Rumors about incompatibility with Brutal-OXCE

[Iazo]

That is a fine sentiment... until you consider that pretty much every strategy game developer, big or small, has had these exact same thoughts and the end result is that strategy game AI is nearly universally incompetent and relies on various cheats to keep up appearances. Xilmi is one of the very few people trying to make AIs that can beat the player fair and square. Not just for X-Com, either.

In any case, you can already turn BAI on and off for individual enemies. It's sort of like flipping both the 'sniper' and 'spotter' flags at once. It'd be neat if the two could be separated, but that seems not to be a priority for Xilmi.

Leeroys have also been returned to mostly vanilla and there's now a new 'aggressive' flag.

Off-offtopic, but I've now been trained to consider the tag 'story rich' a red flag for a game and skip it when a store advertises it as such. So careful about 'lore-rich'.

Fair and square, eh?

Ok, so if the AI plays fair and square, that means that I, too, as the player can bring 50 units to their 50? No?

What about persistent injuries? Will the AI risk not being able to field a full team in subsequent missions because he got badly wrecked in the current one? No to that either? Hm.

What about the AI's armory? Could the player throw a grenade inside in order to  wreck the AI's possibility to outfit his units in subsequent missions? No? Not that?

What about the player being able to take hundred of their units to invade the AI's base which is defended by 20-30 units?

What? Not that either?


So, careful where you throw the 'fair and  square' moniker about. Nothing about Xpz is fair and square, it is not intended to be fair and square, and is balanced around this lack of fairness and squareness.

As to your preference about ignoring story in favour of mechanistic outcomes....why are you even here then? Baffling.

If you want to duke it out with an equal peer AI using the same non-persistent mooks of equal quality and equal numbers using standardized equipment....why not just play chess?
 

[Juku121]

So, careful where you throw the 'fair and  square' moniker about. Nothing about Xpz is fair and square, it is not intended to be fair and square, and is balanced around this lack of fairness and squareness.

Way to miss the context of the quote, since that particular part of the comment was not specific to XPZ. The emphasis was on 'even trying to make', not making it fair'n'square. And obviously an AI that can play even roughly as well as a player will make any Piratez campaign very short. This is something both me and pretty much everyone else in the thread has acknowledged, that XPZ will not 'support' BAI without a rework.

That does not mean it cannot or must not be added to Piratez.

As to your preference about ignoring story in favour of mechanistic outcomes....why are you even here then?

To play a strategy game. Or squad-level tactical game, maybe. I have never hidden my personal dislike of turning OXC into an adventure generator. I've always preferred emergent stories in games to predetermined narratives. If I want a good story, I'll read a book.

If you want to duke it out with an equal peer AI using the same non-persistent mooks of equal quality and equal numbers using standardized equipment....why not just play chess?

Because chess has no randomness, nowhere near the complexity of any strategy game, simulates nothing real-world (although abstracts several things) and machines play it far better than me.

In any case, I don't want peer AI and I doubt one is even remotely feasible for Google or OpenAI, never mind one hobbyist. I want AI that doesn't trip over its own feet, and BAI kinda delivers.

[Vengos]

I will say what i understand from this topic up to this point: Someone made changes to base engine and dubbed it Brutal-OXCE. When he was told that his engine is not compatible with XPiratez he started topic on forum to ask "why its not compatible". When he was told reasons the answer was "hey, my mod can do that, you just have to set it".
So for me it looks like you just want people use your modified engine without doing any compatibility work (thats what i can summarize from yours "yeah, my AI can do it if you set it" and "WH40k modders make Brutal only patches").  I really dont see why 8 years old mod should change to Brutal-OXCE on drop of a hat or maintain 2 separate versions.
So in the end you can make compatibility tweaks and patches yourself or find someone who will do it for you, if you really want XPiratez to work with Brutal.

[Juku121]

Xilmi doesn't want XPZ to work with BAI. He wants his BAI to work as (he) intended for all mods. Balance issues are for others to sort out (if they want), the goal of this thread is to collect instances of Piratez and BAI together producing results neither author intended.

I doubt Xilmi is going to produce compatibility patches for each and every single mod, and while XPZ is the biggest and oldest, it also doesn't mean it necessarily gets preferential treatment. It's just that XPZ stretches the engine the most, and is thus the likeliest place to look for things that don't work, like AI finding loopholes to shoot damsels or all the sweep mode and cover use changes that Xilmi has been working on recently.

[Xilmi]

I will say what i understand from this topic up to this point: Someone made changes to base engine and dubbed it Brutal-OXCE. When he was told that his engine is not compatible with XPiratez he started topic on forum to ask "why its not compatible". When he was told reasons the answer was "hey, my mod can do that, you just have to set it".

Well, from my perspective this summary mispresents my intentions to have created this thread.

The thing to which I said "hey, my mod can do that, you just have to set it" was the suggestion of having smarter and not so smart enemies at the same time. The default-setting, where all enemies become smarter doesn't need anyone to set up anything.

This new alternative client offers new options that modders can make use of, if they want. If they don't want to, this is absolutely fine.

Other than that I was asking for unintentional behaviour or things not working at all. The damsels issue was brought up. After being told how to reproduce it, I checked and noticed that a previous change, like the removal of blindfire, must already have fixed it.

The other issue that was brought up was balance. It's obvious that the highest difficulty-level was balanced against the base-AI. So I suggested using a lower difficulty. I tried it out myself and considered it quite playable on the 2nd difficulty-level.

So for my intents and purposes, all known real issues, which according to my information were pre-priming grenades that have a flag to go off in the inventory and ignoring the ignoredByAI-flag, are resolved. If someone asked me, whether they can play X-Piratez on Brutal-OXCE, my answer would be. "Yes. However, I recommend using a lower difficulty-level than what you are used to because the mod was balanced around base-AI and might be too difficult otherwise. And if you run into any issues, where you think something is not working as intended, please report it to me, so I can take care of it. Ideally provide a save-game so I can quickly reproduce and have something to test my fix for it."