dumb ai builds shipyard on land ???!!

[puppet]

I have a frustrating problem.. well for me anyway :banghead:
I really hate being not able to solve a problem or figure out why a certain anomaly occurs.

In the island style modified melee map I am working on I have an engineer who builds the standard human shipyard so that players have access to ships for expansion/attack. Kinda necessary in an isolated island map. heh

Everything works just fine for user controlled players. The difficulty (grrrrr) arises with the computer ai controlled player. The shipyard is currently set at basically default standard settings. But the stupid computer player invariably builds the shipyard on LAND. So well duh, when it tries to construct a ship .. it can't.

And yes.. I do need 1 player to be 'computer'. The maps I make are what I call LAN maps. Basically cuz I mostly play with a partner across a LAN and we play 1vs1 but more often 1+1 against the computer player. (My partner is still rather noob and doesn't have any fun playing against me cuz I always beat the **** out of him heh). So I am creating maps that are balanced for what amounts to only 3 players.

I have fiddled with various settings in the shipyard properties including sea-pathable, amphibious pathable etc etc. Changing its water radius. Still can't get the thing to build properly in shallow water as it should.

Anyway, I have actually found a work around for the problem by using triggers to send the stupid engineer to a specific region to build etc etc. But it just irks me that the problem shouldn't occur in the first place. I mean how can the ai build a shipyard on land !?!?!

I am attaching a small test map I am now using to try and sort this out (see oddball_shipyard.w3x).

Just make sure all players are set to human and player 3 is the computer.

Anyone have any ideas? Am I just dense or what? There should be a way to fix this without triggers but I just can't find it.

 

[guitarplay]

try making the building requirements + to water or something like that
unless they can defy teh rules of object editor???

 

[puppet]

heh my thought too

but I've tried:

Pathing Placement requires:
sea-pathable, amphibious-pathable, ground-pathable (default) and even clearing that field. And all possible combinations of them.
.. still happens.

Pathing Placement Requires Water Radius:
default is 384. I've tried various values in increments of 50 from 0 to 600.
... still happens.

fun huh?!?!

but thanks for the thought. Any others?

This drives me nuts!! :banghead:

 

[AceHart]

Hm... sea-pathable should actually work (maybe together with "water radius" = 0).
Ships can go in shallow water and deep water, workers can't swim, so that would only leave shallow water...

And, I've never seen a computer player not respect those settings...

 

[puppet]

yes it would seem sea pathable should work, but it does not. (just tested again to make sure I'm not losing my marbles heh)

I have tested sea pathable with various values of water radius (from 0-600) and the engineer actually doesn't build anything, just stands there scratchin' his head ... not much better than building on land heh.

I suspect because the engineer can not enter sea-pathable terrain to build. He can enter the shallow water (ground pathable) or amphibious for that matter, but the default for the shipyard is ground pathable and the engineer still builds on land. grrr

I have never seen the ai ignore the settings before either, but then I have never come across a map with the ai/computer player actually building shipyards either.

dumb 'puter :nuts:

 

[Sargon]

Shallow water is sea-pathable though...hmm. That's strange. I guess they never really programmed it, since in the regular game you don't build shipyards.

 

[puppet]

That's what I was wondering .. that it was not programmed.

The shipyard and engineer does occur in TFT:Act3:Chapter 4: Return to Northrend with the blood elves but the shipyard is preplaced as far as I see.

As soon as you switch the shipyard to sea-pathable the slap-happy engineer just takes sits there.

At first I thought it was my map, some trigger or alteration to the object/or ai editor caused it so I made the small test map I attached so I could limit the variables. But even there it still happens. Bizarre.

And I also tried making the shallow water area huge with a ramp to the area that was large enough to build 4 shipyards across.. but still the engineer builds on land.

Geez it bugs me!