The Man Without Qualities

- unpredictable obstacle avoidance (somethimes I don't see any, but its always at the same spot, must be terrain-related) - missing crowd management (if few units/vehicles try individually to solve a situation, they usually contradict the actions of others. in that situation a crowd management must take aktion simulating communication/coordination between drivers in such an situation (e.g. you move first, when you are few metres away then I move next..)) - inability to detect obstacles early enougth, vehicles smash often into clearly visible objects at middle of the street

Question is: is VCOM AI only for SP/MP with just a few units moved by VCOM or would it work on a CTI with 200-300 units too without further performance issues? I am also not so familiar with the unit/vehicle related preferences when it comes to terrain utilization.

wait...since BIS is not able to roll out a proper AI driving (and hence no proper convoy handling) nomisum is scripting his own convoy handling as workaround? How would that cure that the leading vehicle is still under control of an incapable AI? Watching to an Ifrit in an CTI with vanilla units last week told me that the progress by BIS in terms of AI driving skills is zero. I ordered an Ifrit to my position over aprox. 4km. It managed to reach my pos, but when crossing a field it made some crazy left-right swings like the driver tries to get with full speed through a bunch of cows. Then, the driver managed the one and only rock within 200m to do the usual wheel damage. Still the same issues: - crazy, unpredictable erratic AI driver moves that cannot explained by any obstacle - "blindness" of AI for real obstacles, or they simply ignore them So IMHO it is not so much the general "strategic" path planning between A and B, it is rather the AI habbit at close range. It is by all means broken. Still.

Be more precise: You want guesswork? Then vanilla addons are fine. You want a better MilSim style? Then u better play with CUP or RHS. "Modern" Tanks won't work because the entire handling of T100 and T140 is mainly simplyfied guesswork, even for armor and shell characteristics. So do you want an "Ueberwaffe" in shape and colour of an T-14? Or you prefer a good simulated T-90S based on known information?

You are absolutely right with the description of AI capabilities provided by engine. But still, a relevant part of the community is eager to have those limited AIs at hand for whatever purpose during a CTI. Even just as bullet-catcher 🙂

AI is even for PvP essential because - nobody wants to do the boring jobs. Logistics as well as patrol and guarding an area. Town defense groups have no troubles here since they do not have to follow waypoints over long distance. But in PvP CTI, as comm you can yell as often as you want to guard an area / to seek for an enemy spawn...if you don't have some good and brave players around they won't follow your orders. Here a WORKING AI squadleader + working pathfinding are excellent. Having as commander 2-6 AI Suqads at hand is perfect: S&D enemies in a certain remote area, random patrols in areas around base where nasty lone-wolf apear with spawn+AT weapons, sometimes just transport duty because it is more efficient to have one Squad busy to do transport duty + having many others jsut filled with infantry utilizing the transport facilities. Means less abandoned vehicles scattered across battlefield which were purchased for just one single travel. And even for PvP, in case the acting commander disappears, it is still cool if after 1 minute absence an AI comm steps in and starts repairing damaged buildings, sending soldiers to existing static weapons etcpp. Having AI does NOT mean that the focus is not PvP, it means that some aspects of warfare are proper treated instead of ignored. Of course, all that dense, AI filled battlefield only if server-FPS does not go down to 5 FPS. This is IMHO the real reason why AI is discarded. Not a mystic desire.

Even if discord is the hottest s*, I would love to get some info about OFPS missions and server right here.

You do work on AI, you killed them :-) Benny told me that he maintained the AI comm scripts and AI squad leader part all the time when he was working for OFPS. What you did was to somehow disable/remove all that so that it is impossible to play your mission with AI. So you basically force the community to play only like you want it. Not nice. What if you leave all the AI code in and just disable only for your main server and others might try on another server the same impressive feature set, but with AI commander and with AI squad leader? In this case I am up to co-finance a EU-OFPS server for better ping. Unlike you, I am pretty happy with those AI routines. Sometimes AI comm does a piss, but if the human comm left the game it is better then nothing. And especially for your server: very often the game turns when some human player must leave for whatever reason and a 12 vs. 12 becomes a 10 vs. 4 over a longer period of time. In traditional CTI AI squad leader would jump in and keep the match somehow balanced, AI squads are perfect to secure some areas too, human players tend to ignore orders to do such boring tasks. Game win condition: Same with personal taste versus variations in the public. I have no problem with the current way on OFPS, you created excellent defense assets making it very hard to finish an opponent. So instead of turning that now for all and forever I would make those changes selectable in the mission parameter. This idea of letting towns exausting is basically the simulation of anchient methods of military logistics: you plunder the conquered area and you leave just burned, dead land. So just another mission parameter which basically puts a count down + degredation of supply flow from each town while it is possible to play the old style would be perfect. How you want to mitigate the exploit of cash creation by intentionally lossing and winning a town again and again versus initial resistance? Fast travel: IMHO devils-crap but I do not want to do the mistake and telling others what they have to love. Optional parameter in mission para to generally enable/disable fast travel (maybe by type e.g. NO/INF/INF+VEHIC) as a start. Exactly like you generally design it, FT must cost, A LOT! Otherwise one does not care anymore if he is killed cus in few seconds he is back at front line. Vehicle FT I have seen perfectly working in A2 and A3, but spawning for vehicles is in latest A3 a bit fatal when they clip with objects during spawn. Happened that I spawned in a mega-fireball cus 1 out of 3 tanks spawned half into a wall, flipped and exploded and damaged the rest.

