Brutal-OXCE 8.6.2

[Xilmi]

I play xcomfiles on the brutal. I am disappointed that zombies and other animals, which usually behave ultra aggressively, run away and hide like girls behind a corner. I drove four zombies with 4 agents in 40 turns. Is this normal, or should I change something in the settings?

Putting the Aggressivness-mode to 1 might help in this case.

[Xilmi]

it seems that rockets blown up at Avenger ramp always and never fly into Avenger itself

so alien ramp-rocket is a bug

Thanks for the report I'm gonna have a look at this.

Edit:

Okay... Sectoids are a bad species to test this because they MC me and let my soldiers kill each other before I can test the blasting.
Floaters are a bad species to test this because they shoot blaster from 3rd level and it doesn't have issues to enter the craft as it doesn't try to "climb the ramp".

Edit 2: With Snakemen it worked. Are you maybe using realistic accuracy and is that maybe messing up something about the blaster-shots? Let me try...

Edit 3: Nope, no difference with realistic accuracy. Blaster-shot still hits the soldier I used to bait it. So I can't really reproduce the issue. Maybe it depends on the angle from which the blaster is launched relative to the entrance of the Avenger.

Edit 4: Did different tests with different angles. In all cases the blaster made it in. So I need better reproduction steps or ideally a save a turn before it happens.

[aziza]

Sectoids are a bad species to test this because they MC me
Are you maybe using realistic accuracy

yup
realistic accuracy + explosion height 2 + mod Psi LoF
superhuman + max tech + sectoids + battleship + skyranger / avenger
attached below: avenger save file + skyranger save file + options for 8.5.2 - to reproduce just click "end turn" (and copy options and load) - you will see 3-4 rockets into ramp and humans will alive

(and need to translate options string - STR_BATTLEALTGRENADES)

[Xilmi]

realistic accuracy + explosion height 2 + mod Psi LoF
superhuman + max tech + sectoids + battleship + skyranger / avenger
attached below: avenger save file + skyranger save file + options for 8.5.2 - to reproduce just click "end turn" (and copy options and load) - you will see 3-4 rockets into ramp and humans will alive

(and need to translate options string - STR_BATTLEALTGRENADES)

I first tried just the saves but without your options.cfg.
The aliens weren't using the blaster at all in this scenario.
So my suspicion was that you have enabled "OpenXCom: Unlimited Waypoints". And indeed, you have. So I'm pretty sure it's related to that one.
Yup. It is. For some reason the unlimited waypoints-blaster-shots can't make it up the ramp, while the limited-waypoints-one have no problem doing so.

Now with that information I should be able to figure out the reason and make the aliens-blasters with unlimited waypoints as scary as you'd think they would be.

Edit: When I use my own soldier and place the waypoints in the same way the AI does with unlimited waypoints, it also explodes at the edge. In this sense it's almost more interesting what's different when the AI doesn't use unlimited waypoints.

What I think happens is that the missile always tries to fly through the center of the tile. But the upper-ramp-tile's center is blocked by the ramp. The non-unlimited one only places a new waypoint when either the direction changes or the Z-axis of the next pathfinding-node is different from the last one. So it will not put a waypoint at the ramp but only after the ramp.

So what I need to do is to identify that the tile I want the missile to path through has something blocking it's center and then use the tile above the current tile instead if that's the case.

Edit 2: Fix is available in 8.5.3. Oh, and I recommend maybe not using the "Unlimted Waypoints"-Mod if you don't want to be spawn-killed by aliens with Blasters.

[aziza]

So my suspicion was that you have enabled "OpenXCom: Unlimited Waypoints". And indeed, you have. So I'm pretty sure it's related to that one.

ah
is it an unlimited number of firing points for a blaster launcher (9 or 999), but not alien soldiers starting spawn points on the map?
what a weird description:

name: "OpenXCom: Unlimited Waypoints"
version: 1.0
description: "Allows unlimited waypoints, Aliens will be limited by difficulty."
author: the OpenXcom team

Fix is available in 8.5.3.

nice, now human team is dead!

Oh, and I recommend maybe not using the "Unlimted Waypoints"-Mod if you don't want to be spawn-killed by aliens with Blasters.

lol, they killed me like this on the first base defence mission, on the first turn, so I had to think of a special strategy to defeat them
why can rude humans kill poor sectoids from anywhere on the map, but small smart sectoids can not?
this is a BRUTAL ai, baby, step aside

[Xilmi]

ah
is it an unlimited number of firing points for a blaster launcher (9 or 999), but not alien soldiers starting spawn points on the map?

I agree. The description for that mod is absolutely terrible and I only know what it does because I first read the reference to it in the source-code.

For alien-spawning the demigod-mod is the one that's relevant. It does two things. It removes the randomization of alien-numbers and always uses the max-number and it enforces spawning by spawning on adjacent tiles to spawning-points when not enough spawning points are there. (for example sometimes terror-maps have not enough spawning points for aliens and civilians leading to fewer aliens than there were supposed to be)

[Abyss]

Putting the Aggressivness-mode to 1 might help in this case.

