Darth formations or Sinuhets formation

[gennosuke43]

Quick opinion. What seems to be the best with AI formations Darth's or Sinuhet's?

[Aradan]

Sinuhet's imo. If you tweak them a bit as well, they give very good results.

[gennosuke43]

thanks

[Quinn Inuit]

Aradan, how do you recommend tweaking them?

[Aradan]

Sinuhet's "custom" melee states do not work, actually. He uses some tags like "engage_at_will" or "hold_fire" that don't do anything, because they are not recognised by the engine (and because of that, pseudo-states like these only cancel every other valid state, like "fire_at_will_and_skirmish", which is the reason he thought they do work). So, first you have to get rid of these invalid tags and replace them with nothing or some other valid ones.

Secondly, Sinuhet uses "fire_at_will" for his melee troops (as well as other combinations). When you force a state upon the AI's missile troops, the engine needs more time to evaluate the command, so its archers (mainly) take more time to "decide" to reload and fire the next shot. So what you get is slower rate of fire. if you just let them be and do not impose any melee state, they fire just fine.

And finally, optionally, you can tweak your EDU and turn every mounted skirmisher into "missile cavalry" instead of "skirmish cavalry" so that you reserve the "skirmish" class for mounted bodyguard units. Then, you turn their blocks into "skirmish-cavalry-only blocks" and set "skirmish" (and combos) as their default melee state. That way, you can allow them to have "skirmish" mode, which makes them less suicidal and makes the AI charge-retreat-charge-retreat-etc with them. Works very well actually.

Maybe there are some offsets that need tweaking as well (for mounted units at the flanks) but they depend a lot of the mod's battlemap speed modifiers etc.

[Mithril]

i thought those command lines work hehe
thanks for the info aradan wheres sinhuhet its like hes gone for a long time
and Congratulations to for Being an Opifex now

[florin80]

Sinuhet's "custom" melee states do not work, actually. He uses some tags like "engage_at_will" or "hold_fire" that don't do anything, because they are not recognised by the engine (and because of that, pseudo-states like these only cancel every other valid state, like "fire_at_will_and_skirmish", which is the reason he thought they do work). So, first you have to get rid of these invalid tags and replace them with nothing or some other valid ones.

I can`t believe I`m gonna have to start learning about ai formations now. It never ends.
Which doesn`t mean I`m not grateful to Sinuhet for his good work and to you for reporting this issue.

Ok, so what you`re saying is that I`d need to delete all tags the game doesn`t recognizes and either leave nothing there or leave just the other tags from the line that the game`s engine does know. Right?

Now, I`ve just read the wiki tutorial and the two commands are mentioned in it:

    * skirmish - enables skirmish mode by default for any unit with the ability (missile and skirmish class units). Turns off fire_at_will default setting on archers.
    * defend - sets units on guard mode, which also disables skirmish and fire at will setting for archers
    * fire_at_will - units use fire_at_will (as usual) but archers are not on skirmish setting by default
    * hold_fire - turns skirmish and fire at will off by default.
    * engage_at_will - turns skirmish and fire at will off by default. Not sure of usage but it does seem to be a valid command see below.

So, which are the commands that work for sure? Is there a list with all of them? Better still would be a list with what doesn`t work from Sinuhet`s file, but I`m guessing it doesn`t exist.

[Squid]

Sinuhet's "custom" melee states do not work, actually. He uses some tags like "engage_at_will" or "hold_fire" that don't do anything, because they are not recognised by the engine (and because of that, pseudo-states like these only cancel every other valid state, like "fire_at_will_and_skirmish", which is the reason he thought they do work). So, first you have to get rid of these invalid tags and replace them with nothing or some other valid ones.

Secondly, Sinuhet uses "fire_at_will" for his melee troops (as well as other combinations). When you force a state upon the AI's missile troops, the engine needs more time to evaluate the command, so its archers (mainly) take more time to "decide" to reload and fire the next shot. So what you get is slower rate of fire. if you just let them be and do not impose any melee state, they fire just fine.

And finally, optionally, you can tweak your EDU and turn every mounted skirmisher into "missile cavalry" instead of "skirmish cavalry" so that you reserve the "skirmish" class for mounted bodyguard units. Then, you turn their blocks into "skirmish-cavalry-only blocks" and set "skirmish" (and combos) as their default melee state. That way, you can allow them to have "skirmish" mode, which makes them less suicidal and makes the AI charge-retreat-charge-retreat-etc with them. Works very well actually.

Maybe there are some offsets that need tweaking as well (for mounted units at the flanks) but they depend a lot of the mod's battlemap speed modifiers etc.

