patrol

[javaverona]

Is there any way to segregate patrol into communities? I've got overlapping patrols and it would be great if I could identify where I want the soldiers to patrol.

[Maehlice]

Not really, no. They all share the same "Patrol" painted zone. The only time they should "stay in their lane" is when the patrol area is too far away from their Watchpost (~150m).

As long as your Patrollers don't all come out of the same Watchpost and don't happen to reach the same house at exactly the same time, it's NBD, really. Their effects stack when staggered, so it's not necessarily "bad" if they overlap a little.

[javaverona]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

Not really, no. They all share the same "Patrol" painted zone. The only time they should "stay in their lane" is when the patrol area is too far away from their Watchpost (~150m).

As long as your Patrollers don't all come out of the same Watchpost and don't happen to reach the same house at exactly the same time, it's NBD, really. Their effects stack when staggered, so it's not necessarily "bad" if they overlap a little.

OK, yes. I'm now finding that if I keep them distanced they will patrol their area's primarily.
thanks!

[AmesNFire]

I wonder if making the patrol area similar to the reforesting system would solve a lot of the issues.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by AmesNFire:

I wonder if making the patrol area similar to the reforesting system would solve a lot of the issues.

Yes, each patrol having its own paint brush would vastly improve the system.

One thing that may help. Do NOT make huge patrol areas. The reason is patrols will walk to edge of the area touch it and leave. This causes areas on the other side to not get coverage. So what you need to do is make smaller paint zones and break them up, so they touch all the small areas.

[Grimtorn]

Originally posted by AmesNFire:

I wonder if making the patrol area similar to the reforesting system would solve a lot of the issues.

That would be a solution to the area problem but at the same time does nothing to help with patrols not splitting up.
It would still mean that you need to build multiple small towers to get several patrols.

My current town with a pretty big city area and 1 smaller mining/farming village uses 5 small towers spread around the area for 1-2 patrolman.
Then i got 1 larger building as part of the main manor that houses most of my watchman to man towers.

[Wantoomany]

Originally posted by AmesNFire:

I wonder if making the patrol area similar to the reforesting system would solve a lot of the issues.

I disagree. While I do agree the current system is less then ideal. It has the one advantage that patrol areas allow an overlapping effect. If each watch post had its on local paintbrush, it would eliminate any potential of overlap.

If you ever tried to set up multiple forester huts to cover a large forestery operation you know just how fiddely it can be. I'd rather not have to do that city wide to manage patrol areas.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Grimtorn:

Originally posted by AmesNFire:

I wonder if making the patrol area similar to the reforesting system would solve a lot of the issues.

That would be a solution to the area problem but at the same time does nothing to help with patrols not splitting up.
It would still mean that you need to build multiple small towers to get several patrols.

Ok, well earlier in my game I was trying to get patrol overage on a specific house. The patrol refused to do it because it kept wandering off to an area already covered by another group and watch building. After an hour I gave up and just ended up building a city wall to annex the housing area.

[Maehlice]

The game just needs a slightly smarter Patrol AI. There's no need to reinvent the wheel by changing how patrol zones are painted.

IMO, all they need to do is apply the same procedure currently used by the Tax Collectors -- who specifically and separately target houses and businesses with uncollected taxes.

If that same logic was applied to Patrollers -- especially those from the same Watchpost -- I think every Patrol issue we've encountered would be resolved.

EDIT: Almost every Patrol issue. Simply applying the current Tax Collector procedure isn't all that's necessary. The Tax Collector AI needs smarter logic and to be applied to Patrollers.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

IMO, all they need to do is apply the same procedure currently used by the Tax Collectors -- who specifically and separately target houses and businesses with uncollected taxes.

Tax collectors target the same buildings. I know because when I had a buggy mine they both would get stuck and give blocked pathing message.

Originally posted by Maehlice:

The game just needs a slightly smarter Patrol AI. There's no need to reinvent the wheel by changing how patrol zones are painted.

Nobody is reinventing anything. If you have actually played the game then you would know that over a half dozen buildings use there own paint system to flag ownership if the painted area.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Tax collectors target the same buildings. I know because when I had a buggy mine they both would get stuck and give blocked pathing message.

Tax Collectors do sometimes target the same building, and there are separate pathing issues not unique to the Tax Office.

Again, the game just needs a slightly smarter AI.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Nobody is reinventing anything. If you have actually played the game then you would know that over a half dozen buildings use there own paint system to flag ownership if the painted area.

I neither said nor implied building-specific zones don't exist in the game. Abandoning an entire city-wide Paint zone and replacing it with building-specific Paint zones (which would come with their own new set of challenges) is a significant enough change that "reinventing the wheel" is an applicable idiom.

EDIT: Not to mention that kind of a change wouldn't be retroactive or backwards-compatible. It would have a significant immediate negative impact on every existing game and the understanding of every player using the current Patrol zoning system.

Plus, as it stands right now, even if they changed the zone-painting mechanic to be building-specific, that would not solve for overlapping Patrollers working out of the same Watchpost.

Replacing the current Patroller-route-creating procedure with whatever the Tax Collector is using would potentially resolve both issues. And, there would be the added benefit that future improvements to that procedure would positively affect both Patrollers and Tax Collectors. (Read: Less work and more efficient for the devs.)

EDIT: Changing the underlying route-generation procedure would simply fix the issue without any disruption to players.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Maehlice:

I neither said nor implied building-specific zones don't exist in the game. Abandoning an entire city-wide Paint zone and replacing it with building-specific Paint zones (which would come with their own new set of challenges) is a significant enough change that "reinventing the wheel" is an applicable idiom.)

So you are saying you find wheat farms, foresters, hops fields, grape fields, sheep farms, cattle farms, challenging to use. Nothing is being "reinvented" when you are simply using a system that ALREADY exists.

I also find it ironic that you somehow think all patrollers use the same exact route every time. I have many of them wander around separately like you describe, know how that happens? I do not assign them all the to job at the same time. When you assign them all the the same job at the same time of course the cluster up because you gave them all the same schedule.

Travelling separately like tax collectors does NOT fix the issues people are having. Those issues being:
- They wander off to some far off patrol zone meant for another group.
- They refuse to cover specific target because they spread themselves out over areas already covered.

I got two examples from my current game.
- I had a small village with a dozen houses covered with a patrol of five. I was two territories down and had to creates another area for home on the others side of my wheat fields. So I created another watchpost building with three people to cover six houses. The first group ran across the map and created a path through my wheat field (which was fenced in) just because there is no limit to how far they will travel.
- Another area I have a large city that covers like 3-4 territories. I had inside the walls covered just fine. I ran out of room and had to expand housing outside the walls and I tried setting up another watchpost to cover it specifically. They refused to give 100% coverage to allow an upgrade to one of the houses because they kept running off into the already covered city instead.
- Another sheep farm had its pasture ruined by a patrol as described previously with the wheat feilds.

No "tax collector AI" is going to solve those coverage issues as long as every watchpost shares the same paint field. That is a concept you keep repeatedly fail to understand.

Know what else wanders all over the map because it shares the same paint zone? Boar hunters. I watched one travel half the map last night to hunt boar 5-6 territories away rather than hunt the ones in their own territory.

Patrolling is a feature added with release and was not available in early release. So there was no chance for player feedback on the system. know what had a general paintbrush in early release? Foresters. Yet they had to fix it to give them their own paint brush because they kept going across the map to repaint some other area, gee big surprise and familiar issue.

I think this actually makes the third or fourth topic you have repeated the SAME argument with me about "reinventing" "writing new code" etc. It seems all you want to do is argue with others after they make the SAME complaints and the SAME suggestions as each other. Seriously, how many topics complaining about the patrol system have you jumped in just to argue there is "nothing wrong with it" and argue with the suggestion made? That count should also include your "It aint a bug topic." Actually, I think I am just going to move on to blocking you.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Originally posted by Maehlice:

... replacing it with building-specific Paint zones (which would come with their own new set of challenges) ...

So you are saying you find wheat farms, foresters, hops fields, grape fields, sheep farms, cattle farms, challenging to use.

How in the world did you arrive at that conclusion when all I said was changing to building-specific zoning would come with a different set of challenges when setting up Patrols?

There's nothing between the lines.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Nothing is being "reinvented" when you are simply using a system that ALREADY exists.

Fine; you got me on semantics then.

However you phrase it, nothing changes the fact that switching from the current mechanic to a completely different mechanic represents a significantly more disruptive change than altering the underlying mechanics without affecting the player.

It's a significant customer-facing change that will disrupt players. And that's what I mean by "reinventing the wheel" (whether the idiom is correct is moot).

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

I also find it ironic that you somehow think all patrollers use the same exact route every time.

Again, there's nothing between the lines. You're coming to wild conclusions based on god-knows-what, because that's not what I'm writing.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Travelling separately like tax collectors does NOT fix the issues people are having.

Here I am saying not to read between the lines, but then reading my first response literally doesn't mean what I intended.

So in light of this, I've edited my first response to add the following:

"Almost every Patrol issue. Simply applying the current Tax Collector procedure isn't all that's necessary. The Tax Collector AI needs smarter logic and to be applied to Patrollers."

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Those issues being:

I'm not going to address specific issues, because none of the AI is without flaws. No matter which zoning method or route-generation-procedure is used, the AI needs tweaking to cover all cases.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

No "tax collector AI" is going to solve those coverage issues as long as every watchpost shares the same paint field.

... Boar hunters

I agree. The AI is not flawless and needs to be slightly smarter. Pathing, Work-targeting. Range-finding. It all needs tweaking.

None of the worker AI is flawless. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

All I'm pointing out is that one solution is far less disruptive and is (IMO, of course) likely to have greater benefit overall.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

I think this actually makes the third or fourth topic you have repeated the SAME argument with me about "reinventing" "writing new code" etc. It seems all you want to do is argue with others after they make the SAME complaints and the SAME suggestions as each other. Seriously, how many topics complaining about the patrol system have you jumped in just to argue there is "nothing wrong with it" and argue with the suggestion made?

Wait; what? You can jump into posts and make this argument for building-specific zoning, but I'm not allowed to respond to you in any of them because I already responded somewhere else? Make that make sense.

I've probably jumped into just as many as you have. You jump I jump we all jump. If you stopped making this suggestion in every thread, I'd probably stop responding to it in every thread.

And FWIW, I don't think I've ever said even once in any post that nothing is wrong with it.

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Actually, I think I am just going to move on to blocking you.

Okay. It's a shame we can't share civil discourse.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Seriously, how many topics complaining about the patrol system have you jumped in just to argue there is "nothing wrong with it" and argue with the suggestion made? That count should also include your "It aint a bug topic."

I just went back and looked. Never once did I quote or respond to you in that thread. So that additional count is +0 .

EDIT: I just went through my post history further and found only one other post where I've ever replied to you about this topic. It was a topic I was already in, I briefly replied only once to you, and then in your next and only reply you had already "had enough of this conversion."

So, the total number of times I've "jumped into" a topic complaining about this is actually a total of none. In both threads (that one and this one), I was already in the thread with no mention of if and how anything should change. In both cases, you're the one who initiated the discussion about how it should be and about how they should change the zoning mechanic. I think there's a little bit of pot-kettle action going on here.

You either have a very short fuse or have mistaken me for someone else in ignorance.

REF: https://steamcommunity.com/app/690830/discussions/0/592888933793172065/?tscn=1739643070#c632295655176486837

I hope somehow you unblock me out of curiosity or someone else can get this to you, because there's no reason to block me hastily. I'm not your enemy.

[Stefan1200]

Just make the damn patrols smarter or remove that feature. I often lose the house density for some seconds (which have to reconstruct the house, costs materials), because the damn 30 patrol workers just stop walking further to the last house, come back some minutes later, but to short to fill the patrol bar of the house, repeating this crap again and again. The moving AI from the patrols are terrible.

[Bored Peon]

Originally posted by Stefan1200:

Just make the damn patrols smarter or remove that feature. I often lose the house density for some seconds (which have to reconstruct the house, costs materials), because the damn 30 patrol workers just stop walking further to the last house, come back some minutes later, but to short to fill the patrol bar of the house, repeating this crap again and again. The moving AI from the patrols are terrible.

You need to break up your patrol paint zones.

As I previously patrolling was never tested in early access, it came out with the 1.0 release.