Devs: How many moves does the AI look "ahead"?

As a player, you often look at: if I make this move then that will fall, and it will create that.

For example, if I make a horizontal 3er between 2 same colored gems above and below my 3er, then I will also create a 4er.
Or, if I make this useless 3er, then that gem will fall down and create a 3er of the gem color I need.

Does the AI do anything like this?

tl;dr - Nope.

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This thread goes into more detail on how the Console AI works, (and explains what the current PC AI does as well slightly)

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I’ve never been a fan of the whole ai cheats argument. However the cat is out of the bag that “random” gem creation is anything but…

My query would be what is the ai handicap on %based proc of traits and spells. I’ve seen enough unbiased player collected data to conclude that their is in effect such an included function, or something is misrepresented, or not working as intended.

Thanks for the quick reply… I was wondering if that was something I was seeing :slight_smile:

Btw, I hope the AI misses will come to PC as well, that definitely is something I like about the console version.
Missing a 4er or 5er, or making a 4er instead of a 5er.

Makes me feel less bad when I do it myself :slight_smile:

I wasn’t inquiring because of cheating, I was just wondering if the AI did what I do to.

For the record :wink:

I know, I didn’t imply you were.

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I think we’ve been pretty up-front about that a number of times since it was implemented 15-18 months ago.

Usually you don’t even notice this behavior kicking in though… it was mainly included to stop unpleasant amounts of extra turns happening when a troop/board started looping, and seldom kicked in until at least 3-5 extra turns had been obtained.
After we re-balanced the number of gems created during gem-spam to not scale off magic, it became quite rare in fact.

I think it was only when the bug was introduced a few days ago that it became really noticeable again. And we’ve toned that right down again now, so it should be close to where it was before.

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Well yes and no. I might have been presumably under the assumption incorrectly an integer value was randomly assigned as a trigger to the streak breaker code so in turn assumed that at least the fist or second cast would have a “fair shake” at being random. I’m still playing mobile exclusively so I still have an entire class of troops that are fairly pointless to use between this script and the gem overwrite.

With the addition on the increased speed just how unfavourable is letting random actually be random? If I have a board with say 22 of a color and I use a spell creating an additional 9, I should be able to reasonably calculate the odds of those gems producing a free move and that’s not been the case.

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We noticed. Even before last week, we noticed. Last week just shows that the code has undue influence about where they spawn, period, because with it reversed, you would never miss after one extra turn. Can we try turning this off completely for a while?

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Noticing a lot that vertical matching in guild wars also is dropping a lot of skulls is this intentional, I’m not a complainer but watching 2 Guild War matches where the skull drop from non createable skull troops was almost 12 skulls on like I said vertical matches, has anyone else experienced similar behaviour during guild wars doesn’t occur in explore or pvp,

agreed. there shouldn’t be anything trying to prevent random spawns from making extra turns after 3 loops or 300. Nothing stops target converters from looping. nothing should stop random converters either.

(#MakeRandomSpawnsGreatAgain

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it doent seem anywhere close to where it was before withwhat ppl are reporting recently

29 purples on board filling nearly the bottom half of the board as tightly as it could without having a match, then casting elemaugrim to create 11 purples, and they all appear in the upper half in just the right configuration to give a single match 3.

No, this is NOT “where it was before”. This isn’t in the same zip code of where it was before. There is something in the code specifically deciding “thou shalt not get an extra turn”.

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Better use the red phone

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Based on your previous comments, I think the old “combo breaker” code was supposed to trigger after 5 extra turns, starting at a 20% “penalty” and increasing from there. The recent issue seemed to invert the logic, so instead of a penalty it provided a bonus, and now the fix seems to have toned things back down again. However, on PC/Unity, it feels like this “combo breaker” is triggering after the first turn rather than after 5 turns, which would explain why extra turns after the first seem much more crippled than on the old PC/mobile code.

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