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A save game too if you want it. |
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It might only be when ships start running away they no longer give kill credit regarding threat (and they are very often running away). I am not sure if the global threat meter is slow to update or not sometimes. |
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Badger, I can take a look at this longer term, but do you have any ideas on this? |
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First, most of this threat is in the Hunter Fleet. There was a bug with the hunter which I have just fixed where it was making really bad choices for lurk planets, so possibly the problem is that the Hunter was doing too much chilling. The "threat" number in the resource bar there is some sort of moving average over time (It's been like that since day 1, though I'm not really sure why it was done this way). If I go and blow up threat with the "Scrub Foes" command then the numbers seem to respond correctly just fine (though they won't be immediately reflected because of the moving average thing). I will note that at difficulty 9 the hunter fleet is getting lots of income from the base AI, so I could imagine that if you are only clearing out a few threat every so often, the AI is just getting Hunter at the same rate. |
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Sometimes if I crunch through a 200 strength sentinel threat fleet or a 50-100 hunter fleet the global number also does not seem to move. Unless the AI is immediately replenishing that as they get destroyed as well. I do notice that SOMETIMES the threat number goes down after I blow up a bunch of clearly threat ships. But it never seems to after they start retreat logic at least which is I wonder if something is happening with that there. Presumably scrub foes would destroy them before they start retreat logic. Going to see about using a scrub foes before and after retreat logic real quick. Not counting warden->hunter conversions that immediately die, where the number does not seem to go up or down, and they also tend not to retreat. |
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I tried scrubbing the planet Grove in this save. It has 103 threat listed. Threat does not change on scrubbing, even after waiting a few game minutes. Screenshots before/after and save included. |
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In this case, it seems like a lot of the threat fleet was busy moving places instead of waiting. |
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I tried scrubbing every hunter ship on a planet with more than 5 strength of hunter fleet and the global threat went up for a bit but went down after a few minutes. It was about 30 strength total the number went down by about that much. Though a lot of warden and praetorian fleet got caught in the scrub so there might be budget allocation shenanigans happening. I don't know that a moving average would be the cause because CPAs bump it a dramatic amount immediately. |
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Based on that, destroying hunter fleet might be working, but sentinel fleet threat seems to not reduce if destroyed in at least some kind of reproducible scenario. |
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The game displays the highest threat number seen in the last bunch of seconds. So it will immediately go up but very slowly go down. Lets say I have 5 data points for threat strength, from latest to most recent. 10 10 10 10 100 it will display 100 immediately. If I have 10 10 10 10 0, then it will show 10 until all those 10s are cleared, so I'd need to wait 5 more interavals till its 0 0 0 0 0 |
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Also counter to "most of the threat is in hunter fleet", in the diff9 game in that save using watch all, hunter fleet seems to account for about 15-20% of the threat, so that assumption might break on difficulties with higher base budget. |
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Per my logging the hunter accounted for 90 of the 150 or so threat strength. |
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I'd be quite happy to have that rolling highest number reduced by a lot in terms of how long it keeps a history. What was happening, and why I think it was I who put that in there, was that the strength counting was producing inconsistent results that flashed by really fast, or perhaps it was due to battles. But I think actually it was something like every few seconds the number would drop dramatically lower, then reset to the proper amounts, etc. If this is truly an issue in the strength counting code, then probably we need to actually see that. It may be that the rolling average is not needed at all anymore, thanks to improvements made since then. We don't see problems on individual planets in the galaxy map with numbers fluctuating, so I'd wager that whatever the old problem was has been fixed. |
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Is the global threat counter not in strength? Because there's 494 global counter in the save, and that seems to be about the total threat strength listed in the map. If the threat strength is 494, then your logging may not be accounting for something that the ui counts as threat if your logging says 150 strength. If the threat strength is supposed to be 150, then something is getting counted as threat that shouldn't be. Trying a couple more things to compare vs scrub. |
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The counter says 150 in the save |
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One bit of info. Hunter fleet is about 30% of the total threat according the threat breakdown with all watch. hunterpercent.png (35,120 bytes) |
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Maybe that's a count of units? I don't know. That is a really old piece of UI, compared to the rest of the UI. |
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I was looking at the second save I posted (scrub grove). So yeah, that makes sense. If I scrub grove in the second save while leaving the game paused the threat does seem to go down around the expected amount, but I don't see the same effect if I leave the game running. |
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If I scrub grove on that save then wait about 30 seconds, the number becomes reasonable. |
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If I go knock down Grove with regular units I get about what I'd expect for global threat counter decrease if I pause immediately after clearing most of it. If I don't pause after it doesn't seem to be nearly as much, and the decrease seems to correspond strengthwise with attacks that start in that timeframe. I would expect that if I scrub 100 strength and then get attacked by 100, the threat should go down 200 and not just 100ish. Is that how it's supposed to work? |
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If I have the code stop using the MaxIntValueOverTimeList data structure then the threat values do fluctuate significantly. But using it causes the game to be very slow in responding to threat changes. You can't actually "knock down grove" with regular units, since all the threat ships on it are going somewhere else; by the time you get there there's only a handful of units. I don't see any evidence of code problems here except for the fact that shown values are significantly delayed, and I'm going to bow out of this discussion and leave Chris to deal with it. |
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Makes good sense -- thank you for all the help on this! |
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Alright, I got a run where few attacks happened for a while so it's cleaner. It seems like threat did go down from scrubbing grove, and the total decrease does about add up to grove's strength and the small attacks' total. It might just be that attacking a planet incurs enough extra threat so cleaning small threats may not reduce threat, and/or the ai kept deciding to pump hunter fleet through some of the grove scrubbing runs. Plus the threat counter making it unclear what's happening until 30 seconds later doesn't help. Consider this a non-issue for now, other than maybe the global threat counter timer could be tightened up some. I'll keep an eye out for more oddities here just in case given the above information. I'm still not feeling 100% that there's nothing weird happening here, but I think I at least have a better idea of how to look for that if it is happening. |
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My "knock down with regular units" run I used watch-all and chased them down to adjacent systems to about 5-10 strength error since my ships were much faster. |
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Is this still a thing in the latest versions? A lot has changed. |
- Anonymous
