Armageddon was held in Zemike

[Tuidjy]

Yvelina and I decided to resolve a game by throwing a big battle in
a predetermined province, with winner takes all. The province was
left neutral before the deciding turn. The results of the battle were...
interesting.

Broadly speaking, Pythium had about 150 astral mages, two of them
wished quite a bit, half a dozen doom horrors, a few supercombatants,
and about 500 mind enslaved troops of all nations and kinds, which
included most archdevils. The pretender was a ghost king, and was
used strictly as support.

Vanheim had the Allfather and all Air Queens, empowered and decked out
beyong belief, about a hundred assorted dwarves and vans, and about 400
devils and storms demons.

Both nations had dozens of matrices and path boosters, but otherwise
Vanheim had an overwhelming advantage in gems and equipment. I guess
wishing is, just as the great Norfleet taught, under-optimal.

Pythium sent more forces into the magic phase battle, and won easily.
Vanheim was the attacker of the movement phase battle. The battle's
main points were:

1. In the first turn, Master/Mind enslave turned a sizable portion of
Vanheims demons and even a few MR 20+ commanders to Pythium.

2. Both sides cast a number of elemental resistance and general
protection spells spells, followed by mass damage spells. By the end,
Wrathful skies, Fire Storm, Stelar Brilliance, you name it, were
active on the battlefield.

3. The Allfather and the three Air Queens were untouchable. Everyone
getting near them was easily dispatched. At some point five quickened,
regenerating, equipped doom horrors were attacking the Allfather. If
they hurt him, I did not notice. Basically, Pythium's forces and all the
demon turncoats broke on the Allfather without leaving a mark.

4. Vanheim's storm demons were obviously set on hold and attack rear.
Only a few of them got through, but they massacred Pythiums mages.
Pythium had the Soulstone, and Howl active. The Dwarves were decimated,
the Vans all got Wolf furs.

5. Pythium's supercombatants weren't. Demons ate them.

6. Both sides were creating elementals as if they had infinite gems. The
storm demons proved to Pythium that they should have brought infinite
mages instead.

7. Left without orders Pythium's pretender started summoning undead. Some
puny death mage started turning them to Vanheim, until he ran out of gems.

8. At that point, Pyhtium had its pretender, a wished Ether Lord and some
insanely lucky Arch-theurg left... oh, and a few puny skeletons, as well.
Vanheim had more than a hundred demons, dozens of elementals, four untouchable
supercombatants, and a number of vans happily casting stuff.

9. Turn 50. Vanheim routs. Game to Pythium.

I think that this battle really shows why the turn limit of 50 is kinda low.
But you can see for yourself. The server Version is 2.12. The password
is 'best'.

Of course, no other game of mine uses this password. Any suggestion that the
file was hacked to change the password will be met with disdain. Any suggestion
that I am dumb enough to use a password like that in a tournament game will be
met with innuendo hinting that the file was hacked.

I hope that someone enjoys watching the battle... while I enjoy having won
the tournament on a technicality... twice in a row.

Luck before skill, any day!

[Yvelina]

By the way, both Odin and the Air Queens were scripted to cast a few buffs and then attack closest. Instead, the air queens spent the whole battle casting, and the Allfather just had too many enemies to kill. I think I would have won way within the time limit if Veni, Vidi and Vici had gotten moving.

Now I feel cheated out of my win. Peter is oh so dead, while my strength is nearly undiminished... but he won. What he said: 'luck before skill'

Suggestion: make the turn limit depend on the number of troops in the battle.

[deccan]

That was a cool battle. Better use a beefy computer to watch it though.

[puffyn]

I second that. Very neat battle, but my computer simply didn't have the power to run it at an acceptable speed.

I think the problem is with the spell-casters. I imagine that the spell-casting AI evaluates _all_ its choices every turn. With essentially everything researched this took about 10-15 seconds for each mage on my machine (1.5 GHz with only 512 MB of RAM); an acceptable delay for battles involving a sensible number of mages, but it's simply painful with hundreds of them involved. Fast-forward helps the graphic animations go more quickly, but doesn't help this spell-casting-decision bottleneck.

[Agrajag]

Yvelina said:
Suggestion: make the turn limit depend on the number of troops in the battle.

How about making it depend on the number of troop left on the screen?
So the battle begins, there are 200 units, 200 turn 'till finish, one turn passes, no battles, 199 turns left, now the armies meet, 130 units left, 130 turns left, another battle, 10 units left, 10 turns left, everyone paralyzed, 10 turns pass and everyone dies.
Or something similar =P

[Cainehill]

puffyn said:
I second that. Very neat battle, but my computer simply didn't have the power to run it at an acceptable speed.

I think the problem is with the spell-casters. I imagine that the spell-casting AI evaluates _all_ its choices every turn. With essentially everything researched this took about 10-15 seconds for each mage on my machine (1.5 GHz with only 512 MB of RAM); an acceptable delay for battles involving a sensible number of mages, but it's simply painful with hundreds of them involved. Fast-forward helps the graphic animations go more quickly, but doesn't help this spell-casting-decision bottleneck.

Those decisions are made on the host computer when the turn is run - it shouldn't be anything to do with AI that's making it slow to watch in the battle replay.

[Truper]

I think those decisions are made on the client machine when a battle is watched. As I understand it, the host passes the starting state of a battle and a random seed to the client (as well as the battle's result). If you want to watch it, the client has to duplicate the decision-making process so it can display the results. Otherwise the host would have to pass all the events of a battle to the client, down to the Last sword thrust, resulting in really huge turn files.

[PhilD]

Truper said:
I think those decisions are made on the client machine when a battle is watched. As I understand it, the host passes the starting state of a battle and a random seed to the client (as well as the battle's result). If you want to watch it, the client has to duplicate the decision-making process so it can display the results. Otherwise the host would have to pass all the events of a battle to the client, down to the Last sword thrust, resulting in really huge turn files.

I suppose you're right about the facts, though it would certainly be possible to have the turn file contain the result of all choices in a battle that were the result of a long decision-making process (it might require integrating several different "threads" in the random number generator, and other adjustments, but it would make it possible to include a real tough AI decision process in the turn generation, without either making the turn files huger or slowing down the battle replays).

[Cainehill]

Well, I looked at the battle and while there was some small amount of slowdown at times, it never got over 1 second a spell. I've no hotrod machine either, albeit 768 megs of ram and an NForce2 motherboard meaning fast memory access.

Also, given the way the computer casts spells once past the script, I hardly think it's dedicating any CPU cycles to something you could consider "AI". I mean - casting spells at the militia that won't get there for 3 turns, as opposed to the heavy cavalry that arrives in 1, for instance, or casting spells that not only kill bodyguards and other friendly forces, but the spell caster himself when there were better (less costly in fatigue, doing more damage to the foe) spells to be cast.

[WraithLord]

Very impressive battle.
I didn't watch the full of it though because it ran very slowly on my old machine

Truth is it might be a good idea to save a batch of turn files from some "famous" games.
This way new players can learn from the best.