Sand Ninja Attacks; Unrewarding Tedium?

[Waswar]

So, I was recently "raided" by the Sand Ninjas, futile as it was. It was quite easily repelled, but I can't help but be greatly annoyed by how it went down.

1: The Sand Ninjas only initial desire is to raid your food stores. They will do this no matter what is happening to them and in your town. Even if you lock the door to your granary and have all of your warriors attacking them, only a few will be siphoned off into one-versus-one fights; the rest will attack the doors of the granary with their katanas.

2: Sweeping AOE attacks caused some of the ninjas to be staggered and pushed through the locked door. They will then run right to your food storage. I had someone inside the building who attacked them, and even after being struck, all they wanted to do was take a chunk of food first.

3: After the attack was done, we're forced to manually shift through the ninjas that actually made it to the food storage and manually replace all the food. Looting mundane crap is one of the few horrendous things in this otherwise magnificent game.

All-in-all, this is a super unrewarding raid that forces us to micromanage tediously just to reclaim a few things that were taken. The ninjas have no sense of self-preservation until after they steal from you. What are your people's opinions?

[rompier02]

Hi. Thought only Black Dragon Genin's raids act like this. Yeah & I agree with you. They should knocked out the town's inhabitants first before making straight for the food stores.

[Faerador]

100% agree. Their AI should focus on actually knocking out your troops before going for the prize of your food bins.

[Pyrrhus]

Stop them from reaching your food container first by building killbox area aimed by numerous of turrets with 2 gates between and additional turrets aimed at front gate. Sand ninjas never raid my base, even I hope they do, I still have plenty food as they wouldn't have enough inventory spaces to take them all.

[bunny de fluff]

q:Is this a feature or a bug?
a:Yes.

[Shidan]

It's 100% a bug. Just looked at their AI for the raid, and the looting food is actually their lowest priority mission.

1. Attack gates
2. Liberate Captives
3. Attack Enemies
4. Protect Allies
5. Look around for enemies
6. Loot food

So normally, after getting through the gates they'd immediately try to free your prisoners. In some ways this makes sense, since captives would be potential allies for the fight. Though I could see issues arising form prioritizing that over fighting, similar to your issues with food. Then they'd kill all hostiles, look for more, then steal the food after it was safe.

So yeah, no chance this is intended behavior.

[rompier02]

If that is the case why hasn't this be addressed? Can't say about Sand Ninjas raids. Never set up an Outpost in their area. The Black Dragon Genins will first stop short of the gates & be babbling among themselves about one of their leader.Then after they are finished they will straight run to the food storage. Never kept prisoners,so never saw them trying to free one. Funny thing is if you put all the food into the backpacks & put the backpacks into a general storage then they will go to that storage & mill around it. Can't take the food cos it is in a backpack.

[prd]

Originally posted by Shidan:

It's 100% a bug. Just looked at their AI for the raid, and the looting food is actually their lowest priority mission.

1. Attack gates
2. Liberate Captives
3. Attack Enemies
4. Protect Allies
5. Look around for enemies
6. Loot food

So normally, after getting through the gates they'd immediately try to free your prisoners. In some ways this makes sense, since captives would be potential allies for the fight. Though I could see issues arising form prioritizing that over fighting, similar to your issues with food. Then they'd kill all hostiles, look for more, then steal the food after it was safe.

So yeah, no chance this is intended behavior.

I'd venture this could be solved by staggering the loot food process by displacing it from the source assault package, directing that to lead to the looting of the food, then finally the retreat AI once satisfied. If the events are separate and conditional on the assault succeeding and completing, they shouldn't even attempt it with it locked in a separate but potentially upcoming package.

[SmallGespenst]

that would bring about it's own issues, since I'm pretty sure that raids can't really be resolved through player defeat, they just have a timer and they'll hang around fighting/looking for a fight until it's time to go home, or they're all KO'd. it's one of those things that would be really weird to try to change because there are tons of factors that can make things confusing like other characters outside the base or non-combatants hiding indoors, not to mention that your characters can get back up.

[Rocksalt]

My opinion... Other than when you're first starting you can ignore it. Later on in progression food production fills up a food store and you have to figure out what your dedicated cook is going to do when they become idle. It's not ideal but given that there's a number of ways to make Cats, it's easier to buy more food than loot back all your food items.

[Waswar]

Originally posted by Shidan:

It's 100% a bug. Just looked at their AI for the raid, and the looting food is actually their lowest priority mission.

1. Attack gates
2. Liberate Captives
3. Attack Enemies
4. Protect Allies
5. Look around for enemies
6. Loot food

So normally, after getting through the gates they'd immediately try to free your prisoners. In some ways this makes sense, since captives would be potential allies for the fight. Though I could see issues arising form prioritizing that over fighting, similar to your issues with food. Then they'd kill all hostiles, look for more, then steal the food after it was safe.

So yeah, no chance this is intended behavior.

They're not initially hostile, simply neutral; is that what bugs out their AI, perhaps, preventing attack and defense priorities from kicking in in practice?

[Pyrrhus]

Even they're neutral, their patrols still will attack you once they see you in wild. If you stand outside of Cactus Den, they won't attack you but if you go inside, they get upset and would turn hostile after they're wiped out.