routing uberweirdness

[segfault]

hi

i recently experienced very strange behaviour of my pretender god.

i played with the moloch leading abysia. he was carrying all the great artifacts (unqeunched sword, aegis, amon hotep, robe of calius, boots of calius, chalice and krupps bracers). he could fight hordes of undead (i was fighting ermor) without even losing a single hit point! he always fought alone; no other units, no other commanders.

but here comes the weirdness: in a really large battle (my moloch against 1153 undead) he routed, after having killed 1136 undead! there were no friendly provinces nearby, so my poor moloch died. i was quite upset about this.

i reviewed the decisive battle many times. the moloch has not lost a single hit point, and his morale also was at maximum (30).

i don't understand this behaviour. does this make sense to anyone of you?

[edit: another detail: i think the unquenched sword made him go berserk. does this have any effect on his behaviour? i thought berserk would make a unit *not* rout???]

[ October 07, 2003, 07:54: Message edited by: segfault ]

[Humer]

Attacker auto-routs after a number of turns (which is lots). This was introduced in some patch to prevent the silicon-based lumps (Sphinx, Monolith, Sacred Statue) abusing teleport-combat-"Can't harm me, nyah nyah" -abuse.

Take it like this: your Moloch finally despaired: "They just keep coming!". Sucks, but that's life... I mean game.

- Humer

[segfault]

thanks for the reply!

well i think this 'feature' is not that bad then. it keeps things in balance, after all.

another strange thing i've noticed once (it has nothing to do with routing, but is weird nonetheless): my pretender (i think it was the wyrm) participated in the arena death match. the Messages told me that i've won. yeah. but when i viewed the final battle, i saw that my pretender actually was killed! i never knew that to die is to win. but well. i guess i still have much to learn...

the enemy used some kind of hitpoint-sucking-attack. his hitpoints grew all the time, while mine shrunk to zero. i don't know if this was the key to my victory... perhaps my hit points were poisonous, and by sucking them out, my enemy got poisoned as well. muahaha!

[Mortifer]

Originally posted by segfault:
my pretender (i think it was the wyrm) participated in the arena death match. the Messages told me that i've won. yeah. but when i viewed the final battle, i saw that my pretender actually was killed! i never knew that to die is to win. but well. i guess i still have much to learn...

the enemy used some kind of hitpoint-sucking-attack. his hitpoints grew all the time, while mine shrunk to zero. i don't know if this was the key to my victory... perhaps my hit points were poisonous, and by sucking them out, my enemy got poisoned as well. muahaha!

Actually this sounds like a bug.

[ October 07, 2003, 08:39: Message edited by: Mortifer ]

[Pocus]

Originally posted by segfault:
thanks for the reply!

well i think this 'feature' is not that bad then. it keeps things in balance, after all.

another strange thing i've noticed once (it has nothing to do with routing, but is weird nonetheless): my pretender (i think it was the wyrm) participated in the arena death match. the Messages told me that i've won. yeah. but when i viewed the final battle, i saw that my pretender actually was killed! i never knew that to die is to win. but well. i guess i still have much to learn...

the enemy used some kind of hitpoint-sucking-attack. his hitpoints grew all the time, while mine shrunk to zero. i don't know if this was the key to my victory... perhaps my hit points were poisonous, and by sucking them out, my enemy got poisoned as well. muahaha!

This has to do the with random number generator. With a given seed number, it is supposed to generate all the time the same numbers, but it can happen (very rarely) that something goes amiss, and the numbers will varies.

So your report (which is the true) says that he won, but when you replay the battle the random number generator screw somewhere a number generation, and deviate from reality, thus an outcome which is not the image of what really happened during hosting.

More generally, you should know that games which allow you to replay battles dont stores all parameters of each game object each round, or each time they change states. They only store the initial parameters, and a seed number. Then they generate the outcome based on this number. This explain why :

- replay dont take much space, even on very long and big battles.
- you rarely have the option to goes backward in a replay, as the tac engine cant retro-deduce what are the positions of round N-1 by examinating round N, and dont have any data to reload.

[WraithLord]

That explains why I saw slightly different results when I replayed a battle many times.
probably they use a linear PRNG and save the seed as you said. Strange thing is that the PRNG is deterministic and given the seed is supposed to give the exact same numbers. unless they "spiced" it up with some really random info.

edit.
PRNG = Pseudo Random Number Generetar

[ October 07, 2003, 09:19: Message edited by: izaqyos ]

[Pocus]

Originally posted by izaqyos:
That explains why I saw slightly different results when I replayed a battle many times.
probably they use a linear PRNG and save the seed as you said. Strange thing is that the PRNG is deterministic and given the seed is supposed to give the exact same numbers. unless they "spiced" it up with some really random info.

edit.
PRNG = Pseudo Random Number Generetar

one of their problem is that the PRNG should be cross platform and works on many kind of machines. I think problems mostly arise when you view a turn generated on another machine /system, as it would appears rather strange that a given machine generate differents results with the same arithmetic operation (strange but not impossible!)

[johan osterman]

Originally posted by segfault:
thanks for the reply!

well i think this 'feature' is not that bad then. it keeps things in balance, after all.

another strange thing i've noticed once (it has nothing to do with routing, but is weird nonetheless): my pretender (i think it was the wyrm) participated in the arena death match. the Messages told me that i've won. yeah. but when i viewed the final battle, i saw that my pretender actually was killed! i never knew that to die is to win. but well. i guess i still have much to learn...

the enemy used some kind of hitpoint-sucking-attack. his hitpoints grew all the time, while mine shrunk to zero. i don't know if this was the key to my victory... perhaps my hit points were poisonous, and by sucking them out, my enemy got poisoned as well. muahaha!

As pocus said it could be a problem with the rng. Another possibility is that the opposite cobatant died of the wyrms poison after the battle, if both finalist dies I am not sure what happens. Did you still posess the wyrm after the arena or where you forced to recall him?

[segfault]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
As pocus said it could be a problem with the rng. Another possibility is that the opposite cobatant died of the wyrms poison after the battle, if both finalist dies I am not sure what happens. Did you still posess the wyrm after the arena or where you forced to recall him?

as far as i remember, i did not have to recall the wyrm. but i don't know if he got some battle afflictions. it's been a while...

[Pocus]

you should also know that (in doms I at least) some effects are applied until your unit pass the saving throw, and wont stop when battle end. For example if you can happen to win a battle with several of your mages poisoned and alive (at end of battle), and have them all dead in reality, because they never succeeded in stopping the poison loss.

Same thing for the spell which corrupt an unit, and let them loose one hp a round (dont remember the name, but I'm sure Nerfix will correct me). You can be sure to have your unit lost, even if the battle end with the unit still alive (not saving throw here, unit doomed).