[PATCH] Sheep-shield - different kinds of population limits

[ffm]

Sheep's can be used as damage sucker as they are treated like a normal unit of a player and not like gaia animals.

This is most useful in survival of the fittest. Except treasures, the player can get only food through sheep. The player produces sheep in front of the CC. If a enemy wave attacks, they aim for the sheep, while the CC shoots the enemy's dead. With this method it is possible to survive forever (if you can make it through the first waves).

If you face a equal army near the enemy's base and he sends in his sheep you can only flee. This is bad for the game play and not historically correct.

Enemy sheep's should be treated like gaia animals.

See also the forum posts ​here.

[Lionkanzen]

use the forum to discuss gameplay

[elexis]

It's quite wrong that units automatically attack enemy sheep. Either UnitAI should ignore them or sheep could spawn as gaia.

This reminds me of #3406. UnitAI should improve target-finding and focus units which can attack first.

[Lionkanzen]

We need start to create the capture of Gaia and cattle animals, a system like AOM , is for the player that discover first and they hold if are nearly by a superior number of units and buildings.( with preference for units or defensive buildings)

[Lionkanzen]

​http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/1907

Ok this is the ticket.

[Lionkanzen]

​http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/997 Ok there is the ticket. The conversion one.

[elexis]

Maybe, but it would probably not solve the issue of sheep being targetted first.

[Lionkanzen]

By tower, Yes, the ticket can be reactivated if is reported as issue by the unit.ai and not a design suggest. I agree, towers don't need kill them, or other units, unless the player itself give the order.

[ffm]

As elexis said, like #3406. The first real target is destroyed, the unit (attacker) searches the next target and chooses the sheep, as it is treated like the nearest enemy unit.

What I didn't mean is, army vs army with sheep's. And now Army-user orders a right-click on sheep's.

This ticket should deal with the intentional behaviour of sending sheep's in battles to suck up the damage (most likely arrows). The sheep's should be dealt with after there is no soldier in sight, or if there is a explicit order of the player.

[Lionkanzen]

Change the name and solution. I will test this but not into the survive of the...

[elexis]

I propose

1. Limit max number of sheep to something reasonable like 100 (= 20 corrals * batch of 5) instead of unlimited
2. UnitAI should not target animals of enemies unless ordered to.

[FeXoR]

IMO a player shouldn't be able to give commands to sheep in the first place (they could stay near the coral it spawned at and may be owned by Gaia).

A "reasonable ammount" should be linked to the army limit (e.g. the same or half).

[historic_bruno]

Replying to elexis:

2. UnitAI should not target animals of enemies unless ordered to.

I don't think UnitAI should target animals, period, unless actively hunting or being attacked by them. It has always been ridiculous that units will go off fighting animals for no reason at all. War dogs would be an exception, as they are legitimate military targets.

Replying to FeXoR:

IMO a player shouldn't be able to give commands to sheep in the first place (they could stay near the coral it spawned at and may be owned by Gaia).

That would be reasonable, if we had some form of herding that still allowed moving them from place to place. I don't think it's necessarily worth adding that complexity, so the current "invisible shepherd" works OK. Herd animals are kind of neat as a mobile resource, while most resources in the game are static.

[fatherbushido]

(just for information, wardogs or even dog are not Animal, they are just Unit Organic Human Dog)

[elexis]

Restricts the number of sheep to 250.

[elexis]

• A limit of 250 means having 100 sheep already produced + 100-150 being queued (If one can't queue sheep in advance, one is likely going to mess up the cycle.)
• Even with a group of 100 sheep can still form a decent sheep shield, esp. since it blocks siege. That will be inevitable sheep shouldn't become ghosts.
• Setting the attacker stance to violent will ignore the sheep and focus on the units that target the attacker.
• Should we really disallow the slaughtering of sheep? Players who use corrals and get their CC destroyed will try to escape as many sheep as possible. It would remove the ability for the attacker to kill the economy. If sheep are only attacked when ordering explicitly, one would have to send 200 commands to kill 200 sheep.

[sanderd17]

IMO, it would be better to limit the sheep per corral. Similar to the Briton dogs.

However, the handling of this limit should be different. It should allow the player to queue long batches (that exceed the corral limit), but these batches shouldn't be spawned until the limits can be fulfilled. This is very similar to how the population limit works.

Note that this kind of limit can't be used for everything (we probably want to keep the hero untrainable until the previous hero is dead), so it should be a flag in the TrainingRestrictions or EntityLimits that switches between one or the other behaviour.

When that limit is implemented, I guess limiting the corral to 10 sheep would be great.

[elexis]

It should be a player choice how many corrals to build and whether to queue batches of 1, 5, 10 or whatever there.

I agree it should work like the population restriction, so that an indefinite amount of sheep can be queued, but only a limited one can be spawned.

To be versatile, the existing population limit functions should be extended to work with 1. inhabitants, 2. domestic animals and 3. custom things a mod could specify (could be reused for a trader or champion limit f.e.).

Functions to change trainingBlocked, TryReservePopulationSlots, GetPopulationLimit, SetPopulationBonuses, GetPopulationCount etc. in Player.js, IsTrainingBlocked in GUIInterface.js and test_GUIInterface.js, onTick of session.js, that one pop cheat in Cheat.js, Cost.js, Templates.js, AIInterface.js, ProductionQueue.js and all occurances of Cost/Population.

[elexis]

About the problem: The sheep shield is a real gamebreaker. Sheep are at least as good as stone walls, because they

(1) fill up any area, leaving exactly no space to move.
(2) Enemies don't attack sheep nor enemies if they are blocked by sheep and enemies in vision but not attack range
(3) sheep can be moved

In this game nani has managed to fight of at least 5 players simultaneously using this exploit:

About solutions: I still don't like the training limit. It would be better if sheep were just not efficient at blocking. Two ways to lessen this effect would be to lower their health/armor and to rebalance the Slaughter attack. The regular attack should be as efficient as the slaughter attack.

(Also it would be good if sheep carcasses would decay)

[Imarok]

Move tickets to Simulation as UI & Simulation got some sub components.