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Zerg Rushes


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I know I'm in the minority, but I kinda miss them.

It seems like people were unhappy a while ago with passive AI, so GJ made the aliens much more aggressive. Then, when players were unhappy with those changes- complaints of "zerg rushes"- things went back to relatively passive again.

Personally, I liked the intensity and challenge of the aliens storming my dropship. You'd have a turn, two at most, to scramble for some kind of defensive position before you were swarmed. Smoke grenades everywhere, bullets flying. What made it interesting, aside from the ferocity of the battles, was that the ETs were bringing the fight to YOU, rather than every mission being a seek-and-destroy (only of varying pattern) on your part.

At the time a consensus seemed to emerge that the aliens were too constantly, unremittingly aggressive. Which I would agree with, but now it seems the enemy offensives have been all but completely removed. I personally feel that this has made ground combat more one-dimensional and comparatively predictable. You almost always have time to position your troops more-or-less where you want them, plan your approaches, and methodically sweep a map. The feeling of "oh sh*t, are they gonna charge me?" is gone, with all of the dread and suspense that entailed.

My question is, is it possible to have your cake and eat it too? Are alien AIs set across all mission types, or can you, say, make androns on cruisers, and sebs on corvettes, much more aggressive than normal? In other words, introduce the possibility that out of the 50 ground missions you might do, 2-3-4 of them just might feature a "zerg rush", and add that element of uncertainty back into the game?

I'm not suggesting GH entertain this notion, if it's even possible. I'm just wondering if a player can individually modify the game files to produce such a result...?

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AI is set in two/three places:

1) AI setting (aggressive/passive)

2) Alien type

3) Class type (possibly. I can't remember)

Aliens type and AI setting is determined individually for each alien according to the UFO type and mission type. For example, you could have a corvette on a ground attack mission have a crew made entirely of Sebellian Elite on aggressive AI, and another corvette with Sebillian Guards all assigned to passive AI.

If setting all the (non-UFO defending) aliens on the map to 'aggressive' was enough to produce a zerg rush, this would be fairly easy to add in as you could just change the aliens on the UFO/mission types you wanted to all be aggressive and leave it at that.

If not, things would be more complicated. You could edit the aggressive/passive AI, but that would affect *all* aliens so probably wouldn't be a good idea. Alternatively, you could create clones of the relevant alien/class types (depending on if you can set AI at the class level or not) and give the clones the appropriate AI. Relevant mission/UFO types could be stocked with those alien/class types for zerg-related fun.

The only other difficulty is making sure it doesn't happen to often. UFO/mission crew loadouts are not at all dynamic except for the number of aliens, so you couldn't, say, have an occasional Corvette with a Zerg-rush crew. Instead, a Corvette of that mission type and alien type would *always* have a zerg-rush crew.

As such, you would probably want to put it on less common mission types. The best candidate, I'd say, is the Terror-Mission-in-transit type (this is separate from the actual terror attack crew you get during a terror mission, so it wouldn't make terror missions insane!). Terror missions don't happen that often (indeed, they can't spawn more than once every 25 days) which means you'd only occasionally get these types of ground assaults. Alternatively, you could do it with a Construction mission type, as they're also quite limited, but thematically it makes less sense I think.

For what it's worth, I might look at doing something like this in a later iteration of my Dynamic UFO Spawns mod.

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Aliens type and AI setting is determined individually for each alien according to the UFO type and mission type. For example, you could have a corvette on a ground attack mission have a crew made entirely of Sebellian Elite on aggressive AI, and another corvette with Sebillian Guards all assigned to passive AI.

Thank you, as always, for your thoughtful and informative replies. This is exactly the answer I was hoping for. Now it's off to the game files to experiment :cool:

If introducing the occasional mission that puts YOU on the defensive is possible- and it appears that it is- I wonder why GJ seems to have tossed the idea overboard completely. I don't think most players objected to "zerg rushes" per se, just the sheer frequency of them. It's almost like the baby was thrown out with the bath water. Or maybe I'm the only one that feels that way

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Zerg rushes would be the most effective if they happened only about 1% of the time. The idea is that they are rare enough that the player never really expects them but frequent enough that they might just happen.

If there's a way to tweak settings to make that possible, it is something I might look into for my own play.

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I had run lot of test of vanilla, I fund the same issue, aliens are not a real threat, I don't know why humankind worry to much xD

In all my experience modding I found that the problem is not the AI, after all, is the system, for example, if you put Burst fire with 33% aliens will shot 3 times and stay stationary. If you make little change to 28% they shot three times or two and then look cover.

Edited by TacticalDragon
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It sounds more like a case of having to balance the AI one way or the other without time to try and get zerging aggressive AI working alongside the more balanced AI that seemed to be preferred by the community at the time.

