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The Crawl of Death - killing a decent AI attack


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This phenomenon is really KILLING my attempts to create a Blue AI attack on a Red Insurgents player scenario. I have tried ALL the different permutations of orders for my AI groups and they ALWAYS perform the crawl of death after receiving incoming fire. Surely it would be better for them to 'drop and return fire' rather than perform this suicidal action which exhausts them rapidly. In fact, that's what I thought the Assault/Max Assault + Active was supposed to work. :confused:

The game works fine as long as the player is the attacker because I can issue sensible orders and keep things moving or get them organised to return fire but once I start a scenario, the AI is out of my control.

Also, vehicles sporadically pop smoke after they have dismounted their charges. It would be nice if there was some way to put this option under the scenario designers control. The AI does use it occassionally so it's in the game somewhere, I just haven't figured out how to make it use the smoke BEFORE tha passenger dismount. Even when it does use smoke, the infantry is still crawling.

I haven't seen any mention of this in the upcoming 1.03 patch. Is this considered to be a problem or is it WAD?

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After futher playtesting my scenario, I've noticed that AI controlled Strykers rarely fire upon known enemy units. They have the active weapons command. They can sit less than 100m from known enemy positions and do nothing while their infantry is crawling along behind them. The AI controlled side seems to be incredibly passive.

To contrast this, my Red units are hammering the US forces with everything they've got without any intervention on my part so the player TACAI is pretty aggressive.

And the situation is not unbalanced. When I play Blue, I never use the artillery and I steamroll the Red Force within a few minutes of the start and with almost zero casualties. I script the AI to do something similar and I sit back and watch my Red forces slaughter the Blue side. And all because they CRAWL... BOO!

Is this game only designed to be played as the attacking side or two player only?

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Originally posted by Paper Tiger:

After futher playtesting my scenario, I've noticed that AI controlled Strykers rarely fire upon known enemy units. They have the active weapons command. They can sit less than 100m from known enemy positions and do nothing while their infantry is crawling along behind them. The AI controlled side seems to be incredibly passive.

To contrast this, my Red units are hammering the US forces with everything they've got without any intervention on my part so the player TACAI is pretty aggressive.

And the situation is not unbalanced. When I play Blue, I never use the artillery and I steamroll the Red Force within a few minutes of the start and with almost zero casualties. I script the AI to do something similar and I sit back and watch my Red forces slaughter the Blue side. And all because they CRAWL... BOO!

Is this game only designed to be played as the attacking side or two player only?

I have several threads on this around and finally someone else notices it. SOmething changed from 1.01 to1.02 to cause this.
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Yep, thewood, noted. But Panzer's right... when threads that provide multiple screenshots and a detailed description of a problem can devolve into a multi-page battle over methodology and software development, normal "hey this is broken and here's why" posts like we've all been making are like drops in the pond. Way too many negative posts in response to bugs here.

Perhaps a gameplay bug forum is called for, if only to get the "you're cluttering up our beautiful forums with your bugs!" folks off our backs. I've written more placating answers to posts like that in the last two weeks than I've written my own or seconded others' actual issue-related posts.

BFC *wants* us to post about bugs, folks, even "old" ones that they "know about", and irrelevant fighting just makes it harder to pick through and find the necessary information.

Anyhow, BFC has said that a large number of LOS and pathing issues will be fixed in 1.03. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these might deal with a number of apparent TacAI problems like the one mentioned (and some of the ones that I myself have been reporting). I'm going to revisit these issues post-1.03 and see if they're still happening. Sounds like there were a number of intertwined issues in there.

That said, though, I'd say let's gather more detail about our bugs... get together savegames and screenshots. That way when 1.03 comes out (or 1.04, or whichever patch *might* fix these issues) we can quickly determine if they have been fixed or not -- or at least if savegames have been broken by the patch. ;) I gather that savegames are the most important things -- Charles can most likely glean quite a bit of info from running a savegame through in debug.

Cheers, and keep on reporting and chewing this stuff over. We're helping to make this a better game to play, no matter how much flak we might take for it. smile.gif

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This particular bug should be either completely squashed in v1.03 or at least greatly reduced. Thought you might like to know :D

Another bug found, that was suspected for a while but difficult to prove, is that some units were "forgetting" what they were supposed to be doing and therefore would sit around instead of sticking with the other units of its AI Group.

Both of these bugs are hardly relevant, or noticable, for a defensive AI but somewhat to very noticable for offensive AI. It will be interesting to see how much of an impact this will have on gameplay.

Steve

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Hey man, thanks for that, really. Can't wait for the new patch:) And I've seen that other 'bug' too. I set up a group with three vehicles and passengers and then added a fourth to the group and the fourth just sat there a couple of times so I thought the vehicle was immobilised or something.

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Could it be a case of how fast/slow units move under different types of movement orders?

Look at this screenshot:

1203573082_addca3ea27.jpg

Basicly it shows that units given an "Assault" or "Max Assault" order will crawl, whether being engaged or not.

They take a very long time to move to the objective, giving the impression that nothing is happening.

Would be interesting to see what happens if you give them an "Advance" order.

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