One of the reasons ladders aren't performing correctly in siege mode is that all of the units assigned to attack up a ladder (and this includes siege towers obviously) are all ordered to do so at once. This results in a pathing and collision nightmare that is obvious to anyone who stops to think about it for 5 minutes, although the solution might not be quite so obvious. I imagine this was done to keep the pathing AI a bit more lightweight, but if so that should probably be looked at again, because breaking part of the game for AI cost savings is probably a bad bargain.
The problem is made worse by the fact that the transition point from "being near the ladder" to "being on the ladder" is only 1 man wide. IRL when approaching a ladder you can grab it from either side and swing a leg over onto the rung but in this game you can only step on the rungs of a latter if you're right in front of it. So if you've got people all pushing to be on one exact spot the result is an unsolvable shoving match where soldiers can only get onto the ladder if, by pure random chance, they happen to get jostled and bumped and shoved and ragdolled onto the correct 2 square feet of ground
So one solution that might go a long distance towards cleaning up ladder AI is just creating a transition point that's about 2-3 men wide and letting people snap to the ladder from slightly further away. This would at least guarantee that you wouldn't have hundreds of soldiers piled up at the bottom of the ladder but no one able to navigate the moshpit in order to get to the precise transition point. Generally speaking after all, if you're standing not mounted on a horse right at the base of the ladder, you want to go up the ladder, so a larger safety margin to ensure soldiers can transition from the ground to the ladder even in a crowd of collision based randomness would be a great start to fixing this issue.
The other way to do it is to take a page from the fixes done to the gatehouse assault module. In the gatehouse assault module, once the outer gate is down, the soldiers rush into the gatehouse but individual members of the assault team are tasked to stand in front of the inner gate and tear it down. Tasking individual soldiers from the ladder teams to go the base of the ladder and having other members of the team group 3 paces back, rather than everyone trying to go up at once, is the other way to solve the same problem. I mean heck, the ladder teams have those individual tasks too, when they set the ladders up in the first place. Just take the same idea and move soldiers to the bottom position of each ladder one at a time. That's 2 soldiers at a time with standard ladders and 3 at a time in siege towers. Shouldn't be even difficult to program if your coder knows his/her business.
so there's two tips that might be a big help in solving the ladder issue: Increase the transition aperture to get onto the ladders, or add in an AI script that means that instead of moshing at the base of the ladder soldiers go up 2-3 at a time in an orderly fashion. either one would work. Doing both would probably work best.
The problem is made worse by the fact that the transition point from "being near the ladder" to "being on the ladder" is only 1 man wide. IRL when approaching a ladder you can grab it from either side and swing a leg over onto the rung but in this game you can only step on the rungs of a latter if you're right in front of it. So if you've got people all pushing to be on one exact spot the result is an unsolvable shoving match where soldiers can only get onto the ladder if, by pure random chance, they happen to get jostled and bumped and shoved and ragdolled onto the correct 2 square feet of ground
So one solution that might go a long distance towards cleaning up ladder AI is just creating a transition point that's about 2-3 men wide and letting people snap to the ladder from slightly further away. This would at least guarantee that you wouldn't have hundreds of soldiers piled up at the bottom of the ladder but no one able to navigate the moshpit in order to get to the precise transition point. Generally speaking after all, if you're standing not mounted on a horse right at the base of the ladder, you want to go up the ladder, so a larger safety margin to ensure soldiers can transition from the ground to the ladder even in a crowd of collision based randomness would be a great start to fixing this issue.
The other way to do it is to take a page from the fixes done to the gatehouse assault module. In the gatehouse assault module, once the outer gate is down, the soldiers rush into the gatehouse but individual members of the assault team are tasked to stand in front of the inner gate and tear it down. Tasking individual soldiers from the ladder teams to go the base of the ladder and having other members of the team group 3 paces back, rather than everyone trying to go up at once, is the other way to solve the same problem. I mean heck, the ladder teams have those individual tasks too, when they set the ladders up in the first place. Just take the same idea and move soldiers to the bottom position of each ladder one at a time. That's 2 soldiers at a time with standard ladders and 3 at a time in siege towers. Shouldn't be even difficult to program if your coder knows his/her business.
so there's two tips that might be a big help in solving the ladder issue: Increase the transition aperture to get onto the ladders, or add in an AI script that means that instead of moshing at the base of the ladder soldiers go up 2-3 at a time in an orderly fashion. either one would work. Doing both would probably work best.
