Proposition regarding pathfinding and unit size

[Yekaterina]

Dear developers and players:

 

I would like to request some potential changes to the game. Please discuss with me whether your agree with me or not.

Firstly, I would like the acceleration feature to be removed for all units except for archer cavalry and archer chariots. This is because the acceleration decreases the agility of units, which not only is irritating in intense battles, but also introduces more lag (or apparent lag) due to more computational heavy pathfinding. In addition, it makes retreating from a battle quite impossible; the enemy ranged units (especially archers) will kill everything you accelerate away. This is also why acceleration should be kept for archer cavalry units: without this feature, they can hit and run on enemies too easily, making them impossible to counter for civilisations without archers. Spartans cannot really defend against a crowd of archer cavalry because the archers can just retreat, regroup and shoot again, slowly wearing out the infantry. Spartan cavalry also cannot take on these archers because they themselves have too little health to sustain a fight (and the archer player would of course carry some spearman as well). The acceleration and slow turn time would make executing this maneuver more difficult and give the other cavalry a change to catch up or escape. 

Secondly, the turn rate of all units except archer units should be set to infinite (or some very large value, e.g. 99999 rad/s). Combined with no acceleration, this again will improve visual smoothness and decrease frustration, so that players feel less lag. It will also help with the pathfinding of siege weapons greatly.

Thirdly, the size of champion chariots seem to be significantly larger than their cavalry counterparts, which causes them to be less agile and cannot squeeze through narrow lanes easily. Unless the chariots have some additional advantage (e.g. more damage, longer range, higher health), they should be made identical to their cavalry counterparts to be fair on the chariot civs. With that being said, I don't mind if we alter the chariots slightly so that it is "stronger" than cavalry but less agile.

Finally, siege towers should be slowed down. Rams cannot catch up with them, which makes them unstoppable. Sspz has a video where he showed this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4UvZ-F8WKk

Please discuss your thoughts, opinions with me and let's make a change for the best!

Best,

Helicity

 

 

[Yekaterina]

The good thing is, all of these changes are very easy to implement, just tweak a few values in the templates.

The hard part is to get people to agree. 

I agree with all of these. Not sure about others. 

I don't play in the A26 lobby very often so I haven't seen siege towers or massive amounts of chariots in A26, but siege towers troll has always been OP and never nerfed. It's been the case since A23. 

Regarding chariots, I think I posted about them as well but no-one could reach an agreement. I wanted them to become turret like units that can shoot while moving, made a mod for it, but was never accepted. To be safe we should just make chariots identical to cav. I can change the effective model size without changing the visual look, so seemingly large models can pass through narrow gaps. 

I haven't used archers yet. How are they?

 

[Yekaterina]

9 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

turret like units that can shoot while moving

That is an interesting idea! But I think we should keep them as focus-fire units, because turrets / towers shoot at everything, including non-important targets like buildings. I find it necessary to use ranged champions to snipe enemy ranged units, especially my champion archers against enemy ranged. With that being said, I would like them to be identical to regular cavalry.

9 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

I haven't used archers yet. How are they?

I find archers very useful, because their range advantage enables sniping or shooting at enemy units from a safe distance. Cavalry archers with the hit and run tactic are especially difficult to defend against.

[Stan`]

The suggestion would revert back to the state of the game up to alpha 23 when none of those features were there. When we had a lot of complaints about automatic dancing making units unvulnerable. There is a also a disagreement between some players and some developpers, where some think the values should be even slower, and others think they should disappear. 

So it's unlikely for it to happen in the main game. But it can happen in a mod for sure.

[Yekaterina]

25 minutes ago, Stan` said:

automatic dancing

I think the entire pathfinding algorithm changed from A23 to A24, not just turn rate or acceleration. In A23 I see units (especially spear cav) just gliding around  while turning instead of walking, but this is not the case in A24 or A25: units stop quickly, turn quickly and run away quickly. There is no gliding. We can do an experiment in community mod. 

[Yekaterina]

@Stan` @Helicity

The mod has been made. All except archer cavs have instant turn and instant acceleration, and dancing is still not possible. I tried to dance and I lost the fight to an AI. I don't think phyzic or JC can dance successfully neither. Everything is now instant, even though the motion may look jerky visually, you have instant response and you no longer have to worry about crowded woodcutting or berries gathering. Feel free to test it yourself. 

yekapathfinder.zip

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

I think the entire pathfinding algorithm changed from A23 to A24, not just turn rate or acceleration. In A23 I see units (especially spear cav) just gliding around  while turning instead of walking, but this is not the case in A24 or A25: units stop quickly, turn quickly and run away quickly. There is no gliding. We can do an experiment in community mod. 

It did not although new things got introduced, such as patrol wait time (it's a template parameter). I suppose that's why it can't be reproduced.

Thanks for making the mod. Still have to address the people problem  

[real_tabasco_sauce]

There appears to be tradeoffs for acceleration. With no acceleration, you get dancing and less visually appealing movements, and less options for balancing/diversifying movement mechanics. With acceleration, you lose agility.

I think the main value of acceleration is the additional mechanic it provides, (ie give spearcavalry +50% acceleration compared to other cavalry for improved chasing). It allows for more interesting diversification of units.

With respect to acceleration making lag worse, I would disagree. What you experience in late-game 4v4s is almost entirely lag between turns with very little contribution from acceleration.

Players have certainly complained about unit responsiveness in previous alphas before acceleration, and that was also because of lag. If you set up a 1v1, I bet you will find the units much more responsive and enjoyable to use.

That being said, I would be fine with some reductions to the acceleration values and/or turn rates.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Is there no other way to deal with projectiles and dancing?

