Bugs and strange/unfun restrictions i noticed

[Evrey]

Hello, Firefly folks!
Here’s a list of things i noticed that unfortunately negatively impacted my gameplay experience, Without much fuss, provided as a simple list. Hope it helps y’all!

• You cannot recruit beduins in the old skirmish trails (Yes, this is probably intentional, but honestly, this just eliminates one of THE major incentives for replaying the trails at all: Self-imposing challenges for using new units, and playing against modded AI lords. People are not gonna replay 100 missions again just the way they already did 20 years ago, might as well have thrown the old trails out of the game. Especially ’cause i’d love to mod the Caliph to also use the new beduin arsonists/ambushers for castle defence.)
• Mangonels don’t auto-target troops, which reduces the threat-level of half the AI castles to »practically defenceless«.
• Tower ballistas don’t prioritise engineers and siege engines, shooting at random archers when bombarded.
• The jewel doesn’t seem to buy weapons (or anything but food?) and she builds her weapon factories too late. She can be easily killed by a neighbouring Rat, making an attempted co-op trail with her an exercise in boredom.
• The jewel has an expensive money wasting stable, but i’ve never seen her recruit knights.
• Ox tether workers have no max distance to quarries they consider, so on maps with multiple stone spots and quarries on them, the workers run across half the map for a single brick like suicidal idiots.
• AI lords still at times spam buildings into walled-off areas, which is visually annoying.
• The crocodiles are too hard to see on grass, i was wondering for hours why my granary was empty.
• Target location icons and other mouse interaction icons do not scale with the chosen cursor image size.
• Some AI castles still have missing or mixed-up buildings. The sentinel even at times builds an armourer for no apparent reason.
• My in-game image is tied to my steam profile picture. Yes, i consider this an anti-feature when not given the choice to import an alternative image.
• Game speed 90 is slooooooow, which makes the popular format of watching AI lords battle each other an unfun experience in SHC:DE. (Occasional slow-downs past 90 are fine, we know what we’re in for when ramping UCP game speed up to 800. You could even make »allow >90« a checkbox in the settings.)
• The chosen player lord model (e.g. European lady) is ignored in some game modes, very disappointingly. It makes no gameplay difference, so why can’t i do them as a woman or cow?
• The panic distance and cooldown timer for gates are too high. (Well, they match the original.) It’s annoying for player castles and breaks many AI lords, stunlocking them in a cut-off economy. It’s better if one super fast enemy slave enters a gate on good luck than it is to wait for a gate to open again for what feels like an hour.
• Oil pot engineers on walls seem to be stuck running up and down, never targeting enemy troops passing by. Combine that with mangonels and especially Richard ends up having a defence as weak as the Rat, unlike in the original game.
• Camels, who can’t attack buildings, are dispatched by AI lords to attack buildings, resulting in them standing around in the weirdest places doing nothing.
• AI lords no longer seem to properly rush their units onto the enemy keep during a siege when there’s a clear and open path straight up. The Jewel failed to kill the Rat next door 4 times in a row, due to this, sending her units off to instead destroy some irrelevant orchards.
• Trebuchet RNG seems to have gotten 10 times worse than they were. The most precise siege engine of the middle ages, and they can’t get a tiny tower to crumble with 20 stones or an Extreme spawner just across a river.
• Defensive trebuchets, like the Wolf’s, don’t seem to aim for enemy buildings when protected by walls. They shoot over towers, they shouldn’t do line-of-sight checks.
• It still seems like archers don’t target enemy units farther away, even though they’re up on towers and can reach farther for already targeted units. This makes castle defences like the Caliph’s weaker than they could’ve been.
• While the more realistically scaled lords are, well, more realistic, the OG huuuuuge lord scale is just fun, and it makes it easier to target the lord when the enemy keep’s full.
• Enemy siege units should do a shortest-path calculation to the walls they target before the AI lord selects their gathering spot. I’ve watched enemy lords in the co-op trail park their siege units on the other side of a cliff, getting easily sniped by my towers, only for them to then take a long detour until they even get to a spot where they can look at my walls before they die. Not really challenging.
• The 4 SH1 dukes still use the messenger when allied. =) I bet a bunch of old SH1 voice lines could be creatively repurposed for ally voice lines if cut together a lil’. Did that many years ago for the Wolf. Wouldn’t that be a nice christmas present? <3

[Evrey]

nvm, this one seems to have been a fluke

~~Oh, i forgot one: The game, when windowed, still listens to mouse wheel events, even if the window isn’t focussed.~~

[Evrey]

Another bug: King’s Crusade, mission 4, where you have to gather 60 swords and armour and enclose the keep. The keep enclosure is never detected, instead the game leaks memory like crazy until it is OOM-killed.

