Units stop acting after prolonged games

wuschelteddy

9 years ago
Views 29,009
updated 8 years ago
Completed - Resolved

Hello,

the title says it all. I build a map with the sole purpose to constant fight enemy AI's in prolonged games. After about 45min into the game, when it gets really crowded, the imps just stop working most of the time. Also noticeable is that the units only occasionally attack each other and basically just stareoff mpst of the time.

(I have this every time and basically also on every 4 player map)

Cheers!

Game Version:

Steam Public

Platform:

Windows

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Satisfaction mark by wuschelteddy 9 years ago

Thanks a lot! A lot of ppl put a lot of effort into this and I am thrilled to see the outcome soon. The amount of interaction with anyone from Support/Technical is awesome!

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Replies 44

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Stefan Furcht Programmer

9 years ago

Thank you for the upload Wuschelteddy,
for some reason i can only download the meta file and not the save file above.
I am not sure if this is an issue with UserEcho or if something went wrong on uploading.
In case it is because the file has no ending, maybe put both in a zip.
We will try to figure out why the download link to the save file is broken.

Thanks for you help

Reply Link

As requested:

Split Worlds.zip

Have fun with that :>

Nice fight :)
I have loaded the save game and nothing moved for a warmup time of like 20 seconds.
But then suddenly when the minimap was rendered (was black before) suddenly everyone was moving again the behaviour seemed correct.
Though I found a few workers which argued about who should drag a corpse so that multiple workers tried but no one succeed to drag it away.
This seems a bug indeed but I did not encounter that other units or workers get stuck after the ~20 sec warmup.
So I wonder if this is depending on different CPUs or something similar.
So for you every unit remains stuck after loading the save game and it doesn't "wake up" after a short time?

I played further to see what happens but I was finally able to win the battle and destroy the AI players without applying any coder cheats ;)
So for some reason on my end the level worked quite good, maybe I need to try it on a different rig.

True, it's not all units that stop working and never have been.

The initial loading time is also similar on my end, and basically after the minimap loads the fight ensues.

On my end it is mainly imps that stop functioning properly, similar to what you wrote about them flailing around and not beeing able to pick up corpes/KO'd units. They wont claim ground or farm gold or whatever imps also do. Also, for me, half of my imps just stand around and dont do anything. Sometimes they wake up after beeing slapped, mostly not.

What occurs on my end, and somhow not on yours, is that the fighting units attacking very much less frequent than they should. It looks like their brains are working at maybe 15% capacity, so their decision making to attack or run away is veeeeeeery slow.

Yea for me all workers did do a proper job after the warmup, i did not watch close if units attack less frequent.
But I get an idea how this could happen in case there is too much load on CPU.
It is made to scale over frames to make sure AI does never hurt rendering, but still has a minimum time it is always allowed to use.
Maybe this time is too small for a big 4 player battle and maybe it should not be smoothed over frames at all cost.
The thing is when we change that, you would probably get more intelligent behaviour at some cost of your framerate.
We will try to tweak on those things for next patch, however I am guessing your CPU is working on its limits, when battles get that big.
Would you prefer a bit lower FPS if this assures the AI acts still fast? So far we did go the full way to prevent it from hurting rendering performance at all.

We are not talking about the micro-stutters that we had a few patches ago, are we? I don't even know what FPS I currently run on. But I generally don't care for FPS as long as everything flows nicely.

But a different approach to solve this entirely would be to make it increasingly harder to satisfy the needs of a growing army. The Units are, in my opinion, waaaaay too modest in the first place. That units actually visit my realm when I don't even provide basic things like food and a place to sleep is weird.

Make it possible to fail at converting, so that units 'chose' to die rather than changing sides.

Well, these kind of things.

I played a bit longer and ended the game with 30 acolytes and 43 gnarlings alone. As much as I love BIG armys getting there is far too easy :>

Галиев Рустем

It's annoying and makes it hard to enjoy the game. On large and complex maps, with many creatures and rooms that over time have considerable time to correct inconsistent game mechanics sluggishness or dullness of workers and creatures.

Played in this map.

This looks quite similar to something I posted before. Good to know others have this issue as well.

My Post:

https://brightrockgames.userecho.com/topic/1071870-units-stop-acting-after-prolonged-games/

Guess V0id will see this sooner or later