chrstgtr

Again, you see you say it is imbalanced but I’ve only ever heard you and your brother talk about “chicken rushes.” I’ve never seen them work against any good player. Your brother (I think) tried to do against me to prove his point when I built ALL women and failed miserably Again, there is no evidence that the player base, as a whole agree, with you on the “enjoyment of the game aspect.” Available evidence says the opposite This is just wrong. This assumes the community game IS the current game. The community mod is an experiment. We had that. It appears to have been rejected. You keep taking change as necessary. That is contrary to what feedback we have

You understand my critique. My point is if it was balanced before, which I think it was, then this is a change designed to disrupt what is already balanced. You keep saying it was imbalanced before. But it seems you are so far ahead of the parade you forgot to look behind to see if the band is still following. You understand my complaints ———— Random or nearest-unit AI is is a personal preference. You seem to take it for granted that nearest-unit is indeed the preference where most available feedback says otherwise. Same for your perceived imbalanced for rushes.

Sure. It’s possible. But I haven’t noticed any change. And two of the three people here are just echos of the just echos

These are indeed very different....I am repeating what others have said. I pointing to votes of other people. You not only are saying what other people MIGHT think--you are saying that people will change their mind. I honestly don't see how you can continue to insist on knowing the opinion of others. It is. If more units die during rush then it is a problem. The current rush game is less dynamic. That is a problem. No matter how you slice it, that will continue to be problem because buildingAI changes are designed to get kills faster. The entire thing is fixing a rush problem that I so rarely heard uttered by anyone (aside from you and your brother). Late game is more complicated to assess because of the melee change. But it has also clearly become more staid with players often unable to kill bases if the game runs longer than the first big push. How much of that is melee change vs buildingAI change, I'm not sure. But I know I have seen several players play in a standoffish manner because they don't want to stand under CCs, which has led to more successful turtles. Players will now often walk away from conquering a CC after they winning a unit battle. Game design should not created stilted gameplay like that.

Come on...Also, see below. There's not a lot of commentary in that thead and it is old. Look at the recent votes on the thread that Weirdjokes posted. Out of all the issues, BuildingAI got the fewest number of approving votes and received the largest number of negative votes (note these two facts do not necessarily have to occur simultaneously as there is a third "uncertain option," which received the lowest share of votes for this question). BuildingAI is the only issue where "no" received more votes than "yes." BuildingAI is also only one of two issues where any choice received a majority of cast votes. I've checked in on that poll from time to time to see how opinions are progressing and it has been trending downward for awhile. For some people, there is a disposition bias that disfavors change. But you would expect that bias to erode with time. The opposite appears to be occurring here. For other people, there is a novelty bias that favors change. That bias appears to be eroding. Opposition to this change has accelerated. The concept doesn't work if you think rush balance was fine before the mod. Full stop. It's inspiration is a false premise.

This is axiomatic and runs contrary to what evidence we do have. You have championed this issue and on several instances have said things along the lines of "people just don't understand what I am proposing" but people do understand and have experienced it. A lot of people just disagree. You keep putting forth a bunch of alternative explanations/theories and it keeps getting more complicated each time. But the fact remains: balance was fine before and there were very few (zero?) complaints. That is nowhere close to true with the mod. Creating a new, more complicated system (that a lot of people seem constitutionally opposed to) just disregards the feedback that we have. Look at the poll in the other thread. There hasn't been uptake on this concept and, as time wears on, it seems to get less popular. Compare the buildingAI change to the melee change where people clearly want something different but just aren't sure if what we have is actually right. Keep the ability to manually control building arrows. For buildingAI, I would do a full revert for CC/forts. In the interest of experimentation, I would maybe keep buildingAI as nearest unit for towers to see if that works as towers seem less problematic on borders. I still think sentry towers are too strong and make rushing too difficult in p1. But I don't think the community has really focused on this aspect vs. the fort/cc aspect.

I don't really care. But others seem to. Regardless, I think buildings were well balanced before the mod change. Yes, non-random arrows. It seems, at best, to be preferred as much as random arrows but more likely disfavored compared to random arrows. Keeping random arrows doesn't require additional balance changes This has been the problem the whole time with this change. It was widely held that rushes were balanced before the change. And, if you have a problem with the hero aura then the hero aura should change. Buildings working against armies without hero indicates that it was properly balanced before. Your proposal just feels ptolemaic. At the end of the day, I want to be able to rush the units around a CC in p1. I don't see how that can ever be possible without losing a bunch of units. I also don't want to lose a considerable portion of my army guarding rams from a couple garrisoned swords in p3 after I have clearly won a battle of units.

I always thought this should be true. But that's a different issue from buildingAI behavior.

