Very serious combat bug?

[Endoperez]

vfb said:
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.)

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

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)

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.

[vfb]

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).

[Agrajag]

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 )

[Edi]

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.

[Agrajag]

Edi said:
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.

Good point