Secondary projectiles behave as if they had an area attack

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
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:arrow_forward: GAME INFORMATION

  • BUILD #: 101.101.43210.05867313
  • PLATFORM: Steam, but it doesn’t matter
  • OS: Windows 10, but it doesn’t matter

When you give a unit 0% accuracy, like an archer, it well has… 0% accuracy. It will often miss, but still deal damage if the arrow hits a not targeted unit or the targeted unit itself. Now, if you do the same with a unit that has an area attack like onagers, they don’t deal damage at all most of the time. They will only sometimes with a very small chance do damage, because the game for some reason seems to think that 0% is still above 0 or something. But that’s not the bug. The bug is, that when you give a secondary projectile 0% accuracy, although they don’t have an area attack, the same happens as with the onagers. They will only sometimes with a very small chance deal damage. Only the original projectile will hit most of the time.
This is very bad for modding, for me at least. I’m working on a mod where ranged units are supposed to have realistic accuracy and long range. If I give a cho ku nu 0% accuracy, only the first arrow will do damage, just like with any other unit that has secondary projectiles such as kipchaks and castles.

:arrow_forward: REPRODUCTION STEPS

  1. Change the accuracy of a secondary projectile to 0%, you can do it with the castle’s projectiles “CST”
  2. In the Scenario Editor, place a castle down and a ram in front of it

You will now see that the castle that fires at the ram only deals one damage per volley. It can also with a small chance happen that it does 2 or even more because of what I said earlier.

Also, please change the system for how accuracy affects units with an area attack in general. It’s really stupid that I can’t have an onager with realistic accuracy. I could give it 50%, but it’s not a solution at all because for 1. the onager will still guaranteed hit 50% of the time and 2. it will only do 50% damage/deal damage to only 50% of the units. Some little checkbox in advanced genie editor for if accuracy should affect units with blast damage like it now does would be totally enough. We would get more moddability and you wouldn’t have to change the whole system.

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This is not a bug.
Do you think that an arrow shouldn’t do damage if it misses the intended target and hits another unit?

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it is a bug. arrows that don’t hit the intended target normally do half the damage, which is discussion worthy too, from a gameplay and realism point of view, as arrows that hit something else don’t just magically lose like half of their potential energy or something.

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this is not a bug, just put anything but 0 accuracy.

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it is a bug. stop replying if you don’t even understand what I said. If you actually had read through my post, you would have understood why giving them anything else than 0% isn’t an option.

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  1. “This game is over 20 years old” what a stupid argument. AoE2 being an old game in its origins isn’t a reason to not fix a bug, even if it’s minor. And the DE isn’t 20 years old, the engine is, and they do have the power to fix the engine up a little bit.
  2. I’m not complaining about the bug. If I had complained, I would have whined all the time about how ■■■■ the game is with it and how it ruins the game, which it doesn’t. I only reported the bug, that’s a big difference. Yes, I do see that it is a very minor bug, but for the overall “polishedness” of the game, it should get fixed eventually, when all the major bugs like the lag in multiplayer and crashes some people still have are fixed.
  3. “Stop complaining about something the current devs most likely didn’t create”: like I said, they do have the power to fix it and I’m not complaining, I’m just reporting a minor modding bug
  4. Let’s talk about the bug a little bit. Even if it’s not a bug, but intentional, what purpose does it serve? It only makes it so that you can’t have units like onagers have realistic accuracy without directly decreasing their damage output, even if they hit in a perfect place. For example, if an onager has 50% accuracy, it will fire at the position of its targeted unit and do full damage 50% of the time, and miss the intended target and deal full damage to only 50% of the units the other 50% of the time. Not only doesn’t this make any sense, because 1. it should at least do 50% damage to ALL units it hits, and 2. this mechanic doesn’t make sense at all because, like I said in my first reply to another guy, projectiles that miss their intended target don’t magically do less damage than projectiles that do in the real world.
    But this (minor) problem doesn’t only affect modding, but the main game. Longbowmen for example have a pretty low accuracy compared to other archers, so you are guaranteed to have situations where many longbowmen will miss a target when microing like 20, hitting another target. Now because missed shots only do 50 damage, which will result in only 1 damage in post imperial age and even castle age most of the time with all the armor upgrades, you will sometimes have problems where you are being chased down by knights for example.
    Let’s say you try to hit and run a bit with your longbowmen against the knights. when you think you should be able to do the most damage by shooting at a knight in the middle of the clump because the missed arrows will very very likely hit another knight, it actually makes 0 difference, because the arrows only do 1 damage. It’s the same as having the archers fire no arrow if they would have missed that shot. Now this is only a very minor problem like the secondary projectiles bug because the chance of it making a big difference is very low, but it does make a difference, even if it’s very small, so again, it should get fixed eventually when all the major bugs are fixed because 1. it does make a little difference and 2. it makes the game more polished and moddable
3 Likes
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yeah sorry, did it now

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  1. the only thats stupid is the way you approach it as a bug report. even if you were the best programmer, telling u to look into something thats designed by others, over 20 years ago, is an astonishing task let alone “fixing” it.

  2. you mentioning major bug requiring fixing, this thread as a “bug” report has nothing to do with those crashes, stop bringing less relevant point into it just so you can sound “right”. lets stick to topic at hand, you’d have zero idea if originally designed this way purposely with those projectile, or if it’s really a bug, it simply didn’t work the way you wanted it to work.

  3. actually you did complain, not only here but also in AOE official discord nonstop, bad mouthing off how bad the game is. yes it does have a lot of issue and that is the truth, its also truth you do complain a lot.

  4. game engine is 20 yrs old, they design with whats capable and what they wanted it to be at the time, also nothing in the game is realistically accurate, it is a game afterall and they made the game it is today, how they wanted it to be at the time.
    also why couldn’t you just do primary projectile, lower its damage and put less accuracy why must you use secondary projectile, find workarounds for it dont be so stubborn.

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I did find one workaround, but that workaround is really bad and shouldn’t even be considered a workaround. what I could do is give chu ko nus only one projectile and then divide their reload time by the number of projectiles they had. but that would look stupid. you would have a chu ko nu with a machine gun. same for every other unit with secondary projectiles like castles. also for the asthetic it needs to have multiple projectiles. seeing many arrows fly somewhere just feels satisfying to me. I also found a workaround for the area attack thing, which is to just not give them an area attack at all., but that would make them very weak. if I give my catapults area attack, they ahve to be 100% accurate which makes them too op in some situations. when I remove their area attack and instead make them a bit unaccurate, they will be too weak against units.

about your number 2, I mentioned them because I had the feeling you indirectly said that this isn’t important anyway. basically what I said is that this is a very minor bug if it is one, and that the major bugs should obviously be taken care off first. I didn’t want to look like I think this is very important and should be fixed immediately.

about your number 1, I still don’t understand what’s wrong about asking the current devs to fix or change something that they aren’t accountable for. the current devs have to fix bugs, even if they weren’t created in the time they had the saying yet.

about your number 3, yes, I did complain on the discord. but not because of this, but because of really big bugs that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. one example of when I complained is when I said something like “do the devs even test stuff before releasing their garbage updates?!”, which is true. if they had tested stuff before releasing an update, the scenario editor wouldn’t be so broken. with “garbage updates” I didn’t mean that what they do is bad, but what they don’t do is bad. when an update, that fixes some minor issues, brings much bigger bugs, then the update is just garbage.

to your number 4, yes, the game is not supposed to be realistic, but I explained in my previous post why this part of the game makes no sense, not even from a game design/balancing/whatever perspective

I also hate that your comments just get deleetd for no reason. Idk who reported them, but I just want to let you know it was not me. your comments weren’t offensive or anything.

I maybe said this already, but I don’t want to angrily argue with you, I just want to know why you are thinking this way, for example that the current devs shouldn’t fix and change stuff that was made befpre they took over. Maybe I am wrong too, but nothing of what you said until now could convince me that I am.

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read it at face value at times would help. many seem to lack that these days, hard to come out and state opinion without offending someone because of their fantasies. you not need worry about reported post, I could care less about those, probably just bunch of snowflake that I somehow “hurt”.

infact, more they report the better, otherwise I would have no way of knowing if my comment worked on the snowflakes lmao. human mind is a mysterious thing, a censored comment says “click to see hidden comment” makes people want to click it more. which has an opposite effect of what they are trying to do, censoring.

you dont want to angrily argue but you open your post like this, it has little convincing power behind it when you contradict what you say.

I don’t need to convince anyone, people will eventually learn it or deal with it one way or another. its not like you don’t know how the devs answer to bug report, even something as major as crashes it still hasn’t been fixed for over a year.

theres nothing wrong asking them to fix things. what is wrong is to assume it is a bug, we simply have no idea if game was designed in mind with how 2nd projectile is suppose to work. perhaps its an addition from original AOK days and there are limitation who knows

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yes, I apologise for the “what a stupid argument” thing. I was really angry because I had the feeling no one understands me. but anyway, what you said about it probably not being a bug because aok may have had limitations, should I create a discussion post about it instead? I mean it does sometimes make a difference that projectiles that don’t hit the intended target do only half damage. a fully upgraded arbalester does 10 damage. when it now doesn’t hit the intended target, which is the case for civs like britons who don’t have thumb ring, it does only 5 damage, which is only 1 because full armor upgrades mean 4 pierce armor. this is a 90% reduction in damage. a missed arrow should still do damage if it hits another target, so you are rewarded for using ranged units a way they were used in real history, which is letting them fire into an area with a large group of units.

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Hey, I am interested if there is any change with the way secondary projectiles work now since they added the functionality for Arambai to deal 100% dmg even with missed shots?

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sadly they hardcoded that. “we wanna make the game more moddable :DDDDDDDD”

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