I think I've just made an interesting find. I was trying to figure where the values for unit class came from. EDU doesn't specify that "skirmish" is a valid class name in its comments at the top, so I went looking in the exe to see if I could the unit class values the exe supports.

What I found was that contrary to the first paragraph, the terms appear in the exe, fire_at_will_and_engage_at_will_and_skirmish for example is at address d07e85, as are a bunch of other commands that appear to be various unit states.

[Quinn Inuit]

Ah, good to know. *scribbles notes furiously* Thanks!

[Quinn Inuit]

I'm sorry, I'm in way over my head here. Can I ask a bunch of n00b questions?

I've looked at this page to get an idea of which commands he's created:
http://www.twcenter.net/wiki/Descr_formations_ai.txt

How do I know which ones work and which ones to delete?

Should I simply comment out all of the commands involving fire_at_will?

How do I change the cavalry to skirmish? According to the EDU, the only supported classes are light, heavy, missile, and spear.

[Aradan]

Skirmish is mentioned HERE though, as a valid class
It does work, but it should be used only for cavalry BGs imho (foot BGs that 'skirmish' are vulnerable to cavalry charges on their backs), because the campaign AI considers skirmish class as 'regular (ie non-missile) troops when it orders recruitment, and you can see stacks of skirmishers if you use it.

Nope, don't outcomment all fire-at-will commands, simply outcomment all default_melee_stance lines from ranged_missile_infantry blocks.

The default melee stances are essentially commands that tell the AI which buttons to push, from the ones you see on the UI panel when you selected a unit: fire-at-will, skirmish, guard. You can use combinations of these three. The rest, hold_fire, engage_at_will and all those that don't correspond to an actual button on the UI, have no effect other than turning fire-at-will and skirmish off. So, if you want to force a block to turn fire-at-will and skirmish off, then you can use a 'dummy' stance (make one yourself ) to do that.

[Quinn Inuit]

Oh, I'd forgotten about that. Good point.

Ok, that sounds like a good plan for general's cav.

I see what you mean about what to remove now. That makes sense.

Two questions about the pseudo-commands:
1) So if I find an invalid command like "hold_fire" that's not linked to any more important commands (and therefore canceling them out), I should just replace it with something like "invalid_command"? (I like to be obvious.)
2) Is the command "guard" or "defend"? I think I saw "defend" a lot in the file.

[Aradan]

1) Yep, replacing with I_dont_do_squat or invalid_command or dummy_stance or whatever you like is fine.

2) The command is "defend", but I *think* the mouse-over tooltip for the button is "guard mode", that's why I used that term. Not played vanilla in a looong time.

[Quinn Inuit]

I see. I think I can do this now. Thanks!

[Athenogoras]

Can the AI change default_state within formations during battle?
For example if heavy infantry has defend in its defensive formation(using Sinuhet) can it change it during attack. My experiences are mixed. Sometimes they spread out as in non-guard mode and somestimes the make contact and even turns back to the enemy.

[atraps]

If all of this is true then why are Sinuhets' formations better then Darth's formations?

[Aradan]

The AI swaps "modes" during a battle. If it's in "attack" mode, it will use an attack formation, and will do what that formations defines. It can also break up its army into smaller ones, and use different formations for some of the units. So, it can change default_melee_state during battle, yeah. And sometimes, even within a formations that strictly specifies a state, the AI can just toggle it off on its own.

Atraps, this is just my personal opinion. Sinuhet's are better because the basic principle is better. Darth uses a faction-based formations system, where each faction has 1 formation available, where Sinuhet uses an army-based one, where factions have multiple formations available, and they pick one based on the type of army they have at the particular moment. Also, it *seems* to me Darth believes that setting a high priority for "attack" formations will make the AI attack more often (in otehr words that priority affects the AI's decision on the mode it will follow) while I believe what Sinuhet seems to believe, that the AI first chooses the mode (attack/defend/march/etc) and then picks a formation from those available, using priority as a means to select one.

I'd like to stress once more that this is my personal opinion. Players might like Darth's system better or find it fits their own style more, so there's no "best" system really, it's all objective.

[atraps]

Oh ok I was just wondering.

[Athenogoras]

Thank you for your reply Aradan.

[Quinn Inuit]

I've tried making the suggested changes, with the generals all as skirmish cavalry with the default state fire_at_will_and_skirmish, but it's not doing much good.

While perusing Darth's ai formations, Sinhuet's, and a primer by Darth (http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=53604), I think I stumbled across another problem. Darth always seems to put his generals behind a dummy block that spans the entire army, with the idea being that will help force them to stay back. Sinhuet doesn't seem to do this. Do you think adding a dummy block to each formation spanning all the previous blocks and then making that dummy block the relative block for the general block would work?

Sorry, did that make any sense?