On my map, I patrol waves of enemy troops to a location. Sometimes, these units get frozen and refuse to listen to my patrol command. When this happens, the game is essentially over, as there's no way to kill the entire wave and move onto the next round.

I've seen how other maps handle this, which typically involves a selector of some kind controlled by the host. By moving this selector to a location, it triggers the unit(s) to be moved to the end, where it's killed by the final line of defense (cannons/sunkens/etc).

Problem with this is, there won't necessarily be any defenses remaining at the end (the enemy is able to kill the defenses).

Anyways, I'd like to find a better way to handle this. I know if one of my own units gets stuck, I can simply issue a STOP command to unfreeze it. So I'm thinking instead of sending the units to the end, I can just issue a stop command on all remaining enemy forces, then issue another patrol command. However, I feel this could be exploited to negativity impact the computer's attack. Also, not even sure how to issue a stop command or if it works for computers.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Have you tried using Preserve Trigger in conjunction with the patrol command?

Yep, in general, the patrol works fine time after time. But on rare occasions, a unit will get frozen.

Why use patrol instead of attack? The way I've seen a lot of maps handle it is to simply have a trigger issue an order every 3-5 seconds on repeat to keep a wave moving forward. An AI script of strategic suicide missions or similar might also work.

Are the units frozen randomly or is it caused by something in particular?

I think ordering the units to stop, or to move in the opposite direction, are your only two (reliable) options with map triggers. To "order" a unit to stop, move it over unpathable terrain like a water tile or outside the map. This will fail to teleport the unit to the new location and make it stop in its tracks.

I don't know how you've triggered your units to patrol, but if you're ordering them to patrol multiple times, you can reduce the frequency of this happening if you only order them once, or as infrequently as possible. However it's not possible to completely eliminate the chance of it happening without some convoluted EUD triggers, or modding.

This bug happens when a unit is ordered to attack (actual attack, not the trigger order) while it was moving, and then ordered to move again (like actually moving, or targeting a unit out of range) too soon. It's technically present with all units but the freezing only happens with units that use IScript movement (e.g. marine, hydralisk). Units that use Flingy movement (e.g. drone, air units) are only affected visually, where they will be playing the idle animation while still moving (e.g. slower wing flapping for mutalisk, engine exhaust disappearing and ship bobbing on wraith).

From my experience, issuing an Attack makes them seem more eager to get to the target location and less interested in fighting. They'll just run right passed defenders sometimes. Patrol makes them attack much more aggressively, targeting everything in their path (basically the units act how they would if a human player issues an Attack Move).


Exactly what I'm doing. Currently using Wait to create the delay between Orders, but I plan to replace it with DC timer.


Rarely and randomly. I believe it's a common SC glitch. Happens to human players too (Dragoon and Marine are common culprits)

Thanks for all the helpful information. I was ordering them to patrol every 10 seconds, as it seems to keep them moving along better, but I'll try to make it work with less Order commands. Also, will give your method a try of moving them to unpathable ground. Hopefully this makes it much less likely to occur. Sounds like I'll need to overlay another location as ground-only for this.

Actually interesting since not sure how to fix this. In some cases, I notice the freeze to occur when a command is interrupted (I had a "smart" zergling where instead of just chasing an enemy, it would actively get into melee range before it attacked so it doesn't stagger behind but instead gets an immediate attack off if it ever gets close enough to the vulture which made it significantly harder to micro against). The issue is that I found it often froze when it got an attack off and had some new form of command applied to it.

Anyways, I'm not sure how to fix it but only things I could think of involve:

- Resending the patrol order every so often (however, if the unit is truly frozen, this will not work. As my example said above, you can just freely attack said Zergling until it dies. It only unfreezes once it is in attack range attack which is a bit strange. Maybe something with getting stuck in an AI loop and attacking breaks it).

- Another may involve having a stuck detector. Essentially there is an incredibly small location that centers on your desired "wave" unit and it has a timer which resets any time it has to "reposition" itself to be on the wave unit. If the unit is non-stationary for say: 20 seconds, a trigger can be used to maybe unstuck that specific unit (instead of all of them). I would think maybe something such as moving the unit's location to a new one, and then moving it back (or even moving it to an unmovable location) then ordering it to move to its required spot.

