Map: Poke in the Eye

[Loren]

Bug report:

There was a province with a Goat Sun in it, I intended to suicide an unwanted commander into it. The Goat Sun immediately runs off--it's acting like he's a unit rather than a commander and there definitely is no other commander in the group that could lead him.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Loren

Bug report:

There was a province with a Goat Sun in it, I intended to suicide an unwanted commander into it. The Goat Sun immediately runs off--it's acting like he's a unit rather than a commander and there definitely is no other commander in the group that could lead him.

Thanks for that. I do appreciate comments.

Its not actually a bug. Or at least, its not unknown. In chaos games any unit can be commander or troops or bodyguard.

LongerAnswer:
the game doesnt actually flag units as pretenders, troops, summon, etc. Every unit can be any of those. The dom3 game just uses them certain ways. But the chaos routines just picks random 1-2100 as a commander, and assigns some random 1-2100 as troops and a few 1-2100 as bodyguards. So you can have a slinger leading an army of wisps and bodyguarded by 5 monoliths.

To get it any smarter Id have to build a separate database to record each unit from 1 to 2100 and what it usually is used as.

[Loren]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

Thanks for that. I do appreciate comments.

Its not actually a bug. Or at least, its not unknown. In chaos games any unit can be commander or troops or bodyguard.

LongerAnswer:
the game doesnt actually flag units as pretenders, troops, summon, etc. Every unit can be any of those. The dom3 game just uses them certain ways. But the chaos routines just picks random 1-2100 as a commander, and assigns some random 1-2100 as troops and a few 1-2100 as bodyguards. So you can have a slinger leading an army of wisps and bodyguarded by 5 monoliths.

To get it any smarter Id have to build a separate database to record each unit from 1 to 2100 and what it usually is used as.

The problem isn't whether there was a sane commander, but whether there was anyone capable of leading them at all. There wasn't. It should ensure that all troops have commanders capable of leading them. I agree checking for usual use isn't necessary. It also doesn't check if they can eat, whether this is reasonably fixable or not I don't know.

I had another such encounter that I'm not whether it was the mod or not as my dominion (with wrath of god up) did touch the province for a little while. 18 tarrasques. Again I suicided a commander into them--18 tarraques run, there's no commander on the field. I was actually rather annoyed as I was planning on capturing those guys. With GOR they get two slots--a reinvigoration item and a luck item and they're just about steamrollers. I had a dozen munching on the enemy and only lost one out of well over 100 battles--and that one went to a spell, not to damage. No matter how big the AI army they couldn't inflict enough damage to overcome the regeneration.


I also ran into another mystery that I've seen twice now:

In the end there was one province (not their capital) flagged as Arco and one as Mictlan despite the fact these were eliminated long ago. I won by killing Ermor--and these two were still on the map at that point. All values were apparently zero in the score graph. Mictlan was also solidly under Ermor dominion for ages, Arco was under it for a fair while. (I wasn't paying enough attention to dominion and just about got dominion-killed. It's the first time I've ever had any real dominion threat from the AI.)

[Gandalf Parker]

Yes that type of thing pops up in chaos.

The chaos program does no decent sanity checks at all. The random selections are all numeric involving the range from zero to the maximum choices. It cant examine or judge the choices based on any criteria. The best it does is that I do kep the choices of troops and bodyguards within a a short range from the initial choice.

So it picks a commander from the full list then adds units and bodyguards from somewhere fairly close to that. All that does is make use of the order that units were added to the game. That way the units MIGHT be at least from the same nation or the same theme (lizard, undead, summons).

As to the provinces you saw, the game does do random ownership of some of the provinces. It picks provinces and randomly adds castle, temple, lab in various combinations and sometimes it randomly gives it an owner. That means that a far province might pop up as being owned/operated by Ermor even if Ermor isnt in the game. On the other hand, sometimes a far province shows up at the start of the game assigned to you. Its also worth noting that other unusual things are the random assignment of unrest and PD. Also that scattered castles have both inside and outside defenders.

Future considerations for adding to the chaos program is more random to the maps (such as colors) such as seen in numbers 31-40 of these map runs.
http://www.dom3minions.com/RandomizedMaps.htm
And possibly some clearing of provinces such as used in the NI maps. And maybe re-ading that scattered castles might start out under siege by a random nation in rare occurances.