Jump to content

Vehicle Panic behavior is really BAD


Wiggum15

Recommended Posts

<snip>

 the waypoint only gets set for the next Order phase were you can drag it around.

This can be already to late if your troops panic after 10sec into the turn and decide to run towards the enemy.

 

You are correct.  In We-Go the Evade command works during the command (orders) phase.  If the troops do anything foolish during the 60 second action (movement) phase in We-Go I have learned to scream at the monitor.  In a few instances I think this helps. :D   (Helps me get a WTF look from the wife)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hope Battlefront will consider historical facts when programming the tac AI.  There are multiple, hundreds, if not thousands of documented cases of US troops coming under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan.... Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, An Nasariyah, Sadr City, Ramadi, etc, etc.   To my knowledge, at no time did vehicle drivers under fire suddenly drive off the road and into enemy fire, nor did troops ever just stand up and run into a street into more enemy fire.  This includes support troops.

 

The same can be said for insurgents under fire. In most cases, in Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents under fire held their ground and simply tried to take cover.  If they ever moved, it was only when they thought they had a covered route and then only to get a better tactical position.

Edited by CommC
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I did not say all US troops should be battle hardened vets, but they should have way more then the Russians for example, especially in leadership positions.

 

The issue is, currently there is no real logic behind the panic behavior, its completely random !

Some think that realistic but for me thats just a excuse for a non existing or very bad TacAI in such situations !

 

The Russians were fighting in Chechnya throughout the nineties and early 2000s and capped that off with the 888 War to prove they still knew what the hell they were doing when it came to conventional conflict. Certainly both were smaller scale than the military commitments of Iraq and Afghanistan but the Russian Forces are a lot smaller than the American military...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

About the panic.

Soldiers can't easily find where the shootings are coming from, specially worse when they are panicked. I can understand why some soldiers run to "wrong" direction when they are being ambushed. They could have no idea where the shootings are coming from, or they misjudged enemy position.... Everything can happen on the battlefield. Their time to think and analyze is too short, but bullets don't care about that.

Of course you know the direction since you are watching from high above, but soldiers are not.

Edited by exsonic01
Link to comment
Share on other sites

All in all I am happy with actual panic mechanics. When my soldiers panic I know I lost their minds and can't control them anymore. The situation got out of hand and I, as the pixel commander, can do little else. Fine with me.

 

Sometimes this leads to stupid or crazy moves, but I really can't see how this could be improved by using a proportional amount of resources and time (proportional to the effective results).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The issue is that writing a "smart" ai is really hard, Like incredibly hard. The tac ai doesn't have a super solid view of the map and it has to make the best case judgment nearly instantly and hopefully that works out.

 

It can't know that 10 meters back is safe ground (at least not efficiently and that is the important part here). It does know that woods provides a concealment bonus. So it picked what it knew.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It can't know that 10 meters back is safe ground (at least not efficiently and that is the important part here). It does know that woods provides a concealment bonus. So it picked what it knew.

 

And drove a truck loaded with a whole squad in slow motion speed deep into the woods while still taking fire the whole time ?

@ exsonic01

Thats correct but there should be some logic behind that, something like where is the next concentration of friendly units.

That they sometimes go into the opposite direction and drive towards the enemy while their teammates lie in cover 10m away is insane.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

...something like where is the next concentration of friendly units.

That's the way to think of it; the TacAI needs rules to follow which will produce reasonable results more often than not. Your above suggestion is a good idea but what if the nearest position of non-panicking friendlies is 300m away across open ground? I suspect the resulting Panic behaviour from the truck driver as he attempts to churn through the mud on his journey to Safety would then be just as annoying as your example of reversing slowly into an exposed tree line.

Our pixeltruppen are (fortunately) not actual beings with actual thoughts and, even if they were, they wouldn't 'know' everything we, as the player, knows about the battlefield. That means that having any given unit judge where the nearest cover is when taken under fire is a colossal problem to try and solve: Does the unit know, for sure, where the fire is coming from? How can it judge where is covered from that fire without running CPU-intensive LOS checks between the assumed source of incoming fire and every local action spot? How many action spots should it consider? All within 50m for infantry units, and 200m for vehicles? Then what if an enemy tank is "known" by the panicking unit to be idling in clear view 500m away from the resulting "good cover" solution? All of a sudden we have a player tearing their hair out again because their pixeltruppen did something 'stupid' when panicked.

Or, you can not tear your hair out, take it on the chin and recognise that coding a human-level thought process into the TacAI is not going to happen any time soon and so the best solution is to work on improving your game so that your pixeltruppen (whether they are uber all-American too-cool-to-panic hero superhumans or otherwise) don't get into such bad trouble in the first place. :)

Edited by Tux
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Professional pilots make mistakes and not-the-right-thing when under heavy stress or panic situations (many time killing themselves and passengers as result). These things that seem plainly stupid when quietly sit down at home. I will not go in cognitive models, but the same happens in battle situations. Training tries to overcome some of this reactions, but it is not perfect.

 

I don't know whether this is something modelled or the TAC AI could not cope with it, but this specific situation would not be unusual in real life.

Edited by speedyglides
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Their are very few situations the tac ai models that would be unusual in real life because the infantry-play is heavily abstracted. Their is a lot that could be happening down in that action square that is simply outside the scope of the game. If it really offends someone so much that they aren't in control of that kind of minutia, then imo, you're (not you explicitly) playing the wrong game. 

 

It's easy for me and you to go "omfg don't run out the building into the machine gun" because we, from our god-view, know that. The pixeltruppen don't, their only link to situational awareness on the battlefield has been their eyes and maybe a radio. 

 

Professional pilots make mistakes and not-the-right-thing when under heavy stress or panic situations (many time killing themselves and passengers as result).

 

Yeah, anybody is susceptible to panic. Training has the value of making it a lot less likely but it's never impossible. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Panic is an extreme condition. It is the result of the player putting the unit into a situation which it would rather not be in. One of the things that is most difficult for players to accept is that they are usually the ones responsible for this happening. Which is to say, when a player says "this would never happen in real life" I often find myself looking at the situation and saying "I agree, in real life nobody would be so stupid as to drive out in the open like you just did". In other words, players who are highly critical of the TacAI seem to forget that there is a larger context and that larger context is in the hands of the player.

In real life battles tend to progress *very* slowly. Units will sit in positions for quite a long time before moving. Vulnerable units, like trucks, won't go anywhere near active fighting if they can avoid it. Troops in the back of said truck wouldn't stay in the truck. Or APC for that matter. So is the TacAI behavior of a specific truck in a specific situation correct or incorrect when the player makes a major tactical mistake? Hard to say.

For sure sometimes the TacAI makes a decision that is stupid by pretty much any measure. However, HumanBeings under stress make bad decisions all the time, especially when they haven't had proper sleep or a good meal in several days. War is inherently chaotic so it is understandable that decision making by a single individual with a second or two for contemplation doesn't take all variables and possible outcomes into account before making a decision.

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The Russians were fighting in Chechnya throughout the nineties and early 2000s and capped that off with the 888 War to prove they still knew what the hell they were doing when it came to conventional conflict. Certainly both were smaller scale than the military commitments of Iraq and Afghanistan but the Russian Forces are a lot smaller than the American military...

 

Actually, they are comparable. Wiki says there are 1.2 million in Russian Forces and 1.3 million in US Forces.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Actually, they are comparable. Wiki says there are 1.2 million in Russian Forces and 1.3 million in US Forces.

 

Wiki is showing me under 900,000 in the Russian Forces in total and over a million in the US Army alone. The actual Russian army end-strength is less than 300,000 plus a modest number of VDV, whereas the US Army and USMC come out to around 1.4 million.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wiki is showing me under 900,000 in the Russian Forces in total and over a million in the US Army alone. The actual Russian army end-strength is less than 300,000 plus a modest number of VDV, whereas the US Army and USMC come out to around 1.4 million.

Yup, those are the generally accepted numbers I've seen. Then there's the issue of conscripts, which means that a very large percentage of the Russian armed forces has about 1 year of training vs. the minimum of 2 years (plus 6 for reserve).

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...