Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

A few times now in the same game, I've had a very powerful commander go berserk and win a battle while the rest of his side routed. Two of those times, the commander disappeared after the battle, and thereafter it was as if he had been killed.

This happened, just now, for the second time. The enemy all routed or died, leaving only my commander on the field--but now on the map, some of those routed enemies are apparently still in the province they invaded and then routed from. They are besieging my fortress, and my great commander is no longer on the map. It seems as if my .trn file is broken--as if the battle replay it shows me isn't what "really" happened. What kind of awful bug is this? How can it be avoided?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

He got killed. Deal with it.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

How did he get killed? I think you don't know. I'm dealing with it by asking a question about it. Does anybody know the answer?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Sometimes battle replays are wrong, for whatever reason. There is no known workaround, other than asking your opponent if he saw an accurate replay, and getting him to tell you what happened.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I noticed this too in a recent game. I had completely routed and defeated the enemy and even won the battle (according to the message) but the enemy remained in actual control of the province on the map.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Today in replay I have 5 tigers and 1 cave dragon alive after battle. Cave dragon with 4 pts of life (he did a great job, keeping 3 grove guards 1 step from my mages for a few turns). After battle I had no him in my army, as well as less tigers.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Yeah the battle replay bug sucks. I had a battle in a game just recently where I killed a whole load of enemy stuff and both my thug and the support caster survived with ease. But the 'reality' is that both my guys died and very few of theirs did. Hard to see exactly what it was that could have differed so much from what I saw. Maybe a first turn soul slay?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

After 75 rounds of combat all berserked attackers instantly die. If any defenders remained on the field (due to fatigue perhaps), they keep the province. This is not the case here, since you say you were defending, so it's the awful bug striking again unfortunately. But, maybe it was the case for the other battle.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I don't think so--in both cases, the field was cleared of enemies in the replay I saw. So I guess nobody should have reached the 75-round limit.

It sounds like dudes consider this to be just some random problem. I don't expect to figure it out myself, but still, it's suggestive that for me, this happened twice in the same game, in battles where a single berserker was the last defender standing....

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

One thing I would say is the random battle replay bug is WAAAY more common when mods or patch transitions are invovled.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

In my case, mods are involved. And it happened once before the recent patch transition, and once after it.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

This may or may not be the cause in this specific circumstance, but I have had cases in the past where having a different version of a mod than the one the server is using causes the replay bug.

Is your commander mindless by chance as well? I think there's a 50 turn limit on them.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Let me ditto Sombre's advice:

The replay bug occurs WAY more often if:

a). Host and client are on two different systems.
b). rollbacks are involved.
c). Patches have been applied mid game
d). Someone does not have the same version of the game 3.23b for example.

I do wish there were a way to validate clients before a turn were submitted (and no, I'm not talking about the -v option).

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Even without different versions of mods, simply having mods on makes the bug more likely.

But yes, different versions means you'll almost certainly get the bug. I wouldn't even call it a bug there, you just have the wrong version.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The attacking player just got back to me--he says he saw what I saw. He also found this other thread about the problem: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=34902

In that thread, dudes say what they've said in this thread, plus the additional speculation that a discrepancy in operating system between host and client can also trigger the problem.

It occurs to me that this problem could be happening very often--and we just wouldn't usually notice it, because only a few minor soldiers would have had their fates misrepresented because of it. But of course it's very obvious when a major commander dies in "reality" but not in the replay.

Anyhow, I feel better about the problem now. I'd been worried that there was a mysterious bug that killed powerful berserkers at random. That problem would be very hard to defend against! But now it appears that my powerful berserkers died correctly, and that only the replays I watched were incorrect. That problem is much easier to defend against! In fact it requires no special defense at all. Just equip your commanders so they won't die, and tolerate the fact that you sometimes won't know what they actually did do. :)

(Of course I'll be careful about version numbers etc., but I was already careful about that, and this still happened.)

I see what you mean Sombre, about not calling this a bug when it arises due to mod version mismatches--but if that's a way to cause this error, then the game allows you to use mismatched mods when it shouldn't. I consider THAT a bug. Of course this community has a pretty high threshold for calling things "bugs" rather than "WAD" issues or even "features". At any rate, maybe we can agree that it'd be better if the game didn't let you use mismatched versions of itself.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

That's a very old thread. At that time the problem was thought to be strictly a problem of version and/or OS differences. I believe the OS differences part of the problem was fixed awhile ago. And soon after reports of the replay bug happening without OS/version differences became more common. It's not clear whether this was a new problem or previous reports were just dismissed as confusion about OS/version differences.