As for the Attack vs Patrol, I found through self-testing that using the attack command seems to only make the units attack other units in the destination location. They will only attack back at other enemies if they are attacked first (so you get where situations where the 3 units getting attack fight back while the other 17 units just run by until they are attacked). Patrol does just attack whatever is in its path. Furthermore, Patrol is considered more responsive (something about how the attack command has a delay in it until patrol). For micro purposes, I believe patrol is considered better to use versus the attack command (especially with vulture micro)

I always find solutions without EUDs nice to know because EUDs are a whole entire new set of things that need to be learned, required additional software, and also can cause issues with saving (and crashing said game). Also, I found using EUDs a bit difficult to read what things due because I'm not good at commenting my triggers. I often can tell what each section does just based on the conditions (since I label switches).

- That smart ling idea is really cool

- Your tiny location idea is smart. I think it will take an outside-the-box idea like this to really fix it in a seamless way, but I want to get my beta version stable before I add complexities such as that. I'm still thinking of just using some selector unit controlled by the host that will allow him to manually trigger the commands that will unfreeze the remaining troops (like moving them to an unmovable location). Just don't want the feature to be exploited by doing it repeatedly even when units aren't stuck. Maybe I'll limit it to one use per round.

- You're exactly right, that's what happening when using the Attack command. Only the units which are attacked stop to engage. Very odd how staredit/scmdraft doesn't have an exact one to one command for Attack, Stop, Hold Position, etc, when clearly the game has those commands built in.

- I'm definitely trying to avoid EUDs until the need arrives, though I'm using one to create the hyper trigger. I try to add comments to every trigger to preserve my sanity since I'm a bit OCD haha.

In my ds map I avoided this issue where other ds maps has the issue too.. especialy giving units (not buildings)from one player to another can cause order issues.. other issue is the units beeing ordered too frequently. I still have the issue with siege tanks when they Are sieged they dont react on order an unsiege moving forward.. for siege tank i order em to move than 1 sec after i order them patrol for my siege tank its improved alot but it can happen that a siege tank Will stuck but thats the only unit on my map. I have a trigger deteting sieged tanks staying behind the lines (those I fix with the system happy mentioned having a timer to detect when they Are stuck) than i remove and create a New unsieged tank which than can be ordered. My ds uses alot of units moving towards each other so thats more less same i think. Im pretty sure you can play around with the order functions, some unit act differently.. you can make the unit iddle by moving it to the excakt location it already is.. iddle units use spells or burrow instantly. You welcome to ask more but be specific about what youre doin right now than i can better help you.

Btw happy was not fully right on hes attack patrol difference(( Happy was fully right on hes statement made a test to check post further down )). Here youll have it, theres not much difference on the patrol and attack order function. Ill try explain. If you order a unit to attack to a location where at the middle of location theres No units than the unit Will move to that spot if it meet enemys on the path it Will attack those precisely as if a human player clicked a unit and pressed it attack to this area. If tho theres an enemy unit excaktly in the middle of the location you order a unit to attack too than the unit Will attack that specific unit and ignore other units on the path. Excaktly like it would happen if a human player press attack on a specific enemy unit. Hence prankenstein said when using attack order the often seem to ignore other units. When using patrol you can avoid units ignoring enemys on their path. So thats why using patrol for Mass control is Best suited. Tho siege tank and lurkers spell casters Ai can be improved by setting their state to iddle.

There can be issues with using patrole order if you dont make em patrol passed enemy units than the units you order patrol Will hit their destiantion and than move back to the destination the where at when they received the order, excaktly like it would be if a human player pressed a unit patrol to destination

The way i fix stucked siege tank is not the Best way only use that if other options not possible cause it Will look seem weird.

I avoided using comments cause than I need open the trigger each time i need check for faults or changes or which dc is used in the trigger this can become an annoying issue if you use up nearly All awaliable dc variables. Without comments i fast see how the trigger looks like

I recall some Months ago one player asked if he could make a Marine hit a zergling before a zealot if both a zergling and a zealot is in the marines range. I told him its possible if he center a Marine range location on the Marine and then center a small location on zerglings inside the Marine range location and if that condition is meet then order the Marine to attack to the small location that was center on the zergling that way the Marine Will avoid using sc bw priotizing and attack the zergling before hand hitting other units like zealots this way he can fully contol the unit Ai insanly time consuming to do with All units but its possible.

Post has been edited 9 time(s), last time on Feb 1 2022, 8:56 pm by GGmano.

As far as I know, the only ways you can get frozen siege-mode tanks to unsiege is to:
1) Use the "Strategic Suicide Mission" script. This will make the computer player add their tanks to an AI attack wave, making them unsiege. However it can only be run once per computer player until the attack wave is cleared, so you will have to modify an AIscript to execute the attack_do and attack_clear commands if you want to use that method again.

