Guards Refusing to Rest

This has been happening for sometime as of late. Sometimes, the Footmen would wander out of the town and fight monsters on their own. Be it wolves, giant zombies, and for the sake of this post, the crypt that popped up recently. I have two guards, armed with the best weapons I can get a hold of early, and they both just rushed the place, and stirred up a Necromancer and a horde of zombies. I wanted them out of the area and back to the town so the Alchemist can patch them up, but even when they’re badly wounded, the two guards just rush back into the fray.

I have no idea how it’s reproduced, or why they think they got no time to bleed or what not, but it costed me two Hearthlings in the process [a villager, and a recently promoted Footman to help out, who blindly rushed without the others.]

I hope you guys can help with this problem as soon as you can and make it so if they’re too injured to fight and begin to flee, they head to a vacant bed.

7 Likes

This. So very this. I meant to post something about it too.

On a related note, I’d like to see some kind of an adjustment on when combat conditions are triggered. Right now, it feels purely proximity based, but it doesn’t seem to check on actual ability to path.

For example, I had a wolf spawn outside my town, and on the wilderness side of my moat. I have a fence gate blocking the only access point to my town, so the wolf shouldn’t be able to path to any hearthlings, and indeed, he gets to the gate and sits there. Which is fine I guess, but it’s not a threat that a footman needs to rush out and respond to, because no one’s actually in danger. It also means the combat music doesn’t need to trigger either.

If the game only triggered combat based on an actual ability for a hostile mob to reach a hearthling, then we might see fewer occasions where footmen charge off into the fray without a good reason.

It would also encourage good defensive strategy because doing so gives the player control over exactly when they want to engage hostiles vs. having to be purely reactionary.

Of course, if you sit in your walled-up village slowly building up a big population, and those new hearthlings spawn out in the wild, the amassing army of hostiles may eat them for lunch before they ever reach the outer gates, so the next layer of the onion will have to be modifying the spawn logic to bring them in closer to town/safety banners…

2 Likes

I think something needs to be done about cowering villagers as well… instead of running like 3 feet and standing there cowering and getting chopped/smashed to pieces… they should run to the town banner or a nearby defense flag automatically… especially since there is no way to control villagers… and even the soldiers dont listen to your commands once they are in combat… i lost 2 soldiers earlier because they wanted to take on a cemetery and nothing i did would make them stop…

On another note… ever since the patch ive been losing alot of my miners… apparently enemies spawn when you mine into areas… normally this wouldnt be a problem… but with no way to set guards in areas and having guards have their own patrol routes and no ability to tell your guards to guard your miners… they just instantly get wiped out by the 4-5 mobs that apparently spawn out of the broken mountain killing everyone before you soldiers could ever get there (you know since theyd rather stand around farms all day than patrol where they would actually be needed)

Of course that second thing wouldnt be an issue if villagers could properly run away if enemies get close… rather than the walk 3 steps and curl into a ball and wait to die that they do now.

2 Likes

Calling Town Alert should help with that, doesn’t it?

1 Like

How about a Target Priority list which the Player can manipulate? Do it at the party level to avoid too much of a micro feel.

Scenario:
Guard is patrolling. New Wolf pack spawns and you issue the Party kill command. She takes off after it. While in combat, undead spawn in the mines across town, and a goblin camp spawns near the edge of the map near the mines but not close enough that you care right now. You smack the Town Defense button to evacuate civilians and rouse the militia.

From there, you could ‘flag’ the remaining wolves, the undead and the goblins as targets, and then open the proposed Target Priority list UI to rank your list of flagged targets in relation to their main job of Patrolling. If a flagged target is ranked lower than their main job, they are effectively ignored unless they approach or attack.

This would let you set the following:

P1: Finish off these wolves
P2: Clear out the mines
P3: Ignore the goblins for now and resume your patrol (eat, get healed, etc).

Of course, discreet kill/move/guard commands would trump priority list settings, and killing a flagged target would remove them from the target priority list.

Is this too micro, even at the party level?

1 Like

To me that is too micro…what about the ability to set a party’s “stance”, in a similar vein to many RTS games. You could set the party to:

  • Aggressive - the current AI, chase and attack any and all enemies in site, and continue to do so after defeating an enemy
  • Defensive - footman continue to patrol as they currently do, but will not attack enemies more than a certain distance from their routes (this would prevent footman from attacking enemies further and further away each time they kill something)
  • Stand Ground - not useful just yet, but when there are ranged soldiers this would cause them to patrol as normal, but not move towards enemies even if they enter the line of sight (if they are close enough to attack, then do so.)

As with @megashub’s suggestions, direct party commands (move, attack, hold ground) would override this, but their stance would affect what happens when the command is completed. If a move or attack command is issued and the party is aggressive, then they would continue to pursue enemies they see. If defensive, they will not attack enemies not in their immediate vicinity and will return to patrolling. Once the hold ground command is cancelable, the same idea would apply to that command as well.

1 Like

I tried everything back then. Town Alerts, forcing them to move to the beds, the works.