As TD says the TU costs also play into a lot of the AI actions.

If a shot is possible then it is usually taken, even if that leaves little time for anything else.

If shot costs are just a little lower then the same number of shots are possible but more TU are available for advancing or hiding, depending on the situation.

Some changes there might be worth considering if you decide to try making the aliens more fluid and mobile to support the aggressiveness.

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With my experiments so far, it's not as simple as increasing the number of aggressive aliens on a map. That certainly gives you more enemies to deal with, but they do not gather and move towards your dropship in any kind of deliberate fashion as they did on a "zerg rush".

Something else has changed. Maybe the spawn points were adjusted. Maybe the ETs now assign a higher value to staying out of your LOS. Maybe their requests for assistance were throttled back. I'm going to try to make "clones" as Kabill suggested and see if I can stumble upon anything. If not maybe I'll have to wait a month or so and then try asking GJ directly, when he should hopefully be a bit less busy...

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I doubt it's to do with spawn points, as the spawns would still be random.

The assistance thing is probably at least partly the key, since I remember GJ explicitly saying he was going to reduce that for passive aliens when the Zerg Rush nerf was happening (and this is even commented in the game file as an intended objective). What I'd expect that to do is encourage aliens to mob up together; I don't think it would necessarily make them come and find you though. (I remember one mission, which I assume was made of mostly passive aliens, where the aliens had clumped together but then just sat there waiting for me to find them.) So something else is probably needed, too.

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I always liked the idea of seeing more than one alien AI behavior. Sometimes they're aggressive, or they're passive and hide, or they'll group up and charge, or scatter around as usual, or each one take a building on the second floor, or my favorite one that occurs often in small maps on OpenXcom... They'll spawn surrounding the Skyranger and depending on the difficulty and how far away they are, they will be facing the Skyranger, so you have to throw smoke to run outside and take cover. I think in Superhuman, they'll all be facing the Skyranger, no matter where they are.

Just give us a huge amount of AI tactics and randomize them for each mission. A lot of the fun factor in the original X-COM was the randomness that occurred in many levels of gameplay.

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  • 2 weeks later...
With my experiments so far, it's not as simple as increasing the number of aggressive aliens on a map. That certainly gives you more enemies to deal with, but they do not gather and move towards your dropship in any kind of deliberate fashion as they did on a "zerg rush".

I beg to differ...it is that simple. Let me explain.

I've finally finished the weapon changes in Magnum-nauts, and the next step is the AI. Specifically, putting the ocassional zerg rush back in, like mentioned in this thread, to mix things up a bit. Put the 'nauts on the defensive once in a while (otherwise it's just sweep and clear, unless it's a terror mission or base defense). So, I make a few changes that I think will work, and fire up a new game. I made changes to Caesan light scouts, as they're usually the first to appear. Here's the bit from the vanilla file:

<Cell ss:StyleID="s63"><Data ss:Type="String">Research</Data></Cell>   <Cell ss:StyleID="s63"><Data ss:Type="String">ScoutMission</Data></Cell>  </Row>  <Row ss:AutoFitHeight="0" ss:Height="13.5">   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">2-2 Caesan_Guard_Passive</Data></Cell>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">2-2 Caesan_Guard_Passive</Data></Cell>  </Row>  <Row>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_Guard_Aggressive</Data></Cell>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_Guard_Aggressive</Data></Cell>  </Row>  <Row>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_Guard_Defensive</Data></Cell>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_Guard_Defensive</Data></Cell>  </Row>  <Row>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_NonCombatant_Defensive</Data></Cell>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_NonCombatant_Defensive</Data></Cell>  </Row>  <Row>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_NonCombatant_Passive</Data></Cell>   <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">1-1 Caesan_NonCombatant_Passive</Data></Cell>  </Row>

I changed the 2-2 for the passive guards to 1-1, meaning that there would be a minimum of 1 and maximum of 1 passive guard on the missions (top row is research, bottom is scout mission, as it says in the very top columns). For the aggressive guards, I changed it to 4-8. In total, there'd be between 8 and 12 ET's (not accounting for ones who die in the crash, which roughly works out at 25%, so realistically there'd be 6-8 ET's in the downed UFO), most of them aggressive. First mission: desert, downed light scout:

B2Xtolh.jpg

That's the second turn iirc, when they started appearing. There's four of them, who were shortly joined by another 3, all attacking that channel. However, that map is one of the easy ones, with the long sight lines and lack of cover, and they all got cut down in that channel. I figured it would be harder on a more cramped map. So, second mission arrives, night-time, desert. This is after two turns:

v2t2kUO.jpg

Five men down and one fleeing. Couple of turns later...

oAlw9Xa.jpg

...and we're down to the Lone Ranger. Sans Tonto. They attacked all at once, and my 'nauts proved ample targets. That's ten 'nauts against roughly the same amount of ET's (although these have nades, as I've given them to more aliens, hence the explosion damage up top). So it's pretty easy to mod zerg rushes into the game.

