Very serious combat bug?
 

A very good equipped SC king of flames (54 hp, 31 st, 35 prot, 28 at, 26 def) is defeated by 2 Marignon pikeneers and a flagellant in 2 hits.
I attach the files, the battle is Manchacka vs Marignon in Houburgs run.
I think there is something very wrong.
I'd love that this beatiful game have a serious bug cleaning. Especially knowing there will not be dom4.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Seems like something like this is unlikly to happen. Perhaps it is 1 in 1000 or 10000, but given the rules it can still happen. Given the amount of people playing this game it is bound to happen sooner or later. Unless you can give a procedure to reproduce this I do not think it is a bug. My guess is that you just got unlucky.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

You need the "Loemendor" map from here to view the fight.

the fight itself is nothing extraordinary - it's just two exceptional damage rolls. From the debug log:


221 striking with weapon Flail. att23 def28
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl3 diff2 -> 4
hitunit 221 16083 dmg-37 spec2097159 ba4
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl6 diff-1 -> 2
hitunit 221 16083 dmg-34 spec96 ba2
damage 36 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2


Trying to strike agains Awe 5 (mor 20)
1412 striking with weapon Flail. att17 def40
1412 striking with weapon Flail. att26 def30
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl3 diff2 -> 4
hitunit 1412 16083 dmg-37 spec2097159 ba4
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl6 diff-1 -> 2
hitunit 1412 16083 dmg-34 spec96 ba2
damage 32 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2





Going through the last one:
Trying to strike agains Awe 5 (mor 20)
1412 striking with weapon Flail. att17 def40
1412 striking with weapon Flail. att26 def30
Flagellant (unit nr 1412) succeeded against awe and strikes the King twice. I think the att26 and def30 values are the attack value of the flagellanbt and the def value of the king after random roll and some modifiers (stats etc) - but not all, because the flagellant did score a hit. Perhaps the def30 is with a shield?

shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
Protection with shield added.
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl3 diff2 -> 4
hitloc -> head strike or body strike, most probably
hitunit 1412 16083 dmg-37 spec2097159 ba4
the attack would deal roll - 37 points of damage (with unit strength added afterwards?)
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Flagellant strikes King of Flames wl6 diff-1 -> 2
hitunit 1412 16083 dmg-34 spec96 ba2
I think this is the same thing for the head. As in, the first is the damage on a body hit, this on a head hit.

damage 32 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2
The result. The flagellant dealt a total of 32 + 34 = 66 or 32 + 37 = 69 points of damage. I don't remember what the flagellant's strength was, but in any case, he had awesome luck - about 10 rerolls on a virtual six-sided dice. Possible, but very rare.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

10 rerolls is about one over 6^10 that is about one over 60M. More than unlikely.

Thanks!!

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

This is one one of the advantages of dominions. No combatant is invincible.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

This sounds like it might be one of those instances where the randomizer goes wonky. I've seen it happen sometimes in d20 games like NWN. You turn on the log and see runs of 3-5 1's out of 20 in a row at a much greater rate than chance. Anyone know why this happens?

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

No combatant is invincible but with the proper tactic. Being severely horror marked and attacked by 10 horrors is a thing, being killed by a flagellant is another.
It is simply not possible.
Three turns ahead the brother of that king of fire, much better equipped with MR of 26 has been burned by the "mind attack from the distance" spell (I don't remember the name) cast by a mage without penetration bonus.
After some calculus it had less than .1% of possibility. Along the king of fire there were due priest with mr 11 and both resisted the spell.
There are some well hidden malicious random generator number bugs around ...

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

It's because computers can't roll actual dice. There are various ways to try and simulate true randomness, but even the best simulations aren't perfect. There might also be compromises needed to ensure the results are same in all platforms Dominions works in. I think there was a bug with one spell (Magic Duel?) that used different random number generators in windows and linux, and thus got different results in different OS's, and thus battles played way differently (lowly Shaman one-shots a Wyrm pretender OR the pretender kills the whole enemy army).

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Yes, is Magic Duel.
But it is not that hard to find algorithms that are almost perfect semi-random generators (Numerical Recipes random algorithms for example). The C rand() is horrible.