[alre]

40 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I think the main value of acceleration is the additional mechanic it provides, (ie give spearcavalry +50% acceleration compared to other cavalry for improved chasing). It allows for more interesting diversification of units.

lol. this mechanic is needed to partially circumvent the bug introduced by acceleration itself, which is that units slow down to hit targets, while those targets don't have to, and take distance.

without acceleration you don't even need the extra mechanic and the somehow hidden diversification that most people can't even realise it's there. 

Edited February 27, 2023 by alre

[Silier]

Unit stops and always stopped to do an attack. Acceleration has nothing with that mechanic.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

I disagree with the proposition.

Edited February 27, 2023 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Yekaterina]

1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

I disagree with the proposition.

Please explain your reasons

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Acceleration can be improved rather than removed. It also does not cause lag or alter pathfinding. Turn rates are fast enough already, with the exception of rams. About the chariots, you are right that they are not quite the same, but it is more of a unit design effort than quick fix.

[Yekaterina]

15 hours ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

does not cause lag or alter pathfinding

If everyone has powerful computers and high bandwidth connections, then there won't be lag. However, the CPU has to do extra maths to compute the acceleration behaviour nevertheless. It might not be visible on some computers, but when it comes to calculating hundreds of units fighting simultaneously, any reduction in calculation tasks is great.

How can we improve acceleration? As long as it is still there, the extra calculation remains and you units will look less agile. From the comments above and some videos on YouTube, it seems like the acceleration feature is something new to this latest update. So my question is: why add it?

Regarding diversification of units, as I said, let the archer units have acceleration and turn time because they must not be as agile as shorter ranged units. The melee units should be  absolutely agile.

 

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Acceleration is an astonishingly simple calculation compared to the pathfinding and ranged combat. One major improvement acceleration has made for the game is making the movement advantage of cavalry less than total. In alpha 25 cavalry were so fast and agile that it was too easy to mitigate losses by selecting when and where to fight. In a26 if you make a mistake with cavalry you will lose many more units as you run away, and this is due to acceleration. This is why cavalry have slower acceleration than infantry. Other changes could be made to improve how infantry accelerate as well and perhaps considerations can be put in for ranged versus melee units.

 

[sternstaub]

8 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

In alpha 25 cavalry were so fast and agile that it was too easy to mitigate losses by selecting when and where to fight.

On 27/02/2023 at 3:07 PM, Yekaterina said:

All except archer cavs

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

On 27/02/2023 at 11:38 AM, Lion.Kanzen said:

Is there no other way to deal with projectiles and dancing?

Yes, but unfortunately you have to make arrows into heat-seaking missiles, which I think a lot of people agree is undesirable. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

@Helicity, your opinion is strong for someone that didn't play in previous alphas. I am pretty sure they are still available for download.

3 hours ago, Helicity said:

So my question is: why add it?

The reasons for acceleration are:

• Visually appealing unit motion

• Vastly reduced the issues of dancing in competitive play

• Options for differentiating unit motion (spear cavalry faster compared to sword)

[Yekaterina]

10 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Visually appealing unit motion

Not really, at least given the lag, the smoothening is not visible if it doesn't make the visual lag worse.

10 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Vastly reduced the issues of dancing in competitive play

Many people speak of this "dancing". Wendy accused me of dancing once, but I have no idea what it means. Please explain to me what exactly is "dancing".

12 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Options for differentiating unit motion (spear cavalry faster compared to sword)

You can surely change the speed of spear cavalry to a different value.

 

I did watch quite a few videos from Ken Wood and Yauna versions. The units in Ken Wood was particularly agile and responsive; Yauna features huge crowds and heavier casualties in comparison and is similar to what we have now, except for acceleration. I don't know how the players felt at the time but from the recordings, the units seemed to be more agile than the status quo.

 

 

[Silier]

43 minutes ago, Helicity said:

Many people speak of this "dancing". Wendy accused me of dancing once, but I have no idea what it means. Please explain to me what exactly is "dancing".

You are moving your unit back and forth for purpose to dodge the missiles as the position (generally small area roughly around your unit position) where they hit is calculated when unit shoots so you are not really moving your unit to another location, with acceleration your unit does not instantly changes its position so dodging arrows that way is not that effective

[real_tabasco_sauce]

47 minutes ago, Helicity said:

Many people speak of this "dancing". Wendy accused me of dancing once, but I have no idea what it means. Please explain to me what exactly is "dancing".

yes it had several forms. Another one was formation dancing, where switching a group of units in a formation made them very difficult to hit. 

Overall, it made battles very difficult to predict. new players would get absolutely ruined if they hadn't figured out dancing yet.

And yes, homing arrows (as in aoe4)

would be a really bad solution to dancing.

53 minutes ago, Helicity said:

Not really, at least given the lag,

Right, the real issue here is the lag, which will hopefully be less severe in a27 thanks to @vladislavbelov @Stan` @phosit and others. Acceleration values can always be tweaked as necessary.

[Yekaterina]

Just how many times do I have to say this, infinite speed arrow will ban dancing, not by nerfing pathfinder.

If all projectiles had infinite speed then even phyzic cannot dance in A23

If you test my mod, you will see that dancing is not quite feasible. We shouldn't sacrifice other things just to nerf dancing, which has a simple solution of infinite arrow speed.

 

 

[Lion.Kanzen]

17 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Just how many times do I have to say this, infinite speed arrow will ban dancing, not by nerfing pathfinder..

 

 

What is infinity speed arrow?

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

Infinite arrow speed makes ranged units into melee units with different armor and damage types and a long, long pike. I think we can do better.