There was a pretty explicit change to unify building arrows recently: https://code.wildfiregames.com/rP25309 Personally, I'm ready to walk away from any change to buildingAI. Random vs. nearest unit buildingAI just depends on personal preference and, after some testing, the player base doesn't seem to want a change in behavior. As it has been said in other places, no one seems to have a problem with rush or late-game building-unit balance, so this change also doesn't "fix" anything (aside from behavior preferences). But as we have seen, it can introduce a problems with building-unit balance. At this point, this seems that this doesn't fix anything, it creates balance problems, and it changes buildingAI to a disfavored form. Seems like an experiment that was worth trying but has run its course at this point.

I don't think anything has changed. It has been a known problem for a long time. It is just being reported here now. To the extent the mod did cause more occurrences, I think it is because the new mod makes some games last longer/more units to be produced/etc. (i.e., the mod is causing the game conditions under which the error occurs instead of the mod itself causing errors)

Got it. Sometimes game-ending OOS errors show that the host and only the host is OOS. But other times everyone, including the host, is OOS.

That makes sense. But why would it happen to all players at the exact same time? If it was one player causing it, wouldn't it just list that single player as OOS?

Yeah, it was unartful language by me. My fault. It is the OOS error @real_tabasco_sauce @Barcodes, and I mentioned earlier in the thread where all players go out of OOS around min 40. For the 10 minutes before that happened, various players went OOS or actually crashed. Sorry.

Yes, I reach the normal "You have reached the end of the replay" message, which makes sense because the game never truly crashes--it goes OOS and makes it impossible to continue

16GB

Mac host. Game crashed at min 42:11. For about the last time minutes of play, other players were dropping like every minute 2024-03-05_0011.zip

Please not range. Camping from a safe distance discourages fights. Also, long pack times are just annoying. No one likes playing with units that don’t feel responsive—it almost feels like lag is built into microing cata

Yes. It also only tends to happen in 4v4 games (i.e., 1v1s that last 40 minutes do not go OOS)

Mac hosts using 64 bit versions have also crashed around the 40 minute mark. The real problem @Barcodes is referring to is when all players go OOS around that time mark. Typically, a few players will go out of sync before that but they can leave and rejoin to continue. For some reason, around the 40 minute mark ALL players will go OOS.

I think the wait and see approach is the way to go--opinions are still forming. With the melee patch, it is clear the community wants something different than community.mod.v4. It's not clear the community wants something like community.mod.v6, though. With the buildingAI patch, it isn't clear if the community wants any change from community.mod.v4.

That is a separate issue. I don't think anyone has an issue with being able to override buidlingAI. But there is a lot of debate around whether buildingAI should shoot randomly or at the closest unit. It isn't clear what the preference of the community is, and if the "closet unit" system can even be balanced in a desirable way. But buildingAI was certainly changed to address a units "don't die" problem. I personally don't think that was ever really a problem. But now we might as well see if this other system is better/workable. In short, everyone should vote in the poll in the other thread once they develop a firm opinion. There is no clear right answer--people have different preferences for legitimate reasons. The community at large should decide. EDIT: Sorry, I didn't all the way down to the bottom of your comment where you said random buildingAI with player override was a good compromise. It could be. I think player override should exist. The buildingAI should be community determined.

Disagree. But assuming you're right then armor should increase. The underlying point is that changing hp will certainly have downriver effects that are unintended and will cause a cascade of imbalances. The underlying cause of quicker battles (whether that is armor or melee dmg) should be addressed instead of changing yet another variable. I don't think anyone disagrees on this and @real_tabasco_sauce hit it on the head when he said that melee rank up was an old hot fix for melee balance that didn't actually fix the underlying melee balance problem. I've always said that melee was strong against range and that the problem was melee's inability to reach range units. All of these other melee advantages v. range get enlarged when melee units actually get engage range units.

The problem with changing hp is that it has a lot of downstream effects. It changes building/unit balance, inf/cav balance, melee/range balance, etc. It just seems a lot cleaner to to nerf the melee attack dmg. Otherwise, we just create more problems for ourselves. Also, the changes of the melee patch suggest that changes to melee attack dmg are the problem. The melee patch gave a major buff to melee BUT gave a nerf to range attack dmg. That means units are dying faster because of melee's buff despite range's nerf. The problem has to be that melee are killing range too quickly. The old meta had melee killing each other in the middle before breaking through and slowly killing the range. The new meta still has melee killing each other in the middle before breaking through and quickly killing the range. Sniping is present in both metas but that doesn't change anything. Battles are only ending quicker once there is a breakthrough and melee are able to rip through the range.

Iphri already got a nerf. It just isn’t in the mod yet. I also think we should consider just a general nerf to melee attack dmg instead of increasing health. It will have the same impact of making battles last longer without further nerfing range units. Melee is stronger now because once they get to range units they really rip them apart. Giving melee more health will let melee do that more effectively.