tcp/ip woes continue

[Grand_Armee]

Garoco, Mogami, and I started a three player game of 1792 scenario playing Russia, Britain, and France. While france was able to initiate treaties, none of mine would even make it to consideration. Nothing shown on the events screen to show I'd proposed them, and nothing to show on the events screen that they'd been denied.

Diplomats appear to be as non-functioning as they were before. Attempts to coup Poland reset my liars to goodwill.

Napoleon level is about unplayable. Russia lost all of her textiles to waste, while Britain could only make 7 per turn even with vigorous trading of cotton, wool, and textiles for cash.

Despite being "wealthy", Britain couldn't make enough money at 30% tax to pay the fleets and troops she started with.

EVen France was considering disbanding fleets to have money.

[ericbabe]

That's disappointing. Assume you all had 1.2.16?

So were the problems only for clients? That is, was the server player able to set diplomat orders? Was France (who was able to make treaties) the server player?

Was Mogami the server player? Is he still using Windows ME? (Although CoG seems to be running on at least some ME machines now, we did have some very bizarre ME specific issues [and I should add, it's not an officially supported platform therefore.])

If at least two of you are interested, I could build a diagnostic version of the program and send it to you directly if you wouldn't mind running that in your next session. The diagnostic version will basically write the packets sent/received into a file and might be able to help me determine where the data packets are getting mangled. As I've mentioned, I've been unable to duplicate these issues and that makes it very hard to track down any bugs that are happening on other systems. Getting this TCP/IP issue straightened out is one of our top priorities right now.

If any other TCP/IP players are having similar sorts of problems, please report also. I'd like to know system specs and game setup configurations of other machines/games in which these TCP/IP issues are occuring, and to get some idea of how common this problem is among other TCP/IP games.

[ericbabe]

Thanks too for the feedback on Bonaparte level. I found the 1.2.15 loss to be very much too draconian on Bonaparte, but haven't played enough of the nations to have a fully formed personal opinion about the 1.2.16 levels. I did play a long game as Austria on the Wellington level yesterday and was fairly pleased with the economic handicapping in that situation: it was necessary to play a much more deliberate economic game and I couldn't afford a very big army. I'll try England this afternoon if I get the chance. I'd like the hardest levels to be very hard -- restricting the player to only fairly small sized armies/fleets, but it shouldn't be completely impossible.

The 1.2.15 was -5% economic output per difficulty level above normal. In 1.2.16 it is -3.3% per level. If there's a consensus that these levels are still too high, we'll lower them to -2% or -2.5% and see how that works out.

[garoco]

Well the server was garoco, I was avalaible of make treaty with or without success. My windows is XP. Notebook Compaq Presario R3000.
From my view point, I believe that Napoleon level is very good the idea of an extreme level hard, but it would be make with the idea of least we will be avalaible of mantain the troops originals of scenario.
I still saw over chat screen the report battle´s screen (mixed) with the dialog between players.
Good idea of put the flag of unit´s protectorate on itself. All have the ver 1.2.16
[:)]

[ericbabe]

ORIGINAL: Grand_Armee
Despite being "wealthy", Britain couldn't make enough money at 30% tax to pay the fleets and troops she started with.

I played Britain on Wellington level, 1.2.16, and just finished. I lost! It was a pretty tense game, and I almost pulled it off, fighting a battle in Ile de France outnumbered 2.5 : 1 (the Russians didn't show up in time!) I had a nice defensive location on a bluff behind a river, with a good village on my right flank and a defensive forest/swamp on my left. All was going well, but a series of French cavalry charges across a bridge against my center finally broke it, and my best positioned infantry division broke and ran. I committed the guards into that location, but by then it was too late. On the retreat the French cavalry picked us apart. (I think if I had held back one of my artillery and one cavalry in reserve I could have swung them up to the breach and won the battle, but as it were all my decent units except the guard had been engaged.)

Anyway, the economy was indeed very difficult on that level of difficulty. I did manage to stabilize the money by getting my merchant ships into good positions, raising taxes, lowering feudal dues (to help the merchants), exporting timber for money, and lowering military readiness (somewhere between 80% and 90% depending on how close the French were each turn...) I was critically short of horses though, only making about 3-5 per turn. (Later after I surrendered I was able to get my horse production/imports up to a slightly more reasonable 15/turn.) Resources other than horses I could get if I fiddled with my production just a bit.

Lowering the economic difficulty to -2% or -2.5% / level may be more reasonable for the next patch.

[Grand_Armee]

HI EB,
I'll try your diagnostic whirligig. France was the only power making treaties. I wasn't even approached by the AI powers with a treaty (I held of DOWing France wanting to see if the Austrians or Prussians would try to get me to join them). ONce set, my diplomats couldn't change settings. The treaties did work in version 1.2.14...so I don't know what changed there.

A positive note, the game seemed to flow better than before...than vers 1.2.14. By this I mean there were fewer crashes and the turns didn't seem to take as long.

AS I'm finding out, playing detailed battles against a human is quite different...escpecially when one of your divisions misunderstands a command and rushes forward out of the line when he was to advance one hex and fire.

I was wondering if one of you guys could give out some information about quick battles. There (often) seems to be no ryhme or reason to the way the AI forms its troops. I've tried various formations pitted against various formations but it always seems that the biggest guarantor (given that size and composition of force is equal) of battle in QB is who has the highest barracks level...even if the difference is as low as three.

[ericbabe]

Hi Grand Armee,

I suspect that whatever is causing the bug is happening intermittently and perhaps only on some machines. So the treaty problem was still probably around in 1.2.14, but it may only show up at certain times. This is a strong suggestion that it may be related to an uninitialized bit of memory, or something similar.

We played around with the "Misinterprets your command" check quite a bit -- tried many different levels and results. The current implementation is probably the mildest misinterpretation rule with which we experimented. It's usually harmless when they misinterpret but sometimes it can be quite devastating (as which a disordered unit misinterprets an order and moves onto your road, thereby blocking all your traffic along that road.)

Ralegh and Mr Z wrote a bunch on quick battle strategy a while back -- it's probably in the strategy area somewhere. (We're in the midst of polishing up the Ralegh guides to put them on our website, but I'll provide a direct link to it from the forum once they're ready.) There are things you can do with placement to increase your odds...obvious things, such as if the enemy has a lot of cavalry then put your infantry in the defensive area. If you have a morale advantage on the other player, it sometimes helps to play a less-aggressive strategy since you'll be able to last longer on the battlefield.

For what it's worth, we decided early in the design process that the most important things for quick combat is that it (1) be really quick and (2) look pretty. Instead of making QC a complicated little system played out on that grid, we decided instead to pour all the complexity in detailed combat.

As for how the AI works, it figures out a payoff matrix based on unit vs unit (and position vs position) and then randomly assigns positions based on the payoff probabilities.