Units stop acting after prolonged games

wuschelteddy

8 years ago
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 8 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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Noah Hunteil Holweck

8 years ago

I went on to the next level with 5 keepers total and 50 minutes in I really noticed something like this again... It's not all of the sunden like I thought... maybe started earlier in the game play, but over time it got worse. But at 50 minutes in, I noticed my ALL rally point flag were only pulling maybe 7 minions in. But I knew I had more, so on my mini map I noticed minions walking around. I went to those dots and clearily they are walking around like normal as if they never heard the rally flag call them... Also game is slightly sluggish at this point. I was about to send in my forces with 2 sets of flags... mainly the beast flag and all flag and I just wasn't getting cooperation from any of my minions to come running.... btw, not sure if the other keepers minions were suffering AI issues... but they wern't springing to action on me like they were 20 minutes before.

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Just a follow up. I started the game up again and loaded the save file. It worked... But the game it loaded showed my minions standing still where I left them.... after 5 minutes everything fully loaded (rest of map) and my minions moved and went on their way like nothing happened. A few objects took a bit to load in graphics, but it went to normal... The only thing I did notice otherwise was the Miro dungeon Keeper still had her minions at the rally flag like before and their AI never improved.

I went on to defeat that level, thinking maybe she was waiting on me to snatch up the relic and...well nothing changed. I won.

I have a simular issue too.

Long game. It was in campaign level with 2 Dungeon Keepers on opposite sides (Main player and Dungeon Keeper Mera). And the Kero relic in the middle and 4 spire things to destroy to get to the Kero Relic... I noticed throughout the level. That the other Dungeon Keeper AI just sat there at the 1st spire defeated & stuck... I was about to make the final rush to the last spire and I realized my minions were expiring on the floor from combat and my imps just standing there where ever they were at and didn't move at all... Then I noticed most of my minions were sluggish and not moving per the typical AI and quite frankly all over the place and not grouped from the rally flag... even after slapping away the rally flag... So I called the rally flag again on a PC unit attacking and only a few of my minions moved...then just stopped moving... while the enemy kept hitting them. Then a second or two later my minion would makea noise and would die after some time... I realized something went wrong and was glitching, so I picked up all my now unhappy units that I could and dropped them directly in the places they wanted to go. i.e. pickup pay in vault.

A few units picked up gold, but froze still... That's when I saved the game and closed the game down... It saved with the normal amount of loading time. But when I exited the game to desktop, it took longer than normal time.

As far as other notes...

-Yes I slapped minions / imps and no change.

-I got a message from the dakr god guy saying, You attached all the minions you can handle.

-I had almost full prisons.

-I have full torture chambers.

-I have full graves I think... can't tell...

-Both torture chambers and graves keep giving me more minions than the cap I think and could be causing an issue.

-The other Dungeon Keeper's minions were still at the same place the entire game. But they kept building and recruiting, so the rally flag squad kept getting larger and larger.

I'm starting to think the number of units is the key issue here. But I'll let you guys decide that.

Here's my specs:

Specify your platform
- Windows 10
- 64bit
  - Ram: 3GB (or 2.9 GiB)
  - CPU: Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz × 4
  - GPU: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV670 (Radeon HD 3870 512 MB)
Build: WFTO V1.3.1f5

Галиев Рустем

Thank You, Wuschelteddy. I used the suggestion in your theme.

My saving.

There are 2 of my game save to the card, which weighs more in kilobytes - is over.

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

Played in this map.

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.

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 :>

Stefan Furcht Programmer

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.

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.