Saving wingies

[kuroi neko]

Sorry to insist, but could you please have a look at the reason why wingies practically never regain their ED?

As it goes, I'm stuck playing silly escort missions against bots to regain my wingie EDs because my demo wingies with their so cool medals are dying as soon as I play against humans.

Bots kill them too, but slowlier (since the 8-skills & 7 redraws AI did no grasp the fact that killing wingie is key to success). I lost another one of them yesterday. Besides, playing escort around 600-1000 XP wears pilots down at a preposterous rate and result invariably in 50 XP loss per mission, my Japanese are all flying with between -2 and -4 structure points.

However, I found these are the only missions which allow wingies to score a kill once in a while without being killed themselves too often.

This obvious bug is simply grounding my high-level pilots and forcing me to be bullied around for hours by über bots. I'm starting to get annoyed quite a bit.

It should be only a couple of lines of code to look at and fix, not a major design change.

Please save the wingies .

[bartbert]

Ok. I'll take a look this evening.

[Ron]

To further add to the ED/Wingman issue, this morning I observed something very interesting. My Pilot pair both lacked ED and during the course of the dogfight the Wingman shot down both enemies. Guess who received the ED? The Leader lol!

Not to muddy this thread but a quick question. Is there any variation in the AI planes you face? I ask because I have some Brit Pilots flying the HurricaneII and they repeatedly face tricked out Raidons over and over and over, ad nauseum. It's a long way to the Mossy and some variation would be welcome.

Ron

[kuroi neko]

Thank you, Brian.

By the way, your last change to the card drawing logic seems to work like a charm. Now I get one or two IMS2:D per game, exceptionally 3 (which is ok since high level planes are drawing enough cards per turn to dry the deck more than 2 times in a 6 turns game). The annoying "IMS2:D avalanche" never reappeared. Congratulations .

Sending this "mortal wingie" bug down in flames will get rid of the last serious implementation problem, as far as I'm concerned.

After that, a bit more variety for high-end computer planes and pilots would be nice. Right now I only use these games for regaining wingmen EDs, so this is no such big deal for me. However, I found the AI pilots level a bit unnerving while I was trying to unlock the top Japanese planes. Preventing players from racking up kills against bots is one thing, but killing them just for trying to see all available planes may be overdoing things a bit .

I know tweaking AI routines is a tricky business, but frankly the super-über aces are showing the limits of computer logic: with the dozen cards they expend each turn, they should wipe the floor with the planes players can oppose them. However, since they fail to go for wingmen first and discard far too much of their cards, they can be beaten (not easily, a simple bad initial draw and the player has to run for his life, but usually the bot wingie buys it and you end up with a smoking leader) while they should simply not be .

[bartbert]

I'll take a look at the logic for picking AI opponents while I'm in looking at the Escape Death issue.

[bartbert]

I looked through the code for awarding the "Escape Death" skill last night, and my findings are as follows:

1. Any pilot (leader or wingman) who shoots down at least one enemy pilot has a 33% chance of being awarded an Escape Death.

2. Any pilot (leader or wingman) who does NOT shoot down at least one enemy pilot has a 20% chance of being awarded an Escape Death IF he survived the mission and WAS NOT shot down (ie, he was damaged or undamaged).

As far as I can tell, there is no bias from a code standpoint that would make it less likely for a wingman to receive an Escape Death.

However, players may be introducing a bias against wingmen by the way they are playing. If players have decided that the optimal strategy is to concentrate on taking out the opposing wingman first, and worry about the leader later, then it seems to me that they are indeed greatly reducing the wingman's chances of getting an Escape Death. If the wingman never gets an opportunity to shoot someone down, he won't fulfill the conditions of #1 above. If the wingman gets shot down, he won't fulfill the conditions of #2 above. The wingman is locked out. Game over.

So, what we have done is to remove the requirement to have not been shot down in case #2 above. In other words, if a pilot did NOT shoot down any enemy pilots, they have a base chance of 20% to get an Escape Death. Period. This should mean that at worst, a pilot should receive an Escape Death once every 5 missions (on average).

This change went into effect last night, so I guess we'll see how it goes.

