Armageddon Oddities

[Sarisin]

I am playing my second game of .34 with patch d. I am a little amazed by some of the Armageddon events. I'm not sure if these are the results of .34 changes or what.

AC 30 Blight. I wrote about this in the Balance Thread. Basically, Blight brought 5 of 6 cities from population in double digits to pop. 1. As you might expect, I was in suspended animation for almost 100 turns (epic speed). A city with a pop. of 11 got 48 Unhealthy, for example. The strange part was that one of my cities (pop. 12) was unaffected. Cassiel was about 100 pts ahead of me in the standings when Blight hit. After I 'recovered' he was nearly 500 pts ahead. I opened the World Builder and noted many of his cities stayed at double digit pop. and seemed to be unaffected by Blight.

AC 63 or thereabouts. I saw the announcement that Buboes was created. I looked at the Huge map to see where - very far away from my civ. 3-4 turns later who shows up on my border - Buboes! He did not have any promotions, so just seemed to be 'born' a world away and just beelined it for me. WTH???

AC90. The Avatar of Wrath appeared, HOWEVER...not one of my units became Enraged. I didn't see any AI units with it either, and I never saw one unit go barbarian. Totally useless event to have the Avatar appear and PFFFFFT!

AC100. This was incredibly brutal. I was left with:

Hero Kythra Kyriel
Low-level Ranger
Low-level Javelin Thrower
Low-level Battlemaster
Curley (over 100 XP)

That was it from well over 100 units. I think the AI was similarly affected as I was able to have Kythra stroll around the map and take numerous undefended cities of civs I was at war with.

I'm not sure what the 'book' says, but to lose 96% or more of your units seems a bit harsh.

Anyone else seeing these strange Armageddon happenings?

 

[heisenberg]

slightly off-topic (sorry~)
If the other horsemen deserve a trophy, doesnt the avatar or wrath deserve one too? lol

 

[orangelex44]

I don't know whether to laugh or sympathize....

I, personally, haven't had anything of the kind - but I haven't had a high AC in .34 yet, either.

At least you still had Kythra!

 

[Sarisin]

I forgot to mention that losing every single Mage (no Archmages yet) and Priest of Leaves with their fairly high XP was a disaster considering there would be no barb Goblins or Warriors to farm for XP.

 

[heisenberg]

Oh now I recall an oddity that last game I played when I brought the AC to 100. I ended up seeing Archeron sitting on a razed city.

I strongly believe (just conjecturing), that this was caused by one of the horsemen razing his city as he was passing through with the new horsemen mechanic of razing every city it captures.

However, this leads to two issues.
Firstly, are the horsemen of the apocalypse allied with the in-game barbarians? I really do not see how hostile barbarian units would/should ally themselves with horsemen bent on simply destroying all living things. Though for the sake of keeping things simple I suppose they were just added as barbarian allies.
Secondly, would Acheron simply sit around without a fight and watch a horseman walk right into his cave and destroy his hoard? That feels kind of awkward to me.

 

[Blackmantle]

His hoard should still be around...

 

[BugReportage]

Horseman of the apocalypse > senile dragon that's too fat to move (unless trained to)

 

[Kael]

Sarisin thanks for posting this thread.

I did a code review based on your post and sure enough enraged isnt being handed out correctly when Wrath hits. Thats easy enough to fix.

But I didnt see anything wrong with the other functions. So I ran a test. Apocalypse is supposed to kill 60% of living units. I created exactly 100 units ran through the Apocalypse event a few times. Every time 15-20 units were left. Statistically more than it should, exactly as many as it should be if apocalypse was running twice.

So I added a function that added a warrior in a specific space for each civ each time it ran. So I could make sure it was triggering for each player, and see how many times it triggered for each player.

The result was that I had 2 warriors for player 0 (the human player in a single player game) and 1 warrior for every AI civ. Im not sure why yet, but it does look like the armageddon events (blight, apocalypse, etc) may be hitting the human player twice as hard as it should.

Im working on figuring it out now.

