Any way to stop light vehicles from auto-evading?

[Crispy129]

Is there a way to get my Strykers and other light vehicles to stop auto evading when they see an enemy tank? I gets really annoying when your recon vehicles see a tank long before it sees them but immediately pop smoke and reverse until they hit the edge of the map (which also most likely alerts the tank when it sees a gigantic cloud of smoke) while I'm trying to pull up something to kill it. Afterward I end up wasting valuable time cleaning up the scattered units, and normally there is so much smoke it's hard for me to get a shot with whatever I was going to use to kill the tank. Whenever I dismount a javelin team to kill the tank, this also means that the Stryker or whatever it was is going to leave them stranded (and of course alert the tank and block the team's shot with smoke). Is there some way to set them to not automatically try to evade like that, or at least do it only when threatened and listen to orders?

On the side, this is completely unrelated, but is there a way to make it so that I just have ot hit the right hotkey to give a unit the command instead of clicking over on the correct menu before I hit the hotkey? To me, having to click to get in the right menu BEFORE I can hit the hotkey sort of defeats the purpose of hotkeys.

[flamingknives]

Pretty tricky to apply some kind of logic to your AI that it guesses what the opposing AI is doing.

[Webwing]

Crispy,

I asume you play RT. In this case you can pause as much as you like and micromanage.

In WEGO on the other hand you are unable to give commands for 1 min. In this case it is desirable that your units take some evasive action it they feel threatened.

I play mostly RT but don't see this as a problem.

But it is a very delicate balance between what should be left to the player and what the game should handle on it's own. No two players will agree on that!

[cool breeze]

I think it should be an option. Retreat mode or stay mode. and sometimes they should retreat anyway

[Crispy129]

Well when you see the tank stop and start turning its turret toward you, you know to evade, but to have them do it as soon as they spot an enemy tank even if in a well covered/concealed area. I have no problem with them automatically doing it as long as they stop when I give them orders to stop. I have tons of trouble controlling light armor in the mixed armor battles because my light armor completely ignores me and just scatters all over the place popping smoke in front of my tanks and letting enemy tanks know where I am.

[Combatintman]

We do need to remember that in earlier versions of the game - the fact that vehicles didn't auto evade well caused people to b1tch until their keyboards wore out. This is very much a case of be careful for what you wish for.

All of that said - if it were easy to have a happy medium then I would prefer that - I suspect however that it would be a nightmare to code for the reasons that Steve has stated on many other threads relating to AI behaviour. If it isn't possible then I would rather the pendulum stays swung exactly where it is as recce elements are too valuable to lose at any time but particularly in a campaign context.

[Battlefront.com]

We've had the same discussions about CMx1's behavior for many years now, so this is old hat to me

It is easy to have the vehicles do nothing. That requires no code To have them do anything beyond that requires code. The "smarter" the behaviors, the more code and more computing resources. The more "specialized" the behaviors are, even more coding and computing resources are needed. Unfortunately it doesn't take too long before we hit the point of diminishing returns. Specific situations can sometimes be tweaked for, but generally this causes something else to get out of whack. Which again reaches a point of diminishing returns.

Finding the happy medium is extremely difficult in an environment as complex as what we have to deal with. We err on the side of what is realistic. Light armored vehicles tend to bugger off as quickly as they can when they find that they're overmatched. In real life survival is generally more important than the mission at hand, which is generally not the case for a wargamer.

Do we have the right balance at the moment? It's hard to say, but I'm not opposed to looking at it some more.

BTW, for WW2 the TacAI's behaviors will have to be completely rebalanced. The code, thankfully, won't have to change, but the "weights" used to determine how the code exhibits itself will for sure need major revision. Different weapons and vehicle properties mean what we have no won't be optimal for anything other than contemporary.

Steve

[cool breeze]

with respect to light vehicles bugging out I dont think it is a problem when they do well. like when the reverse and break LOS. I agree survival should be a highest priority. What bugs me is when I got my light vehicles hiding in some brush at night and an enemy tank comes and all my vehicles start reversing up a slope into the open where they are easily seen. they could lived by staying still and waiting for my tank to blow up their tank but instead leave the good spot of running in the open. An retreat or dont retreat option would pretty much fix all this. But here is an idea, maybe for CMx3 Could we give back up orders, like if then statements? Like; if enemy tank shows up in this arc my stryker will reverse behind that house. But if a tank shows up over on that hill the stryker will pray hard and not move cause nowhere is safe. It seems like if this kind of system were some day added we could have a substantial improvement in realism. Any chance we'll get it someday?

[Battlefront.com]

I doubt it. This sort of thing basically means the player's brain has to be cloned in code. Not really that practical

What you described would require a level of sophistication that I don't think we'll ever be able to manage. Oh sure, it can be done if we put in enough time and sacrifice other things so the CPU/RAM is freed up to figure this stuff out. But that's just it... even if we put in the time, at the expense of everything else, I'm not so sure the hardware will like it.

