I’m not sure if this counts as a bug or feature, but it’s definitely annoying.
When you make a tower in HD, villagers pull aggro. It attacks villagers first and buildings only when there aren’t villagers in range. Even if the villagers return, the tower will attack them again.
When you make a tower in DE, buildings pull aggro. It seems to attack the nearest thing in range. If I tell it to attack villagers, they leave, it starts attacking a building and even when the vils return, the tower won’t attack them unless you manually tell it to. When they leave and return, it keeps attacking a building again.
This gives a huge disadvantage to trush strats because you need to micro your towers. Having the vils pull aggro would be so much better for game experience.
Well, yes the mechanic is different now.
Is it worse though? - debatable.
As you said after units leave tower’s range the tower will attack the building - BUT it will prioritize opponent’s towers first - not the closest building!
That specifically is an improvement over HD. The issue is that it doesn’t target units once they are back in tower’s range.
I would guess that target prioritization changes after it doesn’t detect enemy units and it’s stuck on attacking enemy’s closest fortification (instead of going back to prioritizing units again.
If you want to make it the smoothest experience for players you would want to make target prioritization of fortifications (towers, bombard towers, castles) like this:
1st) Attack the closest enemy unit in range,
2nd) Attack the closest enemy fortification (e.g. tower) in range,
3rd) Attack the closest enemy building in range.
If 1 is impossible move to 2, if 1 and 2 are a no, then move to 3, if 1, 2, 3 conditions are not met do not attack.
Yeah, that’s why I said I’m not sure if it’s a bug. The main difference now is that the opponent can ignore your towers if you don’t tower micro and that house trick doesn’t work that well.
An interesting idea would be adding an equivalent of attack stances like your 1/2/3 targeting.
There’s a lot of things like that. It worked well but then after the next patch some other aspects got improved at the same time these aspects started working incorrectly.
Not sure why is it so common for de. It almost sounds like the code is tangled, classes are overlapping and it’s really tough to find a specific part of the code that influences only one thing.
Ya, something in this directin ois probably the reason for most bugs/weird behaviour.
After all theyre working with the original engine and 20 year old code. So yeah you can imagine…
After playing more games and analyzing the situation I noticed that damaging fortifications (towers, castles, kreposts) work correctly as I mentioned here:
as long as you don’t manually re-target the focus of the fortification building to something else.
Once you do that the tower starts shooting the closest thing (whatever it is - object/fortification/building) and will continue on shooting it until is told differently. After the targeted unit is killed or leaves the range of the tower it will once again target the closest thing until told differently.
In conclusion:
The fortification (tower) forgets how it should be working after the player gives it any command.
It really does suck. Obviously not sure if you’ve tried it. But apparently this only happens if you give the tower an order. If you completely leave it alone apparently it does what its supposed to. But if given an order even when the target dies it loses its auto target units ability…
Ive tried it in game and seems to work. But obviously this issue could still be happening to other people even without interference.
But i still get the issue where if i try to target things the towers go nuts and shoot buildings first…
Sometimes you simply have to manually retarget a tower. Imagine e.g. the enemy baiting fire with the scout/a unit. You are forced to manually retarget.
So this still defo is a very annoying issue.
Build: July 2020 patch, but I think this issues has been around longer
Platform: Steam
Operating System: Windows 10
Gamertag:
ISSUE
When a tower is not ordered to attack, it will choose a target itself. In the situation where both units and buildings are available to attack, the tower will attack the unit automatically. Whenever there are no units within reach, the tower will attack a building. The tower will now lock its fire onto that building until the building is destroyed (as you may know, this takes forever). It used to be that towers would switch its focus onto units whenever units where within the attack range, but that doesn’t happen anymore.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
In a real game scenario: build a tower on an enemy woodline. The tower will attack the vills automatically. Whenever the vills are gone the tower will attack the lumbercamp or an other building. If the vills return the tower will still attack the building.
GAME FILES
See attached.
The tower is placed around 18:40 and attacks villager. The tower is not ordered manually to attack the lumber camp. You’ll see it does so automatically when vills are outside the LOS.
Villager return around 37:30 and the tower doesn’t attack them.
Will I hear it if this gets logged as an official bug? This issue seriously impacts the effectiveness of offensive towers. By the way I think the same issue applies for castles and town centers but I am not completely sure.
GAME INFORMATION