Messages

1

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.1.1

« on: January 17, 2024, 05:30:00 pm »

I've found a new crash. It has only happened on this mission so I'm not sure if it's XCF or BAI or a combination of the 2 that's the issue, but it happens often enough to post it. I can't replicate it, but it happens more and more frequent the further the mission goes on. So I'll just post the save and if you keep playing it should eventually crash during the enemy turn. For me it crashed when I finished the current turn but it's not guarantied, probably depending on your actions during the turn.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: January 11, 2024, 06:24:01 pm »

How do you make your agents go up in rank? They become agents after one mission, then nothing. I thought there where no ranks after agents, but I checked the wiki and it looks like there is. What's wrong here?

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Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.1.0

« on: January 09, 2024, 09:21:00 pm »

It's kinda gruesome how much Mods meddle with the game-mechanics. Supporting all of these scenarios via AI is a gargantuan task. And modders really don't seem to care about AI, as the base AI couldn't even use different weapons at all. Yet a lot of enemies have more than one. Makes me wonder why.

Maybe it's their passive way of asking: Look at this cool thing that is possible if someone feels like doing something. Wink, wink. 

Another aspect is that the units are afraid of reaction-fire. This is something that might deter them from walking around a unit, if it doesn't promise a lot more damage.

Strange, because they very often start walking back and forth between 2 tiles just in front of the tank before attacking.

It didn't happen on the current turn though. Units that got into melee-range and had a melee-weapon did us the melee-weapon.

That's unfortunate. Because it happened to me, after killing the 3 dudes some more came from the building. That's why it's hard to know when to make save backups, you don't know when you should and you can't really make a new save for each turn.

As I already told to Abyss: Ironman is horrible when it comes to being capable of providing save-games for feedback. It is possible to restrain oneself from save-scumming without ironman enabled. And by not having it enabled, it is still always possible to use autosaves for analysis.

I didn't know that BAI was this new. I just grabbed some cool shit and through this together and after watching streams I knew I wanted a better AI, so I gave this no thought. Now I'm hundreds of hours in and I don't want to undo that. Besides, it lead to the crash bug being found. 

Again, plenty of TUs you say... but nothing about energy. Could it be that it happened exactly for the reason I mentioned earlier: A lot of the melee-attacks also costing energy? Could it be they were low on energy and thus only could use a limited amount of melee-swings, which cost energy, and then continued with ranged weapons that only cost TU but no energy?

Nah, I never thought of energy since they sure had no problem throwing out lots of attacks. Besides, the orange guy had no business being in melee range having only ranged weapons.

Edit:
Okay, I made respective modifications to the code. The AI now also considers energy-consuption when evaluating different attack-options. In the scenario at hand this leads to more shooting from the distance instead of running into melee-range only to then realize they don't have enough energy to perform the intended melee-attacks and then using ranged-attacks from up close instead.

Hey, don't get me wrong here. I'm happy for all progress with this.

4

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.1.0

« on: January 09, 2024, 05:34:57 pm »

The score for going to a tile inside the blast-radius of a grenade in order to attack is halved. That means if they have an option to attack from outside the blast-radius they'll go into the blast radius only if they think their damage will be twice as high or better if they do so.

This may or may not be foolish based on the exact situation. My thought-process was that on average it's best to try and maximize damage done to the player on the AI's turn instead of giving the initiative back to the player. So even if the melee-unit sacrifices itself in that maneuver, if they can kill or severely damage the player-unit, it is considered worth it.

But that's the problem, they deal no damage. They don't even try to attack the rear where they actually might do damage, even if they have plenty of TU:s. Hm, do they also consider tanks as cover too?

Please be a little more concrete about the details of the scenarios you describe. Who is "they"? A unit with or without melee-capabilities?

Well, I'm vague since it applies to so many units I'm not sure what to type. This is XCF so I guess most units have some sort of melee. This is so common I'm surprised it hasn't happened to you. Do you have a game that you play along with as you make the AI?

Does the tough unit have that close-quarter-combat-ability that is used in some mods that can make shots fired in melee-range of them miss or not?

No, tanks does not. I have not seen them do this to units that has melee.

What do you mean with "hybrids"? I need very exact information, ideally save-games so that feedback like that can properly be taken into consideration.

Hybrids, the race. The weakest aliens in XCF. I'm not sure how I can make a save since I don't know when this will happen.

But here's a save where it did happen the previous turn. This time it's cults and not hybrids, but the behavior is the same.

Notice the group around one of the tanks. The white dude has both melee and ranged, but he just walked up to the front and shot. The orange one is just ranged and he did the same. The black one is mostly melee and he just went up to the tank and took a few swings and threw some knifes. All from the front. They had plenty of TU:s to walk around before attacking.

It's XCF with Air Raids/Damage Facilities.

5

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.1.0

« on: January 08, 2024, 08:19:07 pm »

I don't think that's unique to the AI...

Well, I don't want to think about all the times I walked on my own mines... But you expect better from the aliens that can travel through space, maybe. 

6

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.1.0

« on: January 08, 2024, 05:41:49 pm »

I want to mention enemies sometimes walk into their own grenades. Someone throws and then someone else just walk up to it. I think it happens when I have an armored unity that they can't hurt so they decide to melee it ignoring the bomb on the ground.

