Very serious combat bug?

[johan osterman]

Beorne said:
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.

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.

[Beorne]

johan osterman said:

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.

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?

[Edi]

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.