Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread

Cernel

@Frostion How about instead having these rules:

Air and raft can always pass.
Land can pass if there is a bridge and the territories on both sides are owned or allied.

Then, the raft would be a movement 1 land unit (or maybe a movement 1 kamikaze air unit) that you use to move land units in attack always or for moving without bridges.

?

It doesn't really make sense to me that the bridges are the way for land units to attack. Then why the defender doesn't just destroy the bridges? Indestructible bridges would make more sense if they allow movement only between friendly territories.

Frostion

@Cernel Realism is not really a goal of this map. No bridges can be destroyed in Warcraft, unless it is a bridge meant to be destroyed as part of some story line, cutscene or mission. And even then, the same bridge would magically be restored by the time a new player arrived to the scene Jokes aside, my Warcraft map also seeks simplicity:

Land bridge = Land, air and ammo units may cross into the other territory.
Air bridge = Only air and ammo units may cross into the other territory.

(and yes, for artillery shots to be able to travel into another territory to hit enemies, these enemies should realistically be standing and waiting just past the border line. And this will definitely not be the imagined scenario of every border crossing.)

The map will have a lot of impassable mountain ridges, air only passable mountains, impassable as well as passable rivers and so on. Some regions of the map are dominated by unhindered travels through territories while other areas will have maze like characteristics

I think that I want to just follow my original plans for the bridges.

Cernel

@Frostion said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

@Cernel I could now use your help to make some nice working air-unit canals again
Here is the data, connections and units:
WarcraftWarHeroes-Connections-and-units.txt

This data is not enough. I also need the attached territories. Practically, in your case, to keep it simplest, you need to attach them to a territory that is and will always be owned by the Neutral player.

Cernel

@Cernel said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

@Frostion said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

@Cernel I could now use your help to make some nice working air-unit canals again
Here is the data, connections and units:
WarcraftWarHeroes-Connections-and-units.txt

This data is not enough. I also need the attached territories. Practically, in your case, to keep it simplest, you need to attach them to a territory that is and will always be owned by the Neutral player.

Here it is the set of canals that should allow you enforcing what you want, provided that you substitute all occurrences of "..." with the needed territory:
connections_canals.txt

Cernel

@Frostion said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

@Cernel Realism is not really a goal of this map. No bridges can be destroyed in Warcraft, unless it is a bridge meant to be destroyed as part of some story line, cutscene or mission. And even then, the same bridge would magically be restored by the time a new player arrived to the scene Jokes aside, my Warcraft map also seeks simplicity:

Land bridge = Land, air and ammo units may cross into the other territory.
Air bridge = Only air and ammo units may cross into the other territory.

(and yes, for artillery shots to be able to travel into another territory to hit enemies, these enemies should realistically be standing and waiting just past the border line. And this will definitely not be the imagined scenario of every border crossing.)

The map will have a lot of impassable mountain ridges, air only passable mountains, impassable as well as passable rivers and so on. Some regions of the map are dominated by unhindered travels through territories while other areas will have maze like characteristics

I think that I want to just follow my original plans for the bridges.

I suppose you would need here a feature request by which you can move ammunition into a territory only if other units are attacking that territory through the same connection as the ammunitions are moving. Basically something on the lines of the naval bombardment requiring offloading from the same sea zone.

Otherwise, don't you think it would make no sense that you can fire ammunition into a territory from a border whence no other units are invading? This would be substantially like a battleship bombarding a territory not from the coast where the sea borne assault is actually happening! For example, if France is only one territory, I could make D-Day on the north of France and have my battleships in the Mediterranean supporting D-Day firing across the entire France to the shores in Normandy!

Cernel

@Frostion said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

So the “Air Bridges” and their final look is now done and implemented (note the bit smaller air bridge pictures):

I'd avoid pointless bridges. Unless I'm missing something, for example, the rightmost bridge is between two normally adjacent territories, so why the bridge?

I understand that the drawing of the map has a road there, but, then, I would rather redraw the borders as to assure that bridge is actually useful (for example, splitting the territory to the bottom-right into two..

