Bots trading with enemy markets during treaty games creates logjams of carts if paths are walled off

[chimpanvi]

GAME INFORMATION

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• GAME BUILD #: 10347837
• GAME PLATFORM: Steam
• OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10

ISSUE EXPERIENCED

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Any maps with a treaty time involving bots result in bots sending trade carts to enemy markets. Particularly on maps with a lot of choke points, such as black forest, this makes any attempt to wall off portions before the treaty expires nearly impossible as trade carts begin piling up at the walls. Because of the recent change where you can not build on any tile where an enemy unit is standing, this makes it extremely difficult to build any walls because every where you look there are trade carts massing into piles 20-30+ deep. Even when your ally trade carts bunch up, you still can’t build anything because they won’t move out of the way.

Having allies trade with enemies also results in a mass kill off of trade carts once the treaty expires. It doesn’t make any sense at all to have allies trade with enemies in this context and it’s a hindrance to building on many maps for the aforementioned reasons.

The other issue here is that trying to wall off anything and having the carts pile up results in both teams starting battle with a deficit of gold because all the trade carts are jammed up against walls, constantly trying to reach a market they never should have been trading with in the first place.

If you’re someone who looks like a long boom game with bots this is a major annoyance.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

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• 100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)

REPRODUCTION STEPS

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Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Choose Black Forest, start game with treaty time long enough for bots to set up markets and trade carts
2. Wait until bot players set up sufficient trade carts
3. Start building walls between your side of the map and the enemy, watch trade carts pile up.

EXPECTED RESULT

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Bots only trade with ally markets

IMAGE

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This is only the beginning of the pileups too. If I wanted to let the game replay cycle through to later you would see about 5x as many carts at even more choke points. It would be one thing if the bot adjusted, deleted those carts, and set new trade destinations, but they don’t. They just keep sending more and more carts to a market they can’t reach.

GAME FILES (SAVE / RECORDING)

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[Felizon89]

Hi @chimpanvi
Could you send me a rec from this specific match?
Thanks for the report!

[chimpanvi]

rec: Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.

[MLC8896]

I don’t know in what capacity it may be linked to this issue. But I’m pretty sure it is.

I recently found out that sometimes AI controlled Trade Units (carts and cogs alike) struggle to path a way to an allied market/dock. It looks like to me that they insist on getting stuck in clumps at the theoretical shortest route in terms of tiles, oblivious of the real pathway, even if that one is completely cleared. Pretty much exactly as the screenshots posted by @chimpanvi.

To me it looks like a pathfinding issue of trade units. Never observed this behavious before last patch.

Cheers.

[chimpanvi]

Yea I can’t quite put my finger on what changed but at some point within the past few months, I feel like the pathing for bot trade carts got really bad and this pileup problem I posted got worse. I don’t remember this being a big issue previously, although the change to not allow building on tiles with enemy units on them has made it incredibly annoying and perhaps just more apparent.

There are some other pathing issues I’ve found with trade carts and at times, enemy units, particularly in Black Forest. Sometimes there are clearings in the middle of the forest with gold/stone/relics and such that you can cut your way to, but if these clearings are in the middle section of forest dividing the teams, sometimes AI units will try to go through the path you cut to reach the other side despite there being no path… They just get “stuck” against the tree line trying to move through as if it was a fully-cleared path to the enemy. This is so annoying. I literally have to spawn onagers & attack ground the giant mass of allied units so my bot teammate can do something useful rather than have like 30% of their population indefinitely bugging out in some random part of the forest. I’ve noticed trade carts do this too even more often.

Whatever the core issues here are, I hope they can fix it. It’s kind of ruining the fun of any bot game because of all the time I have to spend trying to “fix” or work around the nonsensical behavior and pathing issues of bot trade carts clogging up every corner of the map.