I know I've seen it in SP, with the client and host being the same and thus using the same version/OS & the same mods. I'm not sure I've seen it without mods, but I usually use mods these days so ...

Mismatched mods would be hard to prevent, since they are just text files. I suppose some sort of checksum could be calculated...
OTOH, mod differences aren't necessarily a problem. The display only mods (Banners, etc) can be completely different without changing gameplay at all.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

No, I don't agree. There are some cool tricks which rely on using dms which differ at host and client level. One random example is allowing people to have streamers and standards on or off. I don't see the benefit to the game refusing to work with differing dm contents between players, but along those lines a warning wouldn't be too horrible I guess. I think that's the kind of 'bug' which would be a pain to fix and no-one really cares about too.

Easy enough to just not have mismatched dm versions.

If you're talking about versions of dominions itself, then I do agree.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

WELL let's put it this way: There are some version discrepancies that cause errors, and some that don't, and I guess the game allows all kinds without protest. Bug!

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Wait until you have your best supercombatant die on the battlefield because the battle round reached turn_75. All attackers are auto-killed on battle round_75.

As soon as it reaches 5pm(round_50) all attackers must retreat and as soon as it reaches 9pm(round_75) all attackers are instantly killed. Honestly it should be changed from instantly killed to instantly force an automatic retreat.

Also I'm certain if given the option most players would increase the current auto_retreat and auto_kill settings.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Had that happen. Fun. Enemy routed after 10 turns or so but had many exhausted units and I just couldn't kill them quick enough to win and lost my Pretender.

I've had many a bug-ridden battles against a Shedu in an SP game. In every replay I win the battle but lose my prophet commander, while on the map I lose the battle but the prophet is unharmed.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

An auto rout on turn 75 doesn't work, because

a). the units didn't auto route on turn 50 like they were supposed too.

b). Mindless / berserk units shouldn't route anyway.

c). I sure as heck wouldn't want to increase the strength of SC's. I know a lot of people like them - but they are already way too powerful. Armies have way too little utility in late game, as do communions.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

An auto-retreat could be different than an auto-route. It could be just the battle ends and any surviving attacking troops are moved to other provinces as if they had retreated.
It would require a significant code change though. Not likely to happen.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I had the inaccurate-replay bug happen to me in a game recently(definitely mod version discrepancies, as my opponent saw what I saw but other players with scouts in the province saw different stuff entirely). It's mildly annoying unless you were really hoping to see how a complicated strategy worked out, or what went wrong with it.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

If a unit is, say, encased in ice, it shouldn't get to retreat. Allowing them to escape the field is silly. (This is one of the few good ways to actually kill a well-kitted QoW underwater).

Auto-killed on turn 75 is mostly a way of saying 'you haven't managed to retreat yet, so we're going to assume the defenders get to you eventually'.

The one change that should be made is that the turn 75 auto-kill should instead apply to the army which has already routed rather than the attacker. (In situations which it is meant for, the auto-kill will still effect the attacker because they auto-routed at turn 50. But they can't auto-route if the defender already routed (bug), since the game won't let both sides rout. Ie, if one side routes, the other side can't. So if the defender routs before turn 50, they should be auto-killed at turn 75 since its the attacker who will get to kill them at his leisure).

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Mostly I agree with you Squirrel, but it still has some defects.

Most commonly I see this due to SCs or berserking units.

If both sides have units that berserk, I don't see the logic about which sides routes as mattering.

Now, it might be interesting if each side (attacker first) got hit with a 1000 pt AN attack. One for each side, starting say at turn 65.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

'Defenders get to you eventually' assumes every race of people, no matter how primative, is able to eventually kill any type of creature/being from mythology despite any magic buffs and/or items which is not reasonable. If the "best" military units defending a province are unable to kill a supercombatant after 75 rounds it's clear the regular population or other military from the same province wouldn't make any difference. The supercombatant should then be auto-retreated thus instantly forced into a neighboring province to return another day. Auto-Killed is not only historically inaccurate, logically inaccurate, but it's a crude solution when better and more realistic solutions can easily exist within the game.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

That's not true at all.