This confirms that there are very subtle and very red undetected bugs around that hassle the game. And as with other serious bugs (in this same game I've been tortured by the "shrinking dominions" bug too as Ryle'h) I'd like someone correct them.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

As an aside, while playing board games I have occasionally managed to roll absurd streaks of sixes.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Why would it be impossible for a flagellant to kill a king of flames in one shot? It is possible for anyone to get a luck shot in. I think the fact that this can happen makes dominions more realistic then D&D type games.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

It's so unlikely that it could be said to be impossible. Being able to hit someone with thrice as much defense as you have attack is possible, given a lucky strike. Being able to deal damage through prot 34 is even less likely, for a total dam 13 (3 weapon + 10 str) or so attack. Dealing 34! points of damage is possible, but highly unlikely, and dealing it through 40 points of protection from armor and shield...twice in the same minor battle!

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

All I know is one time a Phalanx sunk my Battleship in Civ and I never trusted computers ever again...

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I think as the Battleship prepared to fire its cannons at the Phalanx, Seaman 3rd Class Roscoe (recently demoted) was smoking down in the magazine.

Boom!

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Well, in terms of using probability, you all are looking at this incorrectly.

How long has this game been out? How many games have been played in that time? In all of those games, how many battles have there been? In each battle, how many calculations how many calculations were made?

The fact that an incredibly rare event occurred (6^10 =~ 362 Million) is not unreasonable. Let's just say that there have been 1 Million calculations made (and that number is definitely very low), then that is a 1 / 362 chance that this rare event occurred in one of those instances...

So, it just happened that you had to be that one very unlucky one who gets this incredibly rare event. Now, if this started to occur on a more regular basis, then that would be different. If something were wrong with the random number generator, I think more people would be getting strange events like this.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I concur with MartialDoctor. This game has been played way too much with nothing like this ever being reported. If there were really a bug in the random engine, it would have been reported before now. Now... it could be a bug in the random engine that only occurs very rarely.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

it's possibly a valid result - but I would bet a memory error, not a bug in the game per se. Although some random number generators are pretty iffy... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I don't think it's fair to say "well the game has been played so much eventually something like this was bound to happen" because you have no idea how often this has happened. In this instance it didn't just 'happen', it happened to an SC, he saw it and also reported it. There could be a load of times results like this happened and weren't noticed, or weren't reported.

Once the odds of something happening go over 1 in 60 million or higher I'd say it's a bug, because you also have to factor in the odds of someone actually seeing it and reporting it on this forum, probably leaving you with some insane odds.

So imo it's a bug, but it seems it isn't very common. Usually SCs do work very well. I do remember killing one of llamas bane lord thugs with a small number of flaggies though - they did have a blood/fire bless, but they still shouldn't have been able to kill it, because it was rocking huge protection and had no enc.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

1) There's a very obvious bug:
The "flails" weapons length is "3" for the first, "6" for the second attack.

2) You need the heros1_6 mod to look at the battle as well.
It's late (early, in fact http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif ) .. won't go hunting for it now ...

Without knowing if bless, swarming etc was involved it's very hard to tell if there's something wrong from the combat log excerpt alone ...

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I think you all forgot one thing, flail ignores shield. So shield parry or protection will never come into play. So your actual defense is not as high as it seems (prot 40 so I am thinking barrier, that means your actual defense without shield is only 15, certainly not that difficult to hit). While protection of 35 is more difficult to goes through, you have to factor in bless (is there any?) and fatigue. On critical you get only 17 protection. Also remember flail strike twice on each swing.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I think you forgot that flail doesn't ignore shield, it just gets +2 att vs shields to help get past the parry.

At least as far as I know.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Page 75 of manual clearly states that flail ignores shield. I do not know where you got your idea.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Ignoring shields is the old dom2 mechanic. Nowdays it gives +2 IIRC.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

The King had no fatigue, and there weren't that many units striking him any way. The Flagellants had a Fire 9 bless, so getting a hit through the defense was quite possible.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Scoring 10 sixs with one die is somewhat unlikly but if you uses 2 dices the chance is increase by a large amount.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Oh well, it is strange but it appears the devs have cast a charm spell om most players ...

