Cross Bones Multi

Good Level, Finally in top 10 (hahahah there are only 9 people) I Love the limitations in gear! It let’s code really shine (I beat @nick and @Serg mwahahahhahahahahhah) The only problem is, it’s not in the clan multiplayer levels :slight_smile: Other than that, great, refreshing and fun!

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Maybe one problem is balancing between ogres and Humans. Humans have a CRAZY advantage in power! If you summon the troops for 90 gold in humans, they easily beat the troops summoned for 100 by ogres! It is cray hard to win against humans as ogres in this level. What I mean is the loss to win ratio for ogres is crazy! I’m in 3RD with 47 wins, 26 losses, 3RD! The reason being too many people loose as ogres. EDIT: Nvm I’ in 1st >:D

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@Serg what do you think about the human vs. ogre unit power / cost balance?

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2 Throwers + 2 Scouts is very roughly equivalent to 1 Soldier + 1 Archer, at least theoretically/in test battles.

But, Humans do have a minor advantage in Cross Bones due to the skeletons, it seems. I’m trying to figure out how to minimize that randomness.

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Yes, but 2 soldiers and 2 archers wreck 4 throwers and 4 scouts.
But the humans are also allowed to use flags but the ogres can’t.

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I agree that if you are on the ogre side than you do have a disadvantage.

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I really like the level. I love the all-equipment-equal approach to multiplayer.

I am having one issue so far. Sometimes when losing matches, when I pull up the fight to see how I was defeated, I win the replay. Now, I know the random variation of coin and skeleton generation could cause a close match-up to end differently when re-run, but I think it’s something more than that.

When I am playing blue (orcs), my record shows that I consistently lose matches against 125m125 and nemoyatpeace, but when I run fights against those two opponents, I seem to consistently win.

My best guess is that my code might not be running the same way in simulated matches as it does when I run a match on my computer, but I don’t know. Any thoughts?

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You kicked me out of first… :smiley: I have the same problem with Ace of Coders. I watch replayes and 75% of the time I win the match. @nick why is this?

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It can either be that we changed the level and some people simulating have up to one-day-old data in their cache and you have the new data (or vice versa), or that the enemy changed her strategy in between the time you played the match and watched the results, or that there’s a bug. Matches should be deterministic from a random seed based on the two players, so that wouldn’t do it (unless we accidentally used a non-deterministic source of randomization in a level).

With Cross Bones, because we are still actively working on it, and players’ strategies are new, the level change or opponent change theories are viable, but the bug theory is still likely. Perhaps we can keep an eye on it as the edits to this level start to settle down.

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Thanks for the explanation. The deterministic randomness explains why all matches with a given opponent in my record have the same outcome, even though some are so close it seemed like randomness should vary the outcome on occasion. I should also mention that the phenomenon definitely goes both ways. I’ve since pulled up some matches that registered as ties in which I was completely walloped. I generally don’t watch my victories, but I’m sure some of them would come up differently as well.

Thanks again for the awesome game. I’ve been using it to give my students in rural Missouri a little sorely lacking exposure to computer science (and I’m the English teacher). It’s definitely caught the attention of some of them.

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Sorry to revive this old thread, but it seems like this level hasn’t been published to the general public yet, right?

The main issue I’ve had with this level is that coin spawns seem to be completely random: the referee may spawn way more gold in a player’s side than the other.

I’ve spent several days optimizing my code and I just couldn’t beat the simple AI no matter what. Then I realized that it could be that I was just on a bad seed, so I re-submitted my code and destroyed the poor AI then.

So, I would suggest to spawn the same amount of gold in both sides. For example, for each coin the referee spawns, it could spawn a coin with the same value in the opposite side at the same time. More specifically from an implementation point of view, coins should be spawned in pairs, both with the same value, one in each side of the map.

My suggestion still leaves a small randomness factor such as the coins’ spawn position’s proximity to the hero as well as coin concentration areas. Close matches would still be decided by luck, but it should at least avoid extreme cases such as the one I have experienced.

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True, I’ve read this comment and went on to resubmitting many times and sometimes i’d never win, sometimes I’d destroy.

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