Chapter 4: Followers don't engage

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Dear FunCom… prior to implementing any changes to a game you ask an audience to pay for, beta test it with people who actually play the game you’ve asked them to pay for. Designers and programmers are apparently incapable of being objective to the matters at hand! FunCom has proven this repeatedly. As for feedback on Ch-4:

The options for fighter and archer followers with Ch-4 updates aren’t working. AGRESSIVE set for following and guarding and the follower stands there with his yank in his hand when I target, hit “E” and the feedback says, “Follower is commanded to attack”…

… and it stands there doing NOTHING. Move the follower to this spot, next to the mob… and it stands there doing nothing. My avatar must be within about 15M AND ENGAGED with the THREAT or the follower doesn’t engage. Unless I’m attacked and engaged, the follower does NOTHING.
That follower behavior is not useful. My character is level 60, he doesn’t need XP… followers start at ZERO… need we explain this to FunCom?

Behavior Distances which lock ATTACK distance to CHASE distance is backwards… I may direct attack, but don’t want my low level follower running off chasing mobs only to be killed. It’s a waste of my time in training followers.

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Ok, this one is a simple one: It never worked quite well. At one point, they had to fix the “hate” system (which is what Conan Exiles use as the “aggro” system in other games. It is another version that does not follow the strict sense of aggro), because said system were crashing the game. (there are fix notices for that a while back).

The problem is the AI does not really “complex” trace it, instead it “brute forces” what the NPC does. It uses “trial and error”, and the “inactivity” you see is when the NPC enters a pattern of “error”.

Old times, you could kill any enemy by simply building a box with one side open, a stair outside, and enter the box, climp the wall to a platform, and the NPC would be stuck inside because it would not “think” about going around, even if the stair was there. Once it was “in range”, it would keep trying to attack, otherwise “wait”.

To make an AI effective (minimally), there are three things Funcom seems to not use, despite them being native to Unreal Engine: Count, Pathfinding, and Contact angle.

The AI in conan exiles seem to follow the “step by step guide” you find in the results of “how to make a simple behavioral tree” in YouTube. ChatGPT of all things do better work on that though.

The “regular” idea of AI is 3 fold:

  • Priority
  • Positioning
  • Plurality

That means you use the approach Funcom seem to be using “alone” to define priority, and from that, define positioning, instead of making positioning and plurality its own thing.

I can cite my own work on the dodging feature of my mod in which I tried to do what effective games do, like Horizon Zero (saw how it works in GDC). The NPC looks at the position of the enemies and trace a certain pattern of routes, and from those, trace the destination for positioning, ensuring that it does not get locked, out of range, or cornered. Priority must take that into account. I have a copy of the target list when setting the dodge to ensure that the most targets are in the zone of attack as a result of dodge. Plurality means I have to have the notion that not only enemies are around, but obstacles too, so I need to be sure that I can reach or flee from enemies I am facing, not “nerd focus the top of my list”, instead I can prime it, but not forget others.

There isnt much you can do about the NPCs without changing how they work from the basic AI. The way they work is flawed from the base of the tree and you cant change them to work another way by “updating” the system that is not working. “Standing doing nothing” is something NPCs in conan exiles do since day 1.

To make my mod I had to create an actor from scratch to make thralls simply ignore their AI and follow it instead:

While from a player perspective the npcs are “doing nothing”, from the game perspective they are trying to do the tons of things they are programmed to do, but they lack the information to “turn” to the best direction, to go to the best place, and to position at the advantageous position. Without that, you can get them a “ton of actions”, they will fail.

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An intelligent and highly detailed reply, which I respect and admire whole-heartedly.

With mondo-kudos rendered, and that said, my followers behaved entirely differently Monday; a day before Ch4 update. I was riding a horse picking targets to train followers at max range… I would go 15 to 20 minutes at time (50-75 mobs?) having never gained aggro; all hit-points from the kill assigned to the follower…

OR… that’s what I presume. If there are as many HPs assigned to level the follower no matter who is stacking up HP for killing the mob… I guess it doesn’t matter; hence, a change to my approach is simple.

Any thoughts in your “military-unreal-engine-mind” to that end? :smiley:

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While you seem to say you “respectfully disagree” you went on to describe the exact instance of what I said.

When there isnt any “complication”, the system does work straight forward because it is a straight forward situation.

The complication is added by the update on the follower “command structure” being worked the way it is. The more they build up onto a flawed command structure, the more it unravels its weaknesses.

I have been working on a group mod for a while now, but I am not happy with the results just yet. It relies on creating “followers of followers”. To that end I have devised a formation strategy in which an archer for example commands a warrior to attack their target, which ignores the hate list, and instead keep the formation until told otherwise. Have come up with this idea thinking about this scene:

One of the last cinematics to make justice to the war in Warcraft.

If you are commanding, Thralls should be doing the fighting. You might do some fighting, but your main concern is to command.

What Funcom is trying to do is make it so thralls are not commanded forces, but instead, a kind of “hunting dog” you send to find and pin the target you are meant to fight. So commands are a basic system that cant really be built upon to create a kind of pattern of attack.

On the “Unreal Military Mind”, while you are meant to command and tell them what to do, they do not have the information to do what you tell them to. They are not equipped to understand the battle field, and not equipped to adapt the path or the direction based upon changes in the attack scene. This might be so there is no way PvP can be made by “thrall skill”, which I obviously disagree:

So I equip my thralls with what I call “Thrall Spirit”, which is the thing they have in their heads commanding them to know where they are, see where their enemies are, and not fall into loops of doing nothing.

For the command structure, I think the way funcom does it is flawed in a simple way: It is like you would command pets, not companions. A hunter pet has commands like “attack”, “come back”, “stay”. A companion fighter should be a companion fighter. So I equip them with battle formation, tactics in terms of what it means, so they will flank, hold, ambush, herd, funnel.

Because I dont think we should make the NPCs dumb to force PvP to be about player versus player literally. IF someone has the mind to command an army, they should be rewarded for it.

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Nope… didn’t “respectfully disagree”, very much appreciated your reply; more introspective info than I expected. Just reporting what I experienced, which, by the way, changed within 48 hours of the Ch-4 update.

Seriously, on Tuesday the thralls were unusable and wouldn’t do a damn thing. Since Thursday, much, much better; almost to the point of what they were prior… Although, I now see more behavior artifacts that remind me of some of your comments from the first reply… no idea what direction they’re facing or how to correct it, a dumb-founded “pattern of error”? And, it seems, I’ve been seeing that from mobs now and then also.

Speaking of mobs, I’ve envisioned a system and hope for FunCom to develop one where you can based on a number of inputs such as my location, 360-degree facing direction, desired relief distance (stand-off), attacking the mob with the highest hate (the one whose ass I’m kicking, or some other metric) where my warrior/archer positions themselves by default, how far off, facing what direction, and attacking the most appropriate target.

The numbers exist in the code, they must… all too often my follower ends up on top of the kill and in the way (so where is that coordinate number set and why can’t we influence it?); thralls being all too late to the party and not helping at all.

Interesting discussion… thanks for all your feedback.

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Your post is entertaining and informative. You are totalyl right in that everything in Conan Exiles is implemented in the most straighforward fashion.

You answer wholly begs the question, though. The question is, why is it different now than before?

Prior to AoW Chapter 3, it never worked quite well. However, one could reliably count on thralls AI to engage and re-engage any hostile within attack range if not set to ‘attack nothing’. Even if set to attack nothing, they would consistently attack on command.

Starting with AoW Chapter 3, the AI started not working at all. Thralls started getting stuck in permanent indecision loops that can be broken only by making them re-quip thier weapon or by a hostile NPC doing damage on them. I mean specifically they can be chasing one NPC around on a open flat plain, and spontaneously go into ‘stand there and do nothing’ mode. They stay stuck until something outside pops them out of it. Telling them to attack does nothing while stuck. When they aren’t stuck, they respond to commands. This bug persists into Chapter 4.

Starting with Chapter 4, Funcom added a new thing where thralls will never attack on thier own, and not attack on command until you are engaged. This is coupled with a new ‘Following → Aggressive’ setting. One expects that aggressive + following means that thrall will attack things that come into range, while ‘Following → Defensive’ would produce the behavior of doing nothing until you engage or tell them to attack. Yet Agressive and Defensive seem to do the same, and telling thralls to attack does nothing until you are engaged.

There’s also a rather dumb Ch4 slider behavior where you cannot reduce chase range below attack range, except by tricking the UX. Like the OP, I want attack range to be reasonable, and chase range to be short so thralls don’t go running off when enemies flee. If chase range is just attack range, why is it even there?

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I already said. It is not that now it works worse than before, it is that now they tucked in a lot of things built up on the rotten foundation of what was bad.

The AI in Conan Exiles was always a simple implementation of “brute force AI”, meaning, you try A, if it doesnt work, try B, if not, try C, if not, wait. This was always that way.

Why does that is made in Unreal Engine that way despite not being the “smartest way” ? Like a said, it is like Ants. You can make a case that Ants in collective are the most intelligent being in the planet, because if you were to consider them a one organism instead of a colony, they would “seem” to rival human intelligence, they can grow crops, tend to herds, they have rules for jobs and several intricate social structures.

Yet, they one stumble away of doing this:

Sounds familiar ? That is because this is exactly the same case. They enter the death circle because they individually have one “imperative” that is follow a strong scent of direction pheronome if it exists, and leave your own while at it. That makes the next one do the same, and then on.

What is the problem ? The same. You have a sequence of “things to do in combat” that always end in “walk to” and “wait”. Once they enter the spiral, they do that, because when then “walked to and waited” in the cycle before, they went where A, B and C do not work, so they “walk further and wait”, which only makes A, B and C less likely.

Circling back as to why UE does it like that ? Because you have something called the Blackboard for a Behavioral Tree. It is meant to feed information to the Behavioral Tree in order to change its … behavior.
But the Blackboard has to be fed information from the environment, from the enemies, from the past actions. If it does not, it simply tells the AI “this is where you are, this is your enemy, go get them champ”, and that seems stupid, and results in stupid unless IT IS A SIMPLER LEVEL.

So in short, the game was “easier” before, both for players and AI. AI seems to be dumber now, but it isnt, it is just as dumb as before, but in a much more complicated level.

The same way you say a college student of a certain “generation” is dumber than a “highschooler” of another. If they are functional iliterates all the same, the college student is not dumber, that college student is just way over the place they are supposed to be with their culture.

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Strange… everything works for me. I didn’t notice any problems with the new follower control panel.
Then again, maybe the server is buggy?

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Again, you are saying some great things about many other problems in Conan Exiles.

Yes, the AI is limited and dumb and can be tricked in many corner cases. Yes, all kinds of complexity is built on a base of sand and game additions can fail in subtle and unpredictable ways.

What I assert that the thrall combat environment did not recently get more complicated in the ways that affect whether thralls respond to an attack command.

When it did get much more complicated back in Chapter 2 with NPC combos, we did not see thralls fail to attack.

It’s hard to take such empircal evidence and think anything except Funcom just made some mistakes lately.

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