It is difficult to accept players sayng "it is good Van is unbalanced", "It is good some nation have silly pd", "it is good ai spell priorities go over player script and mess up your battle", but in this case we have a true bug!
"It is good to have some bug, it increases unpredicatability" ... I have just to read this.

This wonderful game needs some major overhaul.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

It is not alltogether clear that what you have reported is a bug. And the AI ignoring spell order is a a unhappy compromise, when in dom1, I don't recall if it was the beta or the finished game, the AI never ignored scripted orders and there were complaints about that too. The AI ignoring scripting is a feature that was added because It was a common strategy to deplete casters gem resources by making small needling attacks before big battles, for example you could cast a cheap summon before a big battle and htne your opponent would be unable to cast his big battle spells when the big battle hit. The solution was to make the AI calculate when a spell was not desirable to cast. It is sometimes annoying but the way it was earlier worked worse.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Same place KO got the idea maybe?

I do love the way people quote the manual like it's holy scripture. It has many errors, believe me.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

It's not "only" a matter of two "extraordinary" damage rolls.
Observig the fight very carefully, I realized that
1) the second succesful strike (the killing one) was the very first strike of that round (so, no multiple attack penalty occours to the king of flame);
2) the flagellant has a fatigue of more than 60 (-3 on the attack roll), and a "lost one eye" battle affliction (-2 attack roll). The +5 attack fire bless is balanced with the -5 from fatigue and battle affliction, and so the chance for that flagellant to hit the king of flame was less than 0.2% (Att 9 Vs Def 26).

Conclusion: the final chance to kill the king of flame was not "only" 1/6^10
(the damage rolls), but 1/6^10 * 2/10^3.

Do you really think it's possible?

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

How does "unlikely" suddenly equate to "impossible"?
Get over the loss of your king and find some Markata (monkeys) to take out that overpowered flagellant. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I think the debug log is not being read correctly.

This line:

hitunit 221 16083 dmg-34 spec96 ba2

is negative 34 points of damage. That makes sense for an average head hit:

Flail 3 + Str 11 = 14 (+DRN)
Prot 8+4 + Shield 40 = 52 (+DRN)

dmg ~= -38 (or -49 with no Str added in yet)

The log normally has dmg8, etc, except for a big hit from the King himself, then you see for example dmg22. Like this:

hitloc King of Flames strikes Flagellant wl2 diff-5 -> 3
hitunit 16083 221 dmg22 spec65 ba3
damage 53 on Flagellant, spec0x41 ba3

(I don't understand why it's dmg22 then "damage 53". Strength is 31 though, but that should already be in dmg, I think.)

Then, in both instances, 2 hits from 2 different flagellants get a "dmg" total of (-71), doing:

damage 36 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2 (strength 7 flagellant)


damage 32 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2 (strength 11 flagellant)


Note that also in the log, a piker hits the King for 1 hit of negative damage, and it has no effect:
16087 striking with weapon Pike. att15 def23
shieldprot for King of Flames = 40
hitloc Pikeneer strikes King of Flames wl6 diff-1 -> 4
hitunit 16087 16083 dmg-35 spec2097155 ba4
... (no damage taken)

So, when there is large negative "dmg", there is a bug converting it to "damage", and it becomes large and positive. I think.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

In a Axis & allies game one night I could not miss with 1 in 6 chance antiaircraft rolls. I lost because it was the only die roll I could make that night.

In a D&D game a friend called his 20's on my dice for 2 hours. His stupid little fighter was a god in battle that night. We spent the night joking about taking him to Las Vegas.

There are times when random just does not work.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

I will wonder you, but the Manchaka King of flame owner is my only remaining enemy (I'm Ryle'h, we are at war) and I will take full advantage of his SC loss. I don't like to take big advantage from bugs.

PS: where is the cake icon to plead for bug corrections? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Do you still think it's huge positive damage from a DRN roll?

Each flagellant did negative 71 "dmg". You just need average DRN rolls to get this. It's not a bug in the RNG, it looks like a calculation bug.

