AI_Formations:

[dvk901]

The behavior I'm seeing in the battle AI more often than I'd like is going to need some attention, I'm afraid.. I had a huge battle near Emporiae last night between a 19 unit Roman army, and two Carthaginian armies....one of which included Hannibal. It would've been a fun battle, even though I lost miserably....but it ended up being a torturous lesson in how NOT to have AI armies behave in RTW. The battle started with a smaller Carthaginian army attacking from the south (6-7 units), and at night. I managed to drive them off without much of a problem, but knew already that I was doomed because I had taken so many loses dealing with this smaller foe.

Now here comes Hannibal. His army behaves like it doesn't have a CLUE!! Two cavalry units run over into a corner of the battlefield by a farm and you can hear their officer the whole battle saying "Units, FORWARD!".....but they never move during the whole battle. Slinger and archer units come forward and attack from an 10 o'clock position...while 5-6 various celtiberian, Carthage Marines, and Celtic hvy spearman engage what's left of my front. The whole time I'm thinking: "Where is the rest of this army?" Well, it's 'hiding' all over the place. I catch glimpses of various missile and infantry units 'appearing' out of nowhere and dispensing of my routing units. (Why are they acting like cavalry, while the cavalry stands over in a corner feeding their horses and having a brew by a farm?) I actually manage to route a couple enemy units, and then a whole column of their units appears at my army's 4 o'clock position....they're over there setting up camp, playing cards, and cutting down trees for their fires!! They 'bother' to send a unit over to replace the ones that routed......(must'a drew the short straw or something).

While Hannibal's army is 'out to lunch', he charges into the foray with my army and gets his unit killed......he escapes, and rides over to a position in front of two Iberian heavy units. I send what's left of my cavalry over to kill him....which they do.....within ten feet of these units...as they watch their General get killed and do NOTHING!! (They're roasting hotdogs and marsmellows on their torches....can't be bothered.)

My overall comment on this battle would be: WTH? It lasted OVER an hour (I stuck it out just to see what was going to happen), but it was boring and drawn out far beyond any reasonable length given the fact that I was going to lose, and I knew it going in. My whole objective in fighting the battle at all was to try and take a 'chunk' out of Hannibal so that my army in the city could maybe save itself.

This is an AI_formations file problem as far as I can tell. After this battle, I put the Sinuhet file we were using for a while in RS2 back into Beta8, went into a custom battle and loaded as 'near' as I could all the same units into Roman and Carthaginian armies. The result was totally different! The whole Carthaginian army attacked...cavalry acted like cavalry, and they slapped the piss out of me in 15+ minutes.

Really, this has got to be fixed....and the reason is that this type of behavior (which I have mentioned before) is extending the length of battles not based on unit stats, but based on units not participating in the battles at all.

[apple]

Why wasn't Sinuhets formation included from the start?

[swhunter]

I,m glad you brought this up.
As playing Sparta the different types of enemies would do either the same thing or retreat then attack later in the game.
And at times you had to chase them up into the mountains fighting in impossible angles which would never happen. This does become annoying and the battles can last up to 20 minutes to over a haft hour.
Not complaining but stating facts.
In the past i shared screens in the locations.

[dvk901]

I've done some testing of the current formations AI vs the old Sinuhet file we were using, and IMHO the old file is better EXCEPT in the case of Greek units..in particular, Phalanx units don't behave properly at all in the old file. They tend to behave too 'independently', wander around, and won't stay in an organized formation. I'm not going to do anything about this, but maybe we could revisit this a little.

[tone]

Interesting, the AI file we're using is supposed to be Sinuhet's formations with some small tweaks, as far as I understand. Maybe I'm wrong.
I'm quite happy to use the Sinuhet's files as long as we make sure the faction ownerships for the different formations are correct.

[dvk901]

I did a file comparison with a program I have called 'WinMerge', and the two are massively different....almost 'overwhelmingly' so. The thing is, there do seem some better things in both......for example, Greek units and armies behave better with the current one. But, I'll see what I can do. I have a feeling that part of the problem with the 'clueless' units is that what they are supposed to do is perhaps more important than we think. 'Defending'....'attacking'.....'skirmishing'...etc. Many units have no 'guidance', so to speak, and I want to see if this matches up to the units that seem to be just 'partying' instead of fighting. I'm also getting the feeling that the issue is with barbarian units in 'other-culture' armies. Barbarians in general seem to exibit this problem the most (so far).

[cherryfunk]

I've fought the battle of Raphia a few times as the Seleucids, and the AI does rather well, advancing in a solid phalanx line with cavalry on the wings. Didn't notice much of this scattered behavior that you saw with Carthage.

[dvk901]

I think the Greek specific parts of the formations are fine, but it seems to me to be mostly a problem with Carthage and Barbarian factions that use, of course, a lot of Barbarian units.
I'm working on it, and have found a number of areas where this formations file isn't yet 'right' for RS2.

[tone]

The important thing twith the AI is to make sure that they keep defence stance off as much as possible, which we adjusted in the AI formation file. Otherwise the player is potentially at an advantage.

[dvk901]

I remembered that, and have been avoiding it. Many of the issues I have found have also been a 'product' of the fact that we have so many units with javelins and such. It is very irritating to have situations where the 1st row of units are set to 'fire at will', while the second or third rows with the same units in them are not. In fact it tends to be quite often 'random' as to whether units are set right. Setting them to 'fire_at_will' if they DON'T have missiles doesn't matter anyway, it's just ignored.

There were also errors in the Roman formations because they were written for a 'Hastati, Principe, Triarii' mix of units, which we don't have. So the entire 1st row of Roman units is not set properly because they don't match the unit description.

[Faridus]

does anyone know whether Sinuhet has a tutorial for formations_ai.txt?
i found darth's and some other guy's (red_spot), i want to look at the different styles.

[tone]

not really but there's some stuff here: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58952

[Faridus]

yes, i saw that...not much of a tutorial

[tone]

No it's not is it.

[dvk901]

Did you find this?

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=130

[MihaiV]

Searching the forums I found this:

http://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=96419

When an army is deployed that army will always deploy in a "defend" formation and will keep the "defend" purpose or immediatelly after start of the battle switch to the "attack" purpose.
Armies that reinforce seem to start on a combination purpose "attack/defend", according to Darth Vader's research you need this formation purpose in your formations_ai file or else a battle with reinforcements will cause CTD's
How exactly reinforcements behave I have no knowledge about ... yet, what I do know is that AI-armies with the "defend" purpose (ones that dont attack you ) can have their reinforcements join up with them and join a single huge army, wich means you need to make sure your formations are not limited at a max. of 20 units as this is what can cause reinforcements stalling and never joining the battlefield, though I think that that is probably not the only cause.


Another thing I remember doing is forcing the unit blocks to have a min_unit_width of 10-15 or so, this seemed to make the AI better at forming his reinforcements and made multiple army battles more interesting. The idea wasn't mine, I just read it somewhere on twcenter a LONG time ago. Another thing to do is to try to use Darth formations, as they have the min_unit_width attribute for most blocks and see if the problem persists, and if it dosn't persist than code to add a min_unit_width to most blocks.

Hope this helps somehow

[Faridus]

hi MihaiV,
welcome to our team (the best one around!)...
i saw that trhead, i have all available threads about ai_formations in my favorites!
still trying to learn about the stuff.