34 replies to this topic

[Smokeskin]

You know, that thing with units and army strength in the BO explains a lot! I also think it is super useful. Does the check for it persist? Say for example if specify for the chaplain tier = 2 and armystrength = 10,000. So he gets built in t2, and if he dies, it will build another because the armysize is still below 10,000? Or does the condition "dissappear" once he is built?
And does units specified in a tier apply to the higher tiers too?

I agree, most units benefit greatly from their heavy weapon upgrades. There are some issues to consider, like waiting for t2 to get proper heavy weapons so you don't fill your slots in t1, and some units aren't as much upgrading as changing from anti infantry to anti vehicle roles. General code with exceptions for some units will probably work fine.

I think the problem with power is that while with vehicles, you can pretty much suck up all the power you get, so you would never have noticed if the dynamic generator code was too aggressive. With infantry builds, you can't suck up all that power, but you're still quite able to spend enough on research and such to keep it low for some time - that makes it build lots of generators, but the need for power dissappears once the researches are done... Other than bumping power research to later in the BO, I can't see an easy fix for it. Predicting power needs several minutes into the future sounds impossible, so you'd need a way to specify in the BO some parameters for the dymanic power code.

Edited by Smokeskin, 02 April 2008 - 10:43 AM.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

You know, that thing with units and army strength in the BO explains a lot! I also think it is super useful. Does the check for it persist? Say for example if specify for the chaplain tier = 2 and armystrength = 10,000. So he gets built in t2, and if he dies, it will build another because the armysize is still below 10,000? Or does the condition "dissappear" once he is built?
And does units specified in a tier apply to the higher tiers too?

Yes, units are rebuild if they get killed and the forced unit builds only apply to the tier level they belong to. The only control mechanism that can stop the unit building are the force techs. Otherwise a AI could be trapped in a tier just by killing his units over and over again.

I guess the SM infantry tech must be deadly for the sisters build with two forced celestian squads. I'm thinking about reducing it to one again, just to be sure. Though I didn't try it, so I'm not sure. AV weapons are also good against buildings, and so it shouldn't be that bad.

[Smokeskin]

Yes, units are rebuild if they get killed and the forced unit builds only apply to the tier level they belong to. The only control mechanism that can stop the unit building are the force techs.

You know, that is really, really cool

I guess the SM infantry tech must be deadly for the sisters build with two forced celestian squads. I'm thinking about reducing it to one again, just to be sure. Though I didn't try it, so I'm not sure. AV weapons are also good against buildings, and so it shouldn't be that bad.

You'd need to test it to be sure. But no matter what, DoW is a hard counter game. Since we can't get the AI to build the proper counters based on what the enemy fields, then we're just going to have a little bit of everything. Imo the current sisters build suffers from too little AV against most opponents - I'd rather fix that than optimize it for a single SM BO.

After the betas are done, if you want to do something more with the AI, a dynamic AV counter system would rock. Something like count the ratio of the value of enemy vehicles to enemy infantry, compare it to its own troops' ratio of antiinfantry to antivehicle DPS, and it the ratios are off, construct some designated AV units. The analyzing code would be universal, and we'd just have to add a list of preferred AV units for each race, sort of like for detectors.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

After the betas are done, if you want to do something more with the AI, a dynamic AV counter system would rock. Something like count the ratio of the value of enemy vehicles to enemy infantry, compare it to its own troops' ratio of antiinfantry to antivehicle DPS, and it the ratios are off, construct some designated AV units. The analyzing code would be universal, and we'd just have to add a list of preferred AV units for each race, sort of like for detectors.

That won't happen! I've already spent far too much time in AI coding. I only touched the AI again because SS was released and too many other mods depend on our AI. We can't just let them stand in the rain, but I also want the chapter 'DOS AI' closed sometime. Therefore my main focus is the conversion to SS, but I won't do any complex code changes anymore. It's too time consuming.

[Zenoth]

Save your energy and passion for Dawn of War 2 Arkhan

Well all know that whatever super duper mega engine DoW2 will be using, the A.I will certainly be sub-par. You said it yourself Arkhan in another thread I believe, that too often A.I coders, the "official", paid ones will simply disable whole functions in the code just to avoid having to fix it because either 1) the publisher (if separate from the developer) is just too proud of its money to pay the coders for a substantial patch or 2) the coders themselves just aren't qualified enough to dig into their own knowledge and find out proper fixes for the bugs... so that the players end up with perhaps a superbly told Campaign through a wonderful narrative, jaw-dropping graphics and orchestrated music, but when you launch a mere Skirmish game you wonder why you bought the game.

I said it many times, and I will say it again. Without this mod I would have never bought even just Dark Crusade in the first place, much less Soulstorm. And to be perfectly honest, if for instance the current team isn't interested in the future to do a mod like this for DoW2 I won't even look at it at the store when it gets released, because I know that once I complete the Campaign the game will just take up dust on my desk and I'll end up go back playing Stalker or UT3 or Civ IV or some other more interesting, longer-lasting, more appealing games.

RTS games are just too dependent on good A.I to be good games, and it lags like hell on-line.

Edited by Zenoth, 02 April 2008 - 10:59 PM.

[Smokeskin]

Yeah me too, I went here to check that you were doing a SS version before I bought the game

I completely understand Arkhan, you have to call for a feature stop at some point. It's some great work you've done so far.

And you're sure you don't want to stick around and implement all our suggestions? What if we beg?

[dreddnott]

Got a CTD just 3-4 minutes in, IG vs. Necrons 1v1 on Eden. Logfiles generated by -dev show nothing interesting. I've enabled aitrace in Utility.ai now because of that, going to fish for some more.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Got a CTD just 3-4 minutes in, IG vs. Necrons 1v1 on Eden.

Great!

I hope it's the same Necron bug Zenoth got.

[dreddnott]

It's easily reproducible...

Skirmish 1v1
starting: Necrons top, IG bottom
Hard difficulty, standard resources, no doodads (like ai donations, fortress, heroes, massive battles, etc)

Happens about every other time a few minutes in as the Necrons roll over the IG base.

aitrace shows it happens during a necron warrior tactic update, so I'm assuming it's the same as Zenoth's broken lands crash.

[Zenoth]

It's easily reproducible...

Skirmish 1v1
starting: Necrons top, IG bottom
Hard difficulty, standard resources, no doodads (like ai donations, fortress, heroes, massive battles, etc)

Happens about every other time a few minutes in as the Necrons roll over the IG base.

aitrace shows it happens during a necron warrior tactic update, so I'm assuming it's the same as Zenoth's broken lands crash.

Well that's a major update.

Because it confirms that Broken Lands itself has nothing to do with the crash.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

It's easily reproducible...

Skirmish 1v1
starting: Necrons top, IG bottom
Hard difficulty, standard resources, no doodads (like ai donations, fortress, heroes, massive battles, etc)

Happens about every other time a few minutes in as the Necrons roll over the IG base.

aitrace shows it happens during a necron warrior tactic update, so I'm assuming it's the same as Zenoth's broken lands crash.

Well, it's not so easy reproducible for me. I still don't get any crash, neither with Necrons vs IG nor with Necrons vs Necrons on Eden. I think I had the warrior crash only one or two times in broken lands in an unbelievable amount of test games.

I'm still not sure if the crash is somehow affected by some game settings or the computer system. Maybe it's because I'm using Vista, it's really odd.

Edited by ArkhanTheBlack, 04 April 2008 - 12:19 PM.

[troubadour]

I had 2 games on Fallen City + one other on Emerald River as SM vs Necron AI set on harder to get my base rampaged and NO crash
In each of the 3 games i waited to see my base invaded by necron squads (warriors + wraith) + vehicules (destroyer, tomb spider) + lord
AI std settings (heroes disabled, turrets disabled, minefield disabled, fortress disabled, huge battle disabled, ai donation disabled)

It maybe be related to graphic setting, mine are :
Models : High
Textures : High
Light : High
FX : Med
Shadow : Low
Terrain : Med
Decals : Low
Bodies : None

Edited by troubadour, 04 April 2008 - 12:47 PM.

[LarkinVB]

Played necrons on eden. No crash. Is it possible that it is connected with the other mods included with the installer ? I have only ai mod + camera mod, didn't install the others.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

Played necrons on eden. No crash. Is it possible that it is connected with the other mods included with the installer ? I have only ai mod + camera mod, didn't install the others.

Nah, you have to activate them in the game options too. Further, I have them installed and heroes activated most of the time and the crashes almost never happen on my comp.

[thudo]

So Eden now? At least its not just Broken Lands.. Ok will have a go also..

So Necrons must be Player1 (AI) and IG as Player0 (Human).

Btw, everyone who experiences this reproducable crash - try dropping ALL your gfx details, turn Critical Messages OFF (thats in the menu under Controls when you are actually playing a game), make sure under your gfx drivers you run without AA or AF enabled, defrag, clean out the \windows\temp folder and ESPECIALLY also your own accounts folder under \document and settings\<your logged in ID>\local settings\temp. Also check under START/RUN type: msconfig and check folder STARTUP and observe any odd apps running on startup. Chances are, oh... 90% of that is crap running on startup and can be de-checked. Save changes and reboot.