ADVICE: solve autorout bug

[MagyarKhans Cham]

yep plz do cuz it is a gamespoiler itself.

[evilc]

ahmen to that

[Krasturak]

Gah!

In fact, if they do all kinds of cool stuff and this bug is still there, Krast will be extremely disappointed.

[Magyar Khan]

target? what u think?

[longjohn2]

I've been a bit confused by reports of this bug, but having finally got a computer that can run Shogun, I tried to replicate it using stacked orders to move away from an enemy, but couldn't. The various reports on this weren't clear though on whether one stacked order was enough, or whether you needed a series. Anyway having tried to replicate it on both Shogun and MTW I don't think using stacked orders has anything to do with it.

I think that what you refer to as the auto rout bug, is what I called the Benny Hill detection code. (Benny Hill was a comedian who used to get chased around a lot by women in underwear ). It's a feature that was put in to discourage people from running around with a single cavalry unit waiting for the clock to run out.
What happens, is if you order a unit to move away from the nearest enemy unit ( if it's fairly close ) 10 times, then it'll rout. Attacking resets the count. Honour, fatigue or anything else have nothing to do with it. It's outside of the regular morale system. Moving away from the nearest enemy unit is the key thing. Each time you set a waypoint, this counts as a move too.
I did have some reservations when I put this in, and asked the rest of the team to look out for problems. However, I figured that you wouldn't move away from the enemy 10 times, if you had any intention of fighting, and in testing it appears no-one did. However, it looks like people who like to make a series of short moves are having problems with it.

If any of you can make it happen reliably in circumstances that don't fit the above description, or if you think it's something completely different, I'd like to know.

I do apologise for any games it's messed up. It was put in to fix a problem, but I failed to forsee the problems it might cause in multiplayer. Hopefully having the information on exactly what is happening will help you avoid it in future. I'd have posted this info sooner, but the emphasis on using stacked orders in the various discussions, led me to believe that it was a genuine bug being discussed.

You'll probably want me to change this for MTW. Unfortunately. I can only talk about what happens in Shogun. I've been expressly forbidden from making anything that might be construed as a promise about MTW

[Krasturak]

Gah!

Finally, here it is! The real explanation behind the rout bug.

Well, it sucks.

It would be best to get rid of it.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets to the point in developing their skills where this bug jumps up and bites them.

It's a mystery ... it isn't explained in the manual.

So, when Krast was getting his fully-rested, safe gun units routing from an enemy 200 yards away, with no fighting or shooting going on, (among many other situations) this was the cause.

Yeah, Krast moved them more than ten times.

Makes sense now.

But it is a bad device, since it will have so many other consequences beyond solving the cav escaping thing.

Hmmmmmmmm. Very interesting. Thanks for explaining it at last.

[Puzz3D]

longjohn2,

Thanks very much for your reply regarding what we call the auto rout. The idea that you have to use "stacked" commands to cause it has been stated by several people, but that was not my finding. Here is the thread from January 2001 where I first posted about 'away' moves being the cause of the auto rout: http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000451.html

I'll paste the two relevent posts I made here to lessen reading, but the whole thread is interesting.

30 Jan 2001
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barocca: I ran some custom game tests on my LAN to investigate routing and flanking. I found out some very interesting things.
First I used 7 honor=0 Yari Ashigaru, and an honor=2 YA taisho unit for each army. The armies were formed into a single line of rectangular units (4 or 5 men deep) with the taisho unit centered behind. I brought the attacking army (Mori) up quite close to the defender (Takeda) line. Most of the units in both lines became 'uncertain'. Taking Mori's end unit to a flanking position and filling the gap with Mori's taisho made Takeda's end unit waver, but the flanking Mori unit also started wavering unless it was pointed directly at the Takeda line. So, units carrying out a close flanking maneuver can easily consider themselves as flanked even though the enemy units are not facing the flanking unit.

