Solver

Это как? Как мое прошлое сообщение формата цитата-ответ-цитата-ответ? Может могу это починить. Я просто выдвигаю ряд предложений на основании просмотра мною переведенных файлов, так я не буду в числе тех, кто непосредственно через игру оценивает перевод. При этом меня внушает, что целиком ваш перевод продвинулся очень хорошим темпом.

I'm not a fan of the removed overdamage, I think it perfectly fits the punishing nature of X-Com. Why shouldn't losing a soldier you heavily invested in hurt?

Спасибо за комментарии, и извиняюсь за смесь языков, на которой пишу. Писать на русском доставляет мне некоторые сложности. Согласен, что нет слова, которое так бы явно указывало на используемое оружие как rifleman. Но при этом пехотинцы они все, даже ракетчики, а "стрелок" существует как официальное название должности по крайней мере в современной российской армии. Официально вон те же стрелки: http://recrut.mil.ru/career/conscription/post/position/info.htm?id=643@BasePost "Его личное оружие автомат, с помощью которого он выполняет поставленную боевую задачу по поражению живой силы противника в ближнем бою." - то есть считаю, что "стрелок" ближе как перевод. Я большой сторонник перевода по духу, а не по букве и дословно. Считаю, что главное - передавать мысль и атмосферу, не всегда брать самый словарно точный перевод. Sentinel, конечно, часовой. Но при этом sentinel для меня звучит гораздо более устрашающе чем часовой. Часовой вызывает мысль о охраннике на посту, который наблюдает за местом и его охраняет. Sentinel за счет литературы, фильмов итд превратился в более "сильное" и устрашающее слово чем guard или watchman, кроме того, использовался как название для сильной боевой техники несколько раз - австралийский танк был такой, есть такой беспилотник США. Тут и по замыслу в игре хотелось бы что-то подобное. Согласен по всем пунктам, но хочу отметить, что этот юридический термин для англоговорящих очевиден, но не для русскоговорящих. Слово "некомбатант" может вызвать реакцию "не кто?". Насколько знаю, слово "комбатант" не есть регулярно используемое слово в повседневной речи. А если так, то может не быть понятным. Я бы здесь вообще опять пошел по принципу перевода для передачи смысла и назвал бы этих элиенов инженерами. Это целиком передает мысль, что их основная задача не бой, и что они менее опасны в бою, при этом используя всем понятное повседневное слово. Жаль, что есть места, где от имперской системы не уйти, но все равно считаю, что стоит использовать метрическую там, где это технически возможно. Полагаю, что подавляющее большинство не-англоговорящих должны в уме переводить восемь дюймов в сантиметры, чтобы извлечь из этого представление о длине.

I think the solution there is not zero LOS persistence but rather just making aliens target smoke. Fire into it randomly, throw the occasional grenade.

Strong cover is still good, but weak cover that used to give ~25% protection is now very weak. Burst is indeed useless, and yeah, firing 2 snap shots is always better than anything, definitely better than 1 aimed shot.

Also sadly I am not getting very good stability out of this. Have had crashes when moving the scout car, and just now when firing a rocket (just before it should have shown the explosion animation).

Riflemen aren't really пехотинцы, those would be any ground soldier. A rifleman should more likely be стрелок. Colossus armour - Колос - should be Колосс. It's a colossus, not a plant Likewise I would expect that Sentinel armour is better as страж than часовой. In "Предварительная рекогносцировка говорит" should probably be показывает instead of говорит. Alien ranks could perhaps mostly use a different word order. Not Андрон страж but rather Страж Андронов. Otherwise add a dash in there. And noncoms could be called небоевой maybe? I am aware that некомбатант is a word, but it's a legal term and unlike the corresponding "non-combatant" in English might not immediately be obvious. I might also suggest that there's no reason for a Russian translation to use Imperial measurements. So for instance the alien pistol in the pedia could be described as being оружие двадцати сантиметров в длину and not восемь дюймов

That explains a lot of the observations, yes. I go around mostly snap shooting because 2 snap shots is always better than 1 aimed shot. Aliens hit a lot with snap shots. Aliens still take 3 rifle shots on average I think, so smoke is absolutely king. Also make the precision rifles distinguish even more between zoom levels! Those should be awesome for aimed shots and suck for snap shots.