Historical example:
There's documented cases of knights, travelling alone or relatively alone, being dehorsed by bandits whose weapons were otherwise unable to injure him through his armor. Of course, keeping the knight pinned down was pretty trivial since he was without recourse to other aid, so a bandit could run off to the nearest farmhouse, borrow or steal an axe, and use that to punch through the knight's armor. Ie, once you have an opponent helpless, finding a way to penetrate his defenses *somewhere* becomes a lot easier, and you can resort to unusual measures.

Would you care to specify a unit that, once incapacitated, would be impossible to kill for some nation?

Incapacitated foes can be stripped of gear, subject to attacks that simply wouldn't work on a battlefield, or otherwise put to death. No unit is invincible, and having them at your mercy dramatically increases your options for dealing with them. Even the most primitive race in dom3 can make a bonfire, find a way to deprive you of oxygen, or drag you to a place where they can drop exceedingly large rocks on you. And most creatures are far less threatening when stripped of gear, something trivial to accomplish if a creature is unable to act.

Basically, its no longer a question of military capability. Its a question of creativity. And you don't have to be all that creative.

Edit: Also, magic buffs eventually expire.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Obviously, it can work either way.

An invincible attacker who just hasn't managed to kill off all the defenders before the time limit. Or a trapped and helpless attacker who's tough enough not to actually die before the time limit. Or 2 berserk SCs hacking at each other but unable to do any lasting damage.
Extending the time limit would help resolve some situations, but not all.
Any solution fails in some circumstances: Auto-kill kills those who clearly were in no danger. Auto-retreat can save those who had no way to escape.
Auto-retreat seems a marginally better solution to me, but it also requires code changes and isn't likely to happen. The current auto-kill solution isn't much worse.

As an aside, I have certainly seen both sides rout. I'd always thought it went attacker routs, defender routes, then auto-kill if that doesn't work.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Haha this is the problem with forums that use linear thread structures! The topic changes importantly in mid-conversation, but how is anybody supposed to know that without reading every post.

They wouldn't all become incapacitated. A mundane knight traveling in a foreign land would be in big trouble; where would he get his food? And even a giant Jotun mage with the Monolith Armor etc. would eventually have to sleep. But what about a well-equipped wraith lord or a Vastness or a high-level angel of some kind? Those things get tired when they cast spells, if they cast spells, but they wouldn't lose their ability to walk or fly right out of danger just because they had to rout from one battle. And what if only a few hundred peasants happened to be in the province the unit routed to, and the unit was amphibious, invincible to fire and ice, non-sleeping, non-eating, regenerating, and always ethereal, fire-shielded, and blood vengeance...ful? A naturally ethereal undead commander could achieve that much and more, with the right equipment. What would peasants do to a monster like that, even if it did knock itself out by casting spells at them? They'd leave it alone, or they'd all (or almost all) die, that's what!

I guess if you wanted to be "realistic", you'd have routing units end up starting new fights in whatever places they routed to. Your flying, regenerating titan might jump all over the map, fighting battle after battle, until it either won one or legitimately died. So a commander that teleported into enemy territory with no friendly land around could leave a trail of destruction, and would be even harder to kill than it would be now. Not so good for the game! But relatively realistic.

I think there's surely a way to design a more subtle solution to the problems of routing and of overlong battles than the really harsh rules that the game currently uses. Like, if somebody were writing Dominions 4, I think they could do better than what we have. Maybe a unit routing into enemy territory would start one new battle after another, each time it routed, until it won or died--but all its stats would be halved anew with each battle, to roughly represent the "incapacitation" incurred by its hostile, foreign environment. That still wouldn't make a lot of sense for, like, ghosts and non-sleeping demigods and such, but it'd be less absurd than instant death.

That might still be overpowered though. The defender would still have to defend his land against both primary attackers, and enemies routing in from other provinces. So maybe the defendant could be compensated for that increased burden, with an increased chance of reward due to attack by routing enemies. Maybe, for instance, a commander routing into enemy land could have, say, a 50% chance of starting a new battle there, a 25% chance of instantly dying, and a 25% (with a boost for low morale?) chance of defecting to the enemy side, maybe with any commander status removed. And if it did fight after routing, but then died, maybe minor local shamans or whatever would convert its corpse and equipment into gems that the defender would get to keep.

