UFO ai patch

[Overweight Manatee]

Preliminary report on my RBA changes: Superhuman is kicking the crap out of me. Whereas in vanilla X-com you can win almost any UFO assault early game with minimal casualties, every kill is now earned in blood. And the aliens have about 2x as much blood as me in Superhuman. Smoke is completely mandatory to close the distance, weapon differences are much more pronounced, and good use of cover to help trap a target is very helpful. Even with all of that, the almost complete removal of the ability to scout&snipe makes the game a bit too hard, I'm going to back off on a few penalties. Now starting with an auto/snap dropoff rate of 1.5 and an aimed dropoff rate of 3, will see how it goes.

Kyrub, if you could add your AI/icing mod stuff to Extender that would be really cool.

Interesting idea with a downside. Digging into someone's work without his permission is a bad habit in my book and I don't do it unless there's no other way. Although the possibility to tweak AI automatically based on RBA settings is really intruiging.

He released it under GNU, so I would take that as an open invitation to change things IMO. Pity he isn't actively contactable, though.

Here's an interesting addition, if it peaks your interest Kyrub: is it possible to let the X-com soldiers automatically choose between aimed/snap/auto modes when they are doing reaction shots using the same logic you used for aliens? One thing I noticed very quickly was that snap reaction shots at 20 tiles with 10% accuracy don't do much in terms of killing sectoids...

 

[SCO]

If he gave the source (GPL?) it is permission in my book.

 

[kyrub]

Finished version of my addition to Extender.

SOS.
Manatee, your link is not working anymore. Do you have the final addition to the UFO Extender somewhere?


...Meanwhile in the news...
I found out, why the AI patch worked badly. The to hit percentage displayed in the game is not correct, there is a hidden dispersion effect, affecting even the shots "you should have hit". E.g. even a "100%" shot may miss.
The effect is bigger with smaller percentages, so that an autoshot may miss a lot more than simpe math will tell us, especially on larger distances. I will make a correction for the alien AI to reflect the knowledge (and I'd like to implement your version of Extender, Manatee).

 

[Overweight Manatee]

http://www.mediafire.com/?bzng1bg6nwwq0b0

I don't know of any file hosting services that don't delete files eventually, sadly.

I found out, why the AI patch worked badly. The to hit percentage displayed in the game is not correct, there is a hidden dispersion effect, affecting even the shots "you should have hit". E.g. even a "100%" shot may miss.
The effect is bigger with smaller percentages, so that an autoshot may miss a lot more than simpe math will tell us, especially on larger distances. I will make a correction for the alien AI to reflect the knowledge (and I'd like to implement your version of Extender, Manatee).

How big would you estimate is the effect? Could it be some bad rounding or something?

 

[kyrub]

Ahh. Thanks a lot. You should put it on Ufopaedia.org, there it won't get deleted.


I have not precise idea about the quantity of the effect. I can only tell how often it occurs. For autoshots, it is much more often. Also, on lower difficulties, the effect is bigger (aliens has poor Firing accuracy stats).


Here (bottom of the page) is the description of what I noticed in the code:
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?titl ... ngle_Range

As an example:
A soldier fires an autoshot with 20% probablity of each bullet hitting the target. I used to think: the odds of "at least 1 bullet hits the target" are 1 - (0.8 * 0.8 * 0.8) = 49%. The reality is: half of the 20% bullets that should hit, are deflected, more or less, so the sure hit is actually 1- (0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9) = 27%. The deflected bullets may still hit the target, if it is close enough.

Summa: it is unadvisable to use low % autoshots or snashots on bigger distances. The displayed % are misleading. Aimed shot is much better option than I thought, in this case.