Scripting language type UI, or SOPs as they are often called, are out for a bunch of reasons. The biggest one being that gameplay would take an overall nosedive. I'd rather have a game that is easier to play, but has a few quirks, than one that is far more difficult to use and yet still has some quirks. It's the law of diminishing returns coming up.

Again, I'm not saying we can't make some improvements, just that they will be along the lines we have already established. That means no massive investment in AI programming, no support for a SOP system. Neither are in the best interests of the game.

Steve

[Vanir Ausf B]

How 'bout a simple, toggleable "No Auto Retreat" button for each vehicle? No doing it in this situation but not that situation, I mean shutting off auto retreat for that unit COMPLETELY.

[YankeeDog]

Problem with a "No Retreat" toggle is it leads to all sorts of gamey abuses of light vehicles -- you end up with stuff like the "Jeep Rushes" of early CMx1, where you can use light, cheap vehicles as recon-by-death.

I think a lot could be done by simply making the Auto-Retreat logic routine affected by already available orders. For example:

- No standing orders:

SOP. Vehicle will generally retreat when faced with a superior opponent.

- Hide Order active:

Unit is more likely to stay where it is and do nothing (i.e., no outgoing fire), as long as it does not actually receive incoming fire. If it does receive incoming fire, very likely to retreat. This covers Cool Breeze's situation, above.

- Cover Arc order:

Unit is somewhat more likely to stay in place and fight, within limits. This represents a unit that has been given "Stand and Fight" orders.

Anyway, I think sumfink like the above would be preferable to adding more orders to the UI.

Cheers,

YD

[Pandur]

@YankeeDog

that would bo good from my point of view. i am also annoyed by reversing recon humvees wich should spot over long distances but back up instead. or HQ´s of ATGM BRDM´s. i try to use them to help spotting and they back up as soon as they see a tank.

so if i hide them, wich shouldnt hinder the crew spotting(like they hide inside their vehicle), that would give me a good chance to keep em stationary.

it would also reduce the problem that thin skined vehicles wich are NOT spotted, back up when they spott something dangerouse themselfs, wich leaves them spotted much easier in turn, wich often means their unnessersary early death.

[Battlefront.com]

Vanir Ausf B,

How 'bout a simple, toggleable "No Auto Retreat" button for each vehicle? No doing it in this situation but not that situation, I mean shutting off auto retreat for that unit COMPLETELY.

As YankeeDog pointed out, this is "gamey". Your idea is akin to decoupling Morale, getting rid of Experience differences, ducking to get out of enemy fire, etc. I'm sure you didn't intend it to sound like that, but that is in fact the way it is from a simulation standpoint. Let me explain that:

The TacAI is there to simulate the reasonable behavior of similar soldiers (experience, condition, losses, etc.) in similar situations in real life. This is done to counteract the traditional wargame problems where soldiers (in or out of vehicles) behave like robots instead of nuanced Humans. To the degree we undermine the TacAI's ability to simulate these things is the degree we make the simulate more like traditional paper and dice boardgames. I don't think anybody, including you, really is in favor of that.

What you guys are in favor of is more realistic TacAI behavior for given situations. That's tough to do, but we've shown that for the most part we are able to do that. It takes some time to polish off the rough spots, and it will never be perfect, but we can do it.

The solution to the issues raised here is, therefore, not to decouple the behavior but to make it more flexible. That's what we need to do and as I said it's something we will look into some more.

Also, as I've said in many threads for many years... we are opposed to Standing Orders (SOPs). They are extremely clunky and generally interfere with gameplay instead of enhance it. That's been our experience with other games that try it and we've not been able to figure out a better way of doing it. Therefore, we have no interest in doing SOPs. It's not as simple as people think they are and the downsides of them are generally not appreciated until they are played with. We can't afford to spend time implementing something only to rip it out or double the time invested to get it to "suck less". Not productive

Steve

[Lee]

Steve: Perhaps some adjustments to the AI, as YankeeDog has mentioned, will help. Such as if a light armored vehicle is given a hide order, then the TAC AI's response to spotting a tank would be weighted just a bit more toward holding position, especially if it spotted the tank at long range. What do you think?

[Battlefront.com]

Lee,

It should work like YankeeDog described already, so this may in fact be a "bug" of sorts. Units Hiding are supposed to prefer to stay still vs. doing anything else.

Mind you, though, that I said "prefer". This does not mean a unit should robotically remain in a position if it feels that it's safer to run than it is to remain hiding. That's a very tricky thing to determine, so it's possible that the logic is off a bit there.

We'll look into it.

Steve

[cool breeze]

Awesome! what Yankydog said sounds perfect