Serious 1.5/BI Archer firing Bug (Bad bug)

Hello Guys,

Just wanted to let you know that Darth Vadar stumbled across a Pretty bad Bug for 1.5 and BI. While the AI is in Defense the Archers will not fire. You can test this in custom battles in 1.5 by setting the AI army to defense by clicking the little icon to green in custom menu.

I tested this out several timesand everytime they didnt attack, What makes this even WORSE is for sieges. Where the AI is set to defense the Archers on the walls will not fire they will just sit there. I have tried the Thrown attribute, but that doesnt do anything Either. Test it out yourself with a custom battle siege and see if the archers do anything. you attacking the castle.

I psoted a thread over at .com in the hopes they may fix this in a small patch. I compare this bug to the Secondary weapon bug of 1.1 is game ruining terms.

The .com thread.

http://p223.ezboard.com/fshoguntota...D=33387.topi c

Lt1956

I think its safe to say how this can ruin alot of our mods if the AI is not able to defend itself with its archers. I hope some fellow modders will support my request for a small patch to address this problem?

It works perfectly fine in BI: The archers fire when they are defending a city.
I've not tested it for 1.5 but for BI 1.6 it works fine.

Well I have 1.5/1.6 and following your post, I just created a custom battle: Julii (3 Principes) versus Dacians (2 Warband and 2 archers). The Dacians are in defense mode. I am getting shot to pieces by the archers as I write this. I then stuck the Dacians in a fort - apart from the chosen archers who decided to run around in front of the walls (some units always do that) the other archers fired at me. And when I put the Dacians in a stone wall city, their archers destroyed my poor Principes. So I don't have your problem. Are Darth's custom formations, or other custom formations causing the problem? Can't see how it would but I haven't experienced what you are saying.

What I have noticed when the AI is in defense mode, is it is willing to sit under a shower of my own arrows and not do much at all. That could do with a bit of fixing, but I've found their archers do fire back when in range.

Please try a siege. I tested with My formations and the vanilla and got the same results the AI will not fire Archer missiles when in range when its in defensive mode. I have successfully duplicated this alot.

Here is a picture of them not firing from a custom battle where the AI us egypt in defence and you see my men walked all the way up the walls and they arent firing.

This is a serious bug and it happens alot. I think you didnt click the icon to make the army defensive. If its not defensive you wont see the bug. Its there and it needs to be fixed.

Lt


http://teencritics.com/spqr/bug1.JPG

I did some more testing to narrow this down and found that Missile units the archers will fire on and ANY lightly armoured untis, but Heavy infantry/ARMOURED units the AI Acrher while in defense will not fire on. This may be the reason why scattered results for some people.

Javelins, Archers etc they will fire on in defense, but heavy infantry they wont fire on. I have tested this about 30 times with always the same results.

I'll see if the AP attribute has any effect next. But apparenty the new AI says good to fire on missile units, bad on heavy units. Still a pain as Archers need to fire on all units when in range. This explains an early post weeks ago when the someone mentioned something with the archers not firing on infantry.

Lt

Well I did try a siege in my previous post.

Anyway --- you are right about the armour thing.

I had some Pharoah's guards on a wall attack my legionaries with gold armour. They wouldn't attack them, but they attacked some nearby onagers. Then I redid the battle, only this time I used 4 legionary units: one with gold armour (15 rating in total), one with silver (14 armour), one with bronze armour (13 armour), one with none (12 armour). The Pharoah's guard attacked the legionaries with no armour bonus. They would not attack the others. I noted that the Pharoah's missile skill was 10.

Next test:
I upped the Pharoah's skill to 11 (gave them a weapon bonus). The Pharoahs targetted the least armoured legionaries, then when I withdrew those, they attacked the legionaries with the bronze armour bonus, then the silver, then the gold. Missile skill versus enemy's armour seems to be a factor.

Next test:
Cretan Archers (11 Missile Skill) versus the same 4 legionaries. The Cretans targetted the weakest unit first again, then the one with the bronze armour bonus, but not the others. Despite the Cretans having the same skill as the upgraded Pharoah's guards, they wouldn't attack the legionaries that had armour ratings of 14 and 15.

Conclusion:
From the basic tests I done, it seems there's some kind of calculation going on that determines whether or not the AI attacks a unit with missiles. If the archer's attack rating isn't deemed high enough against the target's armour it won't attack. Also - the AI will always target the unit with the lowest armour rating, although that's if the units are the same (it might have other target priorities such as cavalry, other archers).

This reluctance to use arrows against armour would suggest it's perhaps to combat the fact that heavily armoured targets with shields (should test if shields matters actually) is often not worth attacking with archers. It also means if your mod has extreme missile skill ratings & armour ratings (compared to vanilla RTW) you have a bit of a problem!

