tdphys

It's just Latex

Hmm... is the percentile roll in integer or float? I've modified the pdf a bit...

I did a more formal writeup of my arguments in the previous critical damage thread, and gave hopefully a more snazzy title to catch DEV's eyes. Apparently Sensuki thinks there might be difference to how damage is calculated in code vs what's been stated, so this might be a moot argument anyways. However, I introduce to you: "Balancing the Damage Threshold (DT) Paradox in Pillars of Eternity (POE)" poedt.pdf I realize that this isn't really a paradox, but the word is too cool

And low damage high attack weapons that profit most from high critical chance would be useless with this. If you buff the min damage throughput for low damage weapons, they could benefit because the crit would apply after the DT rather then having the crit get soaked up in it.

Oddball ? Come on... it's just ... untested Seriously though, how to balance crit in the face of DT is what needs to be addressed if the current state of combat can be fixed/balanced as is. The only other way I can think of is making Crit modifiers really really low... I like the idea of DT, the question is, how do you keep it relevant with progressively higher damage values. By only modifying the net damage, you keep DT relevant, and thus the thematic meaning of armor stays relevant in the game. You could apply some effects, maybe +1 sword before the DT, but you'd have to make sure those before DT modifiers are very few and limited, because they are more powerful. (I like the might before DT modifier, because it allows to differentiate between per and might, but that would have to be carefully balanced) If you apply all modifiers before DT, multiplicative bonusses (crits) make DT irrelevant really fast. Then the game devolves into running around in underwear trying to maximize per...

Yeah, but at this point, I think there might be a systemic problem in the math, mainly excessive crit amplification of damage, see above. Ultimately, if your math makes it hard to balance the game, and makes parts of it redundant, it doesn't matter if people understand the math or not, the game will just suck regardless.

Some more comments... If we compare with DnD, a crit happens 5% of the time. Let suppose a 3x crit multiplier, if you distribute that over the other 45% of successful attacks, ( assuming you hit 50 % of the time) for base damage of 10 per hit, means you've effectively raised damage over time by 2 pts ( 10 x 3 = 30, so 20 extra damage, spread over 10x as many hits). That translates into a 1.2 damage modifier per hit over time, in the absence of DT in DnD. From what I see in the beta, crit mods can exceed this alot. This means more unrelenting pervasive damage amplification for highly accurate characters and creates a balancing issue. Things get worse when you include DT. Let's suppose we add DT to DnD; If you do 10 damage , with 8 DT, you're doing 2 damage per hit. Now apply a crit, which again applies 20 damage over 10x as many hits, but now we have an effective 2.0 damage modifier. Now look at PoE, where crits happen say half the time for a highly accurate player. We have 20 damage over 2x as many hits. This means we've done 4 regular damage and 20 crit dependent damage, and that's an effective modifier of 5x, and happens every 2 hits. How do you balance that? Well, by reducing crit mods, I guess. Still.. Do you balance DT for just normal hits... making critical hits the optimized way by far to do damage... Do you balance DT for crits.... relegating normal hits to *grazes*, again making critical hits the optimized way to do damage. By making crit mods apply to net damage, you can focus balancing DT against regular hits, and allow interesting paths to damage amplification. 1. make light weapons like daggers/rapiers have a higher damage pass through against DT, you could focus on crits and attack speed amplifying that damage, rather then might. 2. A high might/low per character might actually be viable as guaranteed overcoming of DT, and could withstand per debuffs a bit better without wrecking damage output. 3. You'd actually need to pay attention to weapon/vs armor DT to optimize you damage, even with high per characters. I'm not sure what to do with spells and such. Is there DT against magic damage? without DT crits are a little more balanceable. At least you can consider a hit vs a crit as half damage vs full damage or something.

Lots has been said lately about the over balance of damage to health in the recent backer, along with claims of swinginess... One way to fix it, other then straight up imbalance tweaking , might be to give crit bonusses not to total damage, but the net damage. This could work with damage thresholding in interesting ways, and would hopefully cut down on crits (Accuracy) being the ultimate way to raise damage. Pumping might, perhaps would give more reliable damage. High accuracy light weapons could pump up their guaranteed bypass by getting a relative boost from critting... etc... multiple paths for damage options, more strategy? Fitting weapon types to armor style might actually mean something...

Hahaha... The only way I beat Yxonomei (whatever) was by having her aggro run around the table in a room just north of the gates. I must have gone around it 50 times or something. That was probably the hardest fight for me in IWD, besides the finale. When I try and aggro creeps in BG2 (I'm on ToB now), I usually have to get an attack on them to get them to turn and fight.

