Fight engine improvements (April '15 discussion)

[JLP]

I would like to bring in a separate cap for total physicals but it'd be extremely difficult to implement... plus, if you are going for a physical beast then you definitively are leaving yourself open in other areas.

in the top end of the game everyone is elite across the boards in physicals already. After age/injury degradation started I routinely went into elite+ territory for the ones important to my fighter style. You are at a sizable disadvantage if you arent a physicals beast by the age of 23-24.

[FallenFlyer]

I would like to bring in a separate cap for total physicals but it'd be extremely difficult to implement... plus, if you are going for a physical beast then you definitively are leaving yourself open in other areas.

 

I think you'd be better applying a couple of hidden modifiers to differentiate physicals than separating them.

 

On the whole, most people are either power people or endurance people. By working out you can compensate for your weaker area but ultimately you are naturally better at one or the other. Obviously you get some freaks as well - who are just amazing at both - but these are few and far between.

 

To represent this you could then have two groups (strength/agility/speed and conditioning/flexibility/balance) modified by +/- 0.40 which are randomly assigned like all the other hiddens. Then you keep the physical monsters but some will actually be that and others who will never achieve it no matter how much they work at it.

[Stu_Pidasol]

The last thing this game needs is another hidden, another piece of luck deciding g if your fighter is going to be good or not.. There's already too much emphasis put on random rolls at creation.. It should be a game of skill not luck.

 

I like the scramble idea - however I don't think the % of takedowns needs to increase, just the energy loss on a sliding scale like discussed.. You mix your strikes up and you land takedowns at a more than reasonable rate

[Skap]

A point about testing on The Island (since it has come up):

 

When The Island first started I assumed that any fighters made there (and any companies/orgs) would never leave and join the main game. I assumed that they were for The Island and that's that, that they auto-retire when the Island is over (not even going FA). Now that people are talking about testing changes on The Island, I'm wishing that my assumption had been correct, because if it were like that, this would allow the possibility of starting with 1800 skill points or something (Island training being only a top-up). That would allow all kinds of builds at mid-level and a perfect environment for testing potential engine changes every year.

 

I agree, testing on the island with higher skilled fighters would be a good starting point.

[JLP]

I know this isnt about the engine, but another thing I think we should revisit would be age/injury degradation. Karl Socha is 30, has 67 total injury days in his career and is already on a pretty consistent skill loss trend. Six weeks ago he was at 2718 according to the total skills graph. Today he is at 2679. Thats a trend I think should be happening for a guy in his mid to late 30s with a bad injury history. Not a fighter in his prime with a low injury hidden.

I dont even get how this is all governed, because it cant be age and injury as mike has said or Socha would not be losing skills at 30 with less than 67 injury days. I can enter 35 as a minimum age in the search function and get back a long list of triple elites with a brown belt or double elites with a black belt. I doubt any of these guys have less than 67 injury days but have shown no signs of decline as of yet.

[Turbodave222]

has the fight engine already had some changes? i noticed a lot more succesful takedowns and subs in last night fights. fights where my fighters wouldnt get takendown, were almost all fights who ended on the ground. if you have put changes already, it might be too much. Most fights were on the ground, even with good TD and prediction on opponent trying takedowns

[ArtieBanks]

I know this isnt about the engine, but another thing I think we should revisit would be age/injury degradation. Karl Socha is 30, has 67 total injury days in his career and is already on a pretty consistent skill loss trend. Six weeks ago he was at 2718 according to the total skills graph. Today he is at 2679. Thats a trend I think should be happening for a guy in his mid to late 30s with a bad injury history. Not a fighter in his prime with a low injury hidden.

I dont even get how this is all governed, because it cant be age and injury as mike has said or Socha would not be losing skills at 30 with less than 67 injury days. I can enter 35 as a minimum age in the search function and get back a long list of triple elites with a brown belt or double elites with a black belt. I doubt any of these guys have less than 67 injury days but have shown no signs of decline as of yet.

 

I concur, Roman is 30 and he is starting to decline now, same with Andrei. Yet my 38 year old hero Ryo Narushima continues to learn.

[MMATycoon]

has the fight engine already had some changes? i noticed a lot more succesful takedowns and subs in last night fights. fights where my fighters wouldnt get takendown, were almost all fights who ended on the ground. if you have put changes already, it might be too much. Most fights were on the ground, even with good TD and prediction on opponent trying takedowns

Haven't touched it

 

I think this post says a lot; perception is very easily changed.