One other thing I tried here, was to take Mori's tashio way behind the Takeda line. The tashio unit became uncertain back there, but Mori's line units didn't seem to suffer any morale loss that I could see. As the taisho approached Takeda's line from behind it began to waiver when still quite far from the enemy's line. After moving around a bit back there, the taisho ran away and couldn't be rallied. The only Takeda unit I moved around much was the taisho, and that unit also ran away. As I played around with the rest of Mori's units, they eventually all ran away. I figured they got tired.

I decided to try this with 7 honor=0 Yari Samurai and an honor=2 YS taisho for Mori, and the same for Takeda except for an honor=2 YA taisho. With the lines facing each other quite closely the end units became uncertain. Moving the taisho to the end would bring that unit up to steady. The taisho would make enemy units uncertain as he moved along close behind them, but they would recover to steady once the taisho moved on. Routing each taisho in turn didn't noticably change the status of his units. I rallied the taishos, and was moving them around when I saw this rout bug, as it's called. Each taisho was steady. One was quite fresh and the other was quite tired, but they both abruptly routed when I gave a move command, and neither could be rallied.

I played around with this, and it's repeatable. I couldn't get this to happen if the enemy was far away, but with two lines a distance of about 30 men apart all you have to do is move a unit or the taisho side to side a bit. Between the 15th and 20th move the unit will run away, and you cannot rally it. It will happen even if the unit is steady and quite fresh. If you try to rally such a unit, you can see them briefly attempt rallying to an uncertain status, but they can't hold it. Seems like something spooked them.

It might be a bug, or it might be that giving too many move commands makes the troops think you don't know what your doing. In that case, rallying would make no sense whatsoever.
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02 Feb 2001
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barocca: I ran some more tests in custom battle against the AI to investigate the rout bug (feature). I took 8 honor=9 Warrior Monks against the AI's 8 honor=2 Yari Ashigaru on the Green map. It's quite easy to make the WM loose without either side inflicting any casualties. If you march toward and away from the YA eventually all the WM units will run away. It always happens when you move your unit 'away' from the enemy. The WM units were steady and quite tired, and once they rout they cannot be rallied. In a second test, I forced the AI over to my side of the map with some flanking maneuvers so that the map was reversed. Once again the WM's would rout when moving 'away' from the enemy units, and then proceed to run right into the enemy units. It varied, but I was seeing the effect at around 20 'away' moves. In a third test, I tried 16 honor=3 Yari Samurai against 1 honor=3 Yari Samurai. Marching quite close to the lone YS in a double line (13 in front and 3 behind center): the 6 central units of YS routed on the 10th 'away' move. Some other tests showed that you couldn't get the rout to occur if you were far away from the enemy units. So far, I've been able to establish that the effect extends out to at least a distance of 120 men (150 meters).
It looks like there is a parameter being used which the player has no feedback on. This parameter's value is changing each time a unit moves away from an enemy unit. When it reaches a certain value, that unit's morale is severly affected. Either that or the unit's morale is being gradually affected, but the morale value being used for the status display is some intermediate value determined before this hidden parameter's value is added. If the rout bug was simply a random effect with a small probability of occurance, I would sometimes see it happen on the first away move , but I haven't seen it in anything less than 10 away moves.


The implications of this are tactically important. If you're standing in front of an enemy unit and move to the side, you're moving away from it. If the enemy to your front also has a cavalry unit behind you, you can't move in any direction without moving away from an enemy unit. If you bypass a hidden enemy unit, you start moving away from it (I'm guessing that hidden units count). And, the obvious one of falling back to a better position in the face of a stronger enemy.

Personally, I feel the player should be given some visual feedback on this effect. If it is just a random event, then knowing the chance of it happening would be nice. Oh yeah, I forgot. We're not supposed to know this stuff. Trial and error. That's what keeps everybody playing, right?
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End of quoted posts


I did later find the approximate distance this effect extends out to, but I don't know where the thread is right now. This so called "auto rout" or 'Benny Hill effect" has definitely changed with the v1.02 patch to WE/MI. It seems less likely to happen since the patch, but I haven't run any tests to prove that. Possibly the threshold number of moves has been raised.

The online game is much more playable now that this happens less. It's not gone by any means. It particularly, adversly affects the use of cavalry archers which often have to fall back multiple times in evasive maneuvers. In STW players were developing the tactic of putting a single unit behind your army to trigger the "auto rout". With the invisible battlefield ninja of WE/MI this would be difficult to counter. The "auto rout" does often end games where a defeated enemy is just running around with a single fast unit. I'm not sure what the optimum balance would be, but making it something like 30 away moves would still end such a battle, but leave you plenty of flexibility of movement during the height of the battle.

Thanks again for clearing this up.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

[MagyarKhans Cham]

believe me john

it is so ez reproduced that even I can do it.

plz try again

place one unit nearby enemy
and kepe double clicking away from him
it should work within approx 10 times double clicking

some mizus made a better guideline for this.

perhaps i can show u online?

[MagyarKhans Cham]

john

in battles between the best players which have similar armies with various units on a good map it can take 30-60 minutes where armies move around the map like boxers in the 1st round. we just dont clash and hack, manouvring balanced armies is like dancing.

so it is more likely that u make 10-20 moves away from teh enemy without launching a single attack.

but why is it needed enemy for this game?

cant it be skipped?

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Quote I gallop messages around, dont track me I can bring war as well[/QUOTE]

[Toda Nebuchadnezzar]

Not being one of the best, but still well used to playing online, I do tend to skip around with my army until i get a better place to defend from (ad attack http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif) Where as newbies just charge in. The Benny Hill affect really hinders my game play!

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Grand Master of
The Knights Templar
"non nobis Domine non nobis sed Nomine tuo da gloriam"

[TosaInu]

Konnichiwa,

A Benny Hill Detection Toggle in options menu. When toggled on, a box allows user input of 1-255 (store as Char, performance!).

Toggles make good games excellent: UnrealTournament, Civilisation, Alpha Centauri.

A game needs Toggles, Sliders, Editors, PerformanceScaling, SpeedSettings, and AI settings (cautious, beserk etc). When there are 'designissues' (yes/no/yes if/no but) just make a toggle and make the user decide himself (if possible :-).

Most preferably editable txt files (ini) to be able to FORCE a setting with a texteditor. The normal way should also be present: a smooth working WYSIWYG configuration menu in the game. Option to store profiles.

Personally I like the game Unreal Tournament much more than Quake Arena because it has a Wysiwyg option menu with loads of toggles/sliders.

Some other toggles could be:
-availabilty of units,
-different settings for Strategic and Tactic difficulty,
-Automatic/Manual Trade, Recruiting, Diplomacy,
-Allow economic Victory,
-seasons/months/weeks per turn (I prefer less than 3 months per turn),
-respawn of eliminated fractions.
-Usage of custom Stats, Sprites, Scripts.

And please let MTW remember the settings. I've a GeForce3, and the 8 bit textures look horrible (even causes nasty bugs). Every time STW is started it uses the 8 bit as default. I had to Register hack (Riva Tuner) to fix it.


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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi
http://www.takiyama.cjb.net

[This message has been edited by TosaInu (edited 01-25-2002).]

[Sir Kuma of The Org]

I second that Toggles are a great idea and can keep different type of players happy.

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Yes the camel sprites do look good, hope they sound good also...

[Polar]

good idea again tosa, except i wont be able to do any thing other than charge right away when the Benny Hill Detection is set to 1. LOL http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif
and btw, char is usually slower than int http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

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http://chat.carleton.ca/~fbai/pix/sig1.jpg (http://www.totalwar.gametribe.net)
• UglyPolar •

[TosaInu]

Konnichiwa,

Thanks for correcting me Polar san. My programming 'skills' are very basic. I learned (I think) that larger types were less efficient: an int being better than longint.

