morolf: I just finished the 2nd level of the Beyond the dark portal human campaign...you've got three enemy orc bases...but only one was really bulding units and attacking me.
It was the same in the final missions of the WC2 original campaigns.
Is that normal behaviour? Or is there a chance the AI might be broken somewhat in this release.
If you're willing to play warcraft 2 campaigns with their fully potential available then I can suggest you trying out my personal little mod which intends to bring up the original difficulty made by Blizzard Entertainment but in an enhanced way that fixes up as many bugs as the original AIs had in the original campaigns. The original AIs used to have several bugs from either build placements, low worker count, instructions to force not upgrading completely, and more.
My little mod is called Danny's AI Bug Fixes Edition (DAIFE) which can be found in
https://twitch.tv/dannyldd/about There you can get the mod and all information you need about it.
morolf: The thing that irritates me about that 2nd human level in Beyond the dark portal is that it explicitly mentions dragons in the briefing...but I didn't get attacked by even a single dragon.
I also had a short look at a walkthrough video and someone mentioned in the comments that in his version he was attacked by dragons, ogres and death knights (whereas in my playthrough it was only grunts, axemen and a very few orges). So this sounds like there might be drastic differences in difficulty between different versions of the game.
Bit sad if the Gog version is flawed.
jsidhu762: The AI has a general script. They focus on land, sea, or air. In spite of this, there is a random element to it. I've been playing BtDP and I've been reloading a lot. I would prepare for an attack in one area, based on what happened before I reloaded. But sometimes I am attacked in a different spot or with different units. The fact that you didn't have to face dragons is probably luck of the draw.
This is related to a specific save/load bug which I know you're talking about. If you want to play the fully original difficulty intended and more, I can suggest you trying out my little mod known as Danny's AI Bug Fixes Edition which aims to get ride of those original bugs as possible. There're a few conditions you gotta find next to the mod I'm mentioning, if you want to try it out of course, in
https://twitch.tv/dannyldd/about There you can find all information you need in order to play this mod.
Jann180: I've noticed the AI just gets "stuck" like sometimes and it kind of bothers me. It happens a lot in the original campaigns. I remember some missions you could get attacked relentlessly, but other times, the AI would do absolutely nothing at all. I'm not sure about the trigger system honestly, because a lot of times when the AI was aggressive I didn't even move out of my starting areas and other times, when being all over the map, it wouldn't do anything (like others said, just mining gold, not building ANY units, researching upgrades, or even repairing).
Save and reload would sometimes help and the AI would suddenly "activate".
I played the last mission in the ToD human campaign yesterday and black didn't make a single peon (full gold mine for me, I guess). And the mission before that often used to be scary as both AIs would send transport ships full of ogre mages that would attack you, except not this time. They did one pathetic attack at the beginning of the mission, then stopped entirely. I even played with the AI to see if there was something I could do to make it active. Somehow I made it do some upgrades eventually (most of the map was conquered already), but then it would stop again. I just don't know.
The only trigger I know of (universal) is when you destroy second to last, or last building of the AI, it will send all units to try and attack you (even peasants lol).
AI gets stucked because of a save/load bug which causes AIs to just stop gathering wood and so then gettin stucked without either repairing or training units which require wood. As far as I'm concerned, this bug doesn't fix by save and loading from the same mission but it may tend to fix for a few minutes (I mean start gathering wood again) if you either go to main menu or close the game, then reopen and load that game from main menu.
This problem with AIs just happens since the DOS version, as far as I'm concerned.
You can try out if you wants a little enhanced version I have to get ride of as many bugs the original AIs had in the warcraft 2 campaigns, called Danny's AI Bug Fixes Edition (DAIFE), available in
https://twitch.tv/dannyldd/about There're a few conditions which you gotta find on a readme file plus the mod so then you can get the full original experienced intended for this game without bugs at all...
If can bring up feedback I'd appreciate it even further if can be found new unexpected bugs as well !