Suggestions for the AI behavior in purges

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
1

Hi there,

So I think that the purge, while a great idea and something I enjoy in the game, is not currently living up to its potential, mainly due to faults in how the AI works.

At the moment it seems that the AI will basically pick quite randomly a spot inside the base and then it tries to get there. If it can’t find a path, it will simply warp to its destination.

But it has happened to us that the AI has decided that it wants to get to a closed-off attic. Or that the AI wants to get inside a random building with nothing in it built on a cliffside. In pretty much all the purges we’ve had in our several bases scattered across the Exiled Lands, around 1/3 of the attacking NPCs end up stuck inside some fairly silly place that serves no real purpose.

I think there’s a fundamental problem in the goal of the AI being “get inside a base”. Why does the AI want to get inside the base? What’s the actual, true goal of the AI?

What the AI should typically be trying to do, in my opinion, is to loot, destroy and enslave. Yet we find the AI warping inside empty rooms with nothing in them. That’s not what the AI should be seeking to do. If, instead, we give the AI the goal of maximizing destruction and death toll of clan NPCs and players alike, then we can have the AI more easily do things logically.

I would propose two things:
Firstly, the AI should be able to attack and destroy doors and gateways. Even if they are T3. Right now, even closed gates and doors will cause the AI’s pathfinding to fail and it will instead warp through them. The AI should consider gates and doors as costly nodes in its pathfinding. If it can’t find another route, it will opt to destroying the gate or door which it should be able to do with a little bit of effort. This would mean that the AI doesn’t need to warp inside empty rooms; it can instead walk into them by destroying the doors on the way.

Secondly, and more importantly, I propose that the goals of the AI be changed from trying to get inside the base to trying to kill, plunder and destroy the thralls, players, chests and crafting stations of the defending clan. The AI could, for example, build a heatmap from the total value of the different areas in the base. So say, a room full of crafting stations, would show as very valuable in that heatmap. Now this becomes the target of the AI and the AI wants to destroy and loot those crafting stations. If there’s a cluster of thralls somewhere, then those might show up as very valuable on the heatmap and the purge wants to capture those thralls for themselves. Of course, not all purges want to capture, some may want to just kill, like the skeletal or other monstrous purges. But purges by human armies might want to capture thralls from a clan for themselves.

Instead of players defending random empty rooms from the purge, the players should be defending their most valuable property - their crafting stations, their resource chests, their thralls.

I’m aware that programming AIs is very difficult, time-consuming and takes a lot of expertise and skill to do right. I hope that I don’t come off as arrogant when suggesting more detailed ways for how it could function better. But as it is, I really want to like the purge experience more, but it just isn’t that good on most of the times because of how the AI during it doesn’t seem to be making much sense.

Thanks for reading. :slight_smile:

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I agree. By game’s lore and descriptions there should be reason to build something capable of repelling attacks.
In fact in PVE is like playing football with two teams but one goal - players do whatever they want in environment (more often building a useless DLC showoff theme parks) and environment does nothing in return.

If you play like you have no other things to do all week, or all your clanmates are present and do something you have chance of building up purgemeter above 0.75 mark.
When said clanmates discover what pains it take to have a chance of Purge they will give attention to other games.

So the only type of players who benefit from scarce Purges are builders of theme parks, who are cancer of PVE.

4

Lol, calm down a little. They just enjoy building. No reason to call them cancer.

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Oh, but cancer cells are just enjoy multiplying.
Of course they are not guilty in taking pleasure of building. It is lame environment where we are supposed to survive, which allows to exist those theme parks 3 times bigger than Sepermeru.
If Purge is sent by evil treasure hunters, who seek to rob characters of their artifacts, they should take notion of those zooparks, dance schools and marketplaces. Instead they are nearly nonexistent.

Purge is not a test to player’s defenses we were told, it’s a candy for over-active, incapable of destroying even those dance schools. So no one has to think when they build.
So, the PVE game as it is now does encourage more than others the dress-up and theme parks players.

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Still, cancer KILLS millions of people each year. Pick your comparissons a little more…wisely ? Less edgy ? Thanks :slight_smile: .

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Guess who kill gameplay of hundreds of players. 2/3 players I knew in Conan now play other games and simply wait until theme parks and sandstone spam will disappear. I also feel guilty, cause some of them bought this game by my advice.
Problem is they do not talk about it here, cause they think admins do not care. My opinion - it is those who love building theme parks talk too much.

Also cancer killed my cat last month. But both cases - my cat and people are irrelevant to this case in game mechanics.

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Whatever you say.

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Side note theme parks are opening back up here in Florida now that is someplace I would not want to be.

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Purge should be more often and stronger speed it up and level 6 on my server.

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I would like to come back to the discussion @tzaeru started here on the forum. It’s about the purge and not about building.

I really like your suggestions @tzaeru. The purge should have another goal. Right now the only goal of the purge is to get to the base or in the base of a Player and destroy anything. The purge party is behaving like a zombie horde without any intelligence or will.

A. The purge should generally spawn outside a base. If this is not possible then there will be no purge. The player should know this. If the player is anyway building on a high mountain or another not reachable area than he agrees not having purges at all.
B. The purge AI should have priority instances.
First the purge should aim the outer gates. If there are no gates then doors and if there are no gates or doors then the walls.
Second the purge should aim a valuable building. This could be an altar, the building with the most Chests or others.
C. The purge waves should come generally from different sides.
D. Instead of wildlife creatures the purge should attack with siege weapons.
Think of a ballista which forces the player to leave his base to engage this threat.
Let them come with a ram, to tear down the gate and doors much faster.

The suggestion of @drachenfelesmade is more like an invasion of the exiled lands. Also this suggestion is nice and it aims on the description of the purge as it was described from Joel in EA: A horde which comes to the exiled land to destroy everything on its way. The players have to ally to engage this threat.
This would be an additional nice feature, similar to the sandstorm , a new threat for all the players on the server similar a server event.

2 Likes
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@antib Burn the theme parks!

Basically TLDR is bases should have a value to determine the size and strength of the purge. Bigger base = bigger purge. Then it would use the heatmap idea you have where it says this is the most valueable part of the base. The mobs would then attack move towards that area. It would not try to go around doors and stuff instead just cut through the structure. So if there’s a wall it will start beating on it. Now a wall has 100,000 hp and so they won’t do much actual damage to that. I believe they should change the purge mobs to have a siege synergy where the longer they are alive the more damage they will do to structures. It would have a cap ofcourse so they still need to hit a T3 a few times to break it but if you let them just do what they want they will do damage. As they attack and move they might break ramps or bridges this is where they would teleport a random number of tiles closer to their goal not just a pile of mobs into a weird spot. This will make purges actually dangerous. With the changes in my other post it would scale to the size based off of the base. So for what Antib says about theme parks they can have a theme park but they are going to have to defend that theme park. Odds are they won’t so it will naturally “Purge” the theme parks.

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Purge with siege weapons? I would never dream of this.

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