Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

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vexed
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by vexed »

pastdue wrote: 02 Mar 2019, 21:25
Forgon wrote: 02 Mar 2019, 20:11 I finally pushed ticket #4850, which turns the campaign weapons
Angel Missile and Archangel Missile into guided weapons which behave like their
equivalent weapons in skirmish and multiplayer games.

Hopefully, the change can be taken into account by the new campaign balance.
If not, I will obviously revert my commit.
Since the goal is to move from Trac to GitHub, perhaps this is an example of a change that would be best made as a Pull Request on GitHub, instead of being pushed directly to the master branch.
Yes, these aren't the kinds of changes we want now, as I have mentioned before, the Beta is meant for bug fixes only, it isn't supposed to be a total modification of things that haven't been tested and hoping for the best just won't cut it.

Make a local feature branch and play with it there. When you think all is well, use the balance threads to DISCUSS the proposed change, and the reasoning behind it. Once the discussion is finished, then make a FEATURED BRANCH with the changes for new balance, and everyone can work on that.
/facepalm ...Grinch stole Warzone🙈🙉🙊 contra principia negantem non est disputandum
Super busy, don't expect a timely reply back.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by AndrewTheOnly »

Tested camBalance, I'm now at Alpha 06, and although there are some positive changes, like buffing the flamer, which I now use more often because how broken it can be sometimes, light cannon on the other hand, has good damage, better than hmg, shoots almost as fast as the machinegun, but it lacks accuracy. Very much. Like, I get it if it misses sometimes at far range, but at close range, literally face to face with it's enemy and misses 10 shots in a row, it makes it completely garbage.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by alfred007 »

AndrewTheOnly wrote: 14 Mar 2019, 13:04 Tested camBalance, I'm now at Alpha 06, and although there are some positive changes, like buffing the flamer, which I now use more often because how broken it can be sometimes, light cannon on the other hand, has good damage, better than hmg, shoots almost as fast as the machinegun, but it lacks accuracy. Very much. Like, I get it if it misses sometimes at far range, but at close range, literally face to face with it's enemy and misses 10 shots in a row, it makes it completely garbage.
Did this happen in all levels? The accuracy of the Medium Cannon is 50% so if you shoot with one Cannon at one enemy you can expect that about every second shot miss. I'm not sure but afair the game has problems if you are standing too close to the enemy. Please be a little more precise about the situation when you watched that.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by alfred007 »

@Berserk Cyborg

In your campaignJS branch at Github you have commit 54aa2e01e8b2ae69c34152d00b2dfe7d0e5e1b0a to automate the "reinforcements are available" sound. It looks for me that you forgot cam3-1 (Gamma 02). Or is the fact that this is a two-part mission a problem?
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

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alfred007 wrote: 18 Mar 2019, 23:52 In your campaignJS branch at Github you have commit 54aa2e01e8b2ae69c34152d00b2dfe7d0e5e1b0a to automate the "reinforcements are available" sound. It looks for me that you forgot cam3-1 (Gamma 02). Or is the fact that this is a two-part mission a problem?
Nah, I missed that one.

I'll get back into camBalance after I finish fixing any bugs in the secondary orders, and restoring the range orders. Also need to recreate the Alpha 3 map changes... can't rebase that branch off master.

50% accuracy is rather poor. Bethrezen was talking about the same thing. But, it is true, being very close (less than 1 tile) can make any weapon miss almost all the time.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by AndrewTheOnly »

alfred007 wrote: 18 Mar 2019, 23:35
AndrewTheOnly wrote: 14 Mar 2019, 13:04 Tested camBalance, I'm now at Alpha 06, and although there are some positive changes, like buffing the flamer, which I now use more often because how broken it can be sometimes, light cannon on the other hand, has good damage, better than hmg, shoots almost as fast as the machinegun, but it lacks accuracy. Very much. Like, I get it if it misses sometimes at far range, but at close range, literally face to face with it's enemy and misses 10 shots in a row, it makes it completely garbage.
Did this happen in all levels? The accuracy of the Medium Cannon is 50% so if you shoot with one Cannon at one enemy you can expect that about every second shot miss. I'm not sure but afair the game has problems if you are standing too close to the enemy. Please be a little more precise about the situation when you watched that.
It's not the Medium Cannon I'm talking about, it's the light cannon. I've done now plenty of 1v1s and it has these situations like at the beginning it seems the light cannon is winning but then it decides to give up and miss every single shot like in the example below.

