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You watched a certain cheeselord youtuber and are now regurgitating the bug he came across once in several hundreds of campaigns he plays.
Unfortunately there's going to be a lot of false positive reports on it, because very bad players let their ranged units get obstructed, or have some other completely valid reason that they dont fire the way the player wants/expects, and then the player assumes "oh it must be bugged."
The video on this makes this false positive problem way worse because it creates a false sense of validation.
What would be the best next step would be for CA to create way better clarification or visibility for why a unit wont fire, or what exactly its doing, so that players better understand the way these units work. That way if the bug does crop up everyone can see whats going on better, with less argumentation or ambiguity.
When the bug is legitimately happening, my best experience for fixing it is hitting Backspace on the offending units, then turning fire-at-will back on, usually at the group level. Literally just turn it off and on again.
This is very close to what Legend says to do, except he literally -does- what he says to do in the video, and it very evidently doesnt work, so his advice is obviously not correct.
One common element when I see the bug occurring, I speculate, tends to be the issue of target selection. The ranged unit(s) is trying to pick a target to "fire-at-will" on based on a number of factors, but then picks a unit that it cant fire on because of obstruction or because its just not in range yet. This is why I think just hitting Backspace works so well, it resets target selection.
This is also what I think is happening in Legend's video. His nonsense microing his lord around the other end of the map could quite possibly be screwing with this.
"its such an inconsistent bug" he says, as his archers suddenly work when his lord is in the corner of the map not receiving inputs, so the enemy units are not -all- constantly readjusting their battle orders.
The "battle AI" is an asynchronous loop, and player inputs are top priority in that loop because thats the whole reason to write async code. If re-evaluation of targets is very downstream in the loop it should be no surprise if it sometimes hangs up like this (even if obviously this part of the code could be written a little better, or isnt broken in some worse way). Its much more rare for this to be a problem in less cheesy combat, because losing a target is a flag for the archer AI to acquire a new target. In Legend's video its possible the archers are stuck on a target they (incorrectly) evaluate to be a higher threat to them than the enemy unit thats actively shooting them. They're waiting for their preferred target to get in range and there are no flags resetting them, and whatever background check that exists to capture edge cases is getting interrupted or is just broken. -IF- thats the case then it would be smart for CA to include logic, or even a toggle, for archers to shoot back at things that are shooting them.
Fire-at-will is a great concept, but it gets pretty complicated when the player starts to expect too much of it and expects it to always pick the targets the player would pick. Expecting this bug to be entirely eliminated imo is actually too much to ask, because I dont think under the hood the AI has as much of a concept of spatial awareness as a player would. Thats legitimately too computationally expensive in real time. The approximation that exists could be better, but its pretty damned good. The fire-at-will initial target selection is probably optimized to deal with straightforward charges like you see when 2 AI fight eachother. Its not designed to deal with cheese nonsense. The AI will never "understand" that its preferred target is being cheesed at the other end of the map. It doesnt understand anything. Thats not how it works.
Idk, I use ranged units all the time with no issue. Guns, bows, artillery, whatever. So I call ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on most of the reports on the subject.
The bug does happen, but if you're -not- Legend or someone with a huge amount of experience its probably a skill issue and youre coping. Include yourself in whichever category makes you happiest.
In my around 4.5k combined hours of playtime in this sage, I've had it happen less then 10 times.
Every other time where my unit's are not firing, there's a clear cut solution of obstruction. And a simply reposition of my unit's and they will start to fire again.
I can with a straight face make this claim, 99 out of 100 times when one of you make the claim that this bug happens, it's because of the person occupying the seat. Too often people scream bug / cheating AI when they misplay.
Does the bug happen, yes.
Does it happen as often as people claim, no.
It's almost asif a youtuber made a video about it and people pretend they experienced it.
Generally people that haven't touched the game in months. Bonus points for private profiles that hide any evidence of game time.
Yah, over 1000 of my TWH2 hours are literally just custom battles experimenting with the ranged unit mechanics. Yes I am that autistic.
I am not doing anything cheesy(?), nor is their aim obstructed, but it definitely seems to occur with a far higher frequency in "large" battles. 20 vs 20 is already a decent chance of occuring, but in 40 vs 40, assuming you have 10-20 of those being ranged units, you're pretty much guaranteed to have them not work.
I try to limit late-game to 20 vs 20 by not using large armies, but even in those situations it has a pretty decent chance of happening.
There are some borked maps with blind spots, but the majority of the time if my units aren't firing, there's a reason.
Is it common? no it isn't, but i have had to do some fights again because of it
But it isnt common enough to be a real problem at this stage, I would prefer the Gate 'bug' to be fixed, if they were going to fix anything.
My recent experience entirely contradicts yours. Played a few Dwarf campaigns, controlling 40 dwarf units with 25+ ranged of all types as a rule, with 0 issues. Lots of my units were copters too so there was plenty of micro to clutter up the loop. Still no issues.
I dont think anyone so far is denying that it happens. That would be dumb. If you've played enough you -will- see it. If you see it consistently however, and I consistently dont see it, I think you should consider that maybe you just arent seeing what you think you're seeing.
You dont have to take my word for it, and I dont intend to offend, just my POV.
The best you can do is, imo, reset your archer's target acquisition with backspace, and if that doesnt work try repositioning them as Aleera points out. The units -will- work. Fire at will -will- work 99.9% of the time if you set them up correctly. Terrain matters, unit spacing matters, firing arc matters. There's even nitty gritty like the angle of your archer block compared to the "line" of battle, I kid you not.
Manually targeting them is a fine backup like Legend does if they're not shooting what you want them to shoot, but its a huge DPS loss to correctly positioned fire-at-will most of the time.
If you have specific problems that you think arent addressed, please post a specific clip of your gameplay.
I apologize for assuming you were partially referencing a recent video on this exact subject. Bad timing.
You phrased your OP as both an assertion as a question. "Fire at will broken?" in the title as a question, but "they just wont fire." as an assertion in the body.
If you meant your post as an assertion then either you're mistaken, at least in my opinion, or you're possibly looking for an argument, which I hope is not the case.
If you really mean your post as a question, then the answer is pretty simple; no its mostly not broken, but it does happen. If you would like help im sure plenty of people would oblige.