Yah I already found out what causes and and posted on the other forums. Its the armor rating. Anything Over 10 and the AI archers when in defense will not fire at them

No doubt a bug as the armour bonuses will raie it so they wont fire. lol SPQR doesnt use those. BUT I did have several heavys with 12 and 14 armour and the archers wouldnt fire. They do need to fix this bug as the Armour upgrade for normal players will cause the AI not to fire arrows in defense and that means if a unit with armor over 10 uses a ram the archers will not fire on the ram either. :dizzy2:

I found it's armour 13 where the cut-off point is - but it still depends partially on the missile attack of the unit firing.

I did a few more tests:

It's not just armour - it's shields that count. I gave a Falxman 13 armour + gold armour upgrade = 16 armour. He got destroyed by arrows.

Then I gave the Late Legionary First Cohort a shield rating of just 1 and the archers would fire upon the unit even if it had gold armour upgrades.

Also, archers with missile weapon upgrades will fire upon more heavily armoured units. A basic archer with 7 attack will attack standard legionaries (with 12 armour), but not ones with armour bonuses. With a gold weapon upgrade (10 attack in total) the archer will target even legionaries with gold armour (15 armour). By contrast, other archer units with 10 or 11 missile rating won't attack gold armour legionaries unless they too have missile upgrades. I wonder why missile upgrades has such an effect.... perhaps the missiles have an unseen bonus that makes them more likely to pierce armour so the AI attacks armoured units with them??

I'm not convinced it's a pure bug, more of a bit of mis-calculation on CA's part. Archers are obviously made to favour certain targets, only their 'it's not worth firing at that target as I won't kill it' setting is a bit low perhaps. Worse so is how they refuse to shoot the same targets in the back when the shield isn't involved.

Well I am not sure on shield with relation to armour, I know the middle defense setting has no bearing.

I have max 10 for all my shields anyway. And its not 13. My principes were 12 and they archers would fire on them.

Mind you I am testing in the unit files not testing with just armour upgrades, but actual unit stats in the unit text file.

I found 10 was the setting that allowed, but I will be honest and say I didnt test 11, but 12 was already the setting for my principes and they were NOT fired upon. Maybe they have it set to allow only so many points after 10 in the upgrade armour?

Who knows but to be honest with your results to me this sounds more like a BUG than a feature. Otherwise the Armor upgrades would work correctly and they dont by your testing.

All I know is if you adjust the stats to 12 they wont fire. BUt then is that related to the shield being set to 10 also, I dont know. For me I got it to work in SPQR and I removed Upgrades in SPQR. so I am happy, but I think the old way in 1.2 was better.

Lt

Well I've now done more tests - changing one thing at once and noticed some other things that influence whether an archer will fire upon a unit. Here are my findings:

(I am using vanilla settings for all these tests)

Shield = Important. Changing shield value very high makes archers refuse to fire (in combination with armour). Low shield means unit will fire upon it even if the armour is high. The theory is shield value is greater against missiles than melee, so just a slight increase in shield may have a large impact on the AI's behaviour in relation to archery.

Armour = I have found units fire up to 14 before armour upgrades. The archer firing had a skill of 8.

Archer skill = some modifier on what the archer is prepared to fire upon. Higher skills before weapon upgrades seems to suggest the archer will target a unit with higher armour.

Missile weapon upgrade = Seems to make the archer more willing to fire on targets with high armour and/or armour upgrades. Even if the missile skill+weapon bonus is less than another archer unit's skill, the archer is prepared to fire on heavier armoured targets.

Direction of target = Units on walls do not consider facing of target. However, archers on the ground will fire on targets not facing forwards even if the unit has a higher armour rating than the archer is usually prepared to fire at.

Testudo = Archers stop firing at units in testudo even if testudo is facing back towards the archers. This is in combination with usual shield ratings and high armour.

Weather = Yes weather! I found the archers won't fire at the heavier armoured targets in heavy rain, not unless the targets are not facing towards the archer. If you have been testing in bad weather, that will affect your 'archers won't fire against armour threshold'.

Composition of attacking/defending army = Archer's behaviour changes depending on the number of attackers, number of defenders etc. When the archers outnumber the attackers, and there's at least one attacker they can target, the archers may not fire until they flank the attackers... then they can fire at all targets.


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I have done dozens of controlled tests, and that's my findings. The AI is definitely without question in my opinion, weighing up several factions in deciding whether to attack or not: armour, shield, own weapon skill, whether on defense or attack, if it is on a wall, and even weather all factor. However, like everything the AI does, it is not perfect and needs tweaking. After doing all those tests, I'm actually amazed how much goes into it.