"except i wont be able to do any thing other than charge right away when the Benny Hill Detection is set to 1."

I would have a very good excuse when I lose, the current supply of excuses is almost exhausted.




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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi

http://www.takiyama.cjb.net

[evilc]

Quote Originally posted by TosaInu:
WYSIWYG
[/QUOTE]

what you see is what you get ???????

[TosaInu]

Konnichiwa,

Yes, not a console, but a window with sliders and Radiobuttons so that you don't have to remember codes (Quake3).



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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi

http://www.takiyama.cjb.net

[Kraellin]

lol longjohn2,

i always used to laugh when someone called a bug an 'undocumented feature'. boy, this one sure hits the mark on that ;)

magy, yuuki, myself and one other person spent a few hours one day reproducing this thing in multi. just testing how it worked and trying to see if there was any way to avoid it. it's a pure pain in the butt in multi. i can think of several games i've lost because of this thing. i might have lost anyways, but didnt even get a chance to find that out. please, take it out! the only game i've ever played where i tried to simply dodge another player(s) by continuously moving my horses away from him, i was still run down in a corner and was too far away from him to invoke this auto-rout anyways.

the times when it's worked against me are when i'm manuevering away from an enemy that it trying to flank me and who usually has a superior force. this is often done at fairly close quarters to the enemy and is almost always done in small increments, thus invoking the 10 moves away from nearest enemy routine. this particularly comes up in 2v2 or more games where one army on your side is gone and you're now facing your one army against 2 remaining armies. you are forced into a defensive role and must avoid being flanked so you are constantly shifting your units backwards, preferably towards higher ground.

this can also happen in a mongol cav vs jap infantry game where the mongols are constantly manuevering their units for archery targets or flanking advantages and/or in missile games where you are trying to get out from heavy missile fire constantly.

i understand why you put this code in, but the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages of such code. please, this is an arbitrary that no general shld have to contend with. please remove it. in fact, if you could make a patch, i'd love to see it removed from stw/we/mi, though i understand why that may not happen at this point ;)

hehe...cant make any promises, eh? gee, wonder where that came from ;)

K.


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The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.

[Erado San]

One added problem in a messy melee is that when the units are all closely involved in battle any move you make can literally mean moving away from the nearest unit. So while you are trying to plug that hole in your line you actually cause your unit to rout.

From what I have seen during the testing we did some half a year ago... I believe Magy was there, Kocmoc and someone else. LongJohns description seems to explain it well. I remember I could rout units with or without stacked commands. Just making a number of moves away did the trick. Funny. Selected the entire army once and made it move away from one H0 Ashi unit... Crazy to see the entire army run for a bunch of misfits.

[TakedaShingen li]

i was fighting rusty frog when all of the sudden his cav run he was hiding it in da forrest so it explains why he run i didnt liked when all of the sudden his cav run i am sorry that his cav run get rid of this insect we call rout bug or b enny hill bug http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/mad.gif http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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Takeda:cavalary legend

[Vanya]

Gah! I usually just select all 16 of my arquebusier wedgies and double-click on the enemy general. All I gotta do is sit back and watch the mayhem after that! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/eek.gif I guess I am just not 'sophisticated' enough tactically to have experienced this bug so far... http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/rolleyes.gif

[MagyarKhans Cham]

at this moment my Khan of Khans is testing this in game where he reguraly retets the 10-times counter by short-attack commands.

he is wondering if it also is resetted when a shooter unit gets a shoot command and not a combat command.

[evilc]

i just click on an enemy unit every now and again, i am guessing that it might reset the count.

[Krasturak]

Magy, please share the results of this test.

If it is a way to reset the count and kill the bug, we'd all be better off.

[MagyarKhans Cham]

it is not a test in a sense of sience but more trail and erroring along teh way and adjusting his feeling according to what had happend (or not)

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Quote I gallop messages around, dont track me I can bring war as well[/QUOTE]

[Tac]

That thing of making a unit rout if told to run away from enemy 10 times is bullcrap.

Cavalry are HIT AND RUN units. It pisses me off to no end to see my yari cavalry effectively murder half a unit of their archers before their yari sam units come to kill my cavalry, tell cavalry to run away from the archers...

and the 10th time you do it (8 out of 10 times the enemy reacts so quickly you have to call off the charge, making it count as a "run away" command), the fricken cavalry routs, running through MY troops causing them to waver and even rout.

I think this "feature" is really stupid. Hell, if the AI is not affected by fatigue and can RUN away from my armies during the ENTIRE time period making me lose because my troops are totally exhausted and cant chase anymore... then WHY the hell cant I do the same?

1) Get rid of this auto-rout crap
2) ADD fatigue to AI troops.

Do that and the game will be MUCH better off.

[longjohn2]

As I've posted on here before the a.i. suffers fatigue in EXACTLY the same way as the player's forces. I don't know why some people persist in believing otherwise.

It is true that at the end of some battles the a.i. finds itself unable to achieve much, and attempts to keep its forces alive by moving them away from threats. It doesn't however have a deliberate policy of dancing around and running the clock down, and it isn't really too hard to herd it into a corner and finish it off. Sometimes it occurs when it has no retreat on the strat map, and sometimes it occurs because of a difference of opinion between the part of the a.i. that decides if it should withdraw, and the part that tries to find some useful action for it to take.

As for cavalry being hit and run units, I'd have to disagree. This was a period in which infantry was overwhelmly the predominent force, and the game tries to reflect that.

[Puzz3D]

I have observed an ai unit suffering fatigue as it chased one of my units. The ai unit started alternately walking and running. This only happens if the unit becomes exhausted, and then recovers to very tired once it walks for a bit. I did post my observations on this a while back. What I didn't know was the rate of fatigue, and I didn't remember longjohn2's earlier post.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

[TosaInu]

Konnichiwa longjohn2 sama,

'As for cavalry being hit and run units, I'd have to disagree. This was a period in which infantry was overwhelmly the predominent force, and the game tries to reflect that.'

Indeed a lot of yariashigaru, wouldn't that force a cavalry unit to pullback/cancel an attack?

I appreciate that the AI tries to save his skin (seems very logical in campaign battles), but it would both be nice and realistic to have beserk AI armies. In custom battles (practice purpose) and scenarios it's quite frustrating to have the enemy unit routing before engaging at all.

Example: fanatic units don't have to be skilled but should be prepared to fight till the last man (without any trace of routing/pulling back).




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Ja mata
Toda MizuTosaInu
Daimyo Takiyama Shi

http://www.takiyama.cjb.net

[Rath]

Thanks for those who were kind enough to mention that an attack command resets the count...i've been doing it when ive found ive had to shuffle one or 2 units quite a bit in certain battles and havent had a rout bug since.

[Papewaio]

It would make sense that this undocumented feature is toggled on and off when the timer is toggled on and off as well.

So if you have limited time you can't just do the Benny Hill Run. If you have unlimited time it really doesn't matter if you keep running... it might become a marathon test of boredom at worst and good manuvering combat at best and how true to Sun Tzu is that!

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Never start a land war in Asia
Never bet with a Sicilian when death is on the line
Never expect anything more then sarcasm from an Australian

[Tac]

cavalry, specially light cavalry have always been hit and run, harrasment forces. Heavy cavalry (like the brit Heavy Horse) were used to charge into ranks of footmen and break their formations so their own footmen running behind the heavy horse attack could cut them down during the confusion.

In STW, hitting archers with yari cav. is logical, expected even. But while your cav. is killing the archers the yari sams come to their rescue, which is when the yari cav. should pull out. Thing is, they dont. They form up again and get out.. and while they do that even MORE of their numbers get into combat with the archers and get tied down there.. allowing the yari sams to catch and butcher them. This is a great issue.