About decreased effectiveness for cover. I find it is good, but for strong cover. Could it be boosted to previous values perhaps for low cover? I find that low cover now makes almost no difference, a 3-round alien burst hits with at least 1 shot.

I think rearm is 1 hour per weapon, so 2 missiles take 2 hours.

On the topic of air battle, I still propose speeding up the Chinook as mentioned for the previous experimental builds. I'd also consider decreasing the rearm times on planes a bit. I get the idea, but I'd still like to be able to run a few more sorties during a wave. It's annoying anyway how my ground crew is apparently unable to rearm the plane while refueling it, instead waiting for it to be fully fueled first!

I think that setting makes accuracy range dependent, something that wasn't the case in the OG. Then again I think accuracy is too high across the board in current Xeno builds. My starting soldiers get in the 40-50% range accuracy with snap shots. Aliens still typically need like 3 shots to go down, but the higher accuracy almost eliminates firefights and results just in concentrated fire against one alien at a time.

I think the sweet point in balance is when there are occasional firefights, too. Not when it's just that "kill aliens this turn or you die". 60HP shields are not fine if they have an 80% chance to block. 60 HP means that they can only block one shot anyway. If they're intended to be one-time like that, then at lest they need to work 100% of the time. Something that has a 80% chance of blocking one shot is too weak.

I can confirm some of that from a few missions. Shields suck. Maybe 100% frontal mitigation but 100 HP is the way to go. I've had shield bearers killed directly by a bypassing shot, and if not, shields are usually destroyed by the first shot. Burst fire on rifles is useless now due to even snap shots being so accurate. On Max's point #8 though, my first light scout (Caesan) had 3 guards and 1 noncom. Not a cakewalk. Soldier stat variance didn't make it into this build, presumably by error, so I am fixing it on my end manually.

The very first mission of a light scout has quite the welcoming party for me! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=215111975

After the game's released, I'm suing Goldhawk for health damage.

Why does this always happen when it's bedtime?

Everything in the experimental patch is included, except the new reaction fire mechanic, but you can't get that one anymore with the current fixes. It's a good thing, too - the new reaction fire is good but also causes a lot of freezes.

It's not downloading from there, no.

I would think that UFOs should be a special case handled separately. It shouldn't be considered as potential hidey hole, but instead be treated the same way as aliens are - run away screaming.

Speaking of civis, this is undoubtedly due to the smaller maps of the balance patch, but in there I've seen (twice now) a civvie run into a UFO! I am fine with them not being especially bright, they are supposed to be panicking after all, but their basis behaviour should be running away from aliens and UFOs.

I can't speak about performance because I have not seen the code. I don't know the situation therefore, maybe it's as fast as it can be, maybe there is some bad data structure choice that means the whole thing could be sped up by a lot. All I know is that in principle the numbers in Xenonauts (map sizes, alien and soldier count, etc) are such that search-based approaches are feasible. This is of course assuming a good enough technical foundation, which GJ seems to indicate isn't entirely the case. But the scope of the problem is definitely possible to handle with proper application of search techniques. Besides, for things like MCTS you're able to stop the search and get the current-best result at any arbitrary moment.

Thanks for the reply GJ! It's always sad to hear about code issues that prevent the application of best AI techniques, though I quite like the level of sophistication you're putting into it. As a matter of curiosity, have you considered using Monte-Carlo search for firefights? I imagine that it could be applied quite effectively to evaluate fights between 2-3 aliens and soldiers. Stellar, I've seen game AIs do even more complex calculations. The good thing with Xeno is that the search space is not that big. The game's also turn-based, which means AI calculations that take several seconds are no problem. Personally I'd be willing to wait longer to have a smarter AI. Something I liked in GalCiv2 was that the game had an option to enable certain more CPU-intensive AI searches. And there's never any need to worry about the AI becoming too smart to be fun. I'm fully confident of that from experience. Even with the best efforts of very capable developers, it's not going to be smarter than a human. And when the AI gets smarter, it can always be counterbalanced by changing other mechanics, say like alien accuracy. Improving the AI should always be a goal though because it leads to better fun. A game can have the same amount of difficulty, achieved by different means. Difficulty that comes from smart AI is much more fun than difficulty that comes, say, from aliens having ridiculous health.