What are the reasons for the long build times? Is it all compiler or linking etc? I'm assuming you guys are using a distributed compiler? (does this exist for C#/unity?) Just curious

Just as a curiosity, will there be a BB for linux ( is it already live? )

If we go back to the engagement radius, one fix would be to have a smaller radius to create the *engaged* status and a larger radius to trigger the attack. For example, make engaged radius 30% smaller then reach and then have leaving reach be the trigger. This will stop insta-disengagement attacks. When attacking, you could designate click-> attack at reach. shift-click -> engage and attack. And obviously, AI should respond to being engaged rather then moving and procing. This should be a hard clause in the AI.

I'm guessing It's probably the crafting + resource gathering idea in POE that necessitates the stash, since these will all clog up a strictly IE style n-slot inventory. Since you have an infini-stash you can't have wysiwyg since it's to easy too vacuum everything up, rather then make the decisions from IE games like, having to optimize equipment and try and value what's best to bring back and keep (bag of holding not-withstanding). So why not differentiate and only allow an infini-stash for unequipable, unconsumable items used for crafting and let all other ones be restricted to the regular inventory. Now you can go back to wysiwyg. In fact, treat gems and gold to the stash, etc and reduce the regular inventory would be a fine idea to me. Figuring out the best way to equip is part of the challenge IMHO.

So I went over the wiki to see if I could understand engagement a little more, and it stated that engagement is based on a radius slightly greater then the units width (greater widths for fighter etc). Does this mean that almost any movement of an engaged target will result in an engagement attack? or is it possible to "shift" (4e reference here:) ) around the engaging enemy by moving on its perimeter but inside the engagement radius and avoid the disengagement attack? This is just me being curious and not an attempt at another long engagement thread.

That would make the ability of some combatants have to engage multiple targets almost meaningless. No, it would mean it could have multiple buffs from multiple disengagements. A large monster engages 3 PCs, 2 flee, the monster gets buffed twice and focuses on the remaining PC which receives the wrath. Thematic and mechanic synergy !!!!

Why not just let the characters who are disengaging grant a largish accuracy bonus (incur a deflection penalty? ) to engaged foes for a few seconds. If he can get out of range before attacks trigger, good for him. If he can't, boom. Thus, multiple enemies engaged will have better chance to hit with their cool-downs coming off different times, and one doesn't have to rely on gimmicky off cool-down attacks/animations etc. The more I think about it, the more I agree with Sensuki that out of cool-down engagement AOO attack really is a turn-based mechanic, and doesn't fit well thematically and mechanically with real-time pause. If you wanted to be really nasty, you could add an instant cool-down (random even? skill based? ) reduction to the engaged foes when breaking engagement. That being said, I think the kiting example used against the current engagement is an AI issue and not an engagement one. (Edit: I know this is similar to MReed's idea, but I thought it could be simpler and not necessitate more UI, just be a understood combat mechanic)

Except what you really meant to say was "Iterative over all visible foes and find the foe with the lowest stamina..." which requires a loop. Alternatively, "Find lowest stamina" could be a hard-coded function, but what if you want to look for the friendly unit with the lowest deflection bonus (to cast a buff on them)? You don't need much more than if ... then ... blocks to implement a reasonable AI, but you do need a bit more. But wait, let's just have simple lambdas and do everything recursively... Ahah!!! loops begone J/K Yes, I agree loops are necessary (And I'm astounded the older IE games didn't have them, but I guess compute power might have been an issue). From some of the other responses, sounds like the AI's going to be done in Engine, so there'll be no lack of logic/operations/control . I did look into some of the Unity scripting, they seem to have their own *javascript* like language, but I don't know if POE is using it..

I find the dependency of BG2 on the mage class detracts from the game. I'm all for powerful mages, but when they make the rest of the other classes redundant at high levels, I think that's lame. IWD seemed more balanced. Lore wise, I prefer a magic system that feels powerful but has limitations. rather then the ascendancy into GODLIKE. I understand that becoming all-powerful and invulnerable can be fun for some, but I think it honestly detracts from the game and the story. Just thought I'd salt the conversation so that this thread sounded a little less like an Echo chamber For examples... Protection from weapons/ magic weapons/ tensors transformation Shouldn't exist or have really low durations ( I know magic weapons does, but still ) Mage counters that aren't Mages need to exist for other classes. Scrolls just don't do it for me. Cheers

Obviously, these are incomplete fragments, but you get the picture -- these aren't by any means "genius-level" AI, but far more robust (and, just as importantly, easier to implement) than the simple scripts possible in the IE games. Yeah, this is exactly what I was thinking, to me you've described 2 states of AI, one focused on pursuit, the other focused on AOE artillery. Now add a random state transition that allows a shift from say, artillery AOE searching to.... Sniper: * Search for enemy with lowest stamina in range, if stamina < 10% then * target with single damage spell/attack So say you have an AOE equipped wizard, whose main state is the AOE one you described, but every 5 seconds does a RNG markov process, which has a 10% chance to shift to the sniper AI with a chance to shift back. Maybe you have a AOE wizard with less powerful AOE spells, and some serious single spell damage, you bump up the transition chance. Thus you end up with some interesting varied, random AI that can be easily tuned per NPC, without having to combine all the states into a single massive if-then statement.

