Impossible for players to capture friendly mines

[ik80]

Preliminary checks

• I've checked that there aren't other open issues on the same topic.
• I've checked that this issue is reproducible on the latest snapshot build.

Platform

Windows

Describe the bug

Original game allowed for capture of friendly AI (and I think also friendly human player) mines/sawmills etc.

Current code has a check that prevents this. Would be "fixed" by removing two lines.

Save file

QUICKSAVE.zip

Crodo can not capture red sawmill on the top right.

Additional info

No response

[ihhub]

I hardly consider this a bug. This is a deliberate choice. If you want to make to capture mines then the AI will do the same as well as attack human heroes and castles. That would be a fair point.

If we see on this from another angle, it might be a bug in the original and we won't replicate bugs.

[ik80]

In original game, AI didn't capture friendly resources / castles.

[ihhub]

I am moving this into the Discussion section. I also remember that there is a discussion topic about this.

[ihhub]

And are you aware that the capturing for friendly mines and attacking friendly heroes was made because of the weak AI?

[ik80]

I'm not aware of gameplay / game design choices that were made in fheroes2.

I opened this issue / PR to try and bring gameplay logic closer to original game. With this change only players are allowed to capture friendly resources at their discretion, and the similar check that prevents AI to capture friendly resources remains intact.

[Branikolog]

Hi, @ik80 !
Thanks for your interest in fheroes2 project!

Our team decided many years ago to prevent players from capturing mines owned by their allies.

We believe that the alliance mechanics in the original game had several design flaws and unfinished aspects. This was partly because alliances were a completely new gameplay mechanic at the time, and partly because the AI was rather limited and could often interfere with the player's progress instead of helping.

In later Heroes games, both the alliance mechanics and the AI were improved. Because of that, we decided to make this aspect of fheroes2 behave more like what players familiar with the later games would naturally expect.

Capturing allied mines is one of those mechanics from the original Heroes II that remains quite controversial. However, as @ihhub correctly pointed out, if we allow the player to do this, we should also teach the AI to do the same. One of the core principles of AI development in fheroes2 is that the AI should be able to use the same gameplay mechanics as the player.

Interestingly, I've just checked the original game myself, and an allied AI could occasionally capture the player's mine. I don't know whether this was intentional or simply a side effect of the original AI implementation. Judging by the fact that the AI usually ignored allied mines, it seems more likely that it happened accidentally when the AI's path happened to cross such a mine.

If we decide to restore this behavior, we would also need to redesign the current AI to properly understand and use it. This is far from a trivial task, as it affects many different gameplay systems and would require considerable design discussion and development effort.

At the moment, we don't believe this is the best use of our limited development time, as the project currently has higher-priority goals.

Personally, I think it could be fun if alliances became more dynamic, for example, allowing diplomatic relationships to change during a scenario and alliances to break under certain conditions. However, that would move well beyond the traditional Heroes II gameplay, so it is not something we expect to implement in the foreseeable future.

[ik80]

I see few requests related to this specific change to original game mechanics in discussions. Would it be reasonable to include "Original gameplay rules" checkbox in the options to enable this? I could pick up additional things that are needed in UI.

[Branikolog]

@ik80
Over the past five years of development, we've only received a couple of requests regarding this particular aspect of the alliance mechanics. To be honest, most players have become much more familiar with the alliance behavior introduced in Heroes III and later games, so the current implementation generally feels natural to them.

As a general design principle, we try to avoid introducing configuration options for every rarely requested gameplay variation. In my personal opinion, a large number of checkboxes for controversial mechanics is often a sign that the game design itself is uncertain. Instead of making a clear design decision, the responsibility is shifted to the player through an ever-growing list of options.

When the current fheroes2 team started working on the project, the engine already contained dozens of obscure and questionable options. We've spent a lot of effort simplifying the configuration, removing edge-case settings, and making the game easier to understand without forcing players to navigate through large lists of rarely used options.

Perhaps in the future we'll revisit the alliance mechanics as a whole and introduce new interactions that make alliances deeper and more interesting. However, at the moment we don't have the resources to properly implement this feature. It would require much more than adding a checkbox: we'd also need to design the UI, create an icon and description, update the AI to support the same behavior, and ensure players understand when and why they would want to use such an option.

Considering that the current implementation is both familiar to most players and well balanced, we don't believe introducing an additional option for this specific mechanic is the right direction at the moment.

[joereynolds]

Just chiming in to say I found it rather unintuitive that we couldn't capture allied mines either.
Me and my friend like to coordinate our efforts and it makes it harder to do so when the allied AI has hoovered up all the mines and me and my human ally are struggling whilst our computer ally is living the good life with all of the mines.

[ik80]

fheroes2 team insists on making this different from original game. Is really a single "if" in the game logic. If you can build the game, just checkout master and build.

Here's the change #10937

[Branikolog]

This may sound a bit biased, but I feel that the alliance system introduced in Heroes II was rather limited and somewhat unbalanced. The ability to unilaterally capture a resource mine belonging to an ally, or even attack them, does not feel very intuitive and creates some balance issues.

Even if we tried to stay closer to the original behavior, it raises an important question: how should we teach the AI to handle such situations? Should allied AI players also capture each other's mines and attack one another? Should they only react after aggressive actions from the player and mirror that behavior? This quickly becomes a much deeper AI design question.

As AI and the map editor continue to improve, we plan to expand the alliance mechanics in the future and make them more interesting and flexible. For now, however, we prefer to follow the safer and more peaceful alliance concept introduced in the later games of the series.

Perhaps players would have fewer questions about this behavior if visiting an allied mine displayed a message explaining that the mine belongs to an ally and cannot be captured. What do you think, @ihhub?

[ihhub]

I don't think that showing a message would solve the core concern but we can add it.

[Branikolog]

@ihhub
I agree, but we quite often receive reports from users who think they have encountered a bug because they cannot capture a mine, while later it turns out that the mine belongs to an ally.

[zenseii]

@ihhub and @Branikolog we need to consider whether adding a popup dialog will add unnecessary popups for players who just want to path through these mines/saw mills. I'm not sure it is the best solution. As you said, we haven't had many people complain about this so making such a big change might be unnecessary. If we keep the current behavior then essentially the players who thought they could capture the mine will quickly learn that this doesn't work, other players who didn't think it was possible to capture mines will not mind anything. However if we add the popup, then the players who want to capture allied mines will still be annoyed after the popup, while the players who didn't want to capture the mine are bothered by extra dialogs. It would be like a smaller form of showing a dialog whenver you visit a mine you already own that says "This mine already belongs to you.", this would be much more interruptive but in the same area of unnecessarily annoying.

I think exploring how alliances work would be much more interesting, but yes it would take a lot more time and effort. I think that can be revisited later.