Elephants stalling siege AI

[makanyane]

Thought I'd broken a settlement but this seems to be a vanilla problem... aaargh!


Test; set up siege custom battle with you defending and ai as timurids attacking a Motte & Bailey,
give them some infantry a ram and one of their lowest range elephant units...

The ele's will come forward and try and shoot you - if you move out of range they, and the entire rest of the ai army will just sit there - ignoring the fact that they have a ram that could knock down the gate.

Behaviour seems similar if they are set up to attack higher level settlements - if they have ladders they'll use them, but they won't try and use the ram on the gate... it looks like the ai is assuming the ele's will capture the gate - but they can't...


anyone else noticed this? or have any solutions? and do you know if it crops up in campaign battles too??

[irishron]

I never tried any battles with them but is this why I have read since the game was released, Fight the Timurid elephants in the open. Sieges are bugged"? Elephant cannons should blow away those gates to me but I have never tried it.

[makanyane]

I thought the Timurids had some early CTD problems with the elephant artillery...

but this is looking like a generic problem if you try having elephants with archer type riders and not a mounted engine (came across problem in another mod) - I need to go and have a look at some troll/magic firing type elephants in disguise and see how they get on in same situation!

EDIT; Mumakil in TATW seem to do this too.

[Zarathos]

90% it's caused by Germanicus AI. Can be definately fixed using Germanicus AI anyway

[makanyane]

90% it's caused by Germanicus AI. Can be definately fixed using Germanicus AI anyway

the 'vanilla' test I did was with Bare_Geomod folder - that doesn't seem to have any changed AI stuff - Germanicus or otherwise

but if you've got any ideas how to fix it by changing the AI.xml files I'd be very grateful!

really surprised not to have seen more mention of this from players/modders, TaTW's Balrog (non missile ele) and Mumakil (missile ele) both seem to cause the same problem.

EDIT:

I never tried any battles with them but is this why I have read since the game was released, Fight the Timurid elephants in the open. Sieges are bugged"? Elephant cannons should blow away those gates to me but I have never tried it.

just tried with them - they are capable of shooting the gate, .i.e. the player can use them to shoot the gate
but with the ai attacking in custom battle they don't... and they don't use the ram either - so same issue; without ladders (or alternative artillery) the whole attack just stalls.

So that's now all types of ele that seem to have the problem, melee/missile/artillery

[Zarathos]

I never played with battle AI, but it's not a problem of XML files. You need to fix it by using the campaign script and making units behave properly. In latest Germanicus AI there is already a fix for elephants during siege but it's probably somehow broken. Follow those variables:

Elephants Fix - fixes AI's inability to attack settlement gates when elephants are in its army.

;;;;;;;Elephant Fix
set_counter elephant_fix 0
set_counter elephant_gate 0
set_counter elephant_gate_s 0
set_counter elephant_gate_tier2 0
set_counter elephant_gate_tier3 0
set_counter elephant_gate_tier2s 0
set_counter elephant_gate_tier3s 0

You could then either rewrite that part or check if it contains bugs and fix them. The script is very not but it's definately not complicated to understand. There is probably a missing or wrong check, a missing counter set or something like that somewhere that is blocking that.
You could also try older versions of Germanicus AI that contains that fix to see if they work properly and then eventually merge them with the latest one to make everything work as intended.

[leo.civil.uefs]

I nerver noticed anything about this, probably because I never did any test for my settlements beeing attacked by elephant units.

The only thing I can think about is the feature that in rome allows elepahts to hit the gates (not with missiles but actually their melee attack), so maybe the AI still counts with this even if the feature is not present in med2 anymore.

This is one of my requests for the .exe patching thing.

[Gigantus]

Yup, should be left over coding from RTW were elephants could ram gates (loved using Pyhrus' elephants in vanilla RTW to capture some settlements).