Absolutely Yep, Have a bunch of simple states (engage, pursuit, protect, etc) with a Markov-Chain style random transition between them would be great and unpredictable.

With the engagement model that is implemented today (or anything resembling it), the only valid strategy for melee-only (or melee-dominated) foes is "Move towards the nearest foe and attack it continuously once engaged until it dies" (e.g. strategy 1). Any attempt to engage an arbitrary foe ("squishies") will lead to engagement (& associated disengagement attacks) by the fighters, which will almost always block the straight-line path. Avoiding this problem leads back to implementing the 3 critical functions that I mentioned earlier. You are absolutely correct that the Infinity Engine AI is poor -- and remains poor (but better) with third party mods to improve it. The reason is the scripting language -- you can't perform a simple loop in an IE script, much less determine the range between yourself and a particular foe. I'm fairly confident (although I hope that I'm wrong) that the scripting language in PoE is going to be similarly limited -- certainly if it isn't, then none of the AI in the beta even makes a gesture at using the additional functionality. I'd append a bit more to strategy 1: - If target disengages, don't follow if other units are engaged with self. But seriously, this seems to me a valid interesting component of an AI. I agree that trying to engage *squishy/ low health foes* will probably lead to opposing fighters trying to engage to protect the dying/weak, but isn't this what tactics are all about? Even just this * retarget squishy/low health enemies * if possible seems like better AI then whats been talked about in BB and definitely whats in IE games. I did read the rest of your off-topic AI wish-list. I'm just a little worried about shooting for high complexity in your AI scripts could possibly bringing the game to its knees, even if it's mostly compiled. I'm not convinced varied relatively simple AI couldn't do the trick. That being said, yeah, loops might be nice. I don't suppose anybody knows what scripting language POE using for AI? (Hint, Hint, Sensuki)

This to me is an argument in favor for engagement - discouraging melee kiting. One could imagine crafting an encounter with large slow moving ogres operating on a switching non-pursuit AI, while you have fast wolves or archers that target-seek and lock fleeing low hp/squishy units. This to me would be challenging interesting combat, without too sophisticated AI. It should work with or without engagement, but I personally like the idea of engagement just because it adds another dimension. A standard AI could also go pursuit mode if it's faster, switch mode if it's slower, perhaps a never disengage mode etc... lot's of design room. I'm not convinced IE games explored AI well.

Unhappily, switching targets doesn't fix the problem, and generally makes matters worse. In the "stick with a single target even if it seems to be futile" scenario, you at least reduce the volume (and perhaps eliminate altogether) the attacks from the target that you are pursuing. In a 1:1 scenario, this leads to a draw -- in a 1:many scenario (where "many" = NPCs), this may result in a win, if you can corner the PC. Even in a many:1 scenario, the PCs other than the target are limited to ranged attacks only, which tend to be less damaging than melee attacks, at least drawing out the encounter. I think this would be a legitimate AI for fast NPC's, say wolves and such, which could pick and pin down back row squishes, Some of these things would be pretty difficult to implement, (ie prediction) . I think with a varied set of semi-simplistic AI and decent combat mechanics, you could create some effective and fun AI combos that could give a lot of variety and replay.

That sounds a little heavy handed I actually think kiting is a legitimate combat tactic for faster ranged combatants. It's just I hate it when the NPC never switches agro and wanders around aimlessly after a party member while the rest of the team pummels it, which is, coincidentally, how I passed the majority of boss fights in IW. I like your timer approach ( um, I haven't attacked my target in 3 seconds, maybe switch to the slowest/weakest enemy in range). And for silly things like single NPC aggro pulling, why not have a broadcast aggro range, where you pull one, you pull them all (kobold pack tactics, anyone?) I hope we can mod AI.

So the most important summary of this thread to me is: It's the AI that makes the combat tactics interesting/challenging, non-degenerate (kiting etc) So my question is, does engagement assist in creating better AI's by giving some extra tactical data and combat structure for a programmer to work with. for example: I think it would be pretty easy to write an AI to avoid Sensuki's engagement kiting... ( If engaged, only attack adjacent and/or engaged enemies etc..) Is it hard to write an AI to avoid kiting in general?