chrstgtr
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Posts posted by chrstgtr
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5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
Is that what you mean? If so, I agree. Changes must be made to CC arrows and sentry towers so that rushers can still find kills.
And lastly, let me address your last sentence here. Maybe people didn't complain about it, but my observations told me there was a problem. Players were able to dive under the CC for extended periods of time with no consequences. The CC should (according to the success of other games) be able to be a somewhat safe space if there is a ton of pressure. I would just argue that it is now too good at countering rushes when it is garrisoned now that it actually gets kills.
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.
5 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:About your second paragraph, I would summarize it as: late game effects are complicated, but in general there is more turtling. Is that accurate?
You understand my complaints
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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.
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37 minutes ago, hyperion said:
There were quite a few threads beside this one and even bug reports recently. Sure this doesn't mean there must be a correlation. Once the game is at max pop there shouldn't be much of additional memory be needed based on game length tho unless there is a leak, so I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
Windows user are rare in my environment so I have not personally experienced this issue at all and hence I can't make any sensible statement of whether it having changed or not other than the frequency of reports.
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
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9 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
You talk on behalf of others, and I say what would be likely if the decision would be made with no status quo. These are very different.
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.
11 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:Thats not an issue though. Give me an issue with the way it is currently.
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.
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5 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
I think you are making this decision for a lot of people.
1 hour ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:Without any nostalgia or fear of change, people would prefer what I have suggested to random arrows.
Come on...Also, see below.
5 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:This one? In which only 10 people voted? The only written complaints I have seen that didn't come from haters were yours.
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.
8 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:->Please tell me some issues with 26.6 building arrows that are not due to arrow count balance.<-
The concept doesn't work if you think rush balance was fine before the mod. Full stop. It's inspiration is a false premise.
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5 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
Without any nostalgia or fear of change, people would prefer what I have suggested to random arrows.
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.
11 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:Lastly, what do you think should be done now? Full revert? partial revert?
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.
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2 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
yeah and then someone turned around and made towers 11 pierce XD. I don't think all buildings should have to behave identically wrt arrows.
I don't really care. But others seem to. Regardless, I think buildings were well balanced before the mod change.
3 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:is that so? I assume u mean non-random arrows here, not the above updates I suggest.
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
7 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:There were problems with random arrows, its just that people tolerated them: Buildings did not effectively deter rushes/raids, and healer hero auras could invalidate building arrows.
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.
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55 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
I think this is all I would do for now, but in the future we could consider stuff like letting tower upgrades apply to forts, or phase dependent building damage.
I always thought this should be true. But that's a different issue from buildingAI behavior.
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8 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
To give some examples, currently these are the changes from un-garrisoned to garrisoned:
- Sentry: 11->44 is 4x stronger
- Defense tower: 11-> 66 is 6x stronger
- CC: 33 -> 253 is almost 8x stronger
- Fort: 44 -> 264 is 6x stronger
with the changes above, towers would only be about 2x as strong when garrisoned, the CC would be about 2.5x stronger, and forts would be about 4x stronger.
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.
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1 hour ago, hyperion said:
Reports seems to have increased a lot since last community mod release, maybe try without. What should help a lot is reduced map size, less players or lower pop cap.
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)
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26 minutes ago, Feldfeld said:
If the host has a simulation issue then that would show every other player OOS. Not saying that's necessarily the case here
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.
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1 hour ago, Stan` said:
Yeah once you reach 4GB of used RAM for the game, there is nowhere else to write data (Imagine having filled a notebook and the only place left blank is the table but your pen doesn't work on that surface. So at best you manage to find some blank spot in your notebook, or you write over something else and you go OOS.
I'm not sure what you can do to minimize RAM usage on windows. Since most games have no AIs they shouldn't be the culprit. Hopefully some bits of code aren't behaving and leaking memory and we can figure it out, if not this just means the simulation is complex and takes that much space. @wraitii or @Itms or @elexis might know more or how to get more info.
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?
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17 minutes ago, Stan` said:
Wait you said the macos host crashed
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.
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59 minutes ago, Stan` said:
Mmmh. If you replay the game on your machine does it still crash ?
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
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Mac host. Game crashed at min 42:11. For about the last time minutes of play, other players were dropping like every minute
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3 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
I would agree with either bumping range up to 90 or decreasing the pack time some or both.
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
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23 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
It is pretty loosely 40 minutes. Sometimes it is 36 mins, sometimes, 42, etc. Another thing is that when this happens, it also seems that spectators are sometimes OOS, even though they are not players.
It is an interesting problem, since relatively few games reach ~40 minutes.
Yes. It also only tends to happen in 4v4 games (i.e., 1v1s that last 40 minutes do not go OOS)
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4 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:
Barcodes, to confirm, please tell us whether the players who crash around 30 minutes are using Windows
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.
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2 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
perhaps. We will have to see.
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.
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31 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
It wasn't a fix per se, but a desired feature. People wonder why the heck the arrows don't shoot at the unit they tell them to shoot at.
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.
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7 minutes ago, leopard said:
I don't like this new version after playing for a while. can I vote again?
On 31/01/2024 at 10:28 AM, chrstgtr said:I would recommend reserving judgment for a little bit and to cast your vote in a week. Right now, I would be one yes and one no for the two big changes (melee/buildingAI) but I could see both, either, or neither of my opinions changing so I haven’t voted yet.
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1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:
the change to net damage across all units is definitely smaller than the net change to units durability (melee lost armor). The driver of any net ttk change is because of the reduction of melee armor. Before this mod, battles felt slower because either before or after sniping there was this damage sponge you had to kill.
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.
1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:I think one reason why melee seem to kill ranged units faster is because they rank up while killing them and this increases their damage, hp, and armor further. I think further changes to melee/ranged balance aren't clear, but reduction to the rank up bonuses of melee is a clear change.
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.
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1 hour ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:
@chrstgtr The reason I suggested all units + hp was because people argue units in general die too fast.
If that issue is specifically ranged units dying too fast to melee, we could either give ranged units a health buff or decrease melee damage a little. I would prefer increasing ranged health, but a smallish damage nerf could also be fine.
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.
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1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:
Interestingly, quite a few players particularly Havran have argued that champions have become meta. I'm not saying I agree. In fact my argument so far about balance is that its actually pretty good. It is truly a weird situation to have almost every player claim one thing or another is OP with some certainty, all while having very little agreement. Clearly the meta has been more elusive than everyone thinks.
If there is any one thing that I think most people can agree is now OP it is spartans and athenians, the reasons being several bonuses and heroes that combine particularly well with the melee rebalance:
- iphricates (previously determined to be OP): seems to be more important now that melee units have less armor
- Leonidas: the damage addition to spearmen is much more significant now that the base rate is increased
- Skiritai commandos start rank 3 which is now a much stronger advantage over rank 1
- hoplite tradition: improved rank up speed means hoplites can reach rank 2/3 in one good fight, fast enough to make a big difference in the fight in which they rank up.
Combining these civ specific bonuses with the melee rebalance has led to melee units from these civs being too strong. I think removing armor from melee rankup bonuses, and nerfing iphricates would solve these concerns effectively.
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.
Introducing the Official community mod for Alpha 26
in Gameplay Discussion
Posted
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