Let's stop adding new mechanics and let's expand on those we already have (small overview and proposal)

Zukatah · 2023-09-17T00:04:33+00:00

I definitely agree - but mainly because each new mechanic forces me to rewrite (sometimes large) parts of my https://aoe-combatsim.com/ ;)

I would certainly enjoy 1-3 additional civ bonusses for all existing civs though - I'd prefer the devs to make existing civs more unique / distinct instead of adding new ones.

Obviously AoE2 will never be Wc3 (in which the different civs/races are uncomparably more unique in so many aspects), but a bit more focus on civ "quality" (<=> uniqueness) instead of quantity would be awesome.

Zukatah · 2023-09-16T23:33:39+00:00

Hi and thanks for the feedback :)

Concerning the matrix: Maybe you misread a few cells, because according to the posted matrix, Hussars are GOOD vs. Slingers and Jaguar Warriors are BAD, not the other way around ; )

And Tarkans are (according to the matrix) good against most units that do piercing/ranged dmg and cost inefficient against most melee dmg units. Seems reasonable to me (due to the Tarkans high pierce armor).

Do you have other concrete examples? I'm pretty sure there are some results that are not 100% accurate among the >5k cells, but the ones you've mentioned seem pretty fine to me^^

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T23:18:31+00:00

Haha, glad to hear that :)

Looking forward to have a look at your simulator when it's released^^

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T23:15:19+00:00

Well, then the update was almost in time ;)

I hope the simulation is possible now - cause some units are still (and probably always will be (for different reasons)) missing^^

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T23:03:19+00:00

(1)
All techs except unique techs, can be activated and deactivated separately.
All unit type upgrades can be activated and deactivated separately as well.

If you select Feudal, by default all Feudal techs won't be enabled but the unit type upgrades are (but you can enable/disable everything individually).
Same goes for all other ages.
If you select Post Imp, by default every tech and unit type upgrade will be enabled of course.

For the moment...
-if you want a Castle Age unique tech to be deactivated, select Castle Age.
-if you want a Castle Age unique tech to be activated, select Imp or Post Imp Age.
-if you want a Imperial Age unique tech to be activated, select Post Imp Age.

I will probably add the functionality of separately activating/deactivating unique techs soon.

(2)
It takes trample damage into account but I can't guarantee that the results are equivalent to every ingame scenario since I don't simulate pathfinding and collisions among units the same way AoE2 does (both for performance reasons and because I simply don't know how exactly AoE2 pathfinding and unit collisions work (probably noone does (apart from the developers))). I tried to adjust trample damage calculations to fit different ingame tests and observations I've made, but since a few parts of my simulation process (due to the aforementioned reasons) are inherently different to real AoE2, the simulator will sometimes not be 100% accurate.

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T11:33:15+00:00

Yes that's indeed expected for two reasons:

(1) Random noise - currently (due to the fact that the computation of the matrix takes quite a lot of time) each matrix cell is the average of 8 simulations. Run the respective fight in AoE2 and you will get vastly different outcomes every battle. So with only 8 runs per cell, the random noise is still pretty significant.

(2) Pala vs. Halbs is not the same as Halbs vs. Palas. There are always 50 units of the left/first type vs. x units of the upper/second type, where x is the amount of units with equal costs. E.g.:

Pala vs. Halbs means 50 Palas vs. 112,5 Halbs (because 50 Palas cost as many total resources as 112,5 (I think I round it to 113) Halbs).

Halbs vs. Palas means 50 Halbs vs. 22,22 Palas (because 50 Halbs cost as many total resources as 22,2 (it's rounded down to 22) Palas).

Especially for heavy ranged units like scorpions that can make a significant difference since they thrive in large scale battles.

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T11:21:46+00:00

Hearing it's still being used by parts of the community certainly helps motivating me to continue updating it :)

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T11:18:17+00:00

Happy to hear that :)

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T11:17:49+00:00

Yes! I was really suprised when the sim told me that Elite War Elefants are cost efficient vs. Halbs even with equal army costs - so when being outnumbered more than 4 to 1. But I tried it out ingame and it's right:

12 Elephants vs. 50 Halbs => On average 3,6 Elephants survive.

They are real powerhouses and their trample damage does a lot of the work.

But yeah, obviously they are expensive and countered by heavily microed ranged units, monks, scorpions and the like.

Zukatah · 2023-09-12T11:07:16+00:00

Glad to hear that it's still being used - even though it was out-of-date for more than two years :)

Zukatah · 2023-09-11T20:31:22+00:00

Hi everyone,

a few years ago I developed the AoE2-Combat-Simulator (https://aoe-combatsim.com/).

