Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread

[Frostion]

OK ... then it is as I feared. But my plan is still to have territories produce a variety of resources. I guess I will not use the PUs directory pictures but instead display the territory production info in decoration or the territory names pictures.

[redrum]

@frostion Yeah, as mentioned, it only works for PUs not other resources.

[Cernel]

Not sure if having the logo looking alike that of another game might be a problem. Tho I'm stunned by how you managed to modify as you wanted it so well.

[Frostion]

@Cernel Like with the ton of other game mods, skins, fan created content and so on for big franchise themes, a Warcraft map for A&A is nothing but free advertisement for the commercial IP owners. Even on steam, the most popular game mods are based on big business IPs, like LotR Civilization, Star Trek Stellaris etc.

By the way, the logo was easy to make as I found a WoW logo generator where one could modify the original text and title. The title "War Heroes" fits the map concept as well as preserves the abbreviation "WoW" and becomes "WoWH" i guess

[Frostion]

Here is a little Alpha stage development sneak preview. I finally have a working XML that launches without errors, Yay! :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_smiling_eyes: Here is a sneak preview, plus a World of Warcraft ingame screenshot of the same area that is shown:

Not many units and stuff yet But you can see the Auberdine Port building and a neutral convoy.png. It took me a very long time to figure out how a Warcraft version of a buoy could look like, but I think this barrel type turned out well:

In World of War Heroes the port village of Auberdine is going to be one of 8-11 ports from where Heroes can get a Ferry ride, where special Trade Ship units will be depart and sail towards other ports (to get gold … the farther out, the more gold) and where fishing boats depart from and head towards fishing/resource sea territories. I haven’t really figured out exactly all the technical details on how this will work, but I guess they will come up on the way.

End of report

[Frostion]

Just want to let everyone interested in this map know that it is still being developed

Progress is slow though. Right now I am slowly implementing all non-player units like resource generating units, non-hero items, captureable buildings ect.

Here is a little preview of the current state. In this picture land and sea territories are up for grabs. The Horde and the Alliance are standing ready:

[Frostion]

So, I have been working some time on this map. Among other things I have spent a good deal of time making the unit graphics, and I am not even done yet. There are a whole lot of unit pictures for each player unit directory, and even though most are shared, I guess it will be a total of approximately 500 unit pictures in every directory!

But I have finished a lot of the races’ shared standard units. Besides standard units every player will have sea units, a hero and 5 unique special units each (like support units, air units, special ships etc.), plus whatever fighting units the players manage to capture/pick up on the map.

But the basic units are:
Cavalry, Crossbows, Archers, Pikemen, Footmen, Irregulars.

(Note: Units will probably get unit symbols/icons so that they are easily recognizable.)

I would really like to get some suggestions and inspiration from you guys when it comes to the basic unit stats. But it must be within the framework of:
• 10 sided dice
• Archers + Crossbows fire one round of AA and then they just use their normal att/def stats.
• Normal move is 1 and cavalry is 2.
Any ideas in regards to the unit set stats?

[redrum]

@Frostion Looking awesome! My suggestion would be to outline what you see each unit should be good at or used for. Maybe also what you want a standard army to potentially look like? Then after doing that we can fit some stats to them. Types of resources and cost of the units would start to become a factor as well.

[Cernel]

@Frostion Minor suggestion for details lovers: I would be consistent with the names. Like in that list not "Crossbows", but "Arbalisters" or "Crossbowmen".
Also, not sure on having names ending with "men" if they are not all humans? Or cavalry, since that implies it's horses? Maybe "Riders"?

[Hepps]

@Frostion All looking very sexy. Great work as usual. I think @redrum suggestion is a good one. Fine each units specific role and then play with the stats from there.

Looking forward to the finished product.

[Black_Elk]

Looks badass! I was a tides of darkness kid when II hit. Dabbled a little in III, though sadly I missed out on WoW, cause I was deep in school at the time and new it would just ruin me if I opened that box hehe. But its cool to see this universe getting a tripleA treatment. Can't wait to check it out

[Frostion]

Here is a small progress report for this map

All the unit art work is done (almost), so I have begun working on the “Hero Bar” information. The Hero Bar is what I call the top right part of the map, dedicated to displaying hero information like stats, level progression and backpack items. The idea is that when hero unit levels up or captures an item on map, triggers remove it and places a corresponding item in the hero's backpack ... this again triggers a change/upgrade of hero unit’s stats.

Like on this map screen shot of a randomly seeded map, just left of the Troll starting area, you find the “Leatherneck” collar item. Picking this up should give “isMarine” to the troll hero unit called "Sian-tsu". The purple item to the north is the “Pendant of Mana” that gives the hero unit +4 Mana resource generation:

Here is a picture of how a hero’s information is displayed at the hero bar:

However, I have also run into an unexpected problem that seems to set a full stop to any testing out this map

The map runs fine when under human control, but when the nations are set under AI control, the pace slows down after 4-6 players have had their turn. After round 1 is over, it practically takes 30-60 minutes for an AI player to take its turn.