It's not just this particular 1v1, it happened plenty of times to me while playing the campaign, and I've literally lost to a group of mortars attacking my base because I tried defending with my light cannons but they were missing like crazy, and it's incredibly frustrating to me sometimes.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

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Wrong clip, here's the actual one
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by Berserk Cyborg »

That is because the removal of optimum/short/long range, and the resulting accuracy changes from that, made everything shoot at long range starting with 3.2+ (nor was a rebalance done to fix this). Light-cannon in campaign always shoots at 50% now (and thus will do so in this mod cause its based off 3.2+). Before, at short range, it had a 70% of hitting.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by Bethrezen »

Howdy all

So after all the chaos of the last few months, I finally have a bit of time, so though I catch up with the latest developments.

About the unit limit.

Personally I'm not a big fan of doing this, because it cripples your tactical flexibility and results in a retarded amount of time being wasted recycling and rebuilding units as your needs change, and as it is I already spend more than enough time recycling and rebuilding units as new technologies become available, so I would seriously rethink this one, rather than limiting the units the player can build, to make things more challenging it would be better to make the AI smarter and more dangerous, granted this is not so simple to achieve but this would be the better option in the long run.

if it wasn’t for the resource system that warzone has I would advocate for the complete removal of the unit limit, since this is mostly a band aid for the fact that back when warzone first came out computers where inferior and couldn't handle a game that allowed you to build vast armies but on a modern computer that’s no longer a problem.

I'd also like to see if at some point there is a way we can get rid of the timer as well, because again I really hate timed missions don’t get me wrong timed missions have there place but having every level timed is annoying, especially when you have a lot of research to do or you are trying to upgrade a lot of units, or get prepared for the next level.

About weapons damage

Now I'm not sure what if anything has changed on that front, but assuming that they are still the same as a couple of months ago, then here is a list of issues the need addressing

1.) The flamer, the light cannon and the heavy machinegun are all to weak vs the new paradigms scorpion medium units the damage they do is fine vs scavs and the new paradigms bug units but not there scorpion medium units

so maybe we could address that by buffing the accuracy a bit for both the light cannon and the heavy machine-gun maybe we could try taking the accuracy from 50% to 60% and see how people find that.

As for the flamer, i think that needs adjusting as well because with the current values the burn damage is to low where the impact damage is around 400 ish per minute the burn damage is only around 200 ish a minute so I'd increase the burn damage to around 400 ish per minute as well.

2.) Bunker busters are useless they are completely unable to defend them selves if attacked and there rate of fire is way way way to slow.

Personally I'm of the opinion that the rate of fire should be increased to match that of the lancer, or possibly a little faster since the bunker buster only fires 1 round per shot instead of 2 and its damage modifier vs vehicles should be increased to somewhere around 70 to 100

with a propulsion modifier of 70 rate of fire of 5 damage per shot 120 accuracy of 70% that would give the bunker buster about 400 ish damage per minute give or take vs a new paradigm scorpion half track, and at least with that they would have some chance of defending them selves, although I'm not convinced 400 ish per min would actually be enough but i guess we can try that and see.

then to compensate for the fact that buffing the rate of fire would make bunker busters to strong vs structures I'd turn down the structure modifiers accordingly.

In addition id fix lancer upgrades because for some reason lancer upgrades also buff bunker busters i don't know if this is intended or not but personally I'm of the opinion that bunker busters should get there own upgrades and shouldn't be getting buffed by lancer upgrades.

3.) Flamers are way to weak vs hard points so much so that they are absolutely useless a modifier of 40 vs hard points is no where near enough, personally I'm of the opinion that a value of around 60 to 80 seems reasonable with its current damage.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by alfred007 »

Hello Bethrezen, I'm glad to see you back here.
Bethrezen wrote: About the unit limit.

Personally I'm not a big fan of doing this, because it cripples your tactical flexibility...
On the one hand, that's right, on the other hand, it's a challenge for your tactical skills. Using a huge amount of units to destroy the enemy is easy, but to do this with a limited amount is a challenge. I think it's worth to test it and we should also see what other players think about it as soon as it's implemented. It's very easy to revert that in master or making a mod.
Bethrezen wrote:I'd also like to see if at some point there is a way we can get rid of the timer as well, because again I really hate timed missions don’t get me wrong timed missions have there place but having every level timed is annoying, especially when you have a lot of research to do or you are trying to upgrade a lot of units, or get prepared for the next level.
Doing all these things is very easy if you have unlimited time. It's more challenging if you have to do all these things in a limited time. One other problem I see without a timer is the exploit of energy. We implemented timers into Alpha 01 and 03 to avoid that the play can get unlimited energy by running the game overnight. And without a timer, you would be able to gain unlimited energy or, with higher difficulties, the allowed maximum of energy in every away mission. You would just have to stay in your home base until you reached the energy limit. And start the transporter only after you reached that.

