I fought some boars an hour ago. Every one missed me on the charge. I think that kind of AI needs to be fixed. If you have no stamina to dodge, you will be hit. It just needs to self correct its direction as the player moves. It would be way too slow to test that every millimeter closer to the player.
A compromise is needed.
Archers should be a must have for proper defense. Players have become used to regular thralls for defense (through aggro).
As long as it doesn’t block someone in a trap, a kill zone is legit. It gets like that when alpha versus alpha is the main event.
We clearly have a broken “thrall fight” cycle:
The beginning of the cycle is selecting a target and taking out a weapon.
The middle of the cycle is, in fact, a duel and dealing damage to everyone whom Thrall hooks with his punches.
The end of the cycle is the removal of weapons to the inventory.
Now we see that we have a “Turn to face the enemy” setting that should work for the player character.
But it also affects satellites in some way: horses, thralls. I recommend disabling it in the settings.
However, when Thrall has lost a target, he does not put away the weapon and does not start a new cycle. Thrall’s freezes and suffers damage.
He can unfreeze when he receives damage from the enemy in front of him (it does not always work) or when the player uses the “RETURN” command.
I recommend bind the “RETURN” command and you will immediately see the cycle update: thrall resorts to you, unequip the weapon and restarts the cycle. He catches a new target and takes out his weapon, joining the fight.
Please note that the battle cycle is updated only by the “RETURN” command. The command “Attack” or “Run” in the battle zone will not unfreeze Thrall.
RESUME. It is necessary to demand that Funcom fix the thrall combat cycle.
Such FunCom “design decisions” is why looking at other FunCom games, while the concept is interesting, I don’t trust FunCom reasoning or implementation… so, as stated by others in this thread, my wallet stays closed.
It’s great strategy to not retire early with a beach property somewhere, considering how many people are spending money on gaming these days, not such a good approach to “keeping the people with the money” happy.
“Hey FunCom designer… Conan is a great game concept… repeatedly disappointing.”
However I have seen this recently it seems specific thralls are more proactive with shields rather than a complete full block holds, seems they target attacks with quick reactive blocks which seems effective when they actually connect with the incoming attacks.
However the same cannot be said for heavy axe blocks, this seems to actually have horrendous timing between attacks and blocks as it cannot decide to fully commit to a attack or stop midway and block. Would rather him use a Axe with reactive blocks but it seems to be a full hold for my experiences with the thralls. Another thing is the best blockers seem to be based on in game race and class, archers seem to block the best, Cimmarian, Nordheimer, seem to preform the best in my experience.
There is a common misconception when it comes to Funcom’s thrall AI. Most people would assume, and I do not fault them for this assumption mind you, that Funcom would give thralls Artificial Intelligence, hence AI. BUT NO! That was never Funcom’s intention. Funcom never wanted thralls to be better than the players, even though for some time due to their superior stats they basically were. So instead they gave thralls AI, as in Artificial Ignorance. Hence, you have thralls who when told to engage an enemy in melee combat instead run into a tree and get stuck, yet continue to run in place without moving because they cannot move through the solid branches of the tree. Or thralls who stand directly in doorways with the sole purpose of blocking you from exiting the room you are currently in, just to taunt you. Or thralls who run directly in front of you to block your attack which may have killed the NPC you were fighting, and then stand there and take several hits for no reason. THUS WE HAVE IT. TRUE THRALL AI!
I was just thinking earlier today about how to improve that. Yes, I hate it when the scene puts actual (camera) me in the horses head (instead of 3rd person view). Because then the buttons don’t work while it targets… gross innards of its head.
UE5-script is little more agnostic from what I heard.
Yes, the community has been asking for AI improvements for years now. I was hoping Age of War would finally see the AI improvements we all hoped for. Guess we’re still waiting and hoping.
To further comment on this perspective…
So, thralls are therefore “broken” of their will and spirit… psychologically damaged, therefore quite possibly mentally challenged and incapable of sufficient reasoning, so…
Let’s build 1500+ armor that gets them to a 50+ STR bonus and hand them a 4.5 foot legendary great sword… if that were the case, I’d break their bond, snatch the life out of them, and do them (and me) a merciful favor.
Perhaps outside of gaming we can let our toddlers play with grenades.
I work with people with various levels of mental disabilities and developmental disorders. Given proper instruction, they can be hard and motivated workers with a surprising level of skill within a sufficiently narrow field. However, many of them lack initiative (or if they have initiative, they lack the comprehension to utilize it safely) and are often unable to live independently without someone taking care of them.
So yeah, in a fictional setting that is harsh, brutal, pragmatic and barbaric, becoming a thrall is a likely fate for such people. Heck, it can be close enough to that in the real world as well.
Of course, this does not explain why trained, professional soldiers in the game are still complete morons with no sense of self-preservation.
It is not necessary to breed entities.
No need to try to come up with rhymes and express what should be called by their proper names: Funcom does not know how to program Artificial Intelligence. They don’t even have a normal pathfinding. The old new bugs on top of old ones and never test anything. We have been in the Alpha version for 6 years now, but now with a paid Marketplace.
Because they are still using default animations that were acquired along the way.