The negative 71 "dmg" turns into:

Strength 7 Flagellant: 36 damage
Strength 11 Flagellant: 32 damage

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I'm sorry for my tone that could have appeared a little harsh. I can hardly bear the dev assertion "We don't like to correct bugs we prefer to introduce more color" but I can't bear the player answer "Well we are happy with this".
I'm a programmer too and I don't like correcting bugs too. But I have to.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I'm not saying this mechanism is wrong, nor I are saying that you must improve AI, I know it is almost impossible cause the large numers of variables.
But is at least three years people ask to implement a simple spell blacklist.

Where is the cake?

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I'd have been inclined to dismiss this as a fluke incident, since such things do tend to happen after all when the game is played long enough, but there are couple of reasons I don't, especially after the debug log analysis by people who understand it better than I do..

I'd be interested in what system you are playing on, Beorne. Is it Windows? Because if it is, there may be two different issues here.

The first one would be whether or not there is a calculation error in the Dom3 routines when dealing with large numbers (negative or positive). The second, which may or may not be tied to the first, is a problem with Windows itself. Whether the second problem is relevant depends on if Dominions3 uses its own random number generator or if it relies on the default random number generation method of the operating system it is installed on.

This article on how the Windows RNG is flawed is the one where I got that idea. If Dom3 relies on the default OS RNG, then on Windows system this non-random behavior on the RNG would translate into non-random behavior in Dominions and could cause problems. Especially if there is also some sort of calculation bug in Dom3 to boot. The Windows RNG problem could also explain some of the battle review inconsistencies between systems that have different operating systems (e.g. different outcome according to battle review in Linux and Windows).

Of course, all of the above goes with a veritable mountain of salt, since my knowledge of both programming and cryptography is at a very basic and rather non-practical level. But it IS a possible explanation, even if a farfetched one.

In any case, it requires some real looking into, which would be JK's province.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I think strength is indeed calculated afterwards. I think damage multiplications, e.g. 3x against undead, would appear between the two phases.

I think this means that the piker just failed to pass the (RNG+str - 35 (+RNG?) ) roll. That is, he didn't get extremely lucky, so he didn't deal any damage.

Most often, when a number rolls over in negatives, it also works like that in positives. Soul Slay deals base 1000 damage and has no problem killing 10 hp humans, leaving 9990 points of overflow that DOESN'T translate into a negative. So overflow bug isn't probable.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Oh, I see what you are saying ... the "dmg-35" could be prior to the DRN RNG.

But then I can't get the numbers (Wpn-Prot) to add up, no matter what body part I choose, and no matter whether the shield counted or not.

Guess I'd need to look at a bunch more battles to understand what "dmg", "att", and "def" really represent (At least I know "damage" is the actual damage dealt, post DRN, post everything).

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Edi, I find it extremely unlikely that Dom3 uses any Windows related RNG. The most obvious reason is that most of the time replays work exactly the same on different OSs.
IIRC (this is from a topic that was discussed a very very long time ago) the difference between OSs was due to an oversight, where there was a phrase similar to "if (random() > random())" and on some OSs the left random() was called first and on others the right random() was called first, which obviously completely alters how the battle plays out.
This may be the time to point out that the battles have some random seed associated with them and are played by using that random seed to simulate the battle. (The simulation remains identical through replays and OS changes because the random values are fixed since they rely on the random seed)

As an aside, depending on how Dominions generates random numbers, something extremely unlikely may be a bug (though considering Johan's response, I really doubt it). If Dominions uses a (huge) "table" of "pre-randomized" numbers (basically, a gigantic "sequence" of numbers that have been generated through some awesome RNG [like random.org's]) and asking for a random number merely fetches a number from the table according to some sequence (for example, the random seed for a battle may be a place in the table, and asking for a random number fetches the number in that place, asking for another random number fetches the number in the following place etc.), it is possible that the table does not contain a sequence of numbers that will allow something this improbable, in which case a bug may be involved.

And of course there's also vfb's debug analysis which might also point to a bug.
EDIT: ^- or maybe not, that remains to be seen. (Just see when mine and his posts were made http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif)

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Agrajag, probably. I have no idea of how the Dom3 internals work in this respect, so I can't say with any authority how it is. Even if JK gave me access to the source code and all the tools to analyze it, I'd still be worthless since I would not understand much of anything of it.

