Dragon War - Official Thread

Frostion

@redrum That is great. I hope that will improve the AI and it's thinking, as well as the gameplay experience players have when battling the AI.

I hope to work a bit on the Dragon War xml this weekend. So stay tuned

redrum

@Frostion Cool. I'll try to run a few more sample games to test the neutral AI. If you notice any other weird AI behavior let me know and I can try to take a look.

Frostion

@redrum It seems that it is not that easy to implement my idea of two full turns per AI player per round.
For me not get an error saying “this and that must be unique”, like if I in <sequence> simply listed the AI's steps twice, I had to copy and renamed the steps to like:

<step name="PiratesCombatMove-2" delegate="move" player="Pirates" display="Combat Move"/>

This worked and prevented the mentioned the "must be unique"-error.

The map runs fine up until it is AI Pirate player's second turn (the first AI to have its second turn). Then an error saying the following occurs:

“Cannot determine combat or not: PiratesCombatMove-2” (OK) (Show Details)
Details say:

SEVERE: Cannot determine combat or not: PiratesCombatMove-2
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot determine combat or not: PiratesCombatMove-2
	at games.strategy.triplea.delegate.GameStepPropertiesHelper.isCombatMove(GameStepPropertiesHelper.java:110)
	at games.strategy.triplea.delegate.MoveDelegate.start(MoveDelegate.java:93)
	at games.strategy.engine.framework.ServerGame.startStep(ServerGame.java:511)
	at games.strategy.engine.framework.ServerGame.runStep(ServerGame.java:414)
	at games.strategy.engine.framework.ServerGame.startGame(ServerGame.java:290)
	at java.util.Optional.ifPresent(Unknown Source)
	at games.strategy.engine.framework.startup.launcher.LocalLauncher.launchInNewThread(LocalLauncher.java:41)
	at games.strategy.engine.framework.startup.launcher.AbstractLauncher.lambda$launch$0(AbstractLauncher.java:51)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

jan. 18, 2019 3:55:57 PM games.strategy.engine.data.GameParser parseGameLoader
INFO: Loader tag is being ignored
jan. 18, 2019 3:55:57 PM games.strategy.engine.data.GameParser parseGameLoader
INFO: Loader tag is being ignored
jan. 18, 2019 3:55:59 PM games.strategy.triplea.util.Stopwatch done
INFO: Paint took 0 ms
jan. 18, 2019 3:56:05 PM games.strategy.triplea.util.Stopwatch done
INFO: Paint took 0 ms

Do you know how to implement two combat moves for the same player? Any other map that does it? Anyone?

redrum

@Frostion Can you try naming it "Pirates2CombatMove" instead? I think it needs to end in "CombatMove".

Frostion

@redrum That worked

Frostion

@Redrum I am about to release a new version of Dragon War. I am testing it out with engine version 1.10.13840. I must admit that the AI seems not to value the young capturable dragons. Even though they ar given high PUs costs like 100-200 PUs (they still cannot be bought by the primitives) the AI still often places or moves the young dragons alone into vulnerable situations. Like into sure capture spots if a Human player wanted to capture them. The evil/good AI players do not seem to realize that they can easily capture the dragons though.

redrum

@Frostion Do you have an example save game that I can take a look at?

Frostion

@redrum
Yes I have saved examples. I played a game and notes approximately a bad dragon move every turn.

The save is made in the new version of Dragon War that I have just uploaded to github. Updated from v1.2.4 to v1.2.5.

I hope you can figure out what makes the AI be careless with the capturable intrastructure units. It would be great if AI only used them in combat when they are fairly certain of victory

DragonWar1.2.5BadDragonMoves.tsvg

You can see examples at these points:
Round 2, Gnoll, NCM (Second round of AI moves), Young-Brown-Dragon
Round 3, Murlocs, NCM (Second round of AI moves), Young-Green-Dragon
Round 3, Kobold, NCM (Second round of AI moves), Young-Blue-Dragon
Round 4, Barbarians, NCM (First round of AI moves), Young-Red-Dragon
Round 6, Kobold, NCM (First round of AI moves), Young-Blue-Dragon

redrum

@Frostion I guess my question would be for at least some of these moves where would you expect it to go? For example, looking at the Round 6 move, there really isn't any good options and pretty much its going to be captured by any human played blue or orange no matter what. I guess you could argue Garwald or Maragorn is better than the other options since it at least takes amphib to capture but not much.

But there does appear to be a bug where the AI doesn't properly value if isInfra units are the only unit in a territory.

redrum

@Frostion PR to improve AI handling of defending isInfra units: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/4627

Frostion

@redrum What kind of behavioural change could we expect this change to bring? I will test it out asap

redrum

@Frostion I retested the examples from your save game and the AI moves the young dragons to much safer places as it now understands that if the young dragon is alone that its as good as lost. There are still times that the AI really doesn't have much choice but seems to pick the best out of the bad options in those cases.

redrum

@Frostion You should be able to test out the AI changes in the latest pre-release now.

Frostion

A new version of Dragon War is uploaded to Git. The map can be updated via TripleA to this newest version.

Dragon War v1.2.4 to v1.2.5
• Ability to move units from Northern Baldoria over the river to Southern Baldoria removed.
• The capturable Young-Water-Dragon now spawns in round 1 in one of 6 possible random locations, alongside 1 Pirate Ship and 1 Pirate Boat.
• AI harassing players (Murlocs, Ogres, Kobolds etc.) now start out with less units.
• AI harassing players now have 2 turns per round, but their units are raised x4 in price so that they may now actually only buy half the units compared to before this update. This is to compensate for the much smarter and active AI and allow them to be defeated more easily.
• Young dragons are now valued higher by the AI harassing players than before, so they should now try to protect them a bit more.
• Added 9 sawmills to the map to support more building of ships and artillery.
• Doubled the number of unique music files, but also shortened them all from 2 minutes to 1 minute as players can now play an entire alliance, have 3 turns in a row and therefore have 3 music files be played in sequence. It should be avoided to have the music overlap.
• Other minor edits to the map and map notes.

The 6 possible Water-Dragon Spawn points:

redrum

@Frostion The changes look good. A few thoughts/questions:

Any plans to do a similar random spawn locations for the rest of the dragons?
Most of the water dragon locations are in places where both sides would have a chance except the one south of the Pontic Desert. Might be better to move that one further east.
Did you get a chance to test the latest pre-release AI? Any additional feedback?

Frostion

@redrum
Right now the placement of the other dragons are as random as the AIs decisions on where it wants to place. (The dragons are placed by AI at factories, not the triggers.) The placing seems to be pretty consistent, but I haven't really tested out what happens if a player massively moves towards one of the well used spawn points. Will the AI place elsewhere if an army is standing in the neighbour territory and threatens to attack? I hope so.

I have played only a few short test games with the latest AI. I noticed a few times that the AI takes the dragon and runs away if possible before it can be captured, unlike before. So the AI has improved a lot. Maybe enough to let the dragons be captured only if it has no other option.

I don't know about the most southern desert location. It is the only one close to Greenskins and I am not even sure the Greenskin player would cheer after placement, as it forces the player to focus heavily on building ships before a Dragon and 3 pirate ships arrives to wipes out the green fleet and blockade the area. Closer to Greenskins would mean less time to prepare.

That said, further testing and changes are very possible. When there is time.

redrum

@Frostion Ok. Mostly just concerned that the AI placed dragons are sometimes are placed where there aren't any defending units so can be immediately captured (at least that has happened in both the PBF games). Now that the AI defends them better if they aren't immediately captured then it should be better but sometimes they are captured before the AI can move them.

mattbarnes

@redrum, great map. Wow, the AI got aggressive in the latest version! It’s making it very interesting!

redrum

@mattbarnes Yeah, the AI finally understands moves of the advanced features its using. They also have 2 turns per round which gives them a lot of movement.

mattbarnes

We played this again. Lots of fun. The AI is nicely aggressive.

The dragons split fairly evenly but in one game it was I&II&IV against III&V&VI which was a bit disbalanced. Even with the shorter movement range of dragons (which is good), the very high HP dragons are just totally dominant if not facing a similar enemy. Should the dragons be made a little more equal to each other?

The Water Dragon is quite limited and poor value. Not only is it a drawback to be sea-only, it also can’t do a non-combat move after a battle in the way it’s airborne brethren can.

The I dragon isn’t much better than the Elven eagle or Dwarf airship.

Also, the game balance seems to favour Good because Crowton is too easy to isolate and blockade. Can anything be done about that?