Crucible glitches and oversights

Webbernever1

7 years ago
updated 7 years ago
Completed - Resolved

Operating System

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i7 4800MQ @ 2.70GHz 64 °C
Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
Alienware 041W46 (U3E1)
Graphics
Generic PnP Monitor (1920x1080@60Hz)
Intel (Dell)
3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M (Dell) 49 °C
ForceWare version: 372.70
SLI Disabled
Storage
698GB WDC WD7500BPKX- SCSI Disk Device (RAID)
10GB INTEL SSDMCEAW0 SCSI Disk Device (RAID)
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVDRWBD CA40N SCSI CdRom Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

I have played the crucible mode three times so far, but each time I have encountered a few number of glitches and, what I believe to be, oversights.

1 - Ghouls attack the gateways.

I reported this earlier, so I am not sure if it has been fixed. However, if you kill the necromancer early on, the ghouls go into 'berserk' mode and attack everything nearby. This includes the gateways.

2 - Artefacts and gold cannot always be obtained.

If the enemies are killed on the gateway tiles, which is how I was killing them, gold statues from a monolith are inaccessible. More importantly, if a boss is killed on those tiles, the artefacts are out of play for the rest of the game. This caused me to be severely weakened before I realised what was happening.

3 - Bosses are killed by apocalpyse.

I have a feeling that I read somewhere that bosses were not meant to be killed instantly by this lifeline, though I may have been mistaken. In any event, though it makes it much easier, I am not sure if apocalpyse should truly be able to kill bosses.

4 - Respite does Nothing.

Sure, the timer goes up, but the enemies will spawn when it was scheduled initially. This means that the lifeline is currently useless.

5 - Which goldstone is under attack?
Though it is helpful to be notified that a goldstone is under attack and has been destroyed, it would be helpful if the player was notified which goldstone needed to be defended, either through the map or through a message. Perhaps goldstones could even be numbered.

6 - Gateway limit is bugged.

I attempted to use vampires, but this turned out to be a mistake. When I sacrified gnarlings, I found that they would not respawn because the game deemed the creature limit to have still been reached. This meant that minions would not respawn at all, even minions which had not been sacrified. I remember building an arena and never received a beastmaster because of it. When I lost my vampires, they did not respawn either. I really do not understand this, because I had very few minions at the time.

7 - Minions are incredibly weak.

Perhaps this was intended. However, I have found that whenever the enemies have breached my defences, I may as well not bother sending my minions into the fight because they deal minimal damage and are killed very quickly. Not even titans last overly long.

8 - Earthquakes for no apparent reason.

In a previous game, the earthquake message constantly played. For instance, if a goldstone was Partially covered with replace earth, and two lanes were kept open which were walled off with doors, this would trigger the speech. If replacement earth was used on a lane which I, myself, had opened, the speech also played. Yet, as far as I am aware, no earthquake actually occurred. It is possible that this has been fixed, though I am not sure.

9 - Disappearing torture chamber victims.

This was something I encountered on my first game but did not use since due to this glitch. A friend told me that he had experienced this glitch as well. Effectively, it is possible to capture many of the enemies in the prison and use them in the torture chamber (even though some of them do not fit too well and actually float in the air). Some of the enemies shall be converted, but for a majority of the time, the enemies simply disappear.

10 - Unit pathfinding.

Though I have heard of this problem before, I had never experienced it until crucible mode. Effectively, even when you build lairs, slaughterpens, and taverns, minions still complain about not having a lair or being able to go to sleep. I have to physically drop them in a lair, even if they are nearby. Even then, they do not always build a bed. One vampire even seemed to fall over when I dropped it rather than build a bed. Minions complaining about being, 'held for too long', even though I had only picked them up just for a moment, was another issue. This may have been fixed somewhat, but I still encountered it to a lesser degree in my last game.

11 - Gold value too low.

The gold received for killing bosses quickly, and for skipping time for waves, is, in my eyes, far too low. It makes much more sense to spend that time acquiring more gold from the goldstones and building defences/training minions. In fact, gold is not even that much of a worry in crucible mode, until you end up using lifelines too often. I would suggest a much more substantial reward.

12 - Gateways and numbering.

This is another suggested oversight. Out of the three games I have played so far, I do not really understand why the enemies spawn from gateway Two first, and not from gateway One. It would also be nice if players were notified which gateway was going to be used in the next wave, perhaps by a faint glow or a UI interface.

All of the above bugs (save for one, eight and nine) were encountered in the below output log. If it is alright, I shall post new bugs on here whenever I encounter them, rather than creating a separate ticket.

output_log.7z

Game Version:

Steam Public

Platform:

Windows

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Replies 24

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Stefan Furcht Programmer

7 years ago

Interesting, maybe this is the root cause of the problem

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Not the cause unfortunately as Gold Statues are explicitely filtered out when calculating the current population.

Hm, I shall have a go at testing later today. Out of interest, are bosses or crucible units able to kill vampires permanently? I recall sending four vampires after chunders (I think the chunder boss), and they seemed to disappear, I presumed that they were killed. However, they never respawned, I presume due to the gateway limit.

If not, it is possible that it is something related to the map.

[Dev] Nanorock Programmer

There is nothing particular for Vampire in Crucible. A few more units than usual are able to kill them but apart from that nothing. Their respawn have nothing to do with the gateway limit =)

Ah, okay. Just going to do another test now. Whilst I think of it, I have one more theory to offer: I do not really understand why the gateway population would be shown as 100% so early on, and why it would not fall below that even when minions were dying. I remember at one point I saw a few minions return, but nothing substantial. I am wondering if ember demons are somehow contributing to the population. As I see it, perhaps something was causing the population limit to artificially rise. My ember demons were killed very often, so perhaps that was it. In support of this theory, at one stage, my ember rifts would have been destroyed, and perhaps this was when I saw a small rise in population, albeit it would have been too late by this stage. Alternatively, is the population limit in crucible mode lower than usual? If not, micropiglets/rats are my next guess. If none of those, maybe some of the crucible units take up a lot of population (albeit, I doubt all of these reasons because ember demons do not usually do this, and the population which would be required by the crucible unit would be very high). I am just going to presume that something went very wrong with the game, perhaps the way I was playing, and see if it happens this time.

Edit: By the way, I can confirm point 3. The narrator Definitely says that apocalpyse kills all enemies other than bosses 'outright'. To hear it, reset the tips.

Just played again. The gateway populatin limit did not occur again, so I am really not sure what happened on that game. However, I do have an image of point 10. These disciplines simply stood here. I noticed that if I built stone bridges and then removed the connecting tiles, sometimes units I had shockwaved would simply stay there.

I shall create separate tickets for two other odd things I encountered. Just to ask though, is it intended for an artefact of incantation not to complete vampire rituals? If not, I can create a ticket for that.

Hey Webbernever1,
Just to confirm each Ember Demon occupies 1 population like most minions do.
Micropiglets however do never occupy population.
So I am still unsure what was causing your population issue, but if you find any way to reproduce the problem so we can debug our self, it would be more than the half way to actually fixing it.

And yes separate tickets are easier to manage as said.

I noticed that some of the issues mentioned in this ticket did not occur last time, for instance respite worked. Have there already been some fixes?

Just to confirm: an Ember Demon ceases to occupy one population upon its death?

Hey yes we partially fixed issues you reported already.
If you would have made separate tickets, some of them would be closed by now and you could easily see ;)

Yes Ember Demons use 1 population until wiped out, but will use 1 population again once respawned.