There are a million ways for it to work! I think the system we have now is good enough, silly as it can seem at times, but there are better ways. If not what I suggested, then something else. But only in the imaginary Dominions 4. :)

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

First the attacking unit is NOT incapacitated... not sure where you pulled this idea. Turn_75 does not equal incapacitated. The attacking unit is still actively healthy and moving on the battlefield during turn_75 due to berserk or some other natural trait. And when an angel with a tower shield, regeneration, and it's natural awe cannot be harmed by the "best" military the natural population of peasants have no reason or intention of risking their lives. Heck if a town discovered a hundred navy seals were killed by some beast which resisted point blank C4 explosions then OBVIOUSLY the citizens of the town will let the beast control that piece of the beach.
Sure something can eventually be done to initiate another attack, but that would require a separate (game_turn)strike from the military not the general population! You are mistaking the effectiveness of general population as compared with an actual military and mage strike force.

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Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

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99% of the time when i see a combat go to turn 75, its because the last remaining enemy units *couldn't* retreat. (Encased in ice, passed out and unable to get below 100 fatigue due to fatigue causing effects, etc...). Ie, incapacitated.

In the specific case of berzerk, eventually that berzerker rage ends. Generally, berzerkers are exceptionally tired when they come down from their rage. Its not unreasonable to say 'turn 75' is when this happens, and its not a far cry from being incapacitated.

Any other unit should have managed to retreat by turn 75.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

From my experience it's been when the defender could not retreat while the supercombatant was killing the exhausted defenders/crippled defenders. I cannot even recall a battle where exhausted attackers or fleeing attackers were autokilled. As a result the perfectly healthy supercombatant is auto_killed instead of a more realistic solution of auto_retreat so the battle can continue later. Thus we witness an almighty legendary creature killed due to lack of game time!
Ideally the game should provide an instant retreat instead of an instead auto_kill as well as a game setting to adjust the auto_kill game turn. I'm sure many would increase the auto_kill game turn to at least turn_100.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

A time limit on berserk would also work nicely.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I've already maintained the side that routed should be the one to be auto-killed, so if its defenders who have failed to rout from the field then I agree, the attacker shouldn't be autokilled.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

SC's are too powerful. Instead of autokilling on 75, it should be autokill on 50.

We can all repeat our points = ).

But in retrospect, having it be something you could specify at game start would be cool, just given that almost everyone agrees that Tarts are the end-all be-all, I can't see why you would want to do anything to *increase* their power.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The issue happens because the defenders have already routed. They lost the freakin' battle, and somehow manage to win because they couldn't run away.

The simplest solution is really to make the side that routs first lose the battle, regardless of whatever happens afterwards, and auto-kill the losing side.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

So remove rout retreats entirely?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

It's wrong to leave an unrealistic and auto_kill game function within the game when better measures can be taken to deal with SC's being too powerful.
This can be done if the developers were to add new spells which cause insanity on the target. Each time the target is successfully struck by the spell it adds 3 insanity. Another idea is adding a few new summon creatures which horrormark those which kill it. Another idea is a ritual spell which randomly teleports one commander, mage or SC to a random province. I'm working on a mod which can provide the first two suggestions, but I wish I could mod the autokill of turn75 to something of turn125.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

One time a Sacred Statue teleported onto my army and I had some kappas and they dried up and couldn't leave and the Sacred Statue ran out of time before managing to mind-burn them all so it gave up and died.

That would be cool. Hm it's just a couple of numbers right? Maybe a Dominions developer could confirm for us that it's actually stored in the game program as just a couple of numbers, and then somebody could hunt them down in a hex editor and manually patch them. Probably not though

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

How are you doing the insanity spell?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I couldn't disagree more. I don't know what *unrealistic* has to do with an imaginary game with blood sacrifice, magic, and unicorns.

While I think your ideas of new spells are great, I would still be opposed to removing the autokill. Have you ever tried killing a properly kitted chayot, grigory, or regenerating sphinx? It can be bloody hard. One of the tactics I *like* to do is to get them to berserk and auto kill them.

I can equally argue that the problem is not the time limits - its wrong to leave unrealistic and autokill SP's!

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

It's also a game about land, peasants, government, taxes, religion, and spears. The game is unrealistic and realistic, to great extents both.

People naturally care about consistency, so when a superhero that can survive being trampled by ten elephants during a fire storm gets killed by an invisible clock, dudes are annoyed. People naturally care about drama, so, well, same thing. I think consistency and drama are more relevant here than realism is.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

If logical consistency doesn't matter in a game, why don't we make it so that the army that routs first always wins the battle, more powerful spells cost less gems, and building temples decrease your dominion?

