Developer Lavapotion is back with another blog post dedicated to the upcoming changes to turn-based strategy Songs of Conquest. This time the developer message outlines the improvements that will be made towards the AI. Some of them are already live on the internal development branch.
As pointed out in the roadmap the team shared in June, the AI improvements is a continuous, on-going process rather than just one update.
“We’ve started to add the concept of wielder roles. So, now the AI will start looking at its wielders in the terms of roles, and from that it can take certain decision. I.e. who should get the strongest troops or what skills to pick when leveling up. This is in an early stage still, but we are quite certain it’s going to affect more and more decisions. The inital roles we have created for the first iteration is Warrior and Explorer, more will come after the system has matured a bit.”
This a non-exhaustive list of what has been worked on lately:
- The AI upgrading and also switching out (weaker) troops when entering towns/settlements has been made more likely to happen.
- Recruitment has gotten an overhaul in genera. It’s now more likely to recruit if it happens to walk by. Also it should use neutral dwellings much more often than before.
- Skill selection scoring has been changed, in some ways to promote command in situations when it got pushed to the bottom.
- How the AI reasons around buildings has been updated.
- An improved retreat option is in place to make feeding weak wielders to opponents less likely to happen.
The team also fixed several bugs that caused behavior problems.