Unusual high sniping activity of very few players

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I analyzed a game of Stockfish and stumbled up on some weird behavior regarding unusual high sniping activity. Now I analyzed a few more game of him and others.
The unusual sniping acts in that way, that one players sends individual attack commands to individual units. In the commands.txt it looks like this in one turn:

cmd 2 {"type":"attack","entities":[2472],"target":2963,"queued":false,"pushFront":false,"allowCapture":false,"formation":"special/formations/null"}
cmd 2 {"type":"attack","entities":[2483],"target":2963,"queued":false,"pushFront":false,"allowCapture":false,"formation":"special/formations/null"}
cmd 2 {"type":"attack","entities":[2533],"target":2963,"queued":false,"pushFront":false,"allowCapture":false,"formation":"special/formations/null"}
...

In the following graphs I count only these individual attack commands for each player.
Here are 4 games of Stockfish which all show this behavior and I did not find a game which didn't have this that were longer than 10 min:

 

Here are some games of other high ranked players that don't have this unusual sniping activity:

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But I found one player (sanafur) that is currently active and has this unusual active sniping:
Maybe he can provide some insight how this is done.

 

commands.zip

Sniping with alt+rightclick gives the command to one unit. Or more precisely to the unit with the lowest entity ID / oldest. In a game one can't know realistically which would be that in a group. So if one would alt-rightclick one couldn't give the command to the nearest unit. This would only make sense with a target in range of everyone in a group. Archers and slingers might use this in bigger groups (30+). Skirmishers might try to reach a target on the other side of the group and would need to run between their own army. Halt command (H-key) makes more sense then to attack the next target near each unit without sniping.

Edited November 16 by ffm2

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This is the python script for these graphs

load_replay.py

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

I use alt+left click sniping with 100+ units. Can you see if I have an apm spike like this? You may have to look for an older game from base a26; since the comm mod came out sniping with skirmishers is not nearly as good as it was. I’ve definitely lost fights because of trying to snipe after the comm mod came out. The extra pathing and exposure for skirmishers is now more prohibitively expensive. 

[ffm2]

Here are the ones from @BreakfastBurrito_007

[Atrik]

Just fix sniping... Any game mechanic that is about clicking fast fast is not interesting, and subjected to create unbalances if anyone has 'gaming' mouses/drivers with click multipliers or anything.

[Philip the Swaggerless]

lol @Stockfishnub

Individual commands = individual clicks?
1 turn = 1 frame?  
 Besides the ones in the thousands, how are their even ones that are around 300?  People clicking when its paused?

Edited November 15 by Philip the Swaggerless

[ffm2]

1 turn is 0.2 seconds game time (in this alpha). During lag and pauses (if you have autociv) spikes can occur. Usually more players have a high command count then. In the second plot of the sanafur section one can see Decger have one high spike at the end. But looking at other games Decger one cant see this. So one needs to check a few games.

For other commands, like holding the ungarrison key, multiple commands can also be send during one turn. But in this case the target changes where one would need to click on to.

This is very rare, can be code executed or some overlooked mechanic of which no one else knows. Like this funny exploit

Edited November 16 by ffm2

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36 minutes ago, Philip the Swaggerless said:

Besides the ones in the thousands, how are their even ones that are around 300? 

Oh, you mean the legend entry, that's the sum over the whole game. Should have labeled it better. The value of each turn is on the y-axis

[Philip the Swaggerless]

1 hour ago, ffm2 said:

Oh, you mean the legend entry, that's the sum over the whole game. Should have labeled it better. The value of each turn is on the y-axis

Does that mean that there are people who have never specifically directed an individual unit to do anything?  Some say 0.

[TheCJ]

2 hours ago, Philip the Swaggerless said:

who have never specifically directed an individual unit to do anything

Not "to do anything" but "to attack directly". Many players (like me) mainly use attack-move or select entire groups to queue-snipe, which doesnt increase the counter of "sent a single unit to directly attack an enemy".

[ffm2]

Yes, other ways to attack are (all not counted in the diagrams here):

attack-walk (ctrl+Q+right-click)
Is good for the starting of a battle when you face an enemy that is not tightly grouped. If units run loosely with this method in a tight group of enemies they die fast in a outnumbered fight.

stop activity (H-key)
Let the selected units drop all activities with a aggressive stance results attacking the nearest target very fast. Good for complex situations. Also good if your units have a locked target, the target retreats and there are other targets in range. So your units don't spend time walking but attacking.

group sniping (select a group right-click)
Makes sense to take out heroes (and their aura on the army), siege and in small battles with e.g. 5 riders to take out wounded units.

 

With other plots like these I like to see some habits other players have. The stop activity is heavily underutilized imo. of middle strong players that might not even know this can be used in that way.

 

8 hours ago, Atrik said:

Just fix sniping...

It's not so easy, or what do you mean? You'd rather not be able to take out heroes or siege? Commanding a catapult on a CC would also be considered single unit attack (unqueued). I don't want to lose that control. I don't see a general problem in this mechanic.

Imo. a rounded use of all the techniques described above usually makes sniping with a lot alt+rightclick of big groups not a good choice. It's very apm intensive and too little rewarding compared to other tasks. You can see some top players not using this at all in these graphs.

Edited November 16 by ffm2

[alre]

so sniping is still a thing with the community mod? was it nerfed though, right? 

[0 calories]

13 hours ago, ffm2 said:

 

But I found one player (sanafur) that is currently active and has this unusual active sniping:
Maybe he can provide some insight how this is done.

