Erratic / unbalanced base ownership behavior

[cfrag]

While creating a new mission, I seem to have run across two airfield ownership behaviors that seem new to me and/or depart from what I expect:

1. Airfields revert to their original owners (as set by ME) when the last enemy unit leaves the 2km capture radius
2. When a formerly neutral airfield is captured, and it then reverts to neutral after the last unit leaves, no capture event is issued. The base in-game, however, is now shown as neutral. Note that this behavior is exclusive to originally NEUTRAL bases. If a base reverts to blue or red after the last occupying unit leaves, a capture event is issued.

Below please find a mission that illustrates this behavior (i.e., it can be 100% and easily re-produced): Batumi is NEUTRAL at start, Kobuleti is RED. For both, a blue Vehicle transitions through the capture (2km) zone. A tiny script alerts you to all capture events. In Batumi there is ONE capture event (neutral -> blue) and no event when the zone reverts to neutral after the vehicle leaves. In Kobuleti, there are two capture events: red -> blue and blue -> red.

I'm surprised at both:

1. I did not expect bases reverting their ownership simply because all occupying units left. That would be akin to my car reverting ownership to its previous owner when I exit the car. IMHO, anyone who wants to own it should have to expend resources to receive ownership.
2. Not receiving a capture event (which to me signifies a transition of ownership) when a base reverts from blue/red to neutral seems wrong, as it is a significant change in logic.

My recommendations / requests here are

1. Invoke a capture event on every change of hands for an airfield, including a change to NEUTRAL.
2. DO NOT automatically revert ownership after the last occupying unit leaves the 2km radius. A base should stay owned until it is occupied by other forces. I'm aware of a kludge work-around. Turning off autocapture via API for a base entirely would amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as that would require that a mission determines base ownership by itself (a significant additional performance drain).

Is there some official documentation on base capture behavior that I might want to re-visit?

Thank you for your kind consideration

 

 

 

capture analysis.miz

Edited October 18, 2024 by cfrag

[Kanelbolle]

2 hours ago, cfrag said:

While creating a new mission, I seem to have run across two airfield ownership behaviors that seem new to me and/or depart from what I expect:

1. Airfields revert to their original owners (as set by ME) when the last enemy unit leaves the 2km capture radius
2. When a formerly neutral airfield is captured, and it then reverts to neutral after the last unit leaves, no capture event is issued. The base in-game, however, is now shown as neutral. Note that this behavior is exclusive to originally NEUTRAL bases. If a base reverts to blue or red after the last occupying unit leaves, a capture event is issued.

Below please find a mission that illustrates this behavior (i.e., it can be 100% and easily re-produced): Batumi is NEUTRAL at start, Kobuleti is RED. For both, a blue Vehicle transitions through the capture (2km) zone. A tiny script alerts you to all capture events. In Batumi there is ONE capture event (neutral -> blue) and no event when the zone reverts to neutral after the vehicle leaves. In Kobuleti, there are two capture events: red -> blue and blue -> red.

I'm surprised at both:

1. I did not expect bases reverting their ownership simply because all occupying units left. That would be akin to my car reverting ownership to its previous owner when I exit the car. IMHO, anyone who wants to own it should have to expend resources to receive ownership.
2. Not receiving a capture event (which to me signifies a transition of ownership) when a base reverts from blue/red to neutral seems wrong, as it is a significant change in logic.

My recommendations / requests here are

1. Invoke a capture event on every change of hands for an airfield, including a change to NEUTRAL.
2. DO NOT automatically revert ownership after the last occupying unit leaves the 2km radius. A base should stay owned until it is occupied by other forces. I'm aware of a kludge work-around. Turning off autocapture via API for a base entirely would amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as that would require that a mission determines base ownership by itself (a significant additional performance drain).

Is there some official documentation on base capture behavior that I might want to re-visit?

Thank you for your kind consideration

 

 

 

capture analysis.miz 39 kB · 3 downloads

 

This is not something new to users making capture missions, been this way as long as i can remember.

 

When dealing with the lack of capture event to the NEUTRAL coalition, i just have a variable/flag stored to check what the last known coalition of each airbase is, then run a scheduled function periodically to check if it has changed from blue or red to NEUTRAL. Would be nice if there was a event, but this has been known for forever and i have lost hope that it would be added/fixed.

 

When it comes to revert ownership of the airbase i oppose your solution. At least how you purpose it. Mission makers depend on this to get it back to the original state, including me. 
If there where to be a solution to this, it would be to make it toggle on or off with the current native capture system active. Preferably per airbase and configurable in ME and by script.

I think the behaviour of this is made to show that a country owns a airbase even if there are no units on it. This might not be behaviour you want in a fictional scenario, but it would be nice to have it toggle off or on.

 

Edited October 18, 2024 by Kanelbolle

[cfrag]

24 minutes ago, Kanelbolle said:

When it comes to revert ownership of the airbase i oppose your solution. At least how you purpose it. Mission makers depend on this to get it back to the original state, including me.

Ah indeed. Some depend on it, other (me included) don't expect and are tripped up by it. So far, it's more a matter of baseline definition, some written docs on what the rules are. It is something I just discovered the hard way after 4+ years of mission design (including my fair share of capture missions). It's an edge case that was driven to the forefront for me when I designed a large dynamic mission with lots of capturable airfields that are expected to have a lot of to-and-fro. I can code against it, but I would have loved it if I knew years ago when I built that particular part of my code framework. It's no news that the current state of MSE documentation is abysmal (to put it nicely), so yeah, it's just another day in MSE.

30 minutes ago, Kanelbolle said:

When dealing with the lack of capture event to the NEUTRAL coalition, i just have a variable/flag stored to check what the last known coalition of each airbase is,

Agreed. Then again, to do that we switch from a modern, event-driven model to last millennium active polling. It is entirely doable. It does highlight yet another severe deficiency in ED's code. It's really bad design, pure and simple. Let's hope that the fine people at ED find the time to also invoke the event on neutral 'capture'. Your past suffering does not give me much hope, though. Ignorance is bliss, and it seems that I was blissful for the past years.

37 minutes ago, Kanelbolle said:

I think the behaviour of this is made to show that a country owns a airbase even if there are no units on it.

Perhaps. I see no reason to believe that any active thought has gone into this 'feature'. IMHO it just emerged, it was not designed, and therefore also was never documented. It's here now, and I would like to see some formal definition/docs (just like what goes into capturing a base, as -- as was shown in a separate thread -- it is a lot more complex than simply 'have the only boots on the ground') that we can all work from. I'll design around it for now. Doesn't mean that I like it