And jhon, just as I replied on the other thread, take a unit of AI yari sams and face it vs 1 of yari cav. Have the cav run/ march away from them. The yari sams will run most of the way without tiring (marching only to pivot or change direction) while your cavalry gets completely exhausted and cant run.. and then the RUNNING yari sams catch up to them.

Simple test. Do it.

[Puzz3D]

Tac,

I performed your test twice on a flat map except I took an H2 heavy cav (the slowest cav), and gave the ai an H9 yari ashigaru (the fastest yari inf). It was raining both times. The YA could not catch me either time, and the YA became exhaused and couldn't run while my cav was only quite tired. In one case my HC was bitten by the "Benny Hill" code, and ran away. In the second case I eventually attacked the YA, but lost badly.


longjohn2,

I tested the "Benny Hill" a bit on LAN, and I did get 10 away moves as the rout point for YA of various honor. However, YC and WM had more resistance to the "Benny Hill". It was more like 20 away moves for the YC, and 40 away moves for the WM. The "Benny Hill" seems to be unit dependent.

I also tried alternating forward and away moves with the YA, and it routed at the 20th away move in two separate tests. Right now I think that forward or attack moves reduce the "Benny Hill" count, but do not fully reset it to zero.

MizuYuuki ~~~

[longjohn2]

Interesting results Puzz. Perhaps someone changed something for MI, although I haven't noticed any changes in the code.

[Puzz3D]

longjohn2,

I tried this LAN test of Benny Hill again, but made a setup closer to the one I used for the original STW. I have 7 H2 YS in a line formation with each unit 10 wide x 6 deep on a flat map which shows the tile spacing clearly. I leave the taisho unit far back so it is not an influence. I have H2 YA in the other army set up the same way facing the YS line 3 tiles away. I bring a single H2 YA forward to within 1 tile of the center of the line of YS. It wavers as it gets close to 1 tile distance, and I stop it about 1/2 tile from the YS. I then give small, consecutive, "away", move commands to the YA and count them. I couldn't get the unit to rout at all in multiple repeats of the test. After 20 or 30 moves, the YA is probably too far away and out of range of the Benny Hill. I made runs with the YA maintaining facing toward the YS line with ALT + move, and I made runs with the YA facing away from the YS. The final run was with the YA within 1/4 tile of the YS line with its back turned. I gave 20 away commands by the time this unt reached 1 tile distance where it was still wavering, but it didn't rout. That unit had 40 away commands by the time it reached 2 tiles distance, but still didn't rout. One thing of note is that you can easily induce the rout by using the SHIFT + move command to move away. It only takes 3 or 4 of those to trigger the Benny Hill, and that is very repeatable. This seems like a bug, and makes SHIFT + move too dangerous to use.

This result is not consistent with my previous LAN test of WE/MI where I got YA to rout with 10 away moves, but the setup was different. It's a bit confusing. Subjectively, I've always felt that the Benny Hill effect, althought still present, is somehow reduced in WE/MI compared to STW.

[MagyarKhans Cham]

My Khan watches the interaction between u2 with great interests... keep going guys!

[Kraellin]

yuuki,

yup. i've felt the same way. it was very easy in stw to encounter the rout bug, but more difficult in we/mi. and what i'm wondering is if in our tweaking, with patch 1.02 and CA's altering of the code a bit there, if we didnt somehow affect the rout bug a bit. i mean, i know that CA fixed some of the bugs, like with fatigue, and if that didnt somehow also alter the rout bug. it also makes me wonder if the rout bug is subject to Honor upgrades or degrades or honor won or lost in battle. and, if you also recall, we/mi when it came out had a very high overall morale upgrade. it was very hard to rout anything. does that have anything to do with it. dunno. just shootin in the dark here.

K.


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The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.