Stonemason can't reach bug

[Unknown4u]

Hello guys,

first of all I want to express my respect for the developers. It is hard to believe that it's actually possible to reprogramme a game (even an old one like KaM) in a fashion that you can hardly tell the difference between the original game and the clone. Thank you also for eradicating all the bugs of the old game (it wouldn't be very smart to replicate them, but anyway…).

I have played KaM TSK for the first time when I was seven or maybe eight years old and never got past the fourth mission. When I tried to install it to retry playing it on my computer a year ago and was not able to due to Win x64 incompatibilities, I found it somewhat interesting that there is still such a lively community that would even take on the task to clone the game in order to make playable (and even add some functions) on new computers. I didn't believe that the clone could possibly have a good quality, but I found myself mistaken. Then my computer crashed (HDD broken) and I forgot about the game until a week ago, when I installed it again and tried to walk through the TSK missions to see how good of a job you've done programming the AI.

I'm currently in mission 8 and I must say that I can't believe how difficult the mission has become (I'm always overrun in the first attack). I remember that I couldn't reach mission 5 without cheating when I was eight, but I could actually play through mission 8 due to AI player's chronical food issues (that don't appear in the Remake, although I don't understand how they could happen in the first place since the AIs warehouses are full with bread, sausages and everything). Well, after losing like ten times with different watchtower positions, I read that you've made archers less powerful and wanted to edit the map to compensate for that. Then I found that you already did that, cutting the number of attacking soldiers in half and adding five more bowmen. Are you serious about making bowmen just »a little less powerful«? Would you please tell me the exact numbers you have changed (I tried to find it in the source code, but couldn't see it)?

Sorry, I digressed. As I said, I was just playing mission 8 (r4001) and got a message that one of my stonemasons couldn't reach any more stone deposits. Since I have four stonemasons close to each other, I didn't know which one was exactly meant. Watching them I found them all still working. I reloaded three times, the bug occurred every time. Then I tried to destroy some of their houses and found that I can destroy any number of stonemasons, no matter which ones I choose, the message that one of them can't reach any further deposits doesn't pop up again. So, I believe that I get the message because two stonemasons want to dig at the same place, one of them is too late, the computer checks if there is another place he could go, doesn't find any and sends the message. Then the stonemason is idle and checks for stone deposits, which he finds as soon as the other one is finished. He then starts working and makes me wonder what's wrong. Something like that (although it wouldn't explain why I can destroy any of the buildings and the message doesn't show.

You can find a savegame from before and after the bug in the attachment.

I hope I could help and wish you the best!

[Lewin]

Hi,
Thanks for your compliments

Sometimes the AI has food problems because they have too many serfs crowding their storehouse and the food can't be delivered to the inn. Adding another storehouse and other adjustments like that will usually fix such problems, and we try to sort these issues out although it's difficult because the AI is being improved and tweaked a lot at the moment.

I don't think we cut the number of attacking soldiers in half, where did you hear that? In my "list of changes we made to campaign missions" all I have for TSK 8 is "Increased number of starting archers to 20 (was 15) to make the initial attack winnable". At the time I made that change I tested it a number of times and was able to win without too much difficulty. It could still be unbalanced though. Ok I just tested it. I had to load a save twice before I won with 3 axefighters left and all my bowmen. Here's a screenshot of the watchtower layout and archer positions I used:

This might make it a bit hard still, since I'm fairly experienced and it still took a few tries. But I remember when I first played this mission back in the good old days it took me about 10 before I won it

We don't know exactly how archers/projectiles worked in the original game so I can't tell you what we changed. Like many things we've had to guess and take measurements from the original game. One change is that we made archers predict where the enemy will be when the arrow lands and aim for that location, in KaM they just aim for the current location of the enemy.

At one point in development we made archers less likely to hit because in multiplayer we were seeing players build as many crossbowmen as possible with a few militia to guard them, and this tactic proved to be the most effective. Most units in the game were going unused which was not what we wanted at all. We realised this would also impact singleplayer and some adjustments were made to the campaign to ensure they were still winnable. I don't think it's a problem because archers are clearly still very important units (probably the most important).

