Warning about the Stray key

SuperJoe · Commander **Joined**: 03 Sep 2009

Just a warning to anyone who plays around with the AI. Adjusting the Stray key in rules.ini has a nasty little side-effect of affecting the AI waypoint system. I had set Stray=8.0 hoping it would stop large AI teams from getting stuck when moving to their objective, but I noticed that AI units following waypoints started to ignore waypoints that were too close to each other (8 tiles or less). High value here will force you to place waypoints on the AI route far away from each other, making it hard to eg. make a truck follow a road smoothly. I don't recommend going much over 4-5 here or you will start to notice the impact. The default value is 2.0.

Has anyone noticed any impact that the Stray key has? My large AI teams don't really regroup even if they get split up. I've only noticed AI teams regroup (sometimes) when they come under fire AND are moving to an enemy building or some other place. They don't seem to regroup when they are on a mission to directly attack something. Also sometimes the whole regroup action just seems to make the AI team get completely stuck, eg. when one of the units is attacked the rest of the team just stops and never recovers, unless I kill some of the units that have strayed too far from the main team. That's why I originally had increased the Stray value, hoping they wouldn't get stuck like that. But it still happened even with Stray=8.0.

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Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

Have you tried messing around with all of these?

Stray=2.0 ; radius distance (cells) that team members may stray without causing regroup action

RelaxedStray=3.0 ;gs Gather commands will use this number instead, allowing for bigger teams in AIT

GuardModeStray=2.0

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom