Mutiny! (Then crash)

[Destructavator]

OK, I was quickly testing the most recent SVN revision, not really playing the game - at least not on a serious level - and I'm not sure if this is a bug or just because I was doing unusual things to test stuff:

I wanted to see how the camera scrolled when aliens attack, so I started a battlescape mission but didn't see any aliens, just many civilians.  Being impatient after a few turns of moving soldiers around, I decided to start shooting civilians, mowing them down left and right hoping the aliens would come after my soldiers instead.

While happily blasting a civ with (un)friendly fire, one soldier accidentally hit another soldier with a stray shot.  Then, when clicking the "end turn" button a strange thing happened - all my soldiers started attacking each other, blasting one another in a big free-for-all!

When it got down to the last soldier left, the server crashed and I got kicked back to the geoscape - not sure what happened.

I'll post a log later if anyone wants to see it.

Perhaps one of the coders should put in a safeguard for prompting for confirmation before attacking friendly units - ("Are you SURE you want to target this unit?")

Edit:  I also think the game should punish players who repeatedly "go psycho" on their own units or innocent civs that are not infected (having the funding nations get very mad very quickly, getting threats in the inbox about being removed from command, etc.).

[Duke]

Can you (or maybe someone else) try this a second time to confirm it wasn't some 'unusual clicking' like you described in your post ?

[Destructavator]

"unusual clicking?"  I'm not fully clear on what you mean by that, the big thing that was unusual on my part was simply that I was shooting civilians.  The unusual effect on the game's part is that after a stray shot hit another soldier all the soldiers attacked each other during the enemy's turn, as if every soldier thought everyone else was an enemy.

Perhaps I could try to reproduce this, but look at what the console reports when/if it happens again.

[Duke]

...and I'm not sure if this is a bug or just because I was doing unusual things to test stuff:

I was just referring to this statement of yours.

It would be helpful if you could confirm that it's reproducible.

[Destructavator]

OK, I'll see if I can make it happen again, and if it does I'll do my best to collect more information.

[Viento]

I don't know whether it is related... I saw aliens shooting their fellow aliens, running after each other and killing each other (on purpose, not because standing in the line of fire). It doesn't happen often, but could be connected. I didn't find out what caused aliens to hunt down each other.

Andy

[Destructavator]

I don't know whether it is related... I saw aliens shooting their fellow aliens, running after each other and killing each other (on purpose, not because standing in the line of fire). It doesn't happen often, but could be connected. I didn't find out what caused aliens to hunt down each other.

Andy

Hmmm... It might be...

I don't know exactly how the current AI is programmed to target enemy units, but I know enough about programming to know that there may be a typo with some line of code so that a unit targets another from team "x" instead of "y."

Let me try this - is there a way to tell the game to give very verbose output in the console when one unit targets another, to help find where the problem might be?

[Destructavator]

Figured it out!

It has to do with morale and panic behavior - Because I was drilling civs all my soldiers' morale went down too low, so they started panicking and going into a rage where they would shoot anything, even other soldiers.

I suspect this also causes the aliens to do the same thing sometimes when the player is winning, as aliens get defeated they panic and shoot anything, even each other.

Therefore, it really isn't a bug, just a feature in action that can get in the way if the player starts targeting civilians.

...Or, to quote a familiar phrase: "It isn't a bug, its a usability problem."   

[Mattn]

in this case it's really a feature

the morale behaviour is controlled by cvars, if they need tweaking, patches are welcome