There are some destructable buildings...or better after a certain "damage" the change destroyed buildings in several destruction levels. For bunker I do not know if there are some textures for destroyed ones. In CTI some versions adding all kind of objects to passive defense objects and creative users build out of containers, high-rised check points and some other stuff very impressive castles :-). One does not need a WWII bunker pack, already BIS standard objects are fine.

Need to verify that.....

Thanks for the invitation! Attach to some heavy construction vehicles the ability to build extensive fortifications. Real shelters and large bunker which are hard to crack for bombs and arty. Should cost a lot of , also time.

The mission must be written to utilize HCs...and even then it is hard to move units from server to HC without issues. Sometimes AI wbome inactive after moved to HC.

Anyway, http://wheretoinvadenext.com/ I would say Turkey is a good one for next target...or UK.

Yepp, you have exactly what I meant, and with your tools you have also the ability to show server FPS + total playable units + total objects within the same graph where you see the coincidence. Your server needs more cores and more HCs .....or a better A3 server SW :-) PS: Are you able to count the amount of groups in addition to units? Some scripts steering at group level instead of unit level, hence those data would be interesting

well, for serious gaming nerds fasttravel is a no - no; but respawn at all maybe too :-) I do not like Fast Travel (especially group fast travel where even all units including vehicles go with the player) because it makes real life tactics expendable. I found it interesting to give higher death penalties for players and team kills, even supply points are removed (was it Rubber or OFPS CTI?) But the accessability of town camps and mible spawns are also a kind of fast travel, even I used suicide to spawn closer to the next theater of interest. This habbit is prevented by Respawn timer + death penalty that really hurts (no gear, no cash, when spawning, time penalty before you can trigger respawn) (I guess it was in OFPS-BECTI). I still could prevent time penalty by using hand granade for suicide, but I caused supply loss for the entire team which expressed the unhappiness about it. So there are ways to unite easy access to fun (means being after virtual death quickly back to the front line) as well as serious gaming. In the end my evergreen statement: open all possibilities in game design and let the server admin decide if he is setting up a serious game (no spawn, no fast travel) or a run&gun (spawn everywhere, even into other units, FastTravel on). Then, eveyone will be able to find "his" server.

Indeed, crCTI is more about extended AI commander/Squad leader compared to BECTI. Main differences in generic game design I remember: - crCTI features scripts under "transport duty" where units waiting in a certain area would be transported by unity of that group being in transport duty. Excellent to get massive troops into a certain area. Even air transport was working quite ok during those times in OFP when copter were able to land instead of crashing - crCTI - repair/rearm/refuel, scripts gathered all available assets like medic,ambu vehicles, medic tent, gas station, ammo boxes, mobile refuel/rearm....support of any kind. At squad leader level, the conditions of the units and send individual units to the next useful support asset if conditions are below certain threshold. Damaged unit went for heal/repair and returned to squad location after successful heal/repair...all that in AI only environment - nice to just watch

So it is BECTI-RE but based on A2 code base? Basically independent A2-A3 port cus as I understood Benny he wrote the basic game logic more or less from scratch for A3. The GUIs referenced at https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1510350822 looking exactly like those I seen when playing last weekend, maybe AI functions were deactivated in server/game setup. Well...best is to have online stats that displays and records - amount of groups + units per group /per side / per time unit /location of group - server fps / per time unit Then you would be able to compare the performance. crCTI has indeed problems if lots of full squads wandering across (lets say 2 sides times 16 squads times 12 units = 32 groups, 384 units) + base defense patrols (lets say 2 sides times 1 group times 12 units = 2 groups, 24 units) and many towns are triggered and hence defense triggered (lets say 10 towns x 4 groups x 5 units each = 40 groups, 200 units), but I assume BECTI would have performance problems too once server + HCs must deal with so many unity and groups. In classic "PvP"-CTI at least the 32 groups, 384 units of acting factions are not loading the server assuming that so many player clients are connected.

