many things determined by #id

[fantasma]

is it just my impression or are there really many things determined by the order of their respective (sometimes hidden) id rather than random? I guess most of the time they are harmless but some are really annoying.

For example, I remember two games (ashen empire and ma ulm), both with luck scales and big enough to max out events/turn, were getting almost only those bad events from the newly conquered provinces with lower id and enemy misfortune dominion.

What I would suggest whenever iterating over some id, insert a function call that will randomise its order. I think that can be done fairly easily with search/replace.

For combat action there has to be some fixed order or communions become severely handicapped.

Examples are
monthly rituals - sometimes annoying if you always start searching from the south
action in combat - at least it is shown in the army setup
random events (province id) - problematic if capped and playing turmoil/luck and invading misfortune from the north
army movement?
global enchantments? - having the lowest caster gets the last empty slot?
forging artifacts?

I'm sure their are others.

What do you think about it?
PS: ? indicates that it is just my guess

[Edi]

Id#s are complicated in Dominions 3. I'll get back to you in a little while.

[Edi]

Right, finally got rid of that customer and on a break...

• Monthly rituals like site searching: Start from the province with the lowest province number that you have not done yet (and in the case of site searching spells, that does not have more than 1 site already found AND does not have that path searched at any level). This cannot be altered.
• Actions in combat: Always performed in the order the commanders appear in the army setup, from top to bottom. This is because each commander has the invisible unique identifier, which is used to keep track of experience, magic paths, afflictions etc that are specific to the individual unit. Lowest number goes first.
• Random events: Not determined by province number, but number of events is capped at 3. If you have a number of turmoil/misfortune provinces you just captured, be prepared to deal with the fallout from that. However, it is possible that events are checked for each province every turn and if so, it probably goes from lowest up. So your specific situation may casue problems. Not necessarily feasible to change this mechanism.
• Globals: Lowest ID goes first. Most powerful spell will override weakest active one in case this results in a clash (assuming it's stronger than the weakest active one, otherwise it fizzles).
• Artifacts: Lowest number goes first

The ritual casting order should be random according to the manual, but a random casting order has never to my knowledge been observed. Combat is verified to go in IUID order, not randomly.

[vfb]

I have often gotten more than three truly random events per month.

I did some testing and got six random events in a single turn and posted the save game in an attachment here:

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...ev=#Post584064

There are no battles in the turn at all.

[Endoperez]

Yeah, I've got more than three in a relatively short test as well.

[fantasma]

can be, the point was rather to discuss whether things are too much influenced by their arbitrary but fixed order (via id) or if this is not an issue at all.

I tried to give an example with the events. As it looks, there can be more than 3 but what I'm talking about is realistic proportions.

What I meant was more like if the code goes over all provinces in their order and checks if there is an event (based on scales) and checks if there were already enough/too many events for that nation and ignores the other provinces. I, at least had the impression that it works like that, more or less.

This was in 3.10, maybe it's changed with the scales spreading changes?

Anyways, thanks for the replies

[vfb]

I don't understand what you mean by the events being determined by province id#. Please take a look at the saved game through the link in my post above.

There are 6 events, and the province number order is random with respect to event order. The six events do not occur in the six lowest numbered provinces. I don't think I've ever seen that happen.

Provinces held: #13 to #228, with some skipped.

Events occurred in these provinces in this order: 156, 145, 136, 144, 228, 131

[Sombre]

The most worrying thing is the idea that army movement might be determined by ID numbers. This could lead to MP exploits. It's already annoying that the AI can stop you from advancing by attacking with some 20 chaff units against your 1000 dude horde of elites.

If this is happening because the commander of the 20 chaff was built later than the commander of the 1000 elites, then that's a BIG problem.

[llamabeast]

I thought movement success was random, with larger armies more likely to succeed. I have had little to no success in stopping large armies with small numbers of attackers.

[Sombre]

I haven't had much success when /trying/ to do it, but the AI in SP does it all the time and I can never seem to catch a non-stealthy much smaller raiding army hopping around my provinces using a bigger more powerful chasing force.

The main issue is that it is possible at all for a 20 strong handful of chaff to stop a huge powerful army in their tracks. I've actually had my army sat starving in a province for several turns because the damn AI chaff waves (of about 20 people) keep them stuck there.