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Hi Steve,

For the LSA Angriff mod, we are developing an armored patrol boat (BK-2) that can be deployed on Stalingrad maps featuring riverbanks.

The BK-2 is coded as "truck" (team type 22: Vehicle truck), river is coded as "deep water" and set in elements file so only truck can move in deep water.
all other elements are set to be impassable for "Truck"."

We initially experimented with this setup some time ago, and everything worked as intended. I even took a screenshot on 9/5/2023, confirming the functionality.

However, as we now attempt to add the BK-2 to our upcoming Angriff South-Central mod, the engine no longer allows the boat to deploy on the deep water element. The graphic fails to load, and the BK-2 status is marked as "exited."

During troubleshooting, I found that the engine can place the BK-2 on deep water when the deployment area is restricted. However, if the deployment area spans most of the map, the engine seems to "overlook" the deep water element and fails to deploy the BK-2.

Screenshots of the different situations Here are some questions to help us resolve this issue:

-How does the engine determine a suitable element for vehicle placement when loading the map?
-Is there a limit to how far the engine scans from the German deployment zone to find valid tiles for placement?
-Were any changes made to the code between versions V6.00.05 and V6.00.06 that could explain this behavior?
-Could we overcome this issue by modifying vehicle or team settings so the engine will place the unit further back from the enemy deployment zone?

Thanks in advance.

Aetius

I doubt that hacking in boats this way will work well as the engine wasn't designed for it.

The player-level AI does an initial attempt to place each unit within the setup zone. If it can't find any valid placement locations then the unit is 'exited' from the battle. You're definitely going to run into this whenever a battle group with boats moves onto the map from a direction that doesn't give them any water setup tiles.

I would check to see what the entry VL is set to for the side with boats. You'll want to experiment with this as the entry VL is used to determine where vehicles can be placed on a map when a river is involved (i.e. can the vehicle get to a given setup tile from the entry VL.) Since all your entry VLs are on land the boat may not be able to reach the river unless the entry VL is right next to the deep water.

The code in question wasn't changed in any recent update, no.

the idea was to put a boat in a static BG for some maps along the Volga so that it always has access to water. We are aware that if the bg is absorbed and moves on a waterless map, the unit will not be available.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your reply!

As Manoi mentioned earlier, the Soviet static BGs will act as defenders, giving the engine the entire map—excluding the German entry location—to place the boats.
I tried experimenting with VL positions, but it didn’t make much of a difference. Even when I positioned the German deployment zone and the Soviet entry location close together, near, or even within deep water, the results remained inconsistent. At times, 2 out of 5 boats could be placed, but never all 5. The placement seems random to me.

I conducted some tests by halving the map size and running the same scenario with a static BG containing five BK-2 boats. Here are the results:

-Original map of 32X32 maptiles (120 pixels): 0 of 5 boats could be placed
-Map horizontally halved 16X32 maptiles (120 pixels): 3 of 5 boats could be placed
-Map vertically halved 32X16 maptiles (120 pixels): 0 of 5 boats could be placed
-Map vertically and horizontally halved 16X16 maptiles (120 pixels): 5 of 5 boats could be placed

Conclusion: It seems that large maps cause the player-level AI's initial placement to behave erratically.

I even tried coding deep water near or directly on the 0x0 maptile, assuming the player-level AI might start its scan from that position, but the erratic behavior persisted.

However, I’ve found a solution: fixing the boats to specific positions in the StaticBGs.txt file. This ensures that all boats can be placed during Turn 1. Unfortunately, if the boats survive the first battle, there’s a chance they won’t be placed in subsequent battles. It’s a limitation we’ll have to accept for now.

Aetius