Cernel

Since a bridge should be at least much easier to defend than an open border, it would be great if you could modify the attack power of units that just moved through a canal. This would be a feature request, but just letting you know that I'd be available for giving the canal codes, in such a case, if provided with the list of bridges connections.

Frostion

@Cernel The plan is to let ammunition be able to fly/be thrown over borders, bridges and air bridges. And yes, it is only realistic to hit an enemy with medieval artillery weapons if the enemy was right on the other side of a river. Probably always impossible to throw rocks over a small mountain range / air bridge. But this will be a game mechanic. It is inspired by the 1 move mortar shots of Age of Tribes and the 2 move Rockets. I found it pretty fun to acquire those weapons and bombarded from a distance, a helpless enemy So I think that it is great fun and that it adds a special dimension to the map. But there are some other things to take in mind on this map. We are not talking about huge territories like France, Ireland or whatever. Some of the Warcraft map territories are not bigger than it is possible to visually, with your ingame eyes, see to the other side of the territory, even though it is still a considerable distance. The artillery units are also expensive. Also, the ammunition units are mostly on the weak side with low hit/kill chance, ranging from 10%-50% (1-5 on d10) right now. Primarily the units are for ruining/bombarding factories/fortifications, that are so strong that they matter greatly in battle, killing many attacking units.

I agree that the bridge picture + a normal border is not optimal. I can say that this case is the only occurrence on the map. I hope players can just ignore it, and think "Ahhh, I have two ways to cross, here AND here ... yay!" I think it will create just as much confusion to see a "missing" bridge than a bridge to much.

I don't think I want to complicate the mechanics of being able to cross a bridge. There will be a lot of stuff going on on this map as it is, and I think the very simple way of handling bridge crossings is most fitting to the setting. But I appreciate you being there to help out

Frostion

@all Just want to let everyone know that this map still lives I would say that the first 90% was relatively quickly made and done (the concept, file structure, graphics, sounds, tooltips etc.). But right now I am fighting my way through the last 10%. But it is kind of like Windows loading minutes and percentages. The last 10% obviously takes much longer than the first.

Right now, I am doing a lot of play-testing and constantly running into issues that force me to re-think and rewrite the rules/xml code. I am also trying to balance the units, prices, heroes to a degree that makes the map playable.

I plan to release BETA versions of the map as soon as the first two races are playable. So the first BETA will feature and be called "Humans and Orcs". The next release will feature two additional races, Dwarves and Tauren, and so on, until all 8 races are developed. So stay tuned!

(Perhaps there will be a little ALPHA stage exclusively for @redrum so he might take a look at the slow map start-up / AI issue and perhaps some of the not-gamebreaking errors that are occurring.)

Greg Anderson

@Frostion said in World of War Heroes – Official Thread:

t

I love your maps. Really good job!

Any updates for this map? I'm eager to try it and help with beta testing.

Frostion

@Greg-Anderson Very soon now! I am doing my final testing now and think it is almost ready and playable. I want it to be as unbroken and playable as possible so that it is actually fun to play-test.

beelee

@Frostion
:beaming_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Greg Anderson

@Frostion I'm really excited to try your map! It seems really cool. :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

redrum

Per @Frostion

Could you please take a look at this map again and some of the remaining issues? I think they are a mix of engine and AI related things. I used engine version 2.0.18691 with AI pause duration set to 0 as the map otherwise would take ages to load.
Warcraft: War Heroes v0.0.4

Issue 1 – Reaching “Max Opperational Damage” does not disable building AA
The save game shows that I attacked Red/Orc capital, bombed the 25 out of 25 HP (Round 1), invaded Capital and their AA was still operational (Round 2) in both first and second Combat Round. It is only the infrastructure build capacity that is disabled. First Combat Round killed 1 attacking unit and second Combat Round killed 4 attacking units.
Was it not established that disabled buildings as a rule should neither build, repair, do AA or anything?