Okay, this is not a suggestion for a specific situation, but rather to change the general decision-making approach of the AI. Here's what currently happens, I believe: Aliens perform their turn sequentially. The game iterates through aliens on the map in some order. Each alien chooses an action, such as moving somewhere or shooting, performs it, and then chooses action again if TU is available. Some things interrupt the process, like noticing an enemy while moving, and then the AI may choose to for instance fire from the current spot. The core weakness there is that aliens still act individually. Alien N will only start doing stuff when alien N-1 is done. It would be stronger by following a different approach. Generate a preferred action for each alien. Then begin with the alien that has the highest-scoring action, probably shooting at the enemy. At each interruption, regenerate preferred actions and allow another alien to potentially take over. It's sometimes much more effective, say, for alien 1 to take an action, then alien 2 to take some actions, then for alien 1 to take more actions. Example: Alien 1 is not in cover but near it, and close to a bunch of enemies. Alien 2 is farther away and in cover. Now it makes sense for Alien 1 to throw a grenade. It explodes, killing one enemy but leaving another alive. At this point Alien 1 can either fire on the remaining enemy or run for cover. Neither is optimal. Running leaves the enemy alive, firing leaves the alien in too much danger if it misses. It's optimal instead for Alien 2 to safely fire on this enemy, and then for Alien 1 to make its decision. More generally, I would propose the following steps for the AI turn. 1. Generate a dependency graph between aliens. Two aliens are dependent on one another if both have the same enemy within range OR are within a certain distance of one another. 2. Generate a preferred action for each alien, assuming here that higher heuristic score = better action. Also assuming that the heuristic takes into account the chances of doing damage to the enemy, and of remaining alive, that is probably already the case. 3. Of all aliens, pick the one with the highest-scoring action and perform it. 4. Recalculate actions for that alien and all its dependent aliens. 5. Repeat from 3. With the correct heuristics, this should result in behaviour like what I described in the example. But what about situations where it makes more sense to fall back? To have a good evaluation of those, I would also choose the initial strategy based on a probability tree (of sorts) of killing the enemy. When an enemy is range of an alien, proceed as follows to determine the best strategy: 1. Evaluate which other aliens, if any, could fire on the target, either directly or by moving first. Calculate how many shots each of these aliens could fire and so obtain the maximum amount of shots that are possible to aim at that enemy. 2. Make a tree. Each node is a state with a score that is the damage done to the enemy, or the maximum score if it's a kill. Edge weights are the probability of transitioning between those two nodes as usual. Calculate the probability of reaching a leaf node with at least score K, where K could depend on AI type - "cowardly" aliens only going for high K such as kills, aggressive aliens going for lower K. If there is a patch to a K-node above a certain threshold, then attack, otherwise fall back / act defensively. Of course this tree, once calculated, could be used to select the next best action for each alien as previously in step 4. Example of the tree, here: www.xenonauts.com/aishot.pdf There's an enemy with 60 HP. Alien A has a weapon that is expected to do 30 damage and can hit 75% of the time, Alien B has a weapon that does 80 damage and so kills in 1 shot, but only hits 20% of the time. Edges indicate which alien shoots and specify the probability, nodes indicate total damage done to the enemy. Kill nodes are coloured blue and are supposed to have a very high value. Hit edges have green text, miss nodes have red text. Yellow boxes by some kill nodes indicate the probability to that node, where obviously higher is better. Too lazy to make all It should be obvious how the tree can be used for decision making, but here the point is just that the aliens would see there's a high probability of a kill, and therefore act offensively, not defensively on this turn. The tree shows that there's a 56.5% chance to kill the enemy with just two shots from Alien A. But also that if the first shot misses, there's still quite a good chance of finishing the job. One cool thing is that simply applying different search approaches could give very different AI behaviour. Some AI could try for the shortest path, hoping to get a bit lucky and kill with as few shots as possible. Another AI could go for a longer path that uses more actions but almost certainly kills. This is a quick mashup while I'm in a bit of a hurry, so please forgive inaccuracies or unclarity

Any new design decisions on this front? It still does not sit right with me how nation relations are almost exclusively based on the air combat minigame and not the game's main element, ground combat.