T90 talked about The Trebuchet Trick. Basically a wall acts as shield for the trebuchet. The trebuchet with the wall in front of it should be guaranteed to win this fight every single time. However, even if this is a trick it probably should not be considered such since physics-wise a trebuchet behind a wall would probably block projectiles regardless
Makes sense as some units, such as Rams, block projectiles.
He also highlighted a randomness bug.
When the treble sets up it sometimes gets into a state of 100% accuracy and other time 0%.
Random number generator has been buggy in de since about 1 year after the initial release. How do I know? At thsz time a patch made bird paths less random and I made a custom scenario at the time which relied of this randomness (exploding birds nothing on ingame mod page)
Walling should have some effect because of the extremely low accuracy of the trebuchet, scripted ‘missed’ shots sometimes connect with a treb simply because it didn’t miss by far enough to avoid collision with some part of the treb’s unit sprite, and any shot that comes out as a ‘miss’ will still deal damage to another unit that intercepts the projectile. This is true for any projectile in AOE2. However, this does not explain the 100% accuracy/0% accuracy bug. 15% of all the shots should still land, as Trebs have 15% accuracy.
Some units have a property where they block some types of projectiles, even those scripted as a ‘hit’. Rams, siege towers, etc. These units will eat up projectile attacks from fortifications and some other odd sources, this has to do with the hit mode of the projectile, but whether it applies here has to do with Blast attack/defense, and that doesn’t apply here at all.
Fire ships happen to have 0% accuracy, so they always miss, and stray shots are always able to be blocked. Units/buildings do not need to have a special property to block a missed shot. Trebs do not have 0% accuracy, so this is not happening here.
The actual explanation for the trebs missing with 100% accuracy against trebs guarded by walls, and Trebs guarded by walls becoming Warwolf is… it’s a glitch. No doubt this is incredibly bizarre and definitely unintended, and I would bet good money this gets patched out once they figure out why this interaction occurs.
T-West did a much more detailed job of explaining what I explained in a video way back, explaining Blast attack levels and such, but the summary of that video is - This interaction is not playing out as expected from what we’ve known about the game’s mechanics up until this point, and it’s definitely a glitch.
A walled in trebuchet should have an advantage in a treb war to the tune of about 50%, because 15% of all shots should still hit because they were launched as a ‘hit’ and then another ~15% or so of the treb projectiles were launched as a ‘miss’ but landed close enough to the trebuchet to hit anyway will strike the wall.
I found the relevant video.
they could add a new feature to let us choose which projectiles are blockable or have a chance being blockable, that would make things a lot easier
or something like this
I tried this in a couple of games the other day. But it didn’t really work for me like it did in T90s videos. I dunno what I did wrong obviously it was in the middle of the chaos of the game and he had everything setup perfectly in an ideal situation so that might have had something to do with it.
