Hey guys,
Hope everyone's doing well. I don't post very often, but I've been following/reading these forums pretty regularly since 2013. Just wanted to thank Big Ant Studios for such an amazing game, I've been playing Ashes Cricket pretty extensively since it's release on ps4 and it's blown my mind. The new animations along with all the other improvements have really changed the game for me, in terms of immersion. Thanks to the Studios + the amazing beta testing community, this is easily the best cricket game I've ever played.
Having said that, after playing the game for quite some time I wanted to bring forward a few things I've noticed, that presently are the major factors affecting immersion for me. I would love to hear everyone's thoughts, and confirm/reject the things that I've noticed.
Specifically for AI in Tests (I'm on the latest patch - 1.05):
1. It's hard to describe, but it feels like within any given over, as dot balls build up in the over, it's almost guaranteed that the 5th or 6th delivery the AI will attempt to play an aggressive shot and/or play a regular shot that's timed really well + in the gap. I initially started playing the game on Medium/Medium/Easy (Veteran), and moved on to Hardest/Hardest/Easy (Legend), and noticed that the ability to clear/successfully play this final aggressive shot increased as I moved from Veteran to Legend. Since my career is as a Software Dev, programatically it feels like the AI is given some run-rate specific goal (similar to Reinforcement Learning - i.e. 4/over in tests), and there's some aggressiveness/shot likelihood factor that's scaled as each dot ball is bowled. This definitely may not be how it's actually implemented, but I've noticed this time and time again (for both spinners and pace bowlers). This is one of the major things affecting immersion for me right now, where the first over of a test match you would bowl 4/5 really good deliveries / you're bowling to a specific plan (i.e. outswingers ouside off), and the AI would play accordingly, and even if I follow up the final delivery with an inswinging yorker (for example), the batsmen clears it for 4/6. I would love to hear if other players have noticed anything similar/different, it just feels like the AI forces a specific characteristic upon it's batting.
2. Tied with the above issue is that I've noticed short pitched bowling tends to be overly effective against the AI. I've been able to get almost all my wickets caught by bowling short Leg Cutters / Off Cutters, and setting a leg side heavy field. I can imagine this happening for really aggressive and/or confident (set) batsmen (that perhaps like to take on the short bowling regardless of the field), but it seems unrealistic for batsmen to continue playing this way (especially if previous wickets have been lost in a similar fashion). I've noticed this to occur, again regardless of difficulty (although it seems like as I increase difficulty, batsmen in general are both more capable, and more aggressive) and batsmen type (ie. Warner vs. Renshaw - they definitely play differently but they both tend to get out in this way). I can obviously stop bowling with this plan and adjust my immersion experience accordingly, but again I would love to hear people's thoughts on this issue, and learn whether there can be an appropriate solution (if necssary). It would be awesome if the AI can adjust to the bowling setup you give it (perhaps after a few mistakes/wickets, it learns/adapts): i.e. if the field is legside heavy and the batsmen is new/conservative, they duck consistently, forcing the bowler/user to change tactics.
These are the two primary issues that I wanted to bring forward to the community / hear thoughts on, there are other smaller bugs like run outs where both batsmen end up on the same end, (I've had that happen to me at least once in each Ashes test) or stumpings to drives on a spinner, but those are negligible and insignificant in terms of the effect they have on immersion for me.
Hope that helps, really want to help make this game better than it already is!