Obviously, Caesan light scouts on research or scouting missions isn't the best choice, but it served it's purpose as an example. I reckon the best would be Androns, as they ignore cover anyway, so one doesn't end up with mushy little Caesans getting mown down in no cover. Hairy-arsed Sebillians would be a good choice too, as they're pretty tough and would render the panic smoke useless. Pick a mission to use and go for it. Reduce the passive/defensive aliens to a minimum (I used 1, but 0 might work), and put the appropriate number (the amount taken from the passive/defs) into the aggressive row.

Edited by Mikhail Ragulin
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Hello Mikhail Ragulin. Can I also just add a whole lot of more aliens than normal without causing the game to crash or whatever? What about 50 or 100? Is there any real limit to amount of aliens allowed?

I know that every map has spawn points. I wonder how the game is going to handle that or will it be a problem.

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I think you can put an unlimited number of alien in. However, there will be a significant cost in terms of alien turn times so you might not want to do that.

(I think if all the spawn points are occupied then the game will at worst randomly drop the remaining aliens on the map. It might try to reuse the spawn points and simply shunt extra units to adjacent tiles, though, which would be better).

Incidentally, having done some play around of my own with AI today, I get the feeling that the "NearestEnemy" pathing variable is going to be key to getting Zerg rushes independent of the aggressive AI setting since, if that's high, the aliens should want to path towards your soldiers.

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Hello Mikhail Ragulin. Can I also just add a whole lot of more aliens than normal without causing the game to crash or whatever? What about 50 or 100? Is there any real limit to amount of aliens allowed?

I know that every map has spawn points. I wonder how the game is going to handle that or will it be a problem.

Do it! And take pictures.

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Incidentally, having done some play around of my own with AI today, I get the feeling that the "NearestEnemy" pathing variable is going to be key to getting Zerg rushes independent of the aggressive AI setting since, if that's high, the aliens should want to path towards your soldiers.

@Kabill: I'll try that for sure. In fact, now.

@Mikhail ragulin: I'm not so sure about your results. I, too, jacked the number of aggressive aliens up on the map, but that didn't necessarily result in them charging my dropship. I see your examples, and it certainly looks like they were bringing the heat, but I had several maps where the aggressive ETs performed just like normal, only there was more of them. I think making the potential range of aggressive aliens much larger (say, 3-10) would by itself make ground combat more varied and unpredictable, and that alone would be a plus. But I do believe, as Kabill says, I takes more than just that to get "zerg rushes" on a consistent basis on the mission types that you might want them to appear

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I'm not 100% sure, but I do wonder whether it has something to do with enemy numbers.

On the one hand, having more enemies might affect how the AI works. On the other hand, it might simply be that with more aliens, you're more likely to get them grouping up and attacking en masse because there's so many of them.

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@dpelectric, Yes I agree with you, aliens are to passive in the vanilla game. The shame is that the AI system is wondefull, you can do a lot of thing with the AI. Did you know that aliens can retreat if 50% of the allies are down? Did you know that they can plan an organized assault to your forces?

I work hard on degug modes and editors to test the limit of the AI. I finally found that the only way to create a AI scripts reauiere statistical equations and probabilistic analysis.

The alien AI can be modded, I feel that all AI system of vanilla is underuse and wasted to simple solutions.

:/

The AI included in the mod XNT:ITD has been build with the help of hard professional statistic programs and its a good example to how to use the alien AI parameters. Unfortunally there are "there" and "here" some people that take elements of our work and claim as his own. The aliens can assault, explore, hide, ambush, retreat, almost use the UFO doors at the same way of the xenonauts player or worst.

I dont have too much time right now, but balancing alien AI can be .... long and hard.

In other hand, now that your talking about alien numbers, I feel plain the encounters on vanilla, usually the tactic dosent change a lot. If you mix different diversity and combos of aliens you can make that EACH match could be unique, how to do it? Simple, more aliens, different aliens and something like Kabills Map Randomizer. :)

In my experience you can add up to 23 aliens in a map without suffer significant crashes and loops, and when I mean significant is that there is low probsbility, because "NearAlly" variable in the AI become crazy with too many aliens.

What do you prefer? Aggressive AI? Defensive AI? I prefer non of it, I prefer a reactive and diverse AI system that allow aliens to be flexible to the ground combat and events.

:)

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