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Steamhammer sucks with devourers

Devourers are not an everyday unit. They are specialist anti-air support units for when the enemy goes mass air. Devourers shoot slowly and do little damage for their cost, but their acid spores splash on enemy air units and make mutalisk or hydralisk fire much more effective.

Only today did Steamhammer play its first devourer game, the first game in which it both made devourers and had opportunity to put them to good use. XIMP by Tomas Vajda certainly goes mass air, and with devourers Steamhammer could have made short work of the carriers and corsairs.

devourers fly past like idiots

But it didn’t. Steamhammer’s devourer play turned out to be terribly weak. They sometimes hung back ignoring the enemy and sometimes pushed forward on their own and took fire without reacting. In the picture, the 4 devourers are flying at an angle past the corsairs, ignoring them instead of loading them up with purple goop. Shortly after, they flew around and past the carriers, taking fire and still not engaging.

Devourers are not easy to use well, but I was surprised at how poorly they turned out. I didn’t put any special effort into guardian play, and Steamhammer uses guardians effectively as support units, with fewer micro and coordination issues than I expected. Mixing guardians into the late game army poses problems for the enemy, and the devourers did not.

At some point (if nobody beats me to it) I will teach FAP about the effects of acid spores, and then the real anti-air units in the army will know when to pour on the fire. But that’s not the underlying problem in this game. Devourers moved around foolishly and did not shoot as often as they should have.

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Joseph Huang on :

There is an issue with grabbing all units when running combat sim, instead of only units in the squad. I suspect devorers will work a lot better with a fix for that.

Also with how fap handles carriers, it is important to avoid adding interceptors to the sim.

Jay Scott on :

True, but I think it is not a serious issue in this particular case. Part of the problem is that, like scourge, they retreat without engaging whenever the squad is ordered to retreat, whether it makes sense for each specific unit or not.

Joseph Huang on :

The interceptor issue will cause too much retreating as carriers will be simmed as double attack strength.

Jay Scott on :

Hmm, are you suggesting that FAP has a bug in simulating interceptors? Not that that would be particularly surprising. I haven’t looked at all at the carrier code.

Joseph Huang on :

The carrier attack stats are tuned for not adding interceptors to the sim. You could fix this by either decreasing carrier base attack, or skip adding interceptors to the sim.

Jay Scott on :

I see, I’m misusing it because I didn’t understand that wrinkle. I think for now I’ll remove interceptors from the sim. But someday I’ll try this change: Carriers have no weapon except interceptors, so only add visible interceptors to the sim and represent carriers as otherwise defenseless. Then it won’t be afraid of carriers that have lost their interceptors, and it will investigate carriers that have not launched yet. I think that’s likely to be better behavior.

PurpleWaveJadien on :

"...investigate carriers that have not launched yet" -> http://www.hilariousgifs.com/i/qrLEV.gif

Jay Scott on :

Oh, I found some more mistakes in how I’m using FAP, though they’re minor. SparCraft understands detectors, and FAP doesn’t. And I was accidentally leaving out a few unusual units.

MicroDK on :

A squad serves well if it contains the same kind of unit that needs to use combat sim and regroup well together. Units with special functionslity that do not need to regroup should not be part of a squad or have its own special squad where the unitmanager handles if it should do an action or not. Like the drop squad...

Jay Scott on :

That seems like a decent approach. The way I think of it is: It’s best to keep the clean conceptual framework of layers of abstraction. Units that belong in a squad together are units that can be thought of as working together to achieve the same goal, which is to carry out the squad’s order. So if the order is “fight those carriers” I would put devourers and scourge in the same squad as hydralisks, and it is up to the squad to get the different unit types to cooperate and combine their strengths. If the order is “go ravage that base” then the hydralisks get that order and the devourers and scourge might go into a different squad with an order like “provide air defense” or “scout for enemy air units”. To fully realize this vision I’ll have to rewrite the tactics boss and the squad code, so it may be a while....

MicroDK on :

How does FAP handled reavers? They do not have a weapon either like carriers. Microwave handles carriers fine. I have seen a couple of games vs Ximp and it did not seem to be more scared of carriers than with Sparcraft, and I do not skip adding interceptors. It might go even better if I do not add interceptors to the sim. ;)

Jay Scott on :

The reaver’s weapon is set to the scarab. See FAPUnit() where unit characteristics are set. The sim doesn’t include splash damage, so it will greatly underestimate the damage a reaver does in the hands of a skilled opponent like McRave.

Marian on :

The devourers are supposed to be primarily used with scourge vs carriers and with muta vs battlecruisers.
Ofcourse you can use devourer+muta+scourge for maximum effect(even queens fuck yeah!).
Vs protoss you utilize acid spores slowing down attack speed - targeting corsairs while scourge flank to destroy whatever there is to be destroyed.
Vs terran you target the BC's directly or anything there is to protect them and utilize the armor reduction and attack speed reduction, allowing your mutas to rampage.
Even with attack speed halved scourges are still one shotted by battlecruisers making them a less attractive option.

So maybe the proper micro would be hit and run while avoiding direct confrontation with the carrier fleet.
Easy to write hard to code I suppose.

PurpleWaveJadien on :

I just recalled that Devourers are supposed to have the same vulnerability to attack animation cancelling as Dragoons. Is that a potential cause of missed attacks here?

Jay Scott on :

Hmm... I don't think so. I watched the game again. I see standard Steamhammer misbehaviors like retreating through the enemy and suiciding into defense, and I see lying around idle behind the front lines. I don’t see interrupted animations, which I think ought to be visible.

LetaBot on :

CIG results are publisged. So time for yet another results disussion :)

https://cilab.sejong.ac.kr/sc_competition/?cat=17

Cross tables aren't posted yet. Replays + bots will be released after the AIIDE submission deadline.

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