Hi Xilmi, Joy sent me a message regarding his work on THR mechanics rebalance.
I think it worth testing. But only with BAI enabled as intended.
Do you remember our discussion regarding the unit aggressiveness?
The trouble in the Zombie case requires manual fix for all units AGR parameter, because BAI aggressiveness has nothing in common to the modder' set number in UNITS.RUL file.

What is suggested:
1. Can you make BAI understand non-whole numbers of aggressiveness?
Rationale: many of units are intended to act either between cautious and hidden behavior. Hence, the number should be 0.5-0.9. For many-many other units the aggressiveness should be placed between 1.0 and 3.0
2. Can you reserve special number (or letter: X = extra) for Zombie-like no-matter-what-wanna-kill-what-I-see units? For example, it may be 666 (or 69). If aggressiveness: X then unit always behaves as a killing machine.
Rationale:
3. Can you reserve special number for these units who are supposed to stay inside the ship, where they had spawned? But with that in mind: if this unit spawns outside, it acts alongside others. This particular mechanic can be achieved via special mark past the number.
For example: 1.65S (S = ship), which means unit's aggressivenes is 1.65 and it stays on ship, yet if it spawns outside the ship, it has natural aggressiveness 1.65 alongside other troops.
Rationale: you know it, many players and modders requested alien navigators and leaders to stay inside the ship.
Besides, there's more specific places, where some particular units should be located, no matter what.
The question here is: how BAI will understand "this particular place should be considered as ship". Because of grey-blue tiles? Because alien power source? Because of alien navigation? Maybe, some markers?

Cheers, love to see you keeping updates

Edit: all these suggestions are for new UNITS.RUL file, use unit-aggression. Then there is a chance for game to be balanced around units behavior.
And please, remember: game is for a player, not for a computer. There must be fun to play mods, not constant pain in the ass (80% maps = enemy spawn 250% stronger than players, repeat 500 missions).

[aziza]

1
it seems like aliens on the Battleship can't launch a blaster rockets if humans stay on the UFO roof (so you can easy shoot or throw from the roof)
today is almost the only way to survive after making a shoot
----
2
not sure - bug it or feature - but alien missile always fly into craft, even if target is far away from it
here is the save with start of human turn
shoot from the tank in any direction and press "end turn"
alien rocket will fly into craft, will out, and will fly to the tank

[Xilmi]

not sure - bug it or feature - but alien missile always fly into craft, even if target is far away from it
here is the save with start of human turn
shoot from the tank in any direction and press "end turn"
alien rocket will fly into craft, will out, and will fly to the tank

That's extremely bizarre and I'm actually quite baffled.
It seems like somehow there's something weird with the pathfinding.

For unlimited waypoints it only looks weird but without unlimited waypoints something nonsensical like that will clearly eat up waypoints unnecessarily.

I fear I have to debug into the depths of pathfinding to figure out why that happens. Compared to that the issue with the missiles getting stuck at the ramp looks rather trivial.

Edit: I think that actually both the issues you mentioned are related to flying-units. It seems like it cannot properly path to stuff that isn't reachable to non-flying-units. I will check this with Floaters. Maybe it doesn't really get that the missile can fly above ground when the alien that's shooting it isn't able to.

Edit 2: Yeah, Floaters have no issue shooting something on the roof. So it's somehow tied to whether the firing unit can fly. oO

Edit 3: Found it. There's a function called. "validateUpDown" in the pathfinding. It used the movement-type of the unit. I changed it so that it now will always consider missiles as being valid to go up and down the same way as flying units. When I fix it, the missile takes a more direct way and you also can be targeted on the roof.

I also have an idea to improve the AI's amount of waypoints so that it will need less in the future but that's some redoing of some algorithms and I haven't done it yet.

[panzer]

Hi Xilmi. There is such a suggestion: add reaction shots when opening doors (maybe as a switchable option).
 The fact is that enemies, especially with aggression 0, really like to ambush behind doors and it would work if the fire trigger worked. It looks something like in screenshot 1
Of course, they will be killed due to the lack of a rocket shot, since the right to the first shot is always with the one who opened the door.
Knowing this, I will just ambush a little to the side of the door and thereby kill the enemy anyway.Screenshot 2
 That is, the absence of a fire trigger when opening doors almost always works in the player's favor.

[Xilmi]

1. Can you make BAI understand non-whole numbers of aggressiveness?

I had that in the past with the fractions. But I got rid of it. Right now there's only 3 levels left so that they can actually be distinct.
0 is where the enemies prioritize survival by looking for good spots that are difficult to reach
1 and 2 is the progression-mode. The enemies will be somewhat careful but afterall their goal is to sweep the map, search for enemy units and kill them
3 and above is the aggressive mode. The enemies will just try to end it quickly by rushing forward without any regards of safety.

Since in the base-game there also only were 3 different settings, it makes the most sense to assume that that's what modders will use.

