The Shield Problem(s)

[General Zhukov]

Considering the typically ambiguous wording of the guy from CA's statement, it's not clear whether CA considers this a major gameplay bug, a minor nuisance, or an embarrassing revelation of shortcuts they made to achieve the desired unit balance.

From a conversation a forum member had with someone from CA:

I also mentioned the shield bug to him(looks like CA changed the way shields worked and this was an unfortunate side effect)

However, was the unfortunate side effect known about before the game was released? The answer to that question may lead to which of the following idealized conversations are going on, or have gone on at developer HQ:

1. "Drat. They found our shield factor. Alright, redo the engine for the next patch so that the unit balance is roughly maintained, but so that the factor doesn't show up in homebrew testing."

2. "God's Nipples! I want that prog's head on a plate! This means that all shielded units have been underpowered in melee versus unshielded units and against units with smaller shields. Fix it for the next patch."

[Jambo]

I also like to know if the proposed shield fix, whereby the bonus is transferred from shield to armour, works with armour upgrades??

Some have stated that armour upgrades are kind of hardcoded and linked to how they appear on the battlefield. For instance, padded gives 4 armour regardless of the actual numbers displayed in the unit scroll. If this is the case then surely giving a massive armour boost is going to be completely negated as soon as the unit's armour level is upgraded.

[Ulstan]

The opening shot at member who posted a completely valid point was totally unnecessary.

I disagree, Kragennmor. Zhukov told us that everything was working as intended, tried to back up the counter-intuitive results with some rather absurd reasoning, and repeatedly denigrated the sterling bug testing efforts of Carl, Revenant, Foz, Musashi, etc. That was not a valid point at all. Example below:

I did read it Carl. I have read many of your posts. They all move to this beat: bug, fix, bug bug fix, fix, fix, fix fix bug. Which plays into a larger phenomenon I've noticed about the boards: somebody finds something they question in the game, and make a "fix" for it! Meanwhile, it's by no means clear that the vanilla version of what they're changing was bugged in any way.

From another thread, Zhukov dismissing out of hand another players concerns about a possible bug

Seeing more and more of these threads pop up, and contrasting their complaints with the experiences of various experienced players on the boards, and my experiences, it has gradually become clear that the Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

To Zhukov: If your 'bug sense' ability isn't as finely developed as these guys, fine, just let it pass. There's no need to accuse them of crying wolf and finding bugs where none exist. It is and was clear that we have a serious issue on our hands, and the members testing it and bringing it to our attention are doing invaluable work, for which we should be thanking them, not poo-poohing their efforts.

And now, thanks to their efforts, CA is made aware of the problem. Hearty thanks to everyone who's spent time testing, not only the shield bug, but also the 2h bug as well.

[Ulstan]

If they replace the unit's base armour amount with that of the given piece of armour (which I rather expect), then for sure they will mess up the fix.

In theory this could be determined by boosting a units base armor values sky high, so that if what we face is a replacement, the difference will be immediately apparent in a combat test.

However, as you say, we don't have any real way to fix this with mods, unless we have some way to go in and modify the level each armor upgrade applies to each unit.

Still, it should be something CA can fix up for us pretty quickly

[Carl]

I've used armour upgrades on fixed units in custom battles with it increasing their actual power, so no worries there.

[Foz]

Thanks Carl. I just ran the usual 13/21 knight mirror match with one of them having an armor upgrade, and the battle shifted in their favor. If anyone has specific examples that aren't working, let us know. Note, though, that this would probably be clearly indicated on the unit stat sheet: i.e. if the armor upgrade nerfed its stats, you'd see the bad stats when you checked them for the unit. From what I can see though, it appears to work correctly.

@Ulstan: Thanks for the props, it's nice to hear that the work is appreciated. That goes for all of you who've been expressing similar sentiments, too.

As for being poo-poohed, I'm used to being questioned at every turn, and frankly it's good: it gives me a chance to further explain the reasons for drawing the conclusions I have, not to mention giving me countless chances to pin people under inescapable mountains of concrete evidence and sound logic

Seriously though I try not to do that (at least in a harsh or disrespectful way), and typically only will when someone comes in with guns blazing, spouting information that is obviously poorly conceived and quite incorrect... because at that point I feel they've earned being put in their place.

Additionally, all the backlash is really good for me too. I've become quite dauntless and unflappable as a result of being hammered on so much, which in turn has made it infinitely easier to push through the work I've been doing. So in a roundabout way, I'm also thankful for the nay-sayers who've tried to drop the hammer on me: you've forced out my very best work.

[Jambo]

the foz, it's not that it would nerf stats (as seen by the unit scroll). The question was really based on the current two hotly debated hypotheses that 1) armour upgrade adds +1 as the increase to stats suggest or 2) armour upgrades actually mirror what the vanilla armour grades equal in the EDU file, i.e. padded = 4, mail = 5, heavy mail = 7, etc, all the way up to the Gothic armour (advanced plate) at 10.

For example, Italian spear militia start with padded armour and have an armour rating of 4. There next upgrade is mail. Spear militia have 0 armour and their next upgrade is padded. The increase according to the stats is only +1, however, some have shown with tests that the upgraded Spear militia perform very similar to the Italian militia; possibly indicating that the upgrade is really based on the "padded" and battle map appearance rather than the "incorrect" +1 on the stats would imply.

I just wondered how this fitted in with giving units with shields an ungeneric boost to their armour stats which distorts them from the +4, +5, +7, etc associated with the various armour levels?

I know I probably haven't explained it very well, but I hope you understand.

[Kraggenmor]

I disagree, Kragennmor.

As the boards don't need to be cluttered with off topic bickering, you have a PM.

[Ulstan]

Good explanation Foz! I'll try to adopt a similarly relaxed attitude towards the nay-sayers.

All your rigorous testing is much appreciated.

[Foz]

Is this 'Fix' working with armor upgrades? Having tried a number of battles with upgraded and non-upgraded units vs the same opponents, the upgraded units seem to do worse.

Maybe when a unit is upgraded it will not retain the higher armor value generated by the Fix?

TBH, I'm not actually sure. I wasn't thinking about armor upgrades when I did it. If the upgrades add armour points to the unit, then for sure it should work. If they replace the unit's base armour amount with that of the given piece of armour (which I rather expect), then for sure they will mess up the fix. Anyone know for sure what happens? And what we might be able to do (if anything) to work around it if it's the latter case?

Great work guys, really good bug-spotting :) The reason that we don't usually comment is that - to be brutally frank - there just isn't much to say about these things. We try hard to prioritise core gameplay bugs, but it's a huge piece of software with many people working on it, and obviously a few things have slipped the net that shouldn't have.

Rest assured that we do read these forums, both here in the UK and in Australia, and that these things do get discussed internally and passed on for investigation to the folks in Oz who are dealing with the patches.

Understood, and appreciated. It even took me a while to spot this one, and I was running fairly large numbers of custom battles and playing with unit variables at the time. It's so much harder when you have to worry about the whole project at once, especially when the problem is something that only causes unintended behavior instead of compiler errors or game crashes.

If the fix is as easy as I believe it to be in the code, I think there's a very good chance we can expect them to get to it for the second patch. Data inversions, which is what I speculate to be the cause, are among the easiest fixes, often just requiring changing an incorrect minus to a plus, or vice versa. Yeah, amazing that it could be so simple, yet leave us no perfect way to mod a fix. Ahh, the power of real actual code...