The Heist

[Shiki]

I uploaded an old campaign last seen on the 1.4 Server — dubbed the Heist — to 1.14 and 1.15.

It is a special campaign in some aspects, and is an example of what has been discussed recently in the forums.
You get to play different parties, gold doesn't matter except for the fact that it's a heist, and […]


Separately from the campaign, the add-on comes with a scenario of Backgammon.

The campaign was written by genosuke.
An old thread can be found here: https://r.wesnoth.org/t16819 (But beware, it has spoilers)

[white_haired_uncle]

I had a lot of trouble with The Siege Part 1. I think the first time I lost was on turn 2.

Spoiler:

He turned one of my heroes into a bat, which attacked my berzerker. Game over. Something like this happened several times and I finally just skipped to the next scenario. I thought there might be a pattern where you could protect heroes from being turned, but I couldn't find one (I play with animation at full speed, to the point where I really can't even see which unit gets turned before it dies).

[vghetto]

Hi,

I got this error on scenario 8 The Family. It happened after side 2 grabbed the village in the middle of the map.

Code: Select all

20191221 11:56:18 error scripting/lua: ai/lua/generic_rush_engine.lua:601: attempt to index a nil value (local 'dest')
stack traceback:
        ai/lua/generic_rush_engine.lua:601: in method 'village_hunt_exec'
        [string "(...):village_hunt_exec()"]:1: in main chunk

[Adamant14]

I have tested the new AI in my own campaign, and got a similar error message:

Code: Select all

20191222 11:18:36 error scripting/lua: ai/lua/generic_rush_engine.lua:588: attempt to index a nil value (local 'dest')
stack traceback:
	ai/lua/generic_rush_engine.lua:588: in method 'village_hunt_exec'
	[string "(...):village_hunt_exec()"]:1: in main chunk

No unit has grabbed a village when the error meassage popped up, because no village is in reachable distance.

[mattsc]

What's the "new AI"? Based on the error message, I assume it's the Experimental AI? Just asking because that's been around for many years, so just making sure I am not missing something. Also, which version of Wesnoth is this? I mean, I can see from the error message that it must be 1.14, I think, but is it one of the releases or compiled yourself? (The current version of that file, in fact, has fewer than 588 lines.)

Finally, if you could send me a save from which I can reproduce the error, that would be helpful. I tested this with my test campaign and do not get the error. Thanks!

[mattsc]

Adamant14 sent me a save (thank you!) from which I was able to reproduce the error. The problem is pretty much what I expected, the ExpAI trying to move a unit to a village that it cannot actually reach because the path is blocked by enemies. That can be fixed (well, worked-around, really) by changing this line to
if dest then AH.checked_move(ai, unit, dest[1], dest[2]) end
and I will make that change in the code, of course.

However, this is just a consequence of a much bigger problem with the village_hunt candidate action (CA), which really is not suited for a general setting. Back in the day the ExpAI was conceived as a 1vs1 MP AI and this CA in particular is way too simplistic to work well more generally. So much, in fact, that in 1.15, where we recently merged most of the ExpAI CAs into the default AI, I removed this CA entirely, both from the default and the Experimental AI. I am planning to do that in 1.14 as well for the next release. It just isn't worth trying to fix up this CA. If village hunting is supposed to be emphasized, set the village_value AI aspect to a larger than default value instead.

So, my suggestion for your campaigns would be to define you own macro identical to this one in your campaign, but remove the "village_hunt" [candidate_action] block. That way you can use it with any version of 1.14, not just from 1.14.10 onward.

In the meantime, if you encounter problems with the ExpAI, please let us know, so that we can do something about it. Reports as above are extremely helpful for that. Thanks!

[Konrad2]

For 'The Battle', how about putting 'Kill at least 3 units' into the scenario objectives?

[Konrad2]

Couple of things:
Units are not automatically healed after the scenario ends.

'Hideout' is not winnable because one of the 'kids' has the quick trait. He reaches the orcs before I can catch up, resulting in him being killed instantly and me losing the scenario.

EDIT:
FTR, I'm playing on 1.15.6.

EDIT 2:
Also units not being healed after scenario ends screws me over in Hideout because my units are not healthy enough to deal with all those orcs. (Tbh I'm not sure if I could deal with them even if my units were healthy, not while the kids are trying to attack the orcs.)