Balance issues like this are difficult because we're always working on balance changes to improve the game (for both single and multiplayer) so campaigns always need tweaking here and there to get the difficulty right. We have some balance changes planned for the next major update and will begin testing them with the community soon (mainly making units with shields more viable, currently lance carriers/pikemen are far better considering how much cheaper they are to produce). You're welcome to participate in testing, watch the forum for an announcement in a few weeks.

Nice bug you've found there
We recently improved farmers/stonemasons/woodcutters so they wouldn't attempt to mine at a place that already has somebody else mining there. In this case there are only two places to mine stone available within range of the rightmost stonemason's house, and at one point both are being mined by other stonemasons. At this point he checks "Where can I mine?" and gets "Nowhere" as the answer. This causes him to alert you that he has run out of stone. I guess we need to seperate the "have we run out of stone" check to ignore other stonemasons mining and only look at whether or not there is any stone. This issue might also effect fishermen/woodcutters (woodcutters tell you when they run out of trees if you set them on "cut-only") so I'll look into that as well. Thanks for reporting!

Cheers,
Lewin.
P.S. We've released an update to the game, r4179. When you've finished your current saves you should update (because saves are not compatible between releases)

EDIT: I fixed the bug with the stonemasons Thanks again!

[pawel95]

Lol, i thought that this mission was also winable with 15 archers
I remind that i only must think about first school or first tower(when i played the game first time) but then you will win without problems,wont you?

[Unknown4u]

I don't think we cut the number of attacking soldiers in half, where did you hear that? In my "list of changes we made to campaign missions" all I have for TSK 8 is "Increased number of starting archers to 20 (was 15) to make the initial attack winnable".

I opened the TPR version of TSK mission 8 with a map editor and compared it to mission 8 in the Remake. I found that in the TPR version there are 120 barbarians, which seems to be an awful lot, in the Remake there are 60. Maybe the number of barbarians was increased in TPR and could not be handled. I haven't tested that, but I found the number pretty impressive.

Your proposed arrangement was actually the same arrangement that I used when I made it through the first attack, but I didn't always succeed with it. Seems as though you've really improved the random number generator, but the results are now too random. Although I would think that through statistical effects you would get an expected value with a small variation when there are a lot of troops that play a role, with 20 on each side already being a lot. It's strange that still so much depends on luck.

Considering mission 8, I would like to add that if you build five towers (as you did), you'll sometimes run out of stones before being able to build stonemasons. It happened to me, and I could barely save the situation in reloading and immediately stopping the serfs from delivering any more stones to the watchtowers. As you can see in the replay, I have eight stones left for building a stonemason.

About the bug: I believe that this problem would not occur with woodcutters, since one tree can only be felled once and no tree ever blocks another one. I'm also not sure about how fishermen work, but I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't affected either. At least in the case of woodcutters, your bugfix only delays the appearance of the message that the woodcutter's run out of trees to fell.

Greetings!

[Lewin]

What version of TPR do you have? I believe one of the changes made in SR3 (service release 3, a fan made patch to TPR) was to remove some barbarians in TSK 8 which just sat there and starved to death after about 30 minutes. So maybe the extra ones are those. We use SR3 mission files with a few modifications such as the extra bowmen.

It's not really the random number generator, it just the way KaM works. KaM is a very chaotic system: making the tiniest change will cause a very different outcome. I believe it's always been like that even in TPR, I remember having to play the initial battles a few times in various missions before I won them. If you have to play it 10 times to win and rely on luck like that, it either means the mission is too hard or you're using the wrong strategy. The initial fight in TSK 8 might still be too hard, and when we've stopped changing the balance of units so much we can focus more on fixing these things.

Yeah the bug only effected stonemason and fishermen (in very rare circumstances where there's only one location to fish from), but it's fixed now