Who ever designed this one element is a genius!

Unknown

Has anyone noticed that every time the AI has an opportunity to match 5 in a row in an L-shape, they match 4 instead? This is obviously by design, and I love it. It definitely cuts down on the frustration that playing against the AI in previous Puzzle Quest games could provide. All I wanted to say is whoever made this decision is a genius and should be commended

Unknown

Old news dude. When you realize that the ai gets an unfair amount and size of cascades then you'll realize the ai isn't so cool

Unknown

I brought this up a while ago. Pictures and everything.

Dragon_Nexus

Typhon13 wrote:

Old news dude. When you realize that the ai gets an unfair amount and size of cascades then you'll realize the ai isn't so cool

It's probably not as often as you think.
A study/playtest (I forget which) done years ago suggests the player needs at least twice as many "lucky cascades" in order to feel they're getting the same amount the AI does.

Unknown

Dragon_Nexus wrote:

Typhon13 wrote:

Old news dude. When you realize that the ai gets an unfair amount and size of cascades then you'll realize the ai isn't so cool

It's probably not as often as you think.
A study/playtest (I forget which) done years ago suggests the player needs at least twice as many "lucky cascades" in order to feel they're getting the same amount the AI does.

I heard someone say that before, and I'm gonna say that's false. Since i posted that I've literally counted the cascades in several of my matches. As long as I didn't use people like storm who destroy large portions of the board the ai almost always got more cascades than me. The difference is that the ai gets much LARGER cascades. I've seen on several occasions: cascades that clear half the board at once
connect nearly 20 of the same color in one shape
make several critical tiles
take over 10 seconds for the falling cascades to end.
Also, their cascades often come from above the board, I almost always have to plan mine with what's on the board, and I almost never get lucky stuff fall from above the board. So yeah, their programmed to get more "lucky" cascades.

Unknown

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Ok, how?

Dayv

Typhon13 wrote:

So yeah, their programmed to get more "lucky" cascades.

Nope. Just not true.

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Ok, how?

If I state it simply, it doesn't really tell you anything. Simply put: Match tiles that will cascade, or likely to cascade, instead of matching tiles you want. Your first move is often an opportunity to get a pretty good cascade. It's unusual for me not get get at least 6 AP in the first move.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Typhon13 wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Ok, how?

If I state it simply, it doesn't really tell you anything. Simply put: Match tiles that will cascade, or likely to cascade, instead of matching tiles you want. Your first move is often an opportunity to get a pretty good cascade. It's unusual for me not get get at least 6 AP in the first move.

Yeah, I recently figured this out and you're right. To really have more wins, you need to plan ahead much like in chess instead of going for easy and quick fix.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Typhon13 wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Ok, how?

If I state it simply, it doesn't really tell you anything. Simply put: Match tiles that will cascade, or likely to cascade, instead of matching tiles you want. Your first move is often an opportunity to get a pretty good cascade. It's unusual for me not get get at least 6 AP in the first move.

Yes, because on the first move the board is all yours. Same if your fighting all goons. But fighting real characters, from my experiences they can and usually will disrupt your planned cascades by making just the move you needed them not to, and they will get more cascades of their own, and theirs will be much larger. Also, matching tiles that you can obviously see will cascade is easy. But getting ones that are "likely to cascade" is an entirely different story. Speaking once again from experience, whenever I bet that a cascade will go in my favor I bet wrong, no matter how likely a cascade is from that match, it goes wrong in some way, whether the cascade is small or nonexistant or it sets up the ai for a good move. Even if I've planned out two match fours in one move or something equally good, the cascade will never be as large as an ai cascade, which is one point of mine you ignored. The ai definitely gets LARGER cascades, even if them getting more cascades is debatable. So technically, they get more cascaded matches, even if those matches are all part of one cascade. Read some of the things I've seen in my earlier posts. I've seen each one of those several times, and never had the "luck" to get one myself. I don't know what everyone else has experienced in terms of this argument, but this is just what I've seen, and I don't see how my in-game "luck" can be different from anyone else's.
On a somewhat related note has anyone ever realized how off the original topic these threads get? I realize this one was my fault, but eventually every thread seems to go off on some vaguely related tangent.

Dayv

Typhon13 wrote:

The ai definitely gets LARGER cascades, even if them getting more cascades is debatable.

Nope. Still not true.