Note that it now is also possible to force a minimum aggression in the deployment via "minBrutalAggression". The purpose of that is to make it so that on mission-types where it clearly is intended for the enemy to be the aggressor they won't just camp. For example in a base-defense-mission.

2. Can you reserve special number (or letter: X = extra) for Zombie-like no-matter-what-wanna-kill-what-I-see units? For example, it may be 666 (or 69). If aggressiveness: X then unit always behaves as a killing machine.

Everything 3 and above as well as enabling leeroy-flag will do that already.

3. Can you reserve special number for these units who are supposed to stay inside the ship, where they had spawned? But with that in mind: if this unit spawns outside, it acts alongside others. This particular mechanic can be achieved via special mark past the number.

I really don't think it is reasonable to make changes like this.

Edit: all these suggestions are for new UNITS.RUL file, use unit-aggression. Then there is a chance for game to be balanced around units behavior.
And please, remember: game is for a player, not for a computer. There must be fun to play mods, not constant pain in the ass (80% maps = enemy spawn 250% stronger than players, repeat 500 missions).

There's so many options to tweak brutal-AI already. Including not using it at all. I can't chase every vague idea someone comes up with and hasn't really thought through without previously having tried to use the existing options.

[Xilmi]

Hi Xilmi. There is such a suggestion: add reaction shots when opening doors (maybe as a switchable option).
 The fact is that enemies, especially with aggression 0, really like to ambush behind doors and it would work if the fire trigger worked. It looks something like in screenshot 1
Of course, they will be killed due to the lack of a rocket shot, since the right to the first shot is always with the one who opened the door.
Knowing this, I will just ambush a little to the side of the door and thereby kill the enemy anyway.Screenshot 2
 That is, the absence of a fire trigger when opening doors almost always works in the player's favor.

I don't really want to change the game-mechanics and get rid of the "mutual-surprise"-rule, which is what suppresses reaction-fire when two units see each other at the same time in cases such as someone opening a door. This would make reaction-fire a lot stronger and lead to a different and likely rather stale camping-meta.

I think it would be better to analyze why the AI does what it does and try to teach it to play better.

I think the issue here is that the AI doesn't really grasp the concept of how a seemingly decent cover can be turned into no cover at all by opening a door. That's actually something I can have alook at.

[Abyss]

0 is where the enemies prioritize survival by looking for good spots that are difficult to reach
1 and 2 is the progression-mode. The enemies will be somewhat careful but afterall their goal is to sweep the map, search for enemy units and kill them
3 and above is the aggressive mode. The enemies will just try to end it quickly by rushing forward without any regards of safety.

Well, number 0.3 may refer that unit takes 70% of actions as hider, whereas 30% actions as slow-progresser over the map. That could make sense in terms of diversity and unpredictability.
You know what, this is kind of sad to play three scenarios over and over again.
So my solution is to go to units.rul, change all numbers as they really should be and go play with *get unit aggression from mod*, to make it all different.
For example, leeroy flag for zombies is quite understandable, while hiding behavior for hovertanks and thinking-brutes is strange, as they are either disposable units or thinking tanks (role, firecatchers).
 When you go to human citizens, they may be very different, too. From street fighters (aggro 2.3) to commando (aggro 1.4) to human citizens (aggro 0.0 - 0.3)

BTW please remind me if this is still working: the more AI believes it wins, the more aggressive becomes?
Does it know amount of player units at the beginning of the match?
Does it count overall armor and shooting capabilities of it's own units while making sturm-solutions?

[Xilmi]

Well, number 0.3 may refer that unit takes 70% of actions as hider, whereas 30% actions as slow-progresser over the map. That could make sense in terms of diversity and unpredictability.

That's a decent idea and wouldn't require any weird in-between-behaviors. Unfortunately all the unit-aggression-values are read as integers, so only full numbers are allowed. I don't know how much of an effort it would be to convert them to floats and whether this would break compatibility. In rul-files that use floats, i usually see them written as 1.0 and such. But maybe a float-reading-function can also deal with integers.

I guess I can give it a try.

BTW please remind me if this is still working: the more AI believes it wins, the more aggressive becomes?
Does it know amount of player units at the beginning of the match?
Does it count overall armor and shooting capabilities of it's own units while making sturm-solutions?

I don't think that ever went live. I've only experimented around with stuff like that but the results were quite disappointing. Especialls since I analyzed scenarios where the player thought the enemies had an advantage when they actually didn't. (There were a lot of enemies but they all were way weaker than the player-units)

[Abyss]

I guess I can give it a try.

Thanks, I think it has potential, too. Also, it can be written in more AIsh manner, like
1 (70,30), which can be read as: the 70 number is percentage for actions for aggro 1, 30 is pecrentage for aggro 2 actions.
Advantage is that with this approach, even three aggro settings could be written, like
0 (80, 15, 5)
0 = base to start counting from
80% hiding
15% careful approach
5% strong approach with covering

2 (80, 20)
80% strong approach with covering
20% chasing the enemy openly

UPD
Or I think it can be written even more straightly, if aggression settings are final and are not a subject for further changes
like Aggressiveness: 0, 60, 30, 10