Had a nice comparision last night cus played 3 different CTI during 8 hours, Rubber-CTI (I guess without AI comm); OFPS, crCTIProman. Proman was the only one with AI comm+AISquadleader. While the 1st two have the best GUIs for Inventory, Spawn etcpp, Proman beats all cus it is easy to compensate unbalanced join/quit over time. Proman is a bit clunky when it comes to spawn selection and the gear shopping does not disclose important values important for selection decision for any item. So the best would be any of the versions with a generic AI-comm module that can be turned off/on. OFPS is basically BECTI, but further developed by Benny but AI comm crippled/cut out/deactivated by OFPS Team. Benny told me that he still maintains the AI part (a while ago), even in the work for OFPS, but he was not aware about some bugs at the time I chatted with him so I do not know how mature the actual OFPS version (Bennys repository -> OFPS) is when it comes to AIcomm. Or if he is working at all for OFPS or if they do meanwhile all alone. After all I still think Bennies core is still the best for CTI with tons of AI....but not A3 :-). I will change that statement when BIS is replacing that bastard headless client for a real mature server SW able to scale masses of AI over lots of CPU cores and endless memory.

That brings me back to a question that wasn't answered to me since 2003: If a soldier is facing 2 threats: enemy soldier and enemy tank but owns just a rifle, no AT, how is the AI behavior calculated? Which parameters make that he might flee the (how?) asumed threat range of the tank? What is the preference if AI can attack both soldier and tank from (assumed) hidden position?

There are many functions missing in this mission which can be copied from other existing A2/A3 missions (and even OFPand A1..). e.g. - check of maximum objects per type (per time unit) (per side) (per player) before really spawn it into the virtual world - kill protection zones - team kill protection

Well, you are right, ex-yugo-new-whatever-micro-countries are not ideal, but hey, they don't kill each other that regular anymore - the rest they have to do on their own. And Libya is just an example of a bad implementation of an good idea. If you remove a regime - you have to watch and control what's growing right after. You can compare it with mould on cheese or brewer's yeast for beer, for good cheese or beer you have to control the initial injection and supervise the first growth. Well, and sometimes the west is favouring the wrong mould...like that crap in power Ukraine...but hey, folks elected.

1st I would suggest you move and keep this in the related thread. 2nd WARLORADS != WARFARE and what you whish is almost like all other CTI, in the end you throw nukes at each other. Jezuro's general mission design is as it is so if you want high tech assets just add them in your own fork.

Well, I am German, the first fault was not invading Syria together with France back in 2010 when all that shit hit the fan. Now we have all the refugees tumbling across and around the Mediterran Sea, all the killed peaople, all the destroyed assets and that costs more than a nice short war against assad after all. Ex-Yugoslavia is IMHO the best example how to tacle such a situation. You give everyone around there a slap and kill everyone who still waves around with a gun. But not by an bastard like Putin. You all remember how the Russians did their own thing in Yugo-war and wanted to support the serbs only? I guess Russians and Putin are even worst as the russians around 1991. Putins collection of "friends" it looks like a summit in Southpark-hell together with Adolf. I guess the best is even killing Putin, then, without support, all those other regimes in Iran, Syria etc collapsing soon after. And in Ukraine would be peace. Sounds simple minded? Indeed! But Putin is similar, he want's to be the Tzar of Eurasia and he will continue pushing the limits until someone is slapping his fingers, not before. Sounds like I hate Putin and Russians? Indeed! Like I hate Americans. Russians let Putin happen, Americans let Trump happen, Germans let Adolf happen. So the citizens are guilty and responsible - no excuse. Phew........

Did we asked already...who is "we"? We have both Assad and Putin Fanboys in here as well as their enemies (me for example). So how should we come to a common result what to do?

AI routines like back in OFP CTI would be nice: - AI under AI group leader would go for rearm/heal/repair/refuel (requires routines gathering all available asstes and the distance between demanding unit and asset) - AI under human group leader would go for rearm/heal/repair/refuel (requires routines gathering all available asstes and the distance between demanding unit and asset + map view where human group leader can select the unit + asset where to go for logistic action)