Issue 2 – Picture of wrong owner wants to be displayed?
Occurrence: Save game number 2, Round 1, Dwarves Turn, Right after the attack from Ironforge into Nordstrand is concluded.
It still seems that there is an error poping up (IlligalStateException – Wrong owner, expecting??? but got PlayerId named: ???) everytime a player kills a unit of a another player, the dead unit having "whenHitPointsDamagedChangesInto" something. In this case the dead unit turns into a bag of loot/capturable isinfrastructure. Why is this happening? Is it expected that every single player has a picture of every single enemy unit of the map, even though they can’t build them?

Issue 3 – AI is stacking units at capitals and losing
For some reason, with the current map setup, the AI Orcs, Tauren and Trolls keep insanely amounts of units protecting their capitals, even though their capitals are in no way in any danger of being attacked. This holding back of units during play sets them back quite a bit, prevents them from expanding and winning. Note: In round 7 the Trolls chose to move their grand army from capital, but I still cant see the reason for this build up.

Issue 4 – AI does not build factories
The AI does (again) never build factories (Alliance Guard-Towers and Horde Watch-Towers). Even after 10 rounds of play. Why is that?

Issue 5 – endTurnNoPU does still collect “other resources”
The player “Pirates” seem to collect and display “other resources” even though they use the endTurnNoPU. Why is that?

Issue 6 – Not all isinfrastructures are captured when territory captured
Look at an example of this in “Brewnall Village” west of Green/Dwarven capital. And “Quel Danil Lodge” west of Green/Troll capital. And “The Wyrmbog” not realy catured by the Tauren.

Issue 7 – Round 8, Dwarves Combat Error when capturing Dun Modr.
Don’t know what it is about, but the game kept going.

redrum

Issue 1
So there are actually 2 problems here. The first is that you need to set maxOperationalDamage to 24 instead of 25 as it checks that damage is greater than it and add a _disabled image for capital buildings. The second is that AA rolls were done before isDisabled units are removed from combat so here's a PR fixing that engine bug: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/6271

Frostion

@redrum I appreciate the effort. I did the changes you said and await the PR change so that I may test out bombardment again.

@all does anyone recognize this error just by the text? Is it an AA thing? Normal battle miscalculation thing? I guess the AI did some combat move calculations and failed. The game broke down so there is no save, only a screenshot.

redrum

@Frostion The PR should be merged so I think #1 should be resolved now. I'll try to look into more of them over the next few days.

Uh, I haven't seen that but it essentially is a pretty severe battle calc error (which is used by the Hard AI to simulate battles). For some reason, it tried to take more hits than number of dice rolled! If you are see that again please click report to TripleA if you see that again.

Frostion

@redrum @LaFayette I just tested out prerelease 2.0.18852, and it seems to have the disabled buildings and their AA taken out of battle now. Great!

Also this version of TripleA allows the Hard AI to play with a speed that I have not seen before on this Warcraft map (huge map with many territories). Have you also done some other optimizations that resulted in a speed up of AI thinking time? Something that affected memory? This map runs like x3 the speed of before (hope this doesn't change). It also seems like when I use the minimap to look around the map, it is now much smoother and the tiles load up much faster.

PS: I just uploaded yet another bug report that I think is related to the same AI movement / battle calc thing. This time the map broke down during an AI NCM phase.

redrum

@Frostion Good to hear. And yes, @Alexei-Svitkine has made some AI performance improvements the especially impact very large maps.

Frostion

@redrum
Any news or theories on the issue where AI keeps stacking units at capitals? Since this also seem to affect Dragon War (in both instances making the AI very passive), I suspect it is related to the implementation of land territory canals (for air units only) and restrictions on units ability to travel the connections.

Also the issue where AI does not build factory units. There was a short period during development where AI did build factories a lot, after I made all territories 1-3 PUs territories. The AI began to place factories in 2 and 3 PU territories. But I guess that there has been an AI update some time ago that changed this behavior. Can you see in the save I sent you why there is no factory building?

I sent you a new save and version of the map if you would like to look at this again.

Example of the stacking issue can be seen here, as Trolls keep stacking units in their capital even though they are in no way in any danger of being attacked: