AI War Beta 5.033 "And Other Times There Are A Few Too Many Ponies" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, yea, I meant the 7th   I think I had been looking at April 9th, which would require a very powerful ZTM indeed.

[Cyborg]

Just wondering if we are going to get solutions for the dsyncs that are piling up or if that is expansion work. I'm willing to work with you however makes it easier to track these down.

[keith.lamothe]

Just wondering if we are going to get solutions for the dsyncs that are piling up or if that is expansion work. I'm willing to work with you however makes it easier to track these down.

Wait, desyncs?  I wasn't aware of common ones, but a search on mantis turned up:

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7020

Is that what you mean?  I can take a look at that soon, sorry I hadn't noticed it earlier.

Or are there others?  There was the one on pausing golems, but they aren't able to reproduce it and it seems to be working fine now.

[Cyborg]

Yes, you found mine, but we also have in addition to 7020: 7022,3846

Whether or not these are valid, no idea, just offering to help you close those out, especially because I play multiplayer in addition to solo.

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, you found mine, but we also have in addition to 7020: 7022,3846

Whether or not these are valid, no idea, just offering to help you close those out, especially because I play multiplayer in addition to solo.

I appreciate it. 

7020: As I commented last night on the mantis record, this is actually an interface problem: a player can't change from Normal to Helper midgame, the procedure to getting someone in as a Helper is different.  So the manage-players interface needs to not let you think that you can make that change (and not try to do it, apparently it was and causing a desync), and the lobby needs to be amended to allow picking role, just haven't gotten there yet.

3646: I tested that one a while ago but I wasn't able to reproduce it from the save provided, despite it being consistent for the players at the time.  That probably means that either it had already been fixed or it was related to one or both of the players having "residual" data from a game loaded before they started that one (which is a bug, but hard to find and generally easy to workaround by having everyone do a fresh run of the .exe before starting/loading the MP game).

7022: same as 3646, really.

So if you do find a reproducible case of 3646 or 7022 or any other desync, I'd be delighted to have info on how to reproduce it myself.  Or even non-reproducible reports; those aren't generally actionable but it builds up clues.

Personally my guess on 3646/7022 is that it was the same residual-data bug that was fixed since they were first filed.  But that's uncharacteristically optimistic of me.

[Cyborg]

Okay, understood. Sounds good.  I did not understand the helper mode feature, we were looking for a way to do that in the lobby, and since we could not, we thought "okay, let's just make a game and maybe we can set it in there."

You can do that, but it's incorrect and will hose your game. 

Thanks for looking at it.

[keith.lamothe]

You can do that, but it's incorrect and will hose your game. 

Yea, it looks like an interface element, but it's actually a cleverly disguised Hybrid plot

[keith.lamothe]

So we keep on waiting...

waiting...

waiting on the [fusion] blades to change

Am looking at that right now: it's going off the base health, not the cap-scaled health, so it wouldn't change based on caps.  Are you definitely seeing that it is changing if caps change?

Am digging through the list to see ship types where the mkI is not immune and the higher marks are immune, to make the whole lines not-immune, but wanted to ask about the cap-related thing.

[chemical_art]

So we keep on waiting...

waiting...

waiting on the [fusion] blades to change

Am looking at that right now: it's going off the base health, not the cap-scaled health, so it wouldn't change based on caps.  Are you definitely seeing that it is changing if caps change?

Am digging through the list to see ship types where the mkI is not immune and the higher marks are immune, to make the whole lines not-immune, but wanted to ask about the cap-related thing.

I'm not sure what you mean.

The issue is that when you lower the caps ship health increases correspondingly.

When the ships have 4x the health of high caps (low caps) they at MK III beyond start to get frequently immune to fusion blades due to having over 1 million health.

When the ships have 8x the health of high caps (ultra-low caps) you start getting mk II ships, even the triangle ships iirc, becoming immune due to over 1 million health.

EDIT:

At least, it was this way. Have you changed it recently?


I don't know when it happened, but now I'm noticing that fusion immunity is based of ship type, not health.

Great job! Wait, what?

EDIT: Wait...this still doesn't make sense. The change hasn't been released?

Err...

Welp, anyway, regardless of what happens the patch notes will perfectly fix the problem for good. It was exactly what I had in mind. Fleet craft and starships and larger craft are immune, while those under are blood for shredders and vampires.

Perfect!

[TechSY730]

Speaking of which, any thoughts about the "H/Ks having command grade armor making them be able to cheese turrets and suicide units a little too well" issue?

[zoutzakje]

meh, H/K's are supposed to be deadly. If you give them any other hull type than command grade, they will have to many weaknesses. Now it's just bombers.

[keith.lamothe]

Great job! Wait, what?

That's the Arcen Way: serving the customer and confusing the dickens out of them at the same time!

[TechSY730]

meh, H/K's are supposed to be deadly. If you give them any other hull type than command grade, they will have to many weaknesses. Now it's just bombers.

What I was thinking was giving them a new armor type, like "Repulsive" or something. Basically, it would be like command grade in that very, very few things have a bonus against it, but melee units would still get 1x against it (or maybe a bit less), and turrets would get like .5x or maybe a bit higher against it.

Still makes them very difficult, and gives them almost no weaknesses, but doesn't make things like Spirecraft rams (this very sort of situation being one of the things you would be willing to use them for) worthless against them.

[chemical_art]

meh, H/K's are supposed to be deadly. If you give them any other hull type than command grade, they will have to many weaknesses. Now it's just bombers.

What I was thinking was giving them a new armor type, like "Repulsive" or something. Basically, it would be like command grade in that very, very few things have a bonus against it, but melee units would still get 1x against it (or maybe a bit less), and turrets would get like .5x or maybe a bit higher against it.

Still makes them very difficult, and gives them almost no weaknesses, but doesn't make things like Spirecraft rams (this very sort of situation being one of the things you would be willing to use them for) worthless against them.

Having them weak to things that ordinarily don't hurt big craft would be interesting.

They would resist the generic defenses of all heavy craft: bombers, lasers, etc.

Melee and missiles as potential weaknesses come to mind for me.

But due keep in mind they are hard to kill with the absurd bonuses bombers get. Making them 4x harder to kill by removing that weakness alone with only a 1.0 as their weakness would require tweaking of their health.

[TechSY730]

meh, H/K's are supposed to be deadly. If you give them any other hull type than command grade, they will have to many weaknesses. Now it's just bombers.

What I was thinking was giving them a new armor type, like "Repulsive" or something. Basically, it would be like command grade in that very, very few things have a bonus against it, but melee units would still get 1x against it (or maybe a bit less), and turrets would get like .5x or maybe a bit higher against it.

Still makes them very difficult, and gives them almost no weaknesses, but doesn't make things like Spirecraft rams (this very sort of situation being one of the things you would be willing to use them for) worthless against them.

Having them weak to things that ordinarily don't hurt big craft would be interesting.

They would resist the generic defenses of all heavy craft: bombers, lasers, etc.

Melee and missiles as potential weaknesses come to mind for me.

But due keep in mind they are hard to kill with the absurd bonuses bombers get. Making them 4x harder to kill by removing that weakness alone with only a 1.0 as their weakness would require tweaking of their health.

Sorry, should of been clearer. This would basically be a copy of command grade armors except for those things that get a penalty against it. This implies that bombers would still have 4x against this new armor type.