[MMATycoon]

There is a hidden for the age where people start to decline. That's been the case for at least a couple of RL years.

 

As for the speed - it will be quicker just after their birthday and tail off towards the end of their in game year.

[Mentor]

The biggest problem with the engine is that we keep on changing it. Every change screws up the guys which were building up a certain type of fighter for that engine. Whatever the change is this time, we should just keep it and stop screwing around with it. With every single engine change we lost a few good managers and in the past 6 years we have had multiple significant changes. For the most part the engine has not seriously gotten better since 2009-2010, despite all the changes.

 

The engine is probably the one thing we should not be changing at all because fighters are built over months. If you make one tweak to the engine it screws up the strategy the manager was planning and makes their fighter useless. Can we simply get this engine thing sorted out and we just stop fiddling around with it all the time? I did not hear any significant complaints with the engine how it was, i hear a lot more now though.

 

I am sure there is 100s of other features which can be added.

[Scooby]

Haven't touched it

 

I think this post says a lot; perception is very easily changed.

 

Lol, this is why this process will take FOREVER...

 

We just need the referee standups lowered... Since i didnt train escapes thats my own fault.

 

The rest of our plans will take 3 island seasons to figure out. Testing it in one island season doesnt mean it will be right. Instead of us breaking the game i think we should do something simple while testing shit on the island

[JLP]

There is a hidden for the age where people start to decline. That's been the case for at least a couple of RL years.

 

As for the speed - it will be quicker just after their birthday and tail off towards the end of their in game year.

So there is no use for the injury hidden other than keeping fighters from fighting often?

If a decline hidden causes a guy to fall off at age 30 that definitely needs to be adjusted. Athletic prime is usually 27-33. You might see a guy tail off earlier due to injuries.

[Rambo]

So there is no use for the injury hidden other than keeping fighters from fighting often?

If a decline hidden causes a guy to fall off at age 30 that definitely needs to be adjusted. Athletic prime is usually 27-33. You might see a guy tail off earlier due to injuries.

 

Disagree. Athletic prime is in your early twenties, but we'll say MMA's athletic prime is 21-30 and 30 is really pushing it. Everbody's different though. Depends on how much punishment a body takes. After X amount of fights, and training, wear and tear will happen. If we look at the best fighters in the UFC, the guys with a ton of experience and fights you see fading earlier or losing a pep in their step. Chris Weidman and Luke Rockhold are both 30 years old, but they only have 12 and 16 fights.

 

You really can't use Brazilian's for examples here either, cuz Brazil is a dirty testosterone boosting cesspool. Jose Aldo is 28 years old and has 26 fights, but imo he's looked considerably slower in the UFC than his WEC days.

 

Your fighter has had 34 fights at 30 years old, and there's all types of things I could point out to indicate that it's realistic for him to be falling off in his late 20's. I think a really good IRL example of fighters falling off at an early age would be Chris Horodecki and Shogun.

 

 

Anyway, I think it's fine as it is. No need to change the decline factor. If you don't like that he's degrading it's time for your dude to hang em up, and bring in a new guy.... and I know the issue with this last line is that you've been building his skills for years or whatever, cuz it takes so long for a fighter to reach his max potential, which is why I training speed for all skills should increase, especially since there's a skill cap.

[Rambo]

Rampage Jackson is somebody who fell off rather quickly around 30 too.

[shortfuse122829]

That's been my biggest issue too CK, I'd be fine with the decline where it is if the rise happened a bit faster. My current top level guys took til around 26 to get to the elite level & started declining at or before 30. Granted all my fighters were grapplers which take longer to build......but for a manager like myself who only really cares about elite level fighting & uses ID orgs and lower level fights just as a testing ground, it's very frustrating to invest 2yrs RL time to a fighter who starts going to shit not very long after he makes the big leagues

http://www.mmatycoon.com/fighterprofilepublic.php?FID=183867

is an example, created in July of 2012 moved to Heroic in June of 2014 with his highest secondary being sens + & I cut him in Feb of 2015 because he'd already dropped from about 2680 points to 2590 & was losing about 8 pts per week @ 28-29 yrs old

[JLP]

Mike said earlier decline is based on a hidden generated at creation, he didnt really mention injury at all. I take that to mean that its not part of the equation. So the number of fights and damaged taken seems to be irrelevant to this conversation. Theoretically you could make a fighter who has a bad decline age # and never fight with him and still have skills decline at a young age. I'm not sure if injuries factor in as a modifier to the decline, it would be nice if they did. The large numbers of old highly skilled fighters with lots of fights would make me think that it doesnt have any or very little influence on the degrade.

