I’m a new player here on PC with about 70 hours. I just recently started taming thralls and leveling them up. OMG what horrible AI these things have. About the only thing these do semi reliably is follow. Half the time in battle, even on defend me or issuing attack commands they just stand there zombified. I order it to return to me and I watch it in the distance sitting there getting destroyed. A lot of times not even fighting back. I read and this seems to have been going on for a long time. Is there any word that Funcom is even working to fix this? I would think this would be high priority, especially in a game with sieges on your base, etc. I’m to the point now that I fear takaing them anywhere because they will probably rock out and die and I’m stuck trying to figure out how to get their gear back home for the next mindless wonder. So many great things about this game but to me this is near a deal breaker if it’s not being looked at. I’ve never seen minion AI this bad in all my years of gaming.
It’s a core mechanic of the gameplay so I would certainly hope they’re trying to fix it, but it is a real problem, and is the reason I haven’t played in weeks. Conan is such a great game, but it’s in a sorry state at the moment.
You’re right, making thralls/pets more responsive is the single biggest improvement Funcom could make to this game. They do work alright in single player but get more than a dozen players together on a server and things turn to custard real quick, especially if you want to use mods.
I’m sure they know this so we have to ask why they haven’t addressed it already, and to me the most likely reason is the age of the game engine and the performance bottleneck that places on the game. That’s an answer I hope is wrong because it would mean there will never be a fix.
Initially I had noticed something off with the Ai in single player but before I had a chance to do more verifying a co worker I had convinced to play wanted to start our own private server. Now that we’re back and dealing with thralls a lot more it’s even more apparent there’s a major problem, not only on my thralls but his pets. Our server has great ping so It’s not that. I really like this game and had plans to buy the DLCs and get more into it but I feel I’m going to hold off in hopes there’s a fix being worked on.
The only advice i could offer is, set follow distance, attack distance and chase distance to the minimum.
If your thralls are closer to you it’s easier to look after them. Mobs are their cryptonite!
If they get cornered by mobs they just get stunlocked and die, no matter how strong or well equipped they are.
This is @Xevyr ‘s guide for thralls, it’s very detailed and could be helpful.
Mods can also affect the performance, so i would recommend you to play the game vanilla for now.
As a new player you’ve probably never heard of “hyper armor”.
I won’t explain that mechanic in detail, but it gave thralls a much higher resistance to stagger.
Even if they got cornered they have still been able to fight back. It wasn’t a very “elegant” mechanic, but it compensated for the poor AI quite effectively.
But hyper armor was removed in AoW chapter 2.
And since then everyone can see how bad their AI actually is, or in fact always was.
I‘m sorry if i sound pessimistic but i gotta be honest.
The community cries for better AI since years now, but Funcom never managed to improve it. Instead they crippled thralls even more with nerfs and the removal of hyper armor.
I hope it will get better but i wouldn’t count on it.
Strange, I also play a single player game on PC, and I don’t have any similar problems with thralls.
On the contrary, I can say that now is one of the few periods when I do not notice any problems at all with the thrall warriors following me and their entry into battle in a single player game.
I can get them to follow me out of the house and into the wilds and initially they seem to respond to an attack command most times. That was on single and on our private g-portal server. It’s generally after a pull of more than 1 when things seem to get kinda wonky. Sometimes they do ok, normally when I’m slaying stuff fast enough and probably because I don’t really need them. They’re just face tanking. It’s those times when I really need them to perform is when I notice they kind of space out or I need them run for the hills. Sure my naked dancer at the house’s AI is great for standing on her head and shaking it all out but the combat folks having some issues unfortunately.
Thank you I’ll check out the guide.
Don’t think Ai has ever been good… hard to point out what going on sometimes cause its so, touchy.
I’d ask if your using go/attack command and double tapping? which is its own command. They’ll stay were you double tap, and wont go with you.
It tends to bug them hell out. I ether,
A) have to set them to guard, and then refollow.
B) Set them guard, move them to new guard spot and refollow.
C) Set them guard spot… log out and back in. And then set them follow… if they havn’t returned home. -_-’
This gave me a little chuckle. 70 hours in most games would be an obsession and indicate somewhat of a mastery. And I’m not getting a chuckle at your expense mind you, your humility is very much appreciated. Its just this game sucks you in for a long time. 
Thrall AI has been a problem since they were able to follow us. There isn’t any word that its being worked on, but some of our modders have noticed some framework being added to the game that will allow them to have better AI. But as of yet its not been turned on or fleshed out with actions for them to take. That’s about all I know about the subject. I’m not even certain how open it is to modders, and I’m curious to what they could do with it in its current state if it is open to use.
But I figure if they put the work in to give them better AI, they will eventually use it for something. But they haven’t spoken about it as of yet.
What you’re describing isn’t an issue with the thralls AI, it’s an issue with the server’s performance you’re playing on. If the game server isn’t hosted on dedicated and high performance hardware you can forget about having a good experience. When server FPS falls low enough thralls become unresponsive. Official servers are particularly bad, and so are any private server on a shared hosting plan.
I can put over 200 hours in each of the Baldur’s gate games and feel like it’s a long journey (great though!). 70 hours in Conan and being my first real deep dive into a survival game, I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I love that it feels so fresh and limitless this “early” on haha. I can easily see myself playing this for 200+ easily. Of course that would be easier with some better AI for sure.
