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Wasteland Terror Dispel - Remove Required LoS and Animation


ManGa

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Wasteland Terror is a great unit that - theoretically - complements the Bandit army really well, especially in rPvE with its nasty CC.

Yet the ability is terribly clunky to use in practice. 
90% of the time the dragon has to perform a long turn, or even a full 360 before casting it, and the casting animation itself adds even more delay before the actual Dispel is coming through.
Even if the dragon properly positioned prior to casting, with the target being DIRECTLY in front, it will sometimes do a FULL turn for no real reason.
In practice, the ability rarely gets the full value as a major portion of the CC duration has elapsed already.

 

TL;DR Can we please remove the whole animation. Or at the very least make it so it doesn't require LoS?

Edited by ManGa
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We would love to both improve the animation and remove the line of sight requirement, not just for this card but for others as well such as Northland Drake and Primeval Watcher, but we currently do not know how to do that. 

1 hour ago, Vysnia said:

Similar thing with Harvy when I send him to attack a tower or spawn house in rPvE. Very often (not always) He goes all the way around the building and only then he starts attacking it...

This is a different issue, and also one we do not know how to fix.

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12 hours ago, WindHunter said:

We would love to both improve the animation and remove the line of sight requirement, not just for this card but for others as well such as Northland Drake and Primeval Watcher, but we currently do not know how to do that. 

Oh, great to see you guys are already on it, that's cool.

 

13 hours ago, Vysnia said:

Similar thing with Harvy when I send him to attack a tower or spawn house in rPvE. Very often (not always) He goes all the way around the building and only then he starts attacking it...

I forgot about those. Soulhunter also has an issue with this LoS thing and turn-rate when casting mines.

To be honest, I think most units with abilities suffer from this LoS/Turning Problem. And yeah, the melee pathfinding is another problem altogether. In rPvE, it makes playing them extremely unattractive since you lose a ton of DPS and HP for no reason. The units are constantly shifting around and missing out on attacks. They often also change their targets mid-swing..

Another issue is with the "melee slots" available on a target. 
If several Melees are piled onto a target, and one of them uses an ability, that unit loses its "melee slot", and another unit will step forward to take its place and the original unit is left idle.
Best example commonly is the Bloodhorn in rPvE9. It's attacking the boss. Now you want to kill the boss quickly using Tainted Enrage + Unholy Hero.
The Bloodhorn plays its Roar Animation, you buff Unholy Hero... and some other XL Unit now takes its slot, and the 30k DPS Bloodhorn just sits idle.

 

However, Melee Pathfinding is a problem in just about any RTS. Age of Empires 2 has struggled with this forever despite, even now in DE. I figure it's really really hard to code a flawless melee pathfinding. 
I think that's another reason why it's much preferable to play a single strong Melee like Batariel or Bloodhorn and buff it to the max, or just mass ranged units than to play several melees. It just turns into a giant pathfinding and melee-slot mess. Nowadays I stick to a single, or two Bloodhorns and spam Fire Dragons behind since their DPS is reliable. Same goes for spamming Spells.

Edited by ManGa
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11 hours ago, ManGa said:

However, Melee Pathfinding is a problem in just about any RTS.

I remember a documentary about Tiberian Sun where the developer said that their plan was basicly to have the unit take the least dumb path, cause any real logic did not work out. 

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23 minutes ago, Majora said:

I remember a documentary about Tiberian Sun where the developer said that their plan was basicly to have the unit take the least dumb path, cause any real logic did not work out. 

Oh i remember that one. It dubbed the alternative meaning of AI as "Artificial Idiocy". The approach was that that from the get-go the Pathfinder assumed friendly units weren't there to get a initial path and from then just went down an absurd list of every possible edge-case and how to get around whenever it bumped into something.  So the initial path was just a dumb simplified path made with good ol' A* Search Algorithm and then whenever something went awry just try stuff like wiggling units around or if destructible just blast a path through it and so on. Start dumb, solve things via trial & error as they pop up till it looks smart-enough.

 

Modern Pathfinders still use similar approaches. Though nowadays paths can be planned out in nodes to make them somewhat more flexible and we have learned that just ignoring collision altogether doesn't take away from the experience, so a good number of games like battleforge just don't give a F about other units in the way and path right through them. Instead i believe it is applying some movement case checking on if their speed is affected and/or they are getting knocked aside by a larger unit. Only structures still have that old style of collision checking.

Melee is indeed problematic. Cause there you do still want it to at least look like collision is respected as a bunch of clipping melee units looks more jarring. So you get psuedo collissions where pathfinders steer the units to be adjacent and surrounding the target which tends to go awkward when the target is also moving around. While structures tend to have a predetermined unobstructed "slot" from where it can be melee attacked leading to awkward circling around.

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