At the moment Berserk Cyborg is trying to bring back the optimum/short/long range feature. With that, we will have different accuracies for short and long distances. That means we would have to restart the rebalancing after he succeeded to see if this have a remarkable influence on the balance. That's the reason why I didn't move forward with the balance testing (and because of not having much time for testing at the moment). So in my eyes, your thoughts about the weapon damage should wait until we come again to the point where these issues occur.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by Bethrezen »

On the one hand, that's right, on the other hand, it's a challenge for your tactical skills. Using a huge amount of units to destroy the enemy is easy, but to do this with a limited amount is a challenge. I think it's worth to test it and we should also see what other players think about it as soon as it's implemented. It's very easy to revert that in master or making a mod.
Dong get me wrong I understand the premise behind this one, but the reality is even though I may well have the capacity to field 100 units I never actually use that many at least not all at once, and there is one very good reason why pathing.

I have found that trying to command more than about 20 units at any one time is simply impractical, because they end up getting in each others way due to pathing issues, what I do, do quite frequently however is have different squads attack different objectives.

So for example on Alpha 2 I'll have 1 squad go and deal with the base on the ridge above my base, mean while I'll have a second squad go and deal with the base where you get the generator artefact, and I'll have a third squad stay on guard at the entrance of my base to stop the computer attacking my base, but if I only get to build 40 units then that leaves my base open and undefended since both squads are busy with there individual objectives, and I cant build any units to defend my base and while I could build turrets that’s just more time and resources that I have to spend that I don’t have.

And that right there is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems that this sort of a change would create, so you can see just from that very simple example how such a change would cripple your tactical flexibility.

You make a valid point about players using brute force tactics, but is stopping that really worth all the unnecessary hassle, that this would create ?? to which I'm forced to the answer no, because such a change would have a seriously negative impact on playability and would make the game so frustrating and tedious that it would simply not be worth playing which kinds of defeats the whole purpose of the exercise, like i said before if you want to make the harder difficulties more challenging then fix the retarded AI, fix the pathing issues, rework the resource system and then remove the unit cap and timer.

Doing all these things is very easy if you have unlimited time. It's more challenging if you have to do all these things in a limited time. One other problem I see without a timer is the exploit of energy. We implemented timers into Alpha 01 and 03 to avoid that the play can get unlimited energy by running the game overnight. And without a timer, you would be able to gain unlimited energy or, with higher difficulties, the allowed maximum of energy in every away mission. You would just have to stay in your home base until you reached the energy limit. And start the transporter only after you reached that.
True enough, to remove the timer would require reworking the resource system, so that you no longer have limitless resources.

Having said that there is one way around this, a Dawn of War style resources system, which is what is used in a skirmish game aka you land and are given a starting budget there will typically be a couple of resources point right there at the landing zone/base, and then there will be several more scattered across the map, either held by no one or held by the who ever owns that map and your objective is to blow up computers oil wells to stop them getting resources and then build your own in there place.

Obviously the computer would try to take the resource points back, so they would need to be defended but because resources don’t carry over from map to map it solves the unlimited resources problem and means that you can get rid of the timer, and let people play the level at there own pace, and with an improved AI you could get rid of the unit cap as well again giving the player the freedom to play the level which ever way they like, and ultimately this would be the better way to go in the long run.

I mean imagine if you could replace the campaign AI with something like nullbot well in that case that would make the campaign much tougher due to the fact nullbot is much smarter than the campaign AI, and to make things more interesting you could adjust how cunning the AI is based on the difficulty. Now I'll admit that is not a quick or easy thing to do but it is something worth thinking about.