2) Find all your frozen tanks in the CUnit array and change their Main Order ID from 98 to 99 to directly order them to unsiege.

Giving the siege tank to another cpu player, moving it, or bringing a hostile unit inside the minimum range sadly don't work in this case (if you didn't already know that).

[duplicate]

Thanks for all the clear info. I'll have to do some testing with the siege tank then, haven't even added them to a wave yet so I'm curious how they'll behave now.


Very helpful, I love learning little quirks like this, there's so many of them. I'm surprised it's not on this page though: http://www.staredit.net/wiki/index.php/Quirks_and_nuances

Would this even work for the location "Anywhere" or any large encompassing location?


This hasn't been my experience. The location which the computer is set to attack is never even allowed to contain an enemy unit, let alone have one at the center. I used attack at first and the results were terrible for a defense map. So after a ton of trial and error, patrol finally fixed the glaring issues.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 30 2022, 9:49 pm by Prankenstein.

Interesting stuff.

By "until the attack wave is cleared" do you mean all the units in the wave need to be killed or removed?

I assume the units in this wave are initially determined by their location (similar to Junkyard Dog), rather than anywhere on the map?

Will "Strategic Suicide Mission" also unfreeze other enemies such marines, goons, hydralisk, etc?

Finally, does "Strategic Suicide Mission" make the computer actively seek out enemies or is it more random then that?

No, cleared with the "attack_clear" aiscript command (which is not directly available without a modded aiscript. I think aiscripts can be edited with EUDs but I haven't explored that yet). Even if all the units are killed or removed, the attack will still be considered as ongoing and subsequent runs of Strategic Suicide Mission will be ineffectual.

Not sure, probably not if they happen to be ordered to move in the same direction as they already are, unless the cpu gives them some other command that will unfreeze them. It's more practical to unfreeze those units using the methods I mentioned earlier.

It's identical to an AI attack wave from the computer player AI scripts used in melee or campaign missions, except that it encompasses all of its existing units on the entire map instead of a select few, even if you run the script using "at location". The computer player gathers all of his units to an area in "preparation" for the attack, then sends them in to the location the AI has picked to assault, and will continue hunting down all enemy units on the map in that fashion.

Understood! Thanks as always sir.

theres a third option too and maybe more, the way i said i used is:

I set a timer when enemys units not near CPU siege tank sieged and timer hits the desired amount

I in a trigger center a location on siege tank sieged, i then remove a CPU siege tank sieged and create a New CPU siege tank not sieged and order it to patrol up the batlefield when theres No more sieged siege tanks left. My trigger kinda changing em into non sieged tank at least thats how it looks one by one. When No more stucked sieged siege tank left timer is reset. This option can be done without mod or euds

Yeah i was aware that change owner, move or put enemy units near sieged siege tank dont work, but i plainly just remove and recreate a non sieged tank.


Have in mind theres some issues with tank beeing created again and again when you reach a High amount of created units in total. tank CPU Ai will stop using siege. I wrote about this issue in another post im not fully sure whats causing it, but so far my test showed its the amounts of units created which sets the bug issue.


Just read that site, seems its editing quirks they focused there. Where CPU Ai quirks is not described at All, theres many of those.

It doesnt matter the size of the loaction as long as the CPU unit is ordered to move to the excaktly spot where the unit already is, and remember activate it only one time per timed intervals (instantly preseved order triggers always ruin what you wanna do)


I think you might have ordered units to attack too much which can cause issues not fully sure. But when i order a unit to attack to destination without preserve in a test map it works just fine it attacks enemys on its path as using patrol would. Try test that should be a simple test

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Jan 31 2022, 8:14 am by GGmano.

I've decided on a couple relatively privative solutions for these contingencies. I don't face the same AI vs Ai dilemmas like you did on DS, so they should suffice.


Nice observation


That's a good rule of thumb to follow, thanks.


I'm now ordering them on DC increments of 96 (8 seconds I believe), when I switched from Patrol back to Attack to test this, the units went back into coward mode and often run passed things.

Just ran a quick test and you and happy Are so right totally my bad the attack order seem to make units ignore everything until they reach target location

i think i use the attack order when ordering units to same spot where they Are which makes em Either burrow or cast spell instantly if enemys in range

I think i recalled using the attack order many years ago without problems but now i believe my attack order back then was overwritten by patrole order why it didnt cause bugs back then.

Im also pretty sure you with the attack order can make a unit attack an specific unit. Else the attack order have No purpose. By center a location on the unit you wanna target, the unit has to be within target range tho.. havent tested this tho.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 1 2022, 6:37 pm by GGmano.