He was never this bad before, NEVER. This is new AI, it's not the same as before. Every single battle I do now he follows lone Gunners, it's a joke, here's a few more SS to show his behaviour, I have an endless supply of these as every battle is the same. So here the WD is dropped with 19 Bombers. He stays with em for a second until he spots 2 Gunners. And off he goes. Here's another battle. Here he is with a huge group of Skellies. Until he spots 2 Gunners & off he goes. Where he dies in a Flame Gate before making it. So here's another battle. Here's 2 WD's, totally ignoring the huge group of Skellies, Priestess, Bombers & Ching, on their way across the base together. To seek out 1 single troop each. And there each on of them stands. This new AI is absolutely horrible, I have endless pics I could post here, every single battle he does the same crap, he is seeking out single troops while leaving big groups to get slaughtered. It's beyond a joke & Midoki should be ashamed, they just keep going from bad to worse.
OK, I take anything I said back. This is TERRIBLE! If fact, I now have to deploy 1 troop, make him follow it, then deploy the group
I agree there's room for improvement for sure. He does seem different in that I remember him sticking with groups more than going for a lone gunner in the original AI. Though I really like how he hangs back protecting my gunners and heavey gunners which I can deploy sooner.
The poor WD is just dumber than a box of rocks. They keep trying to give him a smart brain but all efforts thus far have failed. I only keep one in my crew and cross my fingers every time I deploy him, but I've learned to not have any expectations because his behavior is as mind boggling as it ever has.
Yes, completely, it's like Skellywags don't exist to him. Here again standing with a lone Gunner. And here's another one of his mad runs across a base.. Dropped with a load of Skellies. As usual he runs right past my whole entire crew. Where he stands with 1 Gunner. It's beyond a joke, it's a sad thing when you have to stop using your favourite troop because of the way they programme the most important crew member. It's a kick in the teeth. Also have you noticed the replays are wrong again? I went to take SS of two other battles I just did & both are wrong, same thing happened yesterday & the day before too.
Yes it's not the same AI as before, this is far worse, before it was only a very odd occasion he would seek out lone Gunners, now he is doing it every single battle. I'm not kidding either, every time, with my crew of 18 Gunners, 19 Bombers, 27 Skellies, 1 Priestess & 2 WD he does this every single battle. He will completely ignore 27 Skellies, 1 Priestess & a few Bombers & he'll run like a crazy lunatic straight across the full length of a base to get to 1 Gunner.
Today i had to watch my 2 Witch Doctors protecting Sadie for over 1 minute. I mean just her and maybe 1 gunner nearby. 1 Doctor had easily covered both with its range but regardless the second stand nxt to the first instead going after my other troops. This AI is even more messed up than Annabares.
My theory, and I could be wrong, but I believe the way the WD is working is it goes through a priority list of each kind of pirate. If any of that pirate is alive, he runs to the closest one, or picks one and sticks with it, unsure of that exact process. Gunners are clearly at the top of the list though, so if you have one gunner, he seems to pick that and run to it in almost any scenario. Midoki has already said they cannot determine the largest group nearby, given the limitations of the iphone 4s' hardware. People were complaining they wanted it to follow their gunners instead of their Juggs, so I believe they switched it to follow gunners instead. Now that one lone gunner is very apt to drag it away. I think a better approach would be not to give any specific troop any priority over another one, outside of the couple troops that the WD will not protect in any circumstance (thieves, monkeys, bodyguards/minions), and just find the absolute closest troop and follow that one. Then no matter what you want it to follow, you can control where it goes based on deployment timing. It will still have the issue of sometimes splitting off and following one gunner that diverged from its group to go to an outhouse (since it cannot determine which group is bigger as previously stated), but it will at least be a lot more controllable, and in that instance at least you would understand why it did it and be able to plan a bit around it (clear side buildings first so the group he's following is less likely to split up). As always I still prefer my WD to stay with my jugg/bomber group most of the time during their initial approach, since the bunker and gun tower damage is the most critical thing for it to prevent, whereupon it can resurrect the group of bomber's corpses that died as they were finishing up the walls. After the walls are breached, there's not much need for a WD in my strategy. However other players will want it to stay back with their gunners, or follow in a horde of skellies, and by controlling deployment timing, you could essentially tell it which group to follow.
Yes I remember one of them saying that, but for the love of God they can surely fix it so he won't pick 1 troop over a group of 30, it's happening with every single battle that I do, he is completely useless. My last battle he stood there with 1 Gunner while Ching, 27 Skellies, 1 Priestess & a few Bombers flew by. I tried to get a SS of this battle as its one of the worst yet but the replay is wrong, watched it twice & each time it was different, second time I watched he actually died straight away in the replay. I thought the replays were fixed? Anyway, this is the worst the AI has ever been, it's gone beyond a joke now, its not the same AI as before, I don't care what anyone says, it's just not. It's like Skellywags are invisible to him, how on earth can he pick one Gunner battle after battle after battle? He's doing it every single battle I do.
agreed. way to expensive of a resource to have him wander aimlessly and not focus on groups over individulals
Same here. Wanted to post a 3-star victory VS a max base (the layout was beyond joke) but instead the replay only showed 1 star...?
I think Lyndsey once talked about how difficult it actually was to code the WD. Something about all the algorithms involved with defining what a group actually is, how the groups differentiate from buildings and terrain etc. So basically: The WD has a hard enough time telling a pirate from, say, a building, so you can't really expect a whole lot out of him.
The WD can in fact distinguish pirates from buildings. But it seems it cannot distinguish number of troops in a group. So 1 gunner is the same to it as any 1 skelly in that horde of skellies, and the WD prefers gunners to skellies - it doesn't know that there are actually 10 skellies in the group, it knows there is 1 gunner, and there are 10 sets of 1 skelly. If there is even a single gunner, it will pick that over any other troop, since the gunner is its highest priority. If there are no gunners at all, then it will pick its next favorite troop - if there's one of that, he will follow it, if not, he will pick his next favorite troop, etc. A temporary workaround would be to make sure there is 1 gunner that follows your group of skellies in addition to the ones on the outsides of the map, and try to keep the WD with that gunner, which will hopefully stay close enough to skellies to protect them. An even safer option would be to just not deploy any gunners on side buildings (gunners that won't be following the skellies into battle), and wait to deploy the gunners to clear side buildings until after the defenses have been cleared. That way none of them will draw him away from the skellies.
The thing that annoys me is we've had how many changes to the WD AI in the last few months? 3? And in all those changes its done noting only get worse, they need to go back to the original AI, the one before all the messing around, the AI we had a year ago, people complained the odd time when he went walkabout with that but my god this AI is a joke. It's just silly now.
The old WD ai was NOT this. I use 11 gunners-7 skellies and have to use Annabelle to get the skellies through fire. This is downright laughable.
Yes, it was - the only difference now is that the WD still has the priority list of the previous HP-centric AI, in that he prioritises living units, then ressed skeletons (if there are no living units), then piles of skellywag bones (if there are no living units or resurrected skellies), then piles of regular bones (if there are no skellywag corpses). The fact that he occasionally goes on mad adventures to focus on a lone unit is exactly the reason why we changed his AI in the first place. But players preferred that, so, as they requested, we changed him back. Two. One to following the largest HP group in 1.9, and the recent one to change him back to his previous AI.