I'll add that when they walk into melee range of a tough unit, they might still fire their gun, which makes little sense.

And an other thing. Enemies don't seem to care if theirs are close my unit, they will still throw bombs. All this is when fighting hybrids.

7

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: January 08, 2024, 03:53:51 am »

So player crafts are not invulnerable after all? That's 2 shots from ship laser turrets.

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Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.0.3

« on: January 04, 2024, 03:32:55 am »

I've tested 8.0.2 32 and 64 bit today. No crashes and 64 bit is noticeable faster. Good shit.

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.2: The Colors of Sin

« on: January 03, 2024, 05:01:54 pm »

Is it possible to update your current game to the new version or will stuff break?

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Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.0.0

« on: January 01, 2024, 11:47:24 pm »

Damn. That's horrible to hear.  :'(

So now it's not only that I have to redo the merge and hope to not break the hangars again but also look for the reason or even reasons of a crashes.

Do you happen to have savegame(s) from just before crashing? It could potentially be related to going from 32 to 64 bit. But could also have other reasons. I had some weird issues related to pathfinding-destructor.

No it's gone since I reverted. But it should have happened to you for sure so it might be something else.

The only way I could finish a mission was to save and let it crash, then reload and finish it on the same turn. If I passed a turn and finished a mission it would crash again.

The only difference in settings from previous version was that I enabled the new base stats. I also play on lvl 3 ironman and I have some XCF sub mods if you think that matters.

The random crash in the enemy turn was when projectiles were flying so it might be related to the path finding. I did not play long enough to see if it crashed in my turn.

11

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: December 31, 2023, 03:36:58 pm »

You can also just chuck them at enemies and see which one makes them flash red/keel over.

Well, that's the problem. Incendiary made them flash too.

You can see the damage values of weapons in a unit's inventory by holding down the ALT key and hovering your mouse over the weapon.
This shows you the damage range where the name of the weapon normally is. So it shows that incendiary grenades have a damage range of 5-10 (which is the special damage range that incendiary and smoke weapons use), while the napalm grenades have a damage range of 20-60 (which is a range of 50-150% of their base power 40).

I'd recommend giving this thread a read, it details a lot of the useful hotkeys that are in OpenXComExtended.
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=6424.0

Thanks, I actually already have. But it's easy to miss some features... 

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The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: December 31, 2023, 02:27:43 am »

Napald does direct damage, incendiary just lights stuff on fire. 'Power' for many incendiary/smoke weapons is only used to calculate blast radii.

Cheers. Any way to know if this how an item works by looking at it?

13

The X-Com Files / Re: The X-Com Files - 3.1: Lights in The Sky

« on: December 30, 2023, 10:57:15 pm »

From looking at the numbers it seems that napalm grenades are worse than incendiary. Shouldn't it be the other way around or am I missing something?

14

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 8.0.0

« on: December 30, 2023, 01:53:46 am »

There's a bug in 8.0.1 that makes it very very likely to crash when you end a mission. It happens both when you finish it or choose save and abandon game. The save does not corrupt though.

It also randomly crashes during enemy turns so I had to revert to 7.13.1. It was crashing constantly so it is not really playable.

15

Brutal AI / Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.1

« on: December 27, 2023, 12:53:29 am »

Up until this point what you described really sounded like a bug to me. But if BAI for brutes isn't enabled, then you are essentially just fighting the default AI, which I have no control over. After being used to playing brutal-AI the default-AI just starts looking incredibly stupid by comparison.

It really is stupid. Melee only units just don't move in to attack if you keep some distance. BAI should definitely control them, but they should probably value getting closer to you over taking cover. That would make it fair I think.

Modders can throw all sorts of scenarios at the player and I simply can't predict or know all of them, let alone do intesive testing and tweaking of AI-options just so every possible scenario can somehow "feel right" to the player.

I honestly feel like this was taking a path in the wrong direction. Using a mod that wasn't designed with BAI in mind is pretty much "at once own risk". And I'd like to remind that difficulty-levels still do exist.

I know, that's why I play XCF on level 3. 

I don't think you should try to cover all possible things that can happen. The biggest problem with XCF is the absolut insane monster count on some missions combined with very bad spawn point designs. It makes some missions awful while the more vanilla ones are fine and fun.

So I have some ideas that might help without fiddling with the AI behavior.

• Maybe on turn 1 the enemy does not try to actively scout or move towards the players spawn point. Many times enemies spawn right next to spawn and there's no way to move out, so I just smoke and hope for the best leading to them moving into the craft/room and start blasting. This is a huge problem when your armor is bad at the start of the game. (My best solution for this was to just make a mad run and try to hide in an other spot, especially against Chasers, but I feel that's bad play that only really works with save scumming.)
• Maybe also make motion scanners work on turn 1? That way I can move away from the worst blob.
• Maybe add an option to reduce enemy spawn count? You can have some system that calculates enemy strength together with their amount and reduce the spawns if it gets too high.

My idea with these suggestions is also that the modder does not have to consider if you play with BAI or not which is good i think.