 

I've never seen any thing implying an athlete peaks in their early 20s. Ive always read that its a sharp increase until late 20s followed by a slow and gradual decrease in the early 30s.

[Rambo]

 

That's been my biggest issue too CK, I'd be fine with the decline where it is if the rise happened a bit faster. My current top level guys took til around 26 to get to the elite level & started declining at or before 30. Granted all my fighters were grapplers which take longer to build......but for a manager like myself who only really cares about elite level fighting & uses ID orgs and lower level fights just as a testing ground, it's very frustrating to invest 2yrs RL time to a fighter who starts going to shit not very long after he makes the big leagues

http://www.mmatycoon.com/fighterprofilepublic.php?FID=183867

is an example, created in July of 2012 moved to Heroic in June of 2014 with his highest secondary being sens + & I cut him in Feb of 2015 because he'd already dropped from about 2680 points to 2590 & was losing about 8 pts per week @ 28-29 yrs old

 

 

That guy's been fighting for 12 in game years. He should be expected to decline.

 

Mike said earlier decline is based on a hidden generated at creation, he didnt really mention injury at all. I take that to mean that its not part of the equation. So the number of fights and damaged taken seems to be irrelevant to this conversation. Theoretically you could make a fighter who has a bad decline age # and never fight with him and still have skills decline at a young age. I'm not sure if injuries factor in as a modifier to the decline, it would be nice if they did. The large numbers of old highly skilled fighters with lots of fights would make me think that it doesnt have any or very little influence on the degrade.

 

I've never seen any thing implying an athlete peaks in their early 20s. Ive always read that its a sharp increase until late 20s followed by a slow and gradual decrease in the early 30s.

 

Look it up man. I'm almost positive you're at your prime in the early twenties. Now there's a shit ton of supplements and stuff like that, that could alter this... but naturally, your body peaks out in your early 20's. I think you naturally start to decline at 26-28 IRL.

[Timmy]

has the fight engine already had some changes? i noticed a lot more succesful takedowns and subs in last night fights. fights where my fighters wouldnt get takendown, were almost all fights who ended on the ground. if you have put changes already, it might be too much. Most fights were on the ground, even with good TD and prediction on opponent trying takedowns

 

"I want you to think about engine changes"

[Rambo]

 

"I want you to think about engine changes"

 

lol

 

 

people often forget the randomness in randomly generated numbers. it's easy to come to a consensus when things don't go the way you anticipated it, but when dealing with random "dice rolls", there's going to be a lot of unpredictability.

[Timmy]

 

lol

 

 

people often forget the randomness in randomly generated numbers. it's easy to come to a consensus when things don't go the way you anticipated it, but when dealing with random "dice rolls", there's going to be a lot of unpredictability.

 

That's one of the ways financial fraud investigators spot falsified figures - As perhaps you know.

When people try to create false "randomness" it becomes "too random" because they are reluctant to put in anything too wierd. Asked to write 100 random digits, people avoid puting anything like seven 3's in a row for example. In real randomness strange things happen all the time.

[JLP]

Peak and decline are also two different things. Just because you peak on say your 27th birthday it doesnt mean you fall off the cliff the next day. You would maintain close to that physical level for an amount of time afterwards and then start declining.

[Rambo]

Peak and decline are also two different things. Just because you peak on say your 27th birthday it doesnt mean you fall off the cliff the next day. You would maintain close to that physical level for an amount of time afterwards and then start declining.

 

I'm not going to argue that, I just think that male human beings start to decline athletically around or after 26-28.

[Scooby]

So... About these referee standups

[gwad12345]

Yea I think this is another topic for discussion. This is not the engine lets try to keep it on topic.

[JLP]

I think mike has already decided what he is going to do about standups and escapes. His idea seems like a very good one as long as the energy sap from missed tds gets toned down a bit. I'd also like to see predictions toned down a bit.

In the five years Ive been playing I learned that you got to bring things up when you have mikes attention.