 

commands.zip 1.62 MB · 4 downloads

Sniping with alt+rightclick gives the command to one unit. Or more precisely to the unit with the lowest entity ID / oldest. In a game one can't know realistically which would be that in a group. So if one would alt-rightclick one couldn't give the command to the nearest unit. This would only make sense with a target in range of everyone in a group. Archers and slingers might use this in bigger groups (30+). Skirmishers might try to reach a target on the other side of the group and would need to run between their own army. Halt command (H-key) makes more sense then to attack the next target near each unit without sniping.

Gaming mouse is all you neeed to fine-tune your speed of clicks. Also gaming keyboard gives you advantage (better hw = kind of cheating)

[TheCJ]

5 hours ago, ffm2 said:

group sniping (select a group right-click)
Makes sense to take out heroes (and their aura on the army), siege and in small battles with e.g. 5 riders to take out wounded units.

I actually do this every fight, no matter if the enemy has a hero or not, as its technically just better than the single unit target method of sniping.

If you select the correct amount of ranged units to one-shot the enemy ranged units without too much overshooting, this is the quickest way to reduce the enemies damage output, thus granting you an advantage.

Single unit attack sniping on the other hand will result in many units of the enemy army being low, but not dead, as the single unit died before it could kill the ranged enemy, which results in a lot of "wasted" damage, if the enemy heals up after winning the fight.

[ffm2]

2 hours ago, 0 calories said:

Gaming mouse is all you neeed to fine-tune your speed of clicks. Also gaming keyboard gives you advantage (better hw = kind of cheating)

Sure, better hardware gives an advantage, but I don't see a benefit in this case.

Lets assume you hold down a extra mouse button that clicks 1000 times per second.

In combination with holding alt and hovering the mouse over enemies you'd send units a walk command in between when the cursor is not on a enemy unit.

In combination with attack-walk it would be the same as the attack-walk alone.

[MarcusAureliu#s]

I see that in one of the games Decger gets to about 50% of Sanafurs numbers. Some of his spikes seem to exceed sanafurs sniping. One reason i can think of, is that only few players constantly re-snipe after having gone through there whole army once. The sanafur-Decger game seems to hint at Decger beeing able to get to higher numbers than Sanafur, had he enganged into more fights, or sniped constantly. I would suggest we conduct some practical experiments maybe ? Before consequences can be taken we would need to be near 100% sure about it.

[Atrik]

8 hours ago, ffm2 said:

It's not so easy, or what do you mean? You'd rather not be able to take out heroes or siege? Commanding a catapult on a CC would also be considered single unit attack (unqueued).

I'm ofc not talking about removing the ability to make a single unit attack, but rather to add a feature to make sniping less spamy. In my opinion too much workaround are considered when any fun micro feature could just make a great fix for this spamy meta. Example of feature I suggested in another workaround tweaking by @real_tabasco_sauce:

 

[ffm2]

Here is a zoom on the sanafur-Decger game. Apart from the one spike of 30 he gets rarely over 4 and max. 7. You reached 5 here in one game too. Maybe you can try and send a command.txt?

The big difference is that it's in every game over 10 min. of sanafur and Stockfish that I checked. Decger and you have it on rare occasions.

[0 calories]

1 hour ago, ffm2 said:

Here is a zoom on the sanafur-Decger game. Apart from the one spike of 30 he gets rarely over 4 and max. 7. You reached 5 here in one game too. Maybe you can try and send a command.txt?

The big difference is that it's in every game over 10 min. of sanafur and Stockfish that I checked. Decger and you have it on rare occasions.

In general mine clicks are 3xtimes faster - that all magic. Decger probably enable hw or sw snipping only when he wants. As I have it generic setup I do it all the time.

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3 hours ago, ffm2 said:

Sure, better hardware gives an advantage, but I don't see a benefit in this case.

Lets assume you hold down a extra mouse button that clicks 1000 times per second.

In combination with holding alt and hovering the mouse over enemies you'd send units a walk command in between when the cursor is not on a enemy unit.

In combination with attack-walk it would be the same as the attack-walk alone.

With community mod snipping is not that effective anymore, with vanilla it is significantly  much more effective. 

1000 click within minute probably wont be even registered by 0ad engine... you have 20msec one turn.. human is able to get from 5-15 click within this period depends how trained he is .. I would rather see Atrik recommendation to avoid "faster clicks" wins..  so engine would avoid it or get more automation into targeting.. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

8 hours ago, alre said:

so sniping is still a thing with the community mod? was it nerfed though, right? 

I find that is less effective/prevalent as compared to the base game.

Still however, units like the han crossbowman are much better with sniping because you avoid overkill. For instance, if more than 3 Han crossbows hit a ranged unit, each additional hit is a waste. My patch that @Atrik linked is an attempt to fix this aspect of it.

[Atrik]

11 minutes ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I find that is less effective/prevalent as compared to the base game.

Still however, units like the han crossbowman are much better with sniping because you avoid overkill. For instance, if more than 3 Han crossbows hit a ranged unit, each additional hit is a waste. My patch that @Atrik linked is an attempt to fix this aspect of it.

It's less prevalent thanks to the melee re-balance, but in some cases it's still very important, and will 'force' you to snipe even if you would rather not doing it, your example with hans is one, another is when enemy has pikes, or even just if you have archers. I don't think it would be possible to avoid either:
1. accepting sniping as game mechanic (I don't like it) even with workaround this would still give a big fighting efficiency boost to players sniping.
2. introducing a feature that replace alt-clicking for sniping by a less spammy one (in this case, this thread wouldn't have to exist).

[Player of 0AD]

Stockfish is able to click very fast, I heard it in voicechat. Can someone analyse some games of weirdJokes and share the results here?

[0 calories]

15 minutes ago, Player of 0AD said:

Stockfish is able to click very fast, I heard it in voicechat. Can someone analyse some games of weirdJokes and share the results here?

just run that python script ffm attached you can get it yourself