 

[Kjara]

Further adding that it's probably running twice: I finished blood of the phoenix before razing a couple of large cities to hit 100 ac, and while some of my guys were saved and moved to the capital, a good number of them died for good(suggesting that they died in each phase of it?). Wasn't sure if this was intended when it happened, but it would explain it well.

Edit: Woops, noticed that Kael ran a test that definitively showed that it was.
I'll change this to be a question if perhaps Armageddon should be able to kill units(with perhaps a smaller probability) that have the immortal promotion from blood of the phoenix? Seems a little exploity to finish that right before triggering Armageddon to cripple all of the other civs. Even something like check if the unit has the promotion, if it does, remove the promotion and then kill it? Would also effect immortals I guess, but seems themewise that if anything was to be able to kill them, it should be Armageddon?

Last question, does Armageddon affect machines(such as the new airships?). It seemed like when it triggered, that all my cannons and airships survived, making towns completely emptied by Armageddon extremely easy to take. Considering that the airships can have a move of 5, you can take a decent number of towns in the few turns it takes the AI to build even one defender after Armageddon.

 

[Tyrs]

It kills living units only. So the Luchiup as set pretty well for it too.

 

[Kael]

Woo hoo! Fixed it, man that was a pain. It will be resolved in the next patch.

 

[orangelex44]

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

awesome! thanx to both Kael and Sarisin ( alphabetical order )

 

[Sarisin]

Thanks for the fixes, Kael. I am downloading patch 'f' now for my next game.

I'm just surprised that plodding along ole me with my Epic speed games was able to find these Armageddon Oddities before the players who use faster game speeds.

One that was not mentioned/fixed was the beeline of Buboes from his creation point to my civ - quite a distance traveling without stopping to kill/pillage.

Are these Horsemen (and other barb heroes) locked in to their targets no matter where they are created?

 

[Kael]

Thanks for the fixes, Kael. I am downloading patch 'f' now for my next game.

I'm just surprised that plodding along ole me with my Epic speed games was able to find these Armageddon Oddities before the players who use faster game speeds.

One that was not mentioned/fixed was the beeline of Buboes from his creation point to my civ - quite a distance traveling without stopping to kill/pillage.

Are these Horsemen (and other barb heroes) locked in to their targets no matter where they are created?

The barb player picks a player to focus his efforts on rather than just throwing his units willy-nilly against whoever he is closest to. The enemy he picks isnt based on if it is human or not (the AI never considers that in his calculations).

But yes, if you are that targeted player the Ai could very well pull buboes over from another continent to help in its battle again you.

 

[FireBlaze]

Good to hear that it's fixed.

Although, having arrmageedon hitting 2ce for human players is a good incentive to keep the AC low

 

[Gelvan]

The barb player picks a player to focus his efforts on rather than just throwing his units willy-nilly against whoever he is closest to. The enemy he picks isnt based on if it is human or not (the AI never considers that in his calculations).

But yes, if you are that targeted player the Ai could very well pull buboes over from another continent to help in its battle again you.

that makes sense - if the barbarian kills one by one every player ingame, instead of fighting against everyone, he maybe can kill from time to time an AI. (or the human).

maybe I do not understand it correctly, but doesn't that mean, that if he NOT targets you, you're completely safe from barbarian attacks?

 

[FireBlaze]

that makes sense - if the barbarian kills one by one every player ingame, instead of fighting against everyone, he maybe can kill from time to time an AI. (or the human).

maybe I do not understand it correctly, but doesn't that mean, that if he NOT targets you, you're completely safe from barbarian attacks?

From what I understand, you are, unless the barbs take out the civ there targeting and aim for you. Not to say that if you venture out into the wild and stand right next to a lair that you might not get attacked. But what do I know

 

[Gelvan]

we should test it - only we do not know who IS the target of the barbarian, do we?

 

[BillSeurer]

The barb player picks a player to focus his efforts on rather than just throwing his units willy-nilly against whoever he is closest to. The enemy he picks isnt based on if it is human or not (the AI never considers that in his calculations).

So THAT'S what's been going on. Every one-in-a-while I get an (almost) neverending stream of barbarian units attacking me. And I've seen streams of such units go by on their way elsewhere. It goes on for quite some time then suddenly stops. Does the AI change targets at some point?