Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Single player AI Cheating

I really enjoy playing this game the battle's are fun and the RTS elements are good. But I just played a rage inducing game against an AI who attacked my capital. Now I can auto resolve and win with only losing 1 guy but when I try to manually fight the battle the AI just sends a infinite wave of ever changing units at me at no cost.

That's extremely unfair the longer the game goes the worst off I find my self. Now I almost won once by rushing his base and caping his turents but since the AI can build at no cost while im focusing on his main base he sends out units and caps one of the side factories then sends a infinite stream of unites to cap everything on the map.

So in the end my strategies mean nothing because even if for every one unit of mine they kill I kill 10 of theirs they have unlimited population and no unit cost. So in the end they win by swarming so your only real chance of winning is a early rush. That ruins a lot of the game.

The AI can not build unlimited free units, short of a bug.
There are reserve forces that can be built at no cost if you bring in more troops from the strategy map than you have initial 'support' for, so you or the AI would be able to produce additional units fairly quickly after building more recruitment centres.

What difficulty level are you playing on? That effects how aggressively the AI builds and expands.

No I can tell you right now that it costs them nothing to build, I was watching their population. While mine was going down theirs never went down. They literally sent thousands of units at me.

Btw I'm playing on normal.

Where do you see the AI's recruit levels? The UI at the top of the screen shows your recruits and the remaining population on the left, and your used and total support on the right.

Thousands of units does seem a little excessive, though. If you start a multiplayer skirmish with the AI set to None, you can get the entire starting population of 3500 and build just over a thousand troopers (ignoring support limits, which would drop that to 350 on the default 4 player map if you got all the recruitment sites).

A screenshot might be useful.

if i press the keys to near perfection right from the start and capture exactly the same as the ai, it still has more units in a shorter time when i already ran out of recruits.
my teammate and i discovered that on numerous occasions, also did i see that on normal skirmish.
1 gog and 1 vault version playing together at 1.0.20.0. also me playing on gog 1.0.10.0 and 1.0.20.0 so i dont suspect there is a bug involved.
we just thought the ai would get a little "help" because of no dragon ai and the overall disadvantage of a "ai" so it seemed fair enough.
after all when you know how it works you can steer whole ai-armies around with 1 trooper like a donkey with a carrot on a stick

edit: just a second ago we finished a match where the ai had nothing left but 1 recruitment centre for a long time. and while pumping out troopers he built ALL (6-8 dont remember exactly) turret emplacements at the same time (!), with AA and lights.
and we can be pretty sure he didnt save this much resources i can tell you that
also on some campaign maps the ai gets a free research on ALL units right from the start on some maps

The "Insane" AI cheats blatantly, it's what makes it Insane, see Starcraft 2.

If a "Hard" or lower level AI cheats, that would be more of interest.

I didn't really notice any cheating on my playthrough on Easy, except that the AI seemed capable of producing lots of units in a short amount of time. Or maybe it was garrisoning them? Is it possible to do that?

well of course its not a 100% sure since i dont see the code or can spectate an AI but i can tell you 99% it cheats even on normal.
but as mentioned its not that much of a problem since it after all has the disadvantage of no dragon if nothing else.

edit: garison would be possible if it had a lot of troopers for example on the field in the strategy map. but of course you could see that beforehand.

Yes, the single player campaign maps currently have the same initial units and research when they are used in multiplayer, even though you do not start off with the research or gold, etc, you would have in chapter 2 or 3 of the single player story campaign.

I have played a lot of RTS matches and I can assure you that the AI does not have infinite resources on Normal and Hard. I can see the effects of cutting off its recruit supply and many times the map has run out of resources and the AI ran out of units and surrendered.

The only combat issue I found is the AI can micromanage 50 units at once, and pretty much all activateable researches are useless to you, because there's no way you're going to use them effectively.

That being said, the AI is pretty easy to beat. Just capture as much as you can initially, then build mortar turrets and let the fight come to you.

What I've seen happening in the beta a few times is the Giant Blob Of Death:
If the remaining population is close to 0, the AI starts spamming an insane amount of cheap units (troopers, bazookas) and zerg-rushes you.
It can be countered by units/abilities with an AoE damage effect and is over once the AI has used up its remaining ressources (which might take a while...).
It can be tough to do so, however, esp. if you haven't encountered it before.

Turn the speed to Slow. I'm now pretty good at doing micro pretty well in Dragon Commander.

Yeah, that's insanely tedious though.

Not really, you don't even notice after a while. I didn't say "slowest", I said "slow". The action is still fast-paced enough, but I can micro. If you do notice, you can use the +/- keys to adjust the speed on the fly, but doing that might be more disrupting to your game than just leaving it on one speed.

I've been practicing this a bit too, and I gotta say that using Mustard gas on choke points to a horde of troopers is incredibly satisfying.

Yesterday I played around with armor mines and found that if the AI detects them it will sit there and start to destroy them. So I decided to walk up to them and gas attack him with 3 zeppelins while they were waiting for the mines to be destroyed. Easiest victory ever.