[Evrey]

After more detailed observation of allied AI lords turning into useless potatos, here’s what i think is happening:

Buying priorities seem to be completely broken. Saladin, for example, no longer buys wheat or hops, so his economy runs dry, and he wastes huge amounts of gold buying just bread instead. This leaves him with no spare money and popularity to ever recruit troops. Also, when attacked, even though it’s free, AI lords don’t immediately rebuild the market, waiting for enemies to disappear first, worsening the whole situation. Honestly, AI lords shouldn’t even target the market, just ignore it. Breaking it is unfair, cripples AI lords, and with immediate repair the enemy would just get stuck in a break-the-market loop.

So yeah, either there is market buying prioritisation and it’s buggy, or there is no prioritisation, which results in poor choices being made, putting AI lords on effectively life support.

Priority should be, from most to least important:
1. Wood
2. Wheat and hops
3. Food
4. Weapons and armour for ranged units
5. Iron
6. Weapons and armour for melee units
7. All the rest

E: It seems the prioritisation is buggy in that the AI lords seem to not buy goods under a minimum amount that’s rather high, so if they don’t earn a minimum amount of money, which they can’t, they try other deals that are more wasteful. A good fix would be to *always* try buying in priority order, and when there’s not enough money, buy the largest affordable amount, and be it but 1 bundle of wheat.

[Meleyna]

Hi, if I may, I would like to add one thing:
In the map editor the refunded gold, which you get, when wells, churches and other buildings purchased for gold are destroyed, is saved. The refunded amount is then added to the starting gold as soon as you play the map. Even deleting the keep does not change this.
Quite annoying if you want to create challenging maps.

Do you know if the developers are keeping an eye on the Steam discussions or should the bugs be reported elsewhere?

[Evrey]

Hello!

Originally posted by Meleyna:

Hi, if I may, I would like to add one thing
…
Do you know if the developers are keeping an eye on the Steam discussions or should the bugs be reported elsewhere?

Yes, please and thank you. Having all bugs in one place would make it much easier for Firefly to keep an eye on ’em. I don’t know of some public issue tracker, so i’m just hoping they occasionally lurk the discussions here.

Originally posted by Meleyna:

In the map editor the refunded gold, which you get, when wells, churches and other buildings purchased for gold are destroyed, is saved.

This, uhh, »feature« unfortunately has been part of the game since forever. x) But yeah, i had to completely redo maps or never make 8 player maps because of that, so into the bug list it belongs.

[Meleyna]

Originally posted by Evrey:

Originally posted by Meleyna:

In the map editor the refunded gold, which you get, when wells, churches and other buildings purchased for gold are destroyed, is saved.

This, uhh, »feature« unfortunately has been part of the game since forever. x) But yeah, i had to completely redo maps or never make 8 player maps because of that, so into the bug list it belongs.

Oh... good to know. I have never created challenging maps before so I noticed that bug for the first time. Let's hope Firefly reads all of this. From what I can tell, they're trying their best to make the playerbase happy. :)

[Monster Nuggets]

I want to said one question, the lord are too small ,same as normol people.

[Meleyna]

Regarding the saved gold in the editor, I found a workaround in the Steam Discussions of Stronghold: Crusader HD. Within the editor, you can use the market to get rid of the gold. For example, you can buy wood and then delete the stockpile again. The automatic purchase function helps with odd amounts, as you can use it to buy one unit of a good instead of the usual five.

[Evrey]

Right, i completely forgot about the market trick. Learned that so long ago.

[dragonslaver]

another bug I found supremely annoying, fire ballista arrows simply shoot into the void sometimes, especially if their lof is blocked but also when shooting downhill.

[God Gamer]

Originally posted by dragonslaver:

another bug I found supremely annoying, fire ballista arrows simply shoot into the void sometimes, especially if their lof is blocked but also when shooting downhill.

I encountered the same bug. When a bolt is blocked by a wall the ballista stops working and starts shooting blanks

[Prince of Gyatt]

I agree with everything that was pointed out, especially the scaling of all the lords, (except lord bessy). they just had so much "aura" being this 7 ft tin can wearing beast. I wish they would scale them up to look more accurate to the old games, and to just improve their overall presence in the screen.

[chaikobar]

The fire ballista is also faulty, I can no longer set enemy buildings on fire with it.
And "Sands of Time" is also unfair and almost impossible to beat.
5 Enemies in 40 minutes?? alone? without Ressources

[[SG ✚] Mad Medic]

Fire ballista: If there is no clear path (visually obstructed by any obstacle), they will cycle the firing/loading animation, but do not fire. tested it with a friend with a couple ballista and a house behind a small wall, the house was not harmed during the test.

[Gandalf from STARWARS]

It also seems like AI lords still get stuck not having any peasants. My first real skirmish scenario ended with The Jewel not doing anything other than stack money since she had no peasants to train units to attack with.

(My recording of the scenario https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSdJaR20nI&ab_channel=JimmyFredriksson ).