DDR Circular Liege

[derfsss]

Is there anything currently set up to stop circular lieges or any plans to do so in the future?

[IcemarkUK]

Ok. I presume this is a bug? If so then yes - however could you explain how you create the situation and I'll raise a ticket for it... or is this a DDR AI issue?

1. Lord 1
2. Lord 2
3. Lord 3

So Lord 1 is the liege of Lord 2
Lord 2 is the liege of 3
Lord 3 is the liege of Lord 1

If this is it, then this is an original bug - but I don't see an issue with putting a fix in.

??

[IcemarkUK]

Just to clarify.

At the start of the game Glormane is one of the top two Dwarves. Him and Imgorarg.
See: Liege Tree

Berangron starts with Glormane as his liege.

Player then recruits Glormane - therefore liege is Luxor?
Berangron still has his liege as Berangron, even though he is AI.

Berangron recruits Glormane and therefore we get the circular.

Interesting, pretty sure Mike never thought about this. I guess when Glormane is recruited he should not be a liege. However I fear that might break other parts of the game. I guess the "simplest" thing to do would be to to check the liege tree at recruitment and not automatically change the liege of the new recruit.

[derfsss]

Thats correct - In my case it was tarithel who recruited Glormane but the situation stands.

My thinking would be that as berangron is the one doing the recruiting, and his liege is who is being recruited, then change it so berangron has no liege. This example is for a circular liege situation involving 2 lords, but could be expanded and all other lords following Glormane would still do so.

[IcemarkUK]

My issue is - Glormane is now sympathetic to the Free, but is still essentially aligned with the dwarves. Therefore Berangron still uses Glormane as his liege. If this is removed at recruitment time, then there are chunks of the AI that is altered. Because the liege is used to make decisions regardless of the "sides" being different. If Berangrorn needs to make a decision he will follow his Lieges example. So if you move Glormane to the very bottom left of the map, Berangrorn could easily start heading that way. If Berangrorn needs a new foe, then he will take Glormanes...

A simple solution at recruitment time would be to detect the circular and not assign Glormane as Berangrorn's liege as he has essentially just brought Glormane back to the fold.

This is a fix that would stop the circular. I think any bigger "more proper" fix might need to be a game option so that any changes in the game mechanics is obvious.

[IcemarkUK]

I've raised an issue for it.

[FrozenEmpire]

Hi Chris, for info, I avoided this issue by implementing a condition that AI characters don't try and recruit "up their liege tree".

[IcemarkUK]

Thanks @FrozenEmpire. That makes sense.

My concern for me is still the effect on original game play. If you take this example. Glormane is the top of a 17 dwarf group. There are only 20 dwarves in the game. Should Glormane be recruited to the free then there are now 16 lords who will not try to bring him back to their loyalty and would therefore avoid approaching him. That could get worse if a lower level dwarf recruited a high level Icelord for example, or another lord who is the top of a large liege tree, like Carangrane the Giant.

The following is hypothetical as I have no idea if the stats would allow it to happen...

Gligril the dwarf manages to recruit Fangrorn the Icelord, then another 18 lords will not try to re-recruit Glormane.

It's fair to say that the original has a huge number of issues around recruitment and lieges and any tweak to these will change gameplay. To what extent I am not sure, but it will change it.

I think I need another deep dive on the code, because one area this would affect is Follow Liege and Follow Foe and I can see from my code I have comment out GetNextLiege and GetNextFoe which were used when your foe dies. Now they just take the foe/liege or the person you were previously following. I think my original implementation was wrong which is why the code was removed...

So if my foe is Tarithel and she dies, my foe becomes Luxor. Spin that out to one of the previous AI lords who has been recruited and then re-recruited by the enemy

In the recruitment code there is, which I think at least adjust the foe problem.

        // 4. get the my foe's loyalty, if they are loyal to the recruiting char's loyalty
        // then we need the recruiting characters foe
        //
        if ( foe->NormalisedLoyalty() == loyalty ) {
            foe = recruiter->Foe() ;
        }

Will investigate further, and maybe write some tests...

[FrozenEmpire]

I see the potential impact on original gameplay and why you would want a solution with minimal side effects for the vanilla case.

I think my approach goes more in the direction of "proper fix" as a game option, as I've implemented some other related behaviours that reduce the impact of what you describe, for example treacherous AIs have a % chance of defecting at any time and then become liegeless and therefore available to try re-recruiting those that had changed to other loyalties, back to their roots...
(Edit: and there are plenty of treacherous AI's !)

It's fair to say it can be a bit of a brain twister at times :)