Special Forces attack (now with added desync!)

[keith.lamothe]

The good news: I persuaded them, once the black hole machine was scrapped, to beeline down the path to the SF staging point so they could get out of human territory.

The bad news: that involved pathing through both human homeworlds.  The first one was fairly uneventful, as the usually-out-of-the-way placement of the stations kept it, well, out of the way.  The second was worse as the path between the wormholes literally ran through the home station's ff bubble.  Said bubble was demolished and the home station itself brought to 80% health... and then SF carriers were back out of range and motored the rest of the way home.

If you'd like to avoid this, I suggest clearing a path to Struve (I think that's the planet name) by scrapping command stations, and don't box the SF in unless you want it to get creative   And in general splintering the AI's planet graph is a good way to attract unwanted attention.

But the next patch will include various AI fixes to make this sort of thing less likely, and to resolve itself more efficiently if it does happen.

[Vinraith]

Ok, a bit more progress:

1) It wasn't trying to get on the road to the target staging area because it didn't have a path to that target that didn't involve going through player territory (even not counting the player planet it was already on).  I told it to path through whatever if there was no purely non-player path.

But it bears mentioning that you've apparently split the AI's overall territory into a disjoint pieces, and entrapped the special forces blob in one of those pieces (that's in a long string of 2-wormhole planets, even).

2) It pathed through whatever, including player planets (but not engaging them much, just wormhole-to-wormhole)

3) Then it got stuck on your massive chokepoint and I spent a lot of time putting in more logging to figure out why the commands that were being sent from the AI thread weren't actually getting added to the unit command lists.

There was a black hole machine.


Are you guys sure you didn't want the SF to try to bust through?  I'm not sure what choice it was left

Even when I scrap the black hole machine they're dragging their feet a lot on the way to the wormhole, trying to figure that out now.

In fairness, it never got as far as the system with the black hole machine for us (if it had, obviously we'd have scrapped it . For us it came into Naos, blew everything up, and desynced the game before it could move on.

Also, I mentioned that it had attacked our systems twice. The first time was to get in to that corridor of systems you mentioned, though clearly at some point once in there it was going to have to get out. The full extent of the graph cut wasn't immediately obvious to me until pointed out by mcp this evening.

What we ended up doing when we played tonight was to remove quite a few SF posts down the branch we didn't want it to travel, which seemed to stop it and encourage it to turn around. It eventually came out through the opposite side (Luyten's Star) and we let it pass through without much incident.

Thanks very much for looking at this, I'm glad to hear there will be some tweaks to the AI handling of the situation. The whole experience has been... educational.

[TechSY730]

Hooray. Is this change specificially for special forces behavior, or will it apply to AI behavior on human planets in other circumstances too? There are still a few times where the AI gets "indecisive" when on human or neutral planets.

[Vinraith]

We finally managed to finish (and win!) this one, but it's definitely the most unstable I've ever seen the game. We've played several on 7.010 and never seen a desync or a crash, this one crashed several times and desynced several more. I really think all of that was due to that cataclysmic huge special forces patrol moving around and interacting with things. I think we'll be disallowing that AI type in the future.

It's also clearly time to update, so we'll be moving up to the latest beta. Should be fun!

[keith.lamothe]

The special forces captain can be fairly cataclysmic, yes   And congratulations on winning depsite the roving black-sky fleet.

[Vinraith]

The special forces captain can be fairly cataclysmic, yes   And congratulations on winning depsite the roving black-sky fleet.

Thanks, and thanks again for your help in looking in to this. We're really looking forward to seeing the new changes, now that we finally feel like we've "caught up" to the development curve of the game.