You just notice things that hurt you more than ones that help you. This is especially true if your cascade ends the battle and throws a lot of its usefulness at dead enemies.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Unknown

Typhon13 wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

Typhon13 wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

If you change your playing habits, you can get cascading matches like the AI.

Ok, how?

If I state it simply, it doesn't really tell you anything. Simply put: Match tiles that will cascade, or likely to cascade, instead of matching tiles you want. Your first move is often an opportunity to get a pretty good cascade. It's unusual for me not get get at least 6 AP in the first move.

Yes, because on the first move the board is all yours. Same if your fighting all goons. But fighting real characters, from my experiences they can and usually will disrupt your planned cascades by making just the move you needed them not to, and they will get more cascades of their own, and theirs will be much larger. Also, matching tiles that you can obviously see will cascade is easy. But getting ones that are "likely to cascade" is an entirely different story. Speaking once again from experience, whenever I bet that a cascade will go in my favor I bet wrong, no matter how likely a cascade is from that match, it goes wrong in some way, whether the cascade is small or nonexistant or it sets up the ai for a good move. Even if I've planned out two match fours in one move or something equally good, the cascade will never be as large as an ai cascade, which is one point of mine you ignored. The ai definitely gets LARGER cascades, even if them getting more cascades is debatable. So technically, they get more cascaded matches, even if those matches are all part of one cascade. Read some of the things I've seen in my earlier posts. I've seen each one of those several times, and never had the "luck" to get one myself. I don't know what everyone else has experienced in terms of this argument, but this is just what I've seen, and I don't see how my in-game "luck" can be different from anyone else's.
On a somewhat related note has anyone ever realized how off the original topic these threads get? I realize this one was my fault, but eventually every thread seems to go off on some vaguely related tangent.

It's not always going to work, but the AI doesn't always seem to get cascades either. I've seen the AI miss several obvious opportunities for cascading matches. I'm not sure why that happens/

Snickity

If I had to guess, the AI for MPQ is the very similar, if not the same as, the AI for the previous games, which used different matching rules. In previous games, a 4-match resulted in another turn and and an 'L' did not, if I remember correctly, an 'L' didn't even get a wildcard or multiplier.

The AI getting cascades is one part a computer doing something that has the most probability to get a cascade and one part human emotion believing that the computer is cheating. I believe there's a thread here somewhere that IceIX mentioned that the tile cascade was completely random with the exception of some logic to minimize the possibility of getting an large amount of one color in a row/column, but I could be wrong.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

It's not always going to work, but the AI doesn't always seem to get cascades either. I've seen the AI miss several obvious opportunities for cascading matches. I'm not sure why that happens/

I'm pretty sure the dev said the AI randomly throws a few moves on purpose so that it feels more 'organic' (though it still never misses a match 4).

Katai

Seriously, the AI destroys their own countdown tiles and focuses on environment tiles. Do you really think the programmers would put in super-advanced AI that does heavy calculations to obtain optimal cascading?

Unknown

Katai wrote:

Seriously, the AI destroys their own countdown tiles and focuses on environment tiles. Do you really think the programmers would put in super-advanced AI that does heavy calculations to obtain optimal cascading?

It's actually pretty trivial to figure out the optimal path for cascading and the AI is pretty good at it when it's not purposely doing a bad move so that it doesn't beat you up too badly.

The AI in this game is not taught of what its abilities does, so it places no value on its own countdown tiles, because it doesn't know what it does. You could have two abilities like:

5 green AP - you win the game
10 green AP - you lose the game

And the AI will still be saving up for the ability that causes it to lose the game, because it doesn't know what either of those abilities does and it assumes the one costing more is better. Ironically, the AI assumes the devs did a good job balancing the abilities so that the more expensive ones are worth saving up for, which is often not true.

Unknown

I actually wish the AI was a bit more sophisticated, not necessarily with regard to causing cascades, but in its use of characters' special abilities. For instance, the AI has no idea how to use Moonstone's gravity warp ability effectively. I'd rather fight smart enemies at the same level as my team than dummies twice my level.

Unknown

Budapest1980 wrote:

I actually wish the AI was a bit more sophisticated, not necessarily with regard to causing cascades, but in its use of characters' special abilities. For instance, the AI has no idea how to use Moonstone's gravity warp ability effectively. I'd rather fight smart enemies at the same level as my team than dummies twice my level.

The problem is if it did that you'd just see the computer lock up the game with Magnetic Field as soon as they have 5 blue, and that'd be pretty dumb too.