As far as what JO said, it does not talk about the mechanics of the RNG or the debug output at all. JK is the coder, so he is the one who would know what makes things tick.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Good point http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

The Manchaka player asked me to answer this:

Thank you vfb,
in my opinion your theory fits perfectly.
Probably the bug is about managing high negative damage scores.
Hope the dev will take care of this.
I've wasted an axperienced King of Elemental fire(together with his unquenched sword, barrier, and aseftik's armor) to a flagellant, and it's not funny.
I know that sometimes it's only matter of bad luck, but in the same game I've lost another King of elemental fire with al least 23 MR (together with his equipment, magebane and aegis) to a mind hunt by a simple starspawn without any penetration bonus.
Don't you think it's enough?
Enne,
The machaka player

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I finally understood what you meant by the "negative 71 dmg". You got that wrong. The flagellants didn't deal negative damage, but had negative modifier to their damage (the flail's damage ration minus the King's prot value)

The lines similar to:
hitunit 221 16083 dmg-34 spec96 ba2
happen before the flagellant's attack roll. It means that IF the flagellant hits THIS body part, the damage dealt by his str+random is lowered by 34. It is done for both parts of the body every time an attack hits. The damage that is actually dealt is stated on this line:
damage 36 on King of Flames, spec0x60 ba2

The first flagellant dealt 36, the second 32 points of damage through the armor. Neither dealt negative damage.

The hits would have had to deal total of about 70 points of damage, or about 60 without strength counted in. That's about 14 re-rolls on the dice, even if the protection roll gave straigth ones.

However, this also means that to overflow from the negative side, the defender's roll would have had to be much higher than the attacker's. The overflow point can't be -32, because SCs would hit that all the time - the King's base protection was better than that. The next lowest exponent of 2 would be 2^6 or 64, and going under -64 would take the defender a roll of 32. This would take about 6 rerolls in optimal case, less than 0.1% chance - so even if the bug was in negative roll-over, it would be VERY rare, but much less so that the chance of a unit dealing damage through extreme protection.

However, as I said before, I think overflow bug is VERY unlikely, given that the positive damage can go up to 1000 or so at least. Besides, if a human-form Dragon gets hit in dominion 10 under Gift of Health, he gets (dragon's hp - human's hp) amount of "negative damage". All shapechanges work that way. That's why you can see -50 damage coming from an elemental that went from size 6 to size 5, or from a Hunter Spider whose rider died.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Also, don't forget thet fatigue increases at triple levels when your pretender has a name that starts with an F, B, M or Q. This might lead the Fire King to have enough fatigue to have his protection value halved. There is also a chance that The armor is negated if the sum of the attack skills during one turn is less than the sum of the alphabetical positions of the units name. Hence it is all pretty obvious it was not just bad luck, but an expected outcome of the battle.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Good point KO.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

Endo, thanks for clearing up the meaning of dmg. Sorry, I didn't understand what that number represented. So it does look like 2 massive DRNs at the moment. If I get a bit of time, I might duplicate the battle in the simulator map, and see what happens.

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

I have never previously encountered a reference to an alphabetical relationship to any skill or game factor. (Maybe I have't read the manual closely enough.) Please explain.
Also, does the alphabetical relationship apply to the unit name i.e "Fire King" or the units individual name? And if it is the individual name, if I change the units name will that work?

You reference letters with negative connotations, are thee letters with positive influences?

Or are you just pulling my leg?

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

The latter. Wherever it is that you got your sarcasm detector, go there and get a refund. The thing is obviously broken. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Very serious combat bug?
 

OUCH. GOT ME. Now I know why I didn't get a Noble prize again this year, extending my steak to 56 consecutive years. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/shock.gif

Actually this game has so many enjoyable quirks that it would not be a major surprise to find out that there was an alphabetical surprise hidden in the code. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

I've gotten a Hall of Fame hero awarded the "Dumbass" medal and once had a hero that gave his troops leprosy. I think the only thing I haven't encountered (yet) is a female commander who gives the clap to her troops. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif