI got killed within first 5 odd turns(bug?). So that left me with 3 AI on my side of the map. Which yet again, didnt know what they were doing. I mopped them up fairly easily. But then, i hit a brick wall. One of the remaining AI's academy, just fucking pissed me off. Basically, everytime you killed one of his super units, the general could revive the whole stack. Then right after the whole stack could act. So basically it became a disgusting game of tug of war. Oh and lets not forget how overpowered the academy is, they're powerful shooter unit the archmage, is well disgustingly strong. 30 of them, can easily take out 30 priests, but ontop of that they do damage to 4 surrounding squares, so it often decimates most of your troops. Then to top it off they get some retarded genies, that are nearly as strong as cavalary, yet they get about 20 odd of them everyweek. Etc.etc. It took alot to kill them off (37 archangles + 200 archers + 400 infantry +1000 odd conscripts + grpyhons etc) Which is ridicilous, especially since everytime you kill a good chunk of theyre units, the general simply revives the stack. The other AI didnt do anything, it didnt build anything, his hero didnt even move it just sat in the corner.

2)
Ok being as I have an "older" system, 2500+ & GF4 Ti4200 vid card, so set to very low detail, no bells and whistles, and the intro screen still looked ok, so I figure it a matter of not knowing what I'm missing. Went through the first few campaign missions (I'm guessing the "Queen" is basically your tutorial missions), did first 3 yesterday no problem, a tad on the tedious side (I now know why I stopped playing this series), but other than that no problem, get to the 4th mission and I don't know what the fuck happened but the game occasionally comes to an extremely slow crawl for no apparent reason, just sitting on the map screen without doing anything other than moving the cursor around, ie nothing big graphically is happening!

3)
Just completed the largest map on normal (8vs8)
Difficulty is not a set thing in this game for sure. Sometimes normal means getting your ass handed to you and sometimes the enemies dont even clear their starting area.
They didn't even try to steal my resources so my victory was only a matter of time. Just walking through the map wasting everything I met.
Victory didn't bring me any satisfaction.

So...
Ridicoluos AI, memory leaks...
Im depressed.

I think that Nival deserve a good kick in *that place*...
And Fabrice...how could he let them do this mess?

It was evident that both demo and campaign were scripted because NIVAL COULDNT DEVELOP A DECENT AI, and they wanted to hide this, expecially in the demo...which curiosly doesnt seems to have any memory leak, since warez kids says that IT WORKED FINE on his system.

I hope that everything can be solved with patches.


You know whats the funniest thing about this tragedy?
They wanted to protect it with Starforce, just to add the final cherry on the cake

[Veldrynus]

Hey, it isn't fair to compare H4 with this piece of junk !

1) H4 had at least some basic AI.
2) H4 was released with an editor and more than 16 maps.
3) H4 wasn't a H3 clone.
4) H4 needed no supercomputers to run decently on minimal detail.
5) H4 was at least userfriendly.

[Pitsu]

. Oh and lets not forget how overpowered the academy is, they're powerful shooter unit the archmage, is well disgustingly strong. 30 of them, can easily take out 30 priests, but ontop of that they do damage to 4 surrounding squares, so it often decimates most of your troops. Then to top it off they get some retarded genies, that are nearly as strong as cavalary, yet they get about 20 odd of them everyweek.

Archmages do damage to *4* surrounding squares, genies as strong as cavalry and grow 20 per week? Sounds like valid info... or not.

[Romanov77]

Hey, it isn't fair to compare H4 with this piece of junk !

1) H4 had at least some basic AI.
2) H4 was released with an editor and more than 16 maps.
3) H4 wasn't a H3 clone.
4) H4 needed no supercomputers to run decently on minimal detail.
5) H4 was at least userfriendly.

You are so right...

Frankly, I feel cheated.
I wont remove the pre-order because I have a wierd sense of hope related to Fabrice, who always showed professionality.

I have a low end system, but I surpasss minimum req. enought to deserve a decent performance with everything on low.
The Demo works fine on "LOW" for me....but reading this stuff, it seems that even placing everything on "VERY LOW" the retail tends to be choppy.

This just plain suck.
This is not a FPS...not even a RTS...its a freaking turn based game, and Im not going to upgrade for a game for that I meet and surpass all the minimum requirments.

On the AI side...the scripting thing in the demo was a clever move to avoid early detection of crappy AI....also, I dont know how they managed to hide the memory leak in the demo...

What can I say....
After the recent events Im loooking at piracy with different eyes.
Next time I'll think twice from judging a game from a Demo...expecially if its coming from lazy Nival developers.

[Romanov77]

. Oh and lets not forget how overpowered the academy is, they're powerful shooter unit the archmage, is well disgustingly strong. 30 of them, can easily take out 30 priests, but ontop of that they do damage to 4 surrounding squares, so it often decimates most of your troops. Then to top it off they get some retarded genies, that are nearly as strong as cavalary, yet they get about 20 odd of them everyweek.

Archmages do damage to *4* surrounding squares, genies as strong as cavalry and grow 20 per week? Sounds like valid info... or not.

The user was clearly a noob for what concerns gameplay, but I think its comments on AI and memory leaks are founded, as I found various other confirms on the net.


EDIT
from gamespot forums:

Well, it runs a lot better than the beta used to, but it's still pretty horrible. It runs worse for than the demo.
If you have less than a Gigabyte of Ram, it can be somewhat of a pain to run it, even on the lowest settings.
I think that is laughable for a TBS.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dude, i dont know. But it lags as hell for me. It takes several minutes just to quit the game.
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This game is more demanding than Oblivion, if you want an exemple
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It has terrible low end support. In fact, it is one of the worst I've seen. It takes up to 3 minutes to load a save game for those huge maps. It takes 5 seconds to autosave, and the game freezes for about 2-3 seconds during gameplay. The rest is pretty okay though. I can run it at about 30 fps.

[dallasmavs41]

Hopefully the AI isn't as bad as people say...I'll give it a shot anyway..

[Sikon]

Well, I can't say anything about low-end support, I don't know how high-end my machine is by modern standards (Athlon 64 2800+, 1 GM RAM, GeForce 6600GT). Overall, the game runs VERY smoothly on MAXIMUM settings. Loading the game takes 5 seconds, loading Haven Mission 2 also takes 5 seconds. Very eye-candy, no bugs yet (however, lips are not moving in cinematics). Can't say anything about the AI at the moment, haven't encountered AI heroes yet.

[Nebs]

On Celeron 2.0, 512mb RAM and GeForce FX5200 (frankly, pretty lousy setup), game runs fine. Everything is slower than in Sikon's example, but one can play with no problems. Just don't zoom out too much. :-)

[ThunderTitan]

Actualy zooming seems to be one of the problems. If you leave the camera alone the lagging seems to be less. Also the campaign maps seem to lag worse then the other ones. I don't know if it's a memory leak or it just wasn't optimized well.

[Pitsu]

1) H4 had at least some basic AI.

Yet, H4 (adventure) AI at the game release was worse than the Heroes V aI that I have already seen.

2) H4 was released with an editor and more than 16 maps.

No multiplayer.

3) H4 wasn't a H3 clone.

Neither is Heroes V.

4) H4 needed no supercomputers to run decently on minimal detail.

I know some H3 people who left H4 since they could not afford good enough computer for that. I had some problems myself too back then.

5) H4 was at least userfriendly.

If you say that it was more user friendly than H5 then I might agree, but IMO userfriendliness was not a shining part of H4.

[ThunderTitan]

3) H4 wasn't a H3 clone.

Neither is Heroes V.

You're right there. It's more like a Mini-Me.

[Akul]

No multiplayer.

Really?1 How could I then play H4 with my friend on hotseat??

Neither is Heroes V.

Clone? No. Too similiar? Yes.

If you say that it was more user friendly than H5 then I might agree, but IMO userfriendliness was not a shining part of H4.

It takes some time until you learn the hotkeys (alt+S save the game)

[Veldrynus]

So the multiplayer option is more important than the editor ?

You should compare the hardware requirements for H5 with H4...

H5 IS GODDAMN CLONE !

Ok...I have to calm down.

[ThunderTitan]

No multiplayer.

Really?1 How could I then play H4 with my friend on hotseat??

He means LAN/Web multiplayer.

[Akul]

No multiplayer.

Really?1 How could I then play H4 with my friend on hotseat??

He means LAN/Web multiplayer.

Then he should write. As far as I know, hotseat is also mulyplayer. And saw that many people didn't even know that there is no hotseat in H4.

[ThunderTitan]

And saw that many people didn't even know that there is no hotseat in H4.

Weird, I remember H4 having Hotseat, but that it wasn't very easy to find.

EDIT:
Yup, there is. It's just dependend on the map, and if it allows you to play with more that 1 human player. Stupid really.

[DaemianLucifer]

Then he should write. As far as I know, hotseat is also mulyplayer. And saw that many people didn't even know that there is no hotseat in H4.

Multiplayer usually refers to playing on more then one computer.

[Sikon]

Strange people. First they complain a game (H4) wasn't too close to its predecessor H3, but when H5 turns out to be closer to H3, they say it's a clone.

[ThunderTitan]

UR assuming it's the same people. My main complaint about H4 is that it was never finished.

[DaemianLucifer]

Strange people. First they complain a game (H4) wasn't too close to its predecessor H3, but when H5 turns out to be closer to H3, they say it's a clone.

I never complained about HIV.Only that it came out too early.