Hmmm,

My results are different.In SPQR with the NON vanilla settings, I noticed no change in weather changing the behavior of fire for archers.

Noticed no difference for land or siege battles for archers not firing. This is always with a shield value no more than 10 or under. Armour rating 10 or under. Turtle they still fire

Seem the perfect setting is NO more than 10 shield and 10 armour. No effect on the middle hand to hand setting.

So I would say thats why they didnt fire on your turtle and they did mine. Both settings were never higher than 10.

I would suggest any modders consider NOT going above the setting 10 in those 2 areas, even though you may get away with it you may have scattered results like you are having.

Everything is working normal for 10, ?, 10 Turtle works, works in Rain, works on walls, works in the field on defense or offense.

They must have adjusted the Missile effect on AI behavior like they did the difficulty setting before. I really wish they wouldnt change stuff to much, they kinda BOX us in where we really can change those settings too much without bad results.

My question is how do armour upgrades effect this bug when the settings are 10, 10? I didnt bother testing as I dont use those in SPQR and everything is now working in my mod, well except the fact Missile units do a little more damage than before and you need the turtle. lol

Lt

By the way: what skill level are you testing on, medium? It is possible with the AI's bonuses at harder levels, archer behaviour is further modified. I tested on medium where I assume (and hope) the AI has no advantages or disadvantages.

Have you changed anything else in your mod in relation to missiles? Like the projectiles file? Who knows what calculations are going on. It might be worth using a couple of units with vanilla settings to see if you can get the results I did, then work up to find a new ideal shield/armour setting because the archers definitely will fire upon more armoured targets. Saying that, in my mod I stick to max 10 armour anyway (not including cataphracts and big smelly elephants). Ten shield rating might be a bit too much for CA's will-the-archer-fire-probably-not formula. Overall, I suppose you got some rebalancing to do either way. Have fun! ~;p

No your right there is something really screwed up with the Missile calcs.

If you lower the attack on the arrows they dont fire. If you raise the shield to hight they dont fire. Its like they messed it up where you can go beyond the vanilla and even in THEIR game with 1.5 patch and BI its messed up so its not doubt an AI bug. Its like the AI get scared if the unit cant be hurt as bad from the arrows., Yet the Horse archers are fine etc. Just the foot.

I am trying to find the right balance, I am not sure if Size of the unit may effect this? Thats what I am trying to find out as you have this set level you have to keep and that makes arrows way to powerful IMO. I hope they fix this as I can see it can ruin a game and put one off on buying their MTW2.

I was just talking to someone the otherday that said if they didnt know how to mod (which the person didnt) they wouldnt buy another product from them because of the bugs and lack of testing so it seems.

Personally I feel they use the community as testers. I am not sure with this new bug if I want to buy MTW2, I mean what bugs are going to be worse that we dont know about in it?

I'll let you know if I find a balance that works in all settings. I hope if it isnt numbers based also, that I can lower ammo and unit size to compensate for the high attack it has.

Lt

Basicaly AI does missle attack vs full defense comparasion, including some hidden factors like weather, game difficulty and similar things.
And if it thinks it's too bad for him he refuses to fire on that unit.

The bad point is that if none of the units in field is good enough for archer he won't fire missile at all (although even such attack is better then going to melee).

Also, this affects siege equipment since AI still uses same calculation against seige carriers, even when firing on seige equipment only (which is much easier to hit then carriers).


EDIT:
Why i said full defense? Since not only armor and shield matter, but also defense in some way, since in one of my controllled tests archers refused to fire on Urbans, but fired on Pretorians (just 1defense rating difference, same armor and shield).

Dart Vader found very good workaround/soultion for this issue:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...621#post766620

Player one you should check something out before posting in ever forum the bug has a fix. You yourself found out later in testing that the setting he says to change doesnt change anything. This could all be avoided by thurough testing and controlled behavior.

It bad to have false rumors spread. I tested out that setting and it didnt change the AI behavior. Ify ou look he was testing in hard and VH which will automatically give +3 and +7 bonuses to the AI which would in turn give a higher attack to teh archers which is why the fired on the heavy infantry, bit the setting change itself.

Lt

It was in moment of extasy when it seemed that DV had indeed found the fix.

while running balance tests for NTW2 I noticed the AI rather charged me then firing their guns. Apparantly this happens when they think the melee weapon is more effective then shooting. So in order to solve this you have to make the unit's primary weapon (much) more effective then it's secondary weapon. You can always boost 2ndary weapon effectiveness by increasing the "lethality" paramater.

or atleast that's what my first tests led me to believe

Well atleast N2 will be for M2 but your right The AI in RTW and BI seem to love melee.

Lets hope they do better with M2, but I fear many patches will be needed after its release. :no: