Hey folks,
Today I’ve got Rado back with me to catchup with you all on how our recent Campaign AI Beta went, what we’ve learned, and what we’re already working on for the next edition of that Beta.
Before we get to that, a heads up that we’ve moved back our planned release of Patch 6.1 from mid-March to Tuesday, March 25. As always, we want to ensure that our updates are as solid as they can be, and as shared in our recent 6.1 Dev Blog, we’ve got plenty of big updates coming to Kislev and Tzeentch, plus new free units on the way, and want to make sure they get the full love and care they deserve before landing in-game!
On which note, William asked us to pass on his thanks to you all for the love shown to our placeholder art!
As a follow-up to the 6.1 preview blog, we wanted to let you know that we heard your feedback around Mother Ostankya’s campaign starting position. The team have added a new option to her campaigns that allows you to return to Kislev if you wish to do so.
We’ll have more on that in the coming weeks, but for now here’s Rado with the Sports and Weather.
— Steve Coleman // Senior Community Manager
Hello there!
Radoslav Borisov, Principal Technical Designer, back again to talk with you about the recent Beta test we deployed to explore our solutions to idle Campaign AI issues.
First off, a big thank you to all of you who downloaded the Beta recently, and an even bigger thank you to those of you who dropped your thoughts and feedback into the survey, as well as reported the bugs that you ran into, and joined in the conversation here on the forums.
While we are still in the process of reading and understanding your thoughts and expectations, I can share some initial observations:
- More than 50 000 campaigns were started on the BETA, with 65% continuing past the early game.
- The most popular campaign difficulty level was Very Hard, followed by Legendary in second and Normal in third. This is quite different from the live game where Normal dominates as the difficulty level of choice, and Legendary is the least popular option. The team is taking this caveat into consideration and proceeding accordingly.
If you need a refresher you can find the BETA 1 blog here.
Some more straightforward conclusions, in no particular order:
- Query system changes (to stop the AI treating enemy agents the same way as enemy armies) have been universally good and will go live with Update 6.1. We are confident these changes bring a tangible improvement to the experience.
Aggression and Faction Potential changes will not be included in Update 6.1. We saw a significant number of you express concerns about second order effects (aka unintended consequences), which we will be addressing before these changes go live. One example of second order effect that worries us is how Faction Potential changes made minor factions significantly easier to defeat for major factions. This in turn caused Elector factions to perish too early and to be ineffective even when brought back.
We heard from you that anti-player bias is something that you’d like us to spend more time looking at.
The team and I agree wholeheartedly, so addressing issues of this nature is going to be a focus for us in BETA 2.There are a number of reports around the AI exhibiting suicidal behavior. This type of issue can have a variety of causes and we initially thought only occurs in isolated causes. We will focus on investigating reports of this nature and working on addressing them.
In terms of what happens next, our first focus is getting Update 6.1 to you, but myself and some of my colleagues will continue to work through your feedback and look for more ways to improve upon what we have.
I’m hoping to bring the second Beta to you around a week after Update 6.1 and will of course be keeping you up-to-date on our plans.
We are also looking into other potential areas of the game that need more love and would be a good match for a BETA. This first Campaign AI BETA has taught us the potential of the format, specially when it comes to involving the wider community in the development of improvements to the core experience as early as possible.
Thanks for reading, and thanks again for jumping into the Beta!
— Radoslav Borisov // Principal Technical Designer