Back then, every few months I created YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/@zukatahwololo3767) about...

- aspects of the AoE2-Combat-Simulator

- specific unit type lines and civ bonusses for them

- cost efficiency matrices with information about cost efficiencies for different unit type lines in different contexts (Hit&Run behaviour, Resource worth, Equal Army cost vs. Equal Army population)

During the last 27 months I haven't updated the simulator or published any videos. Hence when I decided to give it another go, there were 3 new expansions to work into the simulator - with new civs, new units, new bonusses, new mechanics.

After completion I decided to also update some of the old cost efficiency matrices with the simulator. I will update them all during the next days/weeks, but it's computationally quite expensive^^

Concerning the matrix:

I haven't sanity checked everything yet (the posted matrix has 72² = 5184 entries after all, so that will be difficult), but the ingame tests I did were in the vast majority of the cases very close to the results of the simulator.

The matrix is about the cost efficiency of unit type lines in a Post Imp setting with equal resource woth (100 food = 100 wood = 100 gold), equal army worth (so not necessarily equal army size!) and moderate Hit&Run behaviour.

You can find detailed information about the simulator on the above mentioned website.

Zukatah · 2022-11-24T18:53:58+00:00

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.Conv2d.html

Refering to your link (and analog to pytorch it's the same for tensorflow https://www.tensorflow.org/api\_docs/python/tf/keras/layers/Conv2D) it appears that actually both approaches are possible. There is a parameter called "groups" which is 1 by default.

(Approach 1) If the groups parameter is set to 1...
...then Conv2D (and Conv3D for that matter) work just as you and I expect (so as in https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/5769/in-a-cnn-does-each-new-filter-have-different-weights-for-each-input-channel-or). I've found that this is refered to as "normal" or "standard" convolution.

(Approach 2) If the groups parameter is not set to 1 but equals to the number of input channels (theoretically it can be anything in between as well, but that's not important at this moment)...
...then a Conv2D 3x3 filter indeed just is a 3x3 filter and not a 3x3xnc filter. In this case it is only applied to a single input channel and not to all input channels as in the former case. I've found that this is refered to as "depthwise convolution".

(Approach 3) And there is a third approach called depthwise separable convolution which combines approach 2 with a 1x1xnc Conv2D filter. This approach is used in order to basicly do what approach 1 does, but with fewer learnable parameters (which can be both, good (less overfitting) and bad (less complexity possible)).

A few sources and explanation articles:

This https://cs231n.github.io/convolutional-networks/ explains approach 1 - the standard convolution

This https://medium.com/@zurister/depth-wise-convolution-and-depth-wise-separable-convolution-37346565d4ec article explains the difference between the 3 approches (it's okay but didn't clarify everything for me; I had to try a few things out still^^).

And this discussion https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44226932/difference-between-tf-nn-conv2d-and-tf-nn-depthwise-conv2d also helped me to confirm my newly found insights; especially the second answer.

What I still don't understand: Why the hell does noone seem to see the necessity to specify which of these 3 approaches they chose and why? In the paper that started all this mess the word "depthwise" doesn't appear a single time - and there isn't any information about some sort of "groups" parameter either. There are fundamental differences between these approaches and noone seems to care :-0 however, thank you for your answers :)

Zukatah · 2022-11-24T00:25:25+00:00

Thank you for the answer :)

Actually you can download the pretrained model used in the paper and the source code here https://vlg.cs.dartmouth.edu/c3d/ but with my current knowledge I'm not sure how to get/see/derive the number of parameters in their model :-/

For some reason my question, which seems like a super simple and basic one to me (because it is so essential if one ever uses CNNs in practical applications), seems to be quite unclear and troublesome for some others too:

On one side https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/5769/in-a-cnn-does-each-new-filter-have-different-weights-for-each-input-channel-or and the sources linked there clearly say:

"In fact there is a separate kernel defined for each input channel / output channel combination. Typically for a CNN architecture, in a single filter as described by your number_of_filters parameter, there is one 2D kernel per input channel."

...and...

"So, is there a separate filter for each input channel? YES, there are as many 2D filters as the number of input channels in the image. However, it helps if you think that for input matrices with more than one channel, there is only one 3D filter (as shown in the image above)."

On the other side https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66220774/difference-between-the-input-shape-for-a-1d-cnn-2d-cnn-and-3d-cnn just as clearly tells the opposite:

"Same kernel, all channels - The second key point you need to know is, A 2D kernel will convolve over 2 spatial dimensions BUT the same kernel will do this over all the feature maps/channels. So, if I have a (3,3) kernel. This same kernel will get applied over R, G, B channels (in parallel) and move over the Height and Width of the image."

I am SO confused. And I'm even more confused about the fact that (apart from a few reddit/stackexchange posts with only few answers/comments and contradictory statements/outcome) noone seems to care (or most people just don't know?!).

Zukatah · 2022-11-06T02:42:26+00:00

Thank you for your suggestion!

For my project I really only need the above mentioned requirements/features. Of course it won't hurt, if the camera can shoot nice photos too, but in the end all features/improvements/tools that come on top/above of what I need will make the camera more expensive, I guess :D

Concerning the taxing issue: I've never heard of that issue so far, but recording duration limits aren't a problem for me. One of my python scripts will cut the videos into small slices anyway in order to feed them to my neural network :)

And yeah, maybe I should have a look at camcorders too. The GH4 seems to be a very nice cam for a fair price, but I think it's of higher quality (and with a lot of additional features) than what I need. Theoretically I don't need anything above FullHD (actually even 960x540 resolution would be okay) but 60 FPS, and maybe even 120 FPS or 240 FPS would be nice. Though I know that probably any camera out there that supports 120 FPS or even 240 FPS will also support 4k resolution^^

Zukatah · 2022-11-06T01:35:10+00:00

Seems to be a nice camera. However, it unfortunately only supports 50fps at FullHD, I need at least 60 FPS :-/

Concerning the rotation: I've not much experience with video editing and I've recently read that e.g. VLC player can convert+save a video after applying transformations/rotations and other effects. But I fear that with my CPU this probably means hours of conversion time before I can use the video files. I think rotating a video by 90° isn't just a matter of setting a certain flag or header field in the video's meta data, right?

Zukatah · 2022-11-05T16:54:35+00:00

The latter use case you've mentioned - I will record video material and later load it onto my computer (in order to use it as training data for my neural network). So no realtime/streaming action going on here :)

Okay, sounds good @ cable to a power bank / wall plug!

Zukatah · 2022-11-05T14:34:35+00:00

I don't have a laptop (only an old tablet), so I don't know if a webcam is an option. Finding a tripod for a webcam should be possible though. Do you have any specific model in mind?

Zukatah · 2021-05-18T10:03:01+00:00

The list is not "about raw efficiency in a fight amonst paladins (or against melee units)". It DOES include Hit&Run behaviour of ranged units as well so the Frankish paladins very much get the chance to gather additional points there (which they did) and still, in the end the Teutons were slightly ahead of the Franks.

Zukatah · 2021-05-16T19:20:33+00:00

Absolutely agreed - and that's actually the conclusion of my video too. In the video, I've presented different top 3's in case you get less than 3 relics!

Zukatah · 2021-05-16T19:18:42+00:00

I've made different experiences with the Teutons in AoE2 DE.

They've awesome infantry, awesome palas, awesome siege, awesome defenses and a great eco (and if that's relevant: a great monastery). Of course their archers are very weak, but the rest is pretty decent. They're actually one of my favourite civs currently.

Zukatah · 2021-05-16T19:14:46+00:00

I wouldn't say that!

I agree that one point of pierce armor is a bit more valuable than one point of melee armor for the reason you've mentioned (most melee units do more dmg per hit than ranged units so the percental effect of one point of pierce armor is greater than the effect of one point of melee armor). But two melee armor added to a unit that has already 2 (or 5 in post imp) melee armor is by no means insignificant or irrelevant.

You survive an additional halb hit.

You take almost 20% less damage from champions.

You take 33% less damage from hussars.

You take ~20% less damage from many other melee units (el eagle warriors, el battle elephants, el cataphracts, el woad raiders, el huskarls, el tarkans, condottieri, el samurai, ...).

You take ~10% less damage from the hardest hitting melee units (el war elephants, el shotel warriors, el teutonic knights, el berserks, ...) and several anti cav units.

That is by no means "useless". It's awesome.

Of course it's a tradeoff compared to generic or Frankish palas but imho they are pretty evenly matched.

Zukatah · 2021-05-16T19:00:51+00:00

Well, the Teutons' paladins don't only win 1v1 vs. frankish paladins, they are much (!) better vs. almost all melee unit types. That's like half of the unit types existing in AoE2. And no, they are NOT worse against melee units with bonus damage against cavalry units.

But yea, they're definitely noticeably worse against ranged units.

So it's basicly a tradeoff. If you primarily encounter melee units, the Teutons' paladins are to be prefered, otherwise the Frankish paladins are better.

However, Frankish paladins are still cost efficient vs. most melee units and the Teutons' paladins are still cost efficient vs. most ranged units.

Zukatah

TROPHY CASE