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

I don't know about consistent, in the hard sense everything can be made consistent, but having some sort of realism that you can relate too is important.
I.e. ok, we have unicorns but everything works the way we're used to makes (maybe) a good unicorn game. But we have unicorns so we are unrealistic anyway so humans reproduce through laying eggs and then throwing the eggs into the wastebin and making children the normal way (what, why eggs then? Rule 7-3i of course) and the law of ant-ropy states that the world will be gradually filled by ropes... I'm still wondering if these mushrooms were edible...

It's unrealistic in the first place to have a rout occur exactly on round 50 (that's about 5 minutes of combat) or any other fixed round for that. Quite simply put why would a soldier who is totally uninjured or fatigued and all his comrades are so too suddenly decide to run away and leave his wife and daughter to demon summoners?
There would be better ways to prevent endless battles (icrease fatigue by 5 on round 50, by 10 by round 75 by 15 by round 100 ..., let an SC rout if he's too worn out and not berserk...). Of course the AI taking over after round 5 and SCs being so strong would be even more of a problem but then you change that...

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The word your looking for is not realism, but verisimilitude. The rules of the game should obey their own internal self-consistency. A time-limit that arbitrarily kills units that would otherwise be invulnerable isn't particularly consistent. It is definitely necessary to have some point where battles end though, as otherwise it's possible that some combinations could run indefinitely. Two feebleminded sacred statues staring each other down for example.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

The game is in fact extremely realistic - it's just that no-one ever noticed that all units in the game are members of the New Amalgamated Union of Gribblies, Humanoids, Thugs and Yetis (NAUGHTY). Among the NAUGHTY Articles are extremely strict rules on the duration of melee activities any NAUGHTY Member takes part in over any given month. The NAUGHTY rules specify exactly how long the attacking and defending sides can stay involved in combat, and punishment for breaching said rules is carried out on the spot. This is why attacking armies leave so promptly - they're actually going off for the union-mandated tea break.

Pretenders beware - argue with the unions and the NAUGHTY people will come and get you!

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Gregstroms point is exactly.. on point.

You could arbitrarily say that combat makes the world unstable and that each round increases the likelihood of death.

Now, if it were me, I'd have horrors show up increasing in numbers and severity. But I have no problem abstracting that part of the equation.

I mean, if you think about it, no one has complained that undead simply go poof. Why should you complain therefor if an SC goes poof?

similarly you don't complain that we abstract the turns - the entire months turn is abstracted to one click. We don't see the armies progressing.

The preeminent question is a balance question, not a versimilitude question.

If you are really saying that you can't stand the versimilitude (vs wanting to make sc's more powerful) then you would be fine with any solution that kept the 75 turn limit autokill, so long as it had a reasonable backstory.

And I don't think that is really what anyone is saying. I think they are just using the versimilitude gripe as a way of attacking the turn limit.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Its perfectly plausible to rationalize an autokill at some fixed time - ie, units eventually are too fatigued to fight, undead units need to replenish their dark energy or whatever, etc... So after some number of rounds they simply collapse or shut down and the defenders can do what they will (since they control the land).

The game has rules. Autokill is one of them. Its a perfectly balanced rule, especially since the rules are designed to give the attacker a fair shake at leaving before it happens by auto-routing. The *only* issue is that the game won't let the attackers route if the defenders have already routed. To avoid this, there are two alternatives: (1) let both sides route, (2) instead of auto-killing the attacker, auto-kill the side that routed (keeping auto-route for the attacker at turn 50 - presumption for the defender).

As a game rule issue, that's the end of the discussion.

Once we start talking about removing autokill because its 'unrealistic', we start playing with game balance (autokill is often the only way to kill a pimped-out SC), which means we have to try and make lots of other changes and that leads nowhere good (and probably means we have to do things like remove enc. 0 from the game and/or make SCs a lot weaker - possibly eliminating the role entirely). We have to start rebalancing some spells and abilities (berzerk becomes stupidly powerful without autokill). Removing autokill is not a fix, it forces a total game redesign.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Is it actually true that attackers can't route if defenders have already routed?

I know I've seen the reverse recently. Attackers route, then defenders.

Re: Why do my berserk commanders disappear after winning fights
 

Particular squads can rout from both sides, but once one side has globally routed (you see the 'x's forces have routed' message) the other side cannot globally rout, and may not be able to trigger unit routs (not sure about the second).

Auto-route is a global rout, and thus fails if the defenders have globally routed.