I'm still looking into the issue where you always have to fight the same aircraft and pilots at the higher levels. I can see why it's happening, and I just need to decide how to fix it and test it out. It should be done in a day or two.

[kuroi neko]

Thanks for the explanations and code changes.

About wingies being downed more often, this is only true against humans. Bots tend to concentrate on the leader, except for "wingie duels" if the AI leader is already tailing the player's (which, by the way, means that being tailed by an über bot and its intact wingie is a pretty hopeless situaton, yet again to be avoided by mauling the wingman at all cost )

Anyway, I'll risk a couple of "old geezer" wingies against bots to see if this goes any better .

[Strider]

These updates...do they only affect online play, or are they also applied to the local settings for offline play?

[bartbert]

For now, they only affect online play, but the next time we put an update out for download, it will update local play as well.

I'll probably be putting an update out later tonight that will include the Wildcat, so you won't have to wait very long.

[kuroi neko]

Well, for now I have played 25 games against bots.

20 games where with a wingman without ED scoring no kill. No ED was regained.

4 games ended with a dead wingman, 3 to target pilot (the last target pilot was a bit overkill, the little guy seem to have failed the bailout check first).

1 game ended with the wingman killing a plane and regaining ED

in the course of these 25 games, 3 EDs were lost by leaders and 2 regained, including one without downing any plane. THe interval between loss an regain was 2 and 3 games with kills scored half the time, which fits nicely within expected results.

Too bad I ran out of wingies, I would have hoped to reach 21 games, where the probability not to regain ED in a row drops just below 1% (0.92 exactly). As it stands now, I may still have been selectively unlucky, since the probability of not regaining a single wingie ED in all the 20 games was a confortable 1.15%.

Anyway, all my demo wingies are dead now, I can go back and play against humans .

More seriously, I do not doubt the code you vere looking at does the right thing. There must be another less obvious glitch somewhere else, like the ED being given back to the wrong pilot (maybe the leader, maybe a non-existent pilot, computer software is such a strange and wonderful universe). At any rate the bug is still there.

I did not have the patience to write down the exact outcome of every single game, but I assume you could have a look at the logs on the server, all games occured between my two last postings in this thread.

P.S: ah and also I noticed wingies NEVER get fatigued, at least in online games against bots. I flew with a -8 structure leader just to see what happened and the wingie was as fresh as if coming right out of the box. I assume wingmen fatigue is not a campaign-only feature, so I tend to classify this as a closely related bug. Maybe working on this one will help pinpoint the other?

[ October 14, 2005, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: kuroi neko ]

[bartbert]

Wingmen only get fatigue in the campaign game. Why is that you ask? Well, I think it's just the way things worked out. Originally, only leaders got fatigue. Then we developed the campaign game, and we noticed that if wingmen didn't get fatigue, it threw the campaign strategy off because fatigue is an important factor in limiting pilot operations. So we added wingman fatigue in the campaign game, but not for regular missions. I can't recall if there was some argument against doing it at the time, but the fact is, we just never did it. Maybe that's another one for the list.

I guess I'd better revisit the wingman ED issue again in light of your data. Thanks.

[kuroi neko]

Ah ok, I never really had a thought about that wingie fatigue matter since I always try to play with fresh pilots (except when doing suicidal experiments ).

However, the different handling of fatigue may be a good starting point for debugging. Maybe the "ED-regaining-without-having-scored-any-kill" code has been restricted to leaders along with fatigue attribution or something?

[bartbert]

Well, I think I have tracked down the problem with wingmen not getting the ED skill. The skill is awarded using the same procedures used to award medals, and some medals have a requirement that they can only be awarded to a leader. There was some messed up logic where it was checking to see whether or not the pilot was a leader, but it wasn't comparing to see whether that particular medal was for leaders only. Consequently, wingmen always failed the check. I think this also explains why German wingmen weren't getting the Fighter Clasp medal.

I will try to get the update installed on the server sometime later today. I just need to find a time when the server isn't busy, and I can slip it in.

[kuroi neko]

Ah great, at least my wingies did not die in vain

You could restore the initial condition for regaining ED (not being shot down) now, by the way.