At the moment Berserk Cyborg is trying to bring back the optimum/short/long range feature. With that, we will have different accuracies for short and long distances. That means we would have to restart the rebalancing after he succeeded to see if this have a remarkable influence on the balance. That's the reason why I didn't move forward with the balance testing (and because of not having much time for testing at the moment). So in my eyes, your thoughts about the weapon damage should wait until we come again to the point where these issues occur.
I see, my though on this was to adjust the base accuracy for all weapon to be what it would be if the unit was set to attack at optimum range, because right now the accuracy of all weapons is set to what it would be if the unit was set to attack at long range which makes no sense since optimum range was the default value, but if Berserk Cyborg is going to bring that back a guess we could hold off.

The one problem i have with this though is that currently the latest builds wont run for me, due to the fact that XP support still hasn't been sorted out, so even if this was this is done and even if the old hold guard and pursue stances are restored like they where before, I'll never actually see thoughts changes since i cant run the latest builds.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by alfred007 »

Bethrezen wrote:So for example on Alpha 2 I'll have 1 squad go and deal with the base on the ridge above my base, mean while I'll have a second squad go and deal with the base where you get the generator artefact, and I'll have a third squad stay on guard at the entrance of my base to stop the computer attacking my base, but if I only get to build 40 units then that leaves my base open and undefended since both squads are busy with there individual objectives, and I cant build any units to defend my base and while I could build turrets that’s just more time and resources that I have to spend that I don’t have.
I think Alpha 2 is a bad example. You could easily win this level by using 24 combat units protected by 12 repair units and 4 trucks (= 40 units). You destroy the first Scavenger base with the complete group and then split them into two groups of 12 combat and 6 repair units each. One moves south and one moves west. That way you have all Scavenger groups and factories under control and there is no way that they can attack your base.

Bethrezen wrote:And that right there is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems that this sort of a change would create, so you can see just from that very simple example how such a change would cripple your tactical flexibility.

I see this as a challenge to my tactical skills rather than a problem.

Bethrezen wrote:You make a valid point about players using brute force tactics, but is stopping that really worth all the unnecessary hassle, that this would create ?? to which I'm forced to the answer no, because such a change would have a seriously negative impact on playability and would make the game so frustrating and tedious

In all my tests I never used more than 38 combat units with two exceptions: In Beta 11 I used a lot of Ripple Rockets attached to a sensor unit to gain experience by destroying the Collective ground reinforcements from the north and in Gamma 9 I used a lot of VTOLs to destroy the Nexus VTOL factories in the south. So I think I would just to have some minor adjustments to my tactic if I could only use 40 units at all.

I think an easy way to solve this problem would be a new option in the options menu where you can choose between different limits or unlimited units. That way every player could decide by his own how he wants to play the game. I'll give the idea Forgon so he can decide how much work it would be to implement it.

Bethrezen wrote: ...if you want to make the harder difficulties more challenging then fix the retarded AI, fix the pathing issues, rework the resource system and then remove the unit cap and timer.
I agree with you that we need a smarter AI and a better pathfinding system but I think removing the timer would change the character of the game too much. You gave an example with Dawn of War. But if I understand you right you have only away missions is this game. What is your solution for the home-based missions in Warzone? You would have working oil resources and unlimited time resulting in unlimited power for the home-based missions.
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by Forgon »

Please help to test
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

Post by alfred007 »

I made a test with the changes for Alpha 01 and it's way tougher than before. I needed several tries to win the level. But I like it. @Forgon: What's your trick to win the level within 20 minutes? I never needed less than 25. ;)

I think the best way to move on now is to check if the whole game is still winnable with the unit limit. CamBalance should be tested after that because it would take too much time to do it at the same time. This way it is possible to get the unit limit changes into the stable 3.3 release. The new balance from camBalance will take too much time to finish for that. The first tests took months and we are at Alpha 12 at the moment. And with all the new changes in the current master version, we will have to restart from Alpha 01.

For those of you who don't want to use GitHub I attach a mod with the combined changes for Alpha 01 and the unit limit.

@Berserk Cyborg Should I add the shortRange values to weapons.js in camBalance or do you want to do it?
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Re: Need help developing 3.3.0 campaign

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alfred007 wrote: 14 Jun 2019, 14:04 I think the best way to move on now is to check if the whole game is still winnable with the unit limit. CamBalance should be tested after that because it would take too much time to do it at the same time.
Yep. Should be a fairly easy process. We will have to revisit all the Alpha missions again for camBalance anyway, which will take some time to do again.
alfred007 wrote: 14 Jun 2019, 14:04 Should I add the shortRange values to weapons.js in camBalance or do you want to do it?
I am going to manually recreate the whole branch, again, so I'll do that.
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