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Hi! I remember playing the old Shandalar game on windows 2000. The AI was fine and competitive enough. It even made some clever plays like casting a hurricane to cause a draw, when it was about to lose.

After returning to the game with a windows XP computer, the game no longer worked without the manalink 1.3.2 patch. However, when playing with the patch installed, the AI seemed to be incredibly stupid. It cast pump spells on my creatures midcombat, causing the death of its own. Once it made a dark ritual on turn 1 to shoot me with a 1-point drain life.

So, has there been any improvements on the AI department in the latest manalink patches? Or does the manalink patch still cause it to lose all playing skills?

Thanks

The AI hasn't been developed at all and has to be as smart as originally was especially in Shandalar=(adventure part) which isn't developed at all.I have played the original game myself and remember very well that AI most times made bad choices when playing Dark Ritual,Disenchant and others or playing spells as a response to yours.

For Gauntlet,Duel,Draft,challenges, imho now-days the AI is a bit worse generally as a lot of cards have been added since then some of them very complicated and AI can't play them or can't play them efficiently.Also sometimes as developers don't know exactly how the AI works since they don't have the source code may not set the correct parameters and confuse AI a bit.

The are cases though in my opinion when AI could be a little better because the cards now-days are a lot stronger and you won't feel so good if in turn 2,3,AI use a Natural Order to fetch Progenitus.

Actually, Natural Order was made to work exactly in the way you mentioned (for the AI, it will fetch the creature with the highest CMC). Did it not function in that way ?
For the rest, I'm always working on improving the AI in Manalink (Shandalar is really too broken to work now and I almost know nothing of its code, so I'm unable to fix it), if you found out some obvious bad behaviour, post it in the dedicated thread in the "Bug Report" section

Gargaroz wrote:Shandalar is really too broken to work now...

...I've played with Shandalar a few times using Manalink 3.0 without any notable issues. Sure there's nothing new, but it's the same great game it's always been. Are you using the Shandalar.exe from Mok's post here?

Such a cool idea! Thanks for dedicating your time in the service of the community.

I dont know about Shandalaar but the AI in the duels is really good! Compared to a real person it's probably only 'average', but for an AI even that is quite impressive. I find the fact that I can even play such a complex game against the computer to be really cool. It puts up a fight and it knows what to do. It sometimes does dumb things but it sometimes does clever things too, but the majority of the time it just plays sensibly.

The best thing is that you can choose what decks the AI plays with too. So when you are just warming up, you can let the AI use any standard deck, and they are pretty easy to beat. Especially when its best creatures is old school stuff like Serra Angel heh. But when you are ready for a challenge you can make really powerful decks with black lotus, and lots of removal spells like Swords to Plowshares and load it up with counters and life gain and whatever else. You can even give it very powerful modern creatures, like the Eldrazi creatures and stuff like Ob Nixilis, the Fallen. At that point you have a real challenge on your hands.

AI is good to play simple and efficient made decks and nice to learn some basic magic tips.

If the AI can beat me twice in a row without land issue or counter deck that mean he got a simple and efficient deck.

I was particularly impressed when AI picked up Consuming Vapor deck and started a few winning rounds. After playing this deck I was able to understand its combo and why it was a good one (and this deck is good for deck testing since setup is slow but still fun to use-especially if combined with Sanguine Bond), letting AI setup his own strategy)