My opinion is the market doesn’t show basic memory allotments that achieve the A.I. wishlist. It makes zero sense to compile it. Given I used A.I. back in the 80s, space is the main topic. A blank slate means teaching the A.I. and cloning it to distribution. It isn’t the distributions business to double check latest storage offers.
A.I. process are still bound to 32-bit memory models, but it doesn’t stop anyone from doing 64-bit and a few 128-bit operations. I see it being stricter.
P.S. walking back a thought
The NPC AI (for NPCs, Thralls, Pets, Animals, Demons, Monsters, Beasts, etc) uses the same AI as this guy (more or less):
Walk within range, and it moves over and attacks. Well the green guy doesn’t have an attack, as it tries to bump you. But in CE no NPC reacts to you outside of following you. Instead of a 2d area, it has a somewhat 3d area to move around using basic pathing to get around objects (sometimes).
There’s no special logic about why thralls are bad fighters. That’s the problem. There’s no special logic at all. Anything that moves and isn’t a player has the same ‘AI’. And when I say thrall going forward I mean tamed and wild (unbroken NPCs).
There’s only three distinct differences. If you can even call them distinct.
The first one is basic combos. These are used by T1 and T2 thralls. Basically they have access to combos using 2 attacks. Either light and light, light and heavy, heavy and light, and heavy and heavy. I think they can use special (I don’t have the devkit open right now to double check). But they might not. Either way they choose these randomly. Oh they may only attack once too. Either light or heavy.
The second one is more basic combos. They can do the same as above, but can mix in 3 hit combos and 4 hit combos. So they may attack once, or twice, or sometimes three times, and if you’re lucky (and they don’t get interupted) 4 times. They can also do specials (block, backflip, weird shortsword hop, and kick), but these are random too, and never in reaction.
Finally what non-humans do. So let me explain how humans work a little (the attacks in the two points above). They pick a weapon based on situation (the ONLY intelligent thing any NPC does) usually based on its position in inventory, a ranged weapon or melee. And then they attack with that weapons combos, derived from a table, and randomly. Bows have two, light shot and power shot.
But for everything else… they have an assortment of weapons based on each of their attacks. Redmother has a bite, claw, firebreath, roar (does nothing), and tailswipe. Now, I don’t know for sure they do these randomly (I haven’t delved -that- far), or if they do them in some sort of order, but I suspect its somewhat random with maybe a weighted order. That way a the Redmother doesn’t just tailswipe spin over and over for a few attacks. They might even have cooldowns.
But at the end of the day, they do NOT have any intelligence (outside of thralls swapping to a ranged weapon from melee or vice versa), to what the player is doing. They have no clue what the player is doing other than distance and location.
They don’t see your attacks. They don’t know when you attack. They don’t know what armor you wear, what weapon you use. They don’t even know their own health level or when they are attacked or take damage.
Its why when you send in a thrall to fight another NPC, it looks like two blind drunk dudes flailing at each other. Because… well… that’s what it is. That’s what they’ve been coded to do. And all NPCs are like this. That basically Conan Exiles PVE in a nutshell.
On the contrary, the stuff Thrall AI do is “rich”.
What other game you know that you can find a thrall that once engaged in a combat, chooses to run to the opposite direction of the target not having a ranged weapon, or trying to use a slow ranged weapon with their enemies in front of them ? That is “rich”, not poor.
People love the branching narrative concept, so lets use that image.
The AI works in a branching structure called “Behavioral Trees”. While a “average” game the NPCs participating in large group spawning (like trash mobs, or city dwellers) have around 5 to 8 branched trees, and a more specific NPC might have around 10, 15, the largest branched behavioral tree in CE is around 7 (being extremely nice with the concept of what is a branch).
Your average companion in a game, not even required to be human, might have around 20 branched behaviors.
Now you look at the forums, what people are whining about ?
New maps
New weapons
New Events
New Bosses
What good is any of this if it is populated by cardboard entities ?
I dont blame Funcom for the lack of smarter AI.
I do like Thanos …
What I’m saying, and keep saying to FunCom, is that I’ve lately been shopping for a new game to play into which I’ll soak hours of interactive, and non-television entertainment…
NOT because Conan isn’t fun, NOT because Conan isn’t interesting, but because other games by other studios may be less often utterly disappointing in both failings and bugs, which I run into daily.
None of the titles I’m shopping are FunCom projects. Not one; and DUNE is an interesting project and story line; but at this point, I don’t trust FunCom to deliver on the concept. Something FunCom and it’s designers might consider if they like their jobs and the lifestyle those provide.
It is the first time I post on this forum even if I am a player of the first days. I play the game regularly to test the new features and the evolution of the game. And if I choose to come here to complain, it is because things are getting worse in some aspects of the game and AI and pathfinding are the worst. These aspects are killing the fun of the game. I can’t count the number of times NPCs blocked me giving me no chance of survive in danger situations. But now you can’t run without a stone that block you, making your character shaking like hell in all directions or without your thralls that disappear from the world, maybe fallen in the ground … Sorry but it is not acceptable. These aspects should be the first ones to be worked, but it seems there is no work on it since several years …
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