We rented a server on G-portal and its’ just for the 2 of us. Ping is usually low <70. Both of us run solid gaming rigs with no issues ( I run Cyberpunk full graphics easily) so I’m really not sure if it’s hardware or server host.
I think you just answered your own question. Gportal is the problem. Gportal is notoriously bad. However, to be fair, people are a bit unfair to Gportal. In my opinion, all shared hosting plans are just about equally bad. I’ve tried every hosting method possible. I started with hosting locally on a powerful machine but was bottlenecked by my upload speed. Then, I switched to a shared hosting plan to test it out, and that was a horrible experience. Sharing a single machine with several others running servers on the same machine just doesn’t provide enough performance to run a server for this game. Ultimately, I settled on running the game on a very expensive dedicated host, with each server running on its own i9 with 64 GB of memory. The game runs great and never drops below 60 FPS, so we never have problems with thralls listening on my servers. There are ways to test your Server FPS. Traditionally, you can use the command GetServerHealth in the console, but that’s somewhat unreliable. Alternatively, you can review the logs if you know what to look for, or most conveniently, if you’re familiar with executing Python scripts, you could use the following to create a CSV to review the information:
import io
import re
import os
import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import filedialog
def parseFile(path):
statList = []
os.system(f'cd /d {path} && findstr /l /c:"LogServerStats: Status report. Uptime=" *.log>raw_stats.txt')
with io.open(f'{path}\\raw_stats.txt', mode='r') as log:
for line in log:
match = re.findall('^.+log:\\[(\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+)-(\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+:\\d+)]\\[.+'
'.+Uptime=(\\d*)\\s'
'Mem=(\\d*):(\\d*):(\\d*):(\\d*)\\s'
'CPU=(\\d+\\.\\d+):(\\d+\\.\\d+)\\s'
'Players=(\\d+)\\s'
'FPS=(\\d+\\.\\d+):(\\d+\\.\\d+):(\\d+\\.\\d+)\\s'
'NPC_AILOD=(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+)\\s'
'B_AILOD=(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+)\\s'
'P_AILOD=(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+):(\\d+)', line)
statList.extend(match)
with io.open(f'{path}\\parsed_stats.csv', mode='w') as o_file:
print(f'Date,Time,Uptime,Mem1,Mem2,Mem3,Mem4,CPU1,CPU2,Players,'
f'FrameTimeBest,FrameTimeAvg,FrameTimeWorst,NPC_AILOD1,NPC_AILOD2,NPC_AILOD3,NPC_AILOD4,'
f'B_AILOD1,B_AILOD2,B_AILOD3,B_AILOD4,P_AILOD1,P_AILOD2,P_AILOD3,P_AILOD4,SFPS_Avg', file=o_file)
statList.sort()
for stat in statList:
outputString = ''
for value in stat:
outputString += f'{value},'
outputString += f'{round(1000/float(stat[11]),0)}'
print(f'{outputString},', file=o_file)
if __name__ == '__main__':
root = tk.Tk()
root.withdraw()
file_path = filedialog.askdirectory(title='Select log file directory')
if not file_path:
raise FileNotFoundError
parseFile(file_path)
It’s your server’s performance, not your local computer, and not the game’s AI, that is causing the issue. If you’re interested in just enjoying the game and want to play on a good dedicated server, you’re welcome to join us. We have two servers linked together you can travel between:
Direct Connect info:
Pandemonium Multi-Map: Exiled Lands: 104.128.58.121:7777
Pandemonium Multi-Map: Siptah: 104.128.62.200:7777
Discord: Pandemonium
Thank you very much for the information and the offer. I had hoped being the “official” server provider they’d be better.
Funcom farmed out the AI code to a 3rd party. They probably have no idea how to fix the mess.
Stay away from anything with Funcom’s name attached. They have always been incompetent and always will be incompetent.
Actually… quite the contrary
@Archdruid, I do recommend installing this one, since Funcom did fix 1 out of the 3 things this mod fixes… the other 2 would only come in March (Chapter 4)
Absolutely not the case… my provider runs circles around gportal… and so do many others.
On top of that gportal also has a proprietary panel which is riddled with bugs and other issues… some of which are deliberate like their mod caching, which can be a nightmare to admins.
Just a week ago or so Multigun and I spent several days assising people and giving them instructions on how to manually update mods via FTP, because gportal cached LBPR-AF and was simply not refreshing it for 2 full days…
We had dozens of server admins who simply could not download the new update and all of their players were getting mismatch errors… Every other provider saw the update in minutes… gportal took 2 DAYS… So no, they are not getting treated unfairly… every bit of their bad reputation is fully earned… they’re absolute garbage.
I think that’s overkill for Conan 
Unless you have a ridiculous number of players constantly connected, but even then… the game runs on a single thread so shared game servers are perfectly fine where you get a full core or two… and RAM usage will depend on the amount of heavy mods and connected players, but overdoing the heavy mods would equally mess with your players…
Some people said that in the forums, so i thought i should mention it. (Or is it too many mods?)
But if i was mistaken i‘m sorry, you’re the expert.
For me on console mods aren’t a factor anyway.