The map has 8 main players starting out with 1 territory each + 24 AI small players with 1 territory each (the players are neutral to each other).
In round 1 the 24 small players have no walking/fighting units, just a factory unit placed randomly on the map during territory picking.
In round 1 every small AI players’ only option is to build and place a unit at its factory, but even this is apparently demanding for the AI’s calculations.
In round 2 the AI players only have 1 unit under control and can walk 1 territory out, but this is also apparently demanding for the AI’s calculations.

Maybe it is not the 24 AI players that causes the lag. I have tested out an 8 human player + 1 big AI player, but this version also slows down the game to the same degree, making it unplayable. So I suspect that it is maybe the 400 land territories that is the problem. (???)

Have any of you guys and gals had experience with huge maps and AI?
Is there a developer here willing to download a working alpha version of “World of War Heroes” and maybe figure out what is slowing the map down?
I can provide a dropbox link for you to download from.
Help will be much appreciated … as this extreme slow AI playing / memory problem makes the map unplayable

[redrum]

@Frostion Wow! The screenshots look great. And really liking the ideas and concept here.

I'm glad to take a look at the AI performance issues if you send me a working zip of what you have so far. First question is did you try both the Hard and Fast AI? As if both are slow that narrows down the issue already vs only Hard AI being slow. The 2 most common things that I know of that cause the AI to be slow are number of units being high so simulated battles take a while (probably not the case here and only impacts Hard AI) and the map having a large number of territories (probably the issue here).

I can probably do some quick testing to see which calculations are taking a very long time and make some adjustments. There just hasn't really been any maps that have gotten to the point where the AI takes more than a minute or 2 so haven't really tested anything bigger than probably World At War.

Oh and just to add, number of AI vs human players has virtually no impact as each AI essentially takes its turn separately. Overall number of players has some impact but number of territories is the bigger factor.

[alkexr]

@Frostion Domination 1901 has about 500 land and 200 water territories, turns take around 90s for Hard AI.

[Frostion]

Thanks @redrum. I am at a loss about what is slowing the game down. As @alkexr says, other maps have similar amount of territories, and run much better (still slow I guess), so I can’t see what makes this map extra exhausting for the AI.

The most puzzling thing is that it is so slow, even though all players start out with 1 owned territory.

Dropbox link sent. To test the map, I advise you to just run an all AI game.

BTW because of the change unit on death to another unit, I have of course played with pre-releases. I think I have also tried. I have mostly played with Hard AI.

[redrum]

@Frostion The main issue I found so far is actually that you have a troll and human sea unit after the first set of major player turns that has 100 movement and can transport units. For each AI, it runs calculations to determine the possible moves/attacks from all the other players when determining where it should move. Checking the possibles moves and amphib assaults means for these 100 move ships ends up checking every sea territory and land territory adjacent to sea territories on the whole map. The AI also assumes worse case scenario so doesn't limit the possible moves base on needed fuel (assumes its enemies could possibly get more fuel before moving).

So I guess the question is what's the purpose of these ferry units and do they really need 100 movement?

I did some quick tests and if you either remove their ability to transport units and/or vastly decrease their movement points to say 5 then it seems to run a lot faster.

[Cernel]

@redrum Also guess another user case for being able to set infinite. I wonder if in such a case the AI would go any slower if set to 100 or 1000, assuming 1000 never allows you to do more than what you can with 100?

[redrum]

@Cernel Umm hard to say without running some tests but looking at the code it would have a potential impact and infinite would actually run forever with the current engine code (though infinite would probably correspond to max integer value in Java so wouldn't actually run forever). I added a check in to improve performance where if its already checked all the territories it can reach on a map then it stops searching so that 100 vs 1000 should be the same performance if 100 is already checking all possible territories.

@Frostion I made a few engine improvements for maps with lots of territories and then changed ferries to have 5 instead of 100 movement. I ran a test game with all Fast AI players and got to round 8 in probably about 30 minutes: test.tsvg

@alkexr Yeah, I ran some tests on WaW, Another World, and some of the Domination maps which I think are probably the largest maps we have. I'm making some performance improvements for maps with a large number of territories though this map's issue is primarily the 100 move transport units. If you add units like that to those other maps, you'd probably see performance tank as well.

[Frostion]

@redrum The Ferry unit is a transport that only heroes can use. With the prerelease I have installed, even when they have a movement like 5 move, the AI is still uses a long time to purchase a single unit (the only thing AI can do during round 1), and in round 2 most AI players cannot afford a second unit, but the ones who can, is also here very slow to make the purchase. It seems to me that it is during purchase the slowing down happens.

With the very limited options the AI players have, I can’t see why it takes so long for it to purchase.

I will try to use some of the newer pre-releases and see if there is any differences.

[redrum]

@Frostion Ok. Did you at least see a noticeable improvement when decreasing ferry movement from 100 to 5? Can you give me a ballpark in say round 2 on about how long a major AI turn takes and a neutral AI turn takes? You might want to try increasing the memory allocated to TripleA as well given how large and detailed the map is: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/524/how-to-increase-memory-for-triplea. The default is 2GB but providing 3-4GB might help.

I don't think you'll see much difference in newer pre-release versions until I include some of the performance improvements I'm making now. I'm also vastly decreasing the time it takes for the RandomStartDelegate as that is really slow right now and waiting several minutes for the map to start up each time I test something is painful