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Albalrogue  Offline
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Group: Villager
Posts: 94
God damn creature!
« Posted Sep 05, 2010, 04:20 PM »


Hey all, I've started playing BW1 again and I'm having problems with my creature.

When I started training him, I tought him to eat, sleep (at night and when exausted), and drink.
Then once I saw he could look after himself, I tought him to be nice to others : collect food and wood, water trees and fiels, impress villagers (he learned that on his own).

But now he just goes to be nice and won't think of himself, he gets hungry and wont eat, he gets tired he won't sleep, funny enough he drinks from time to time.

Oh and he uses miracles quite a lot so he gets exausted quite fast.

Anybody, please help me put this son of creature straight! u_u"

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vezrilx  Offline
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Group: Villager
Posts: 19
Re: God damn creature!
« Reply #1 Posted Sep 06, 2010, 02:24 AM »


Lots of beating and a few lightning strikes should set em straight  woot

But seriously, what you're describing happens to a lot of people. What's going on is, your creature's need/desire to help your people is greater than any desire to eat/sleep.

You have two approaches here, first, you can increase his desire to eat and sleep, which you need to be careful with. You don't want to make him too greedy/tired. Your creature's eating habits can be annoying to fix, it really depends what's wrong with them and trying to fix the issue might end up screwing with more variables in his mind. Obviously the best way to get a creature to eat more often is to get him to eat things.. more often (note hunger when you reward him AND when you feed him). There are a few tricks to use if your creature isn't eating at all. Make sure you do not have him on a leash, then hand him the food. If he is curious, or decides to do something else afterwards, reward him to ZERO percent. This will turn his attention to you, "Your creature wants to mess around with you." Once that happens quickly reward him to 10% and he will eat it almost every time no matter how bad of a state his mind is in. Reward at your own discretion afterwards. Things to watch out for would be, feeding him at low hunger levels, and getting him too accustomed to eating what you give him. Creatures can learn to eat things as soon as you give it to them, and they can also learn to only accept food from you, instead of getting his own.
-- As for sleeping, creatures all develop different sleeping pattens which can be VERY annoying to fix. Especially when you want them to sleep outside of the temple creature pen. Getting him to sleep while away from distractions may help. Rocks and trees that he cannot pickup will be more likely to cause your creature to sleep while leashed, but it's not certain. Teaching him to sleep too much in the pen might cause him to only ever sleep in his pen, which is annoying as heck to me, but you might want that.

Second, you may want to consider lowering your creature's desire to help your people, ESPECIALLY when he has a high hunger or tiredness. Also you can teach your creature to use miracles less, and choose to manually gather resources to save energy when he gets tired. You also have to be somewhat careful with this as you don't want him to ignore your people forever (that won't really happen), but you have to keep in mind the creature will try to choose something they think is okay. He might end up trying to kill people if you push him too far. Then when you turn around and beat him til he's bruised, he'll add that as a rebellious action to choose from.

When you get into messes like these you need to consider how you taught your creature. If you used 15 miracles in a row helping your village and raising the % your creatures knows miracles, there is a chance he learned the whole streak, or any other combination you did, so he's going to pass out before it occurs to him to shift focus. Remember that positive reinforcement works much better than negative, though you need to be very mindful of the condition your creature is in and what's happening around him at the time. You might not want your creature to refuse to water your burning buildings just because his tiredness is 65%.

Keep in mind a creature's intelligence actually has a lot to do with how you teach them outside of miracles as well. Tigers might decide to do the same thing you slapped them for five times in a row, while I had an ape that could tell he needed to cast a specific miracle if I merely charged it up in my hand and hovered around him a bit (that was freaking cool). I've noticed that the more intelligence a creature has, the more likely it will try to act rebellious from beatings so beware.

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Albalrogue  Offline
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Group: Villager
Posts: 94
Re: God damn creature!
« Reply #2 Posted Sep 06, 2010, 11:34 AM »


Well here's what I did :

50% for feeding, sleeping when exausted, sleeping at night, drinking when thirsty
40% for being curious
60% for messing around with me
70-80% for being nice and generous, impressing people
30% for being playfull.

For punishing, I do it randomly according to his actions. But it's around 30-60 generaly.

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fenton_pat  Offline
Insane Irishman
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Group: Deities
Posts: 3,265

Re: God damn creature!
« Reply #3 Posted Sep 06, 2010, 02:03 PM »


It's a delicate balancing act really.

Don't forget one of the real problems in B&W1 was that you were never 100% sure what you were rewarding/punishing him for.

A few more things to consider:
  • Rewarding is cumulative, i.e. even if you reward him the same way every time he does an action, it's reinforcing the behaviour so that he'll do it more often.  It won't just leave it at the same level you initially rewarded him for that same action.  In the beginning, if he happens to do one good action more than the others (which you reward the same way each time), that action can still be the dominant one even if you only reward it by say 10%.  Once you've taught your creature how right/wrong an action is, you should not continue to do so as it'll only upset the balance.  Only if your creature is doing one action too little/too much should you give him a one-off reward/punishment as required.
  • Neat/annoying little feature this that not many people seem to know about.  While B&W2 was in development, Peter Molyneux admitted that one of the bad things they did with the B&W1 creatures was that if you didn't praise/punish a creature's actions, he'll automatically assume it's something like 10% good (perhaps a smaller percentage, but the principle is the same).  This goes some way to explaining why really old creatures become a little bit daft in their old age as they've developed a lifetime of bad habits not rewarded/punished by their owner suspect.
« Last Edit: Sep 07, 2010, 09:09 AM by fenton_pat »

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Okapidragon  Offline
Wazzat?
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Archaeologist

Group: Elders
Posts: 1,242
Re: God damn creature!
« Reply #4 Posted Sep 06, 2010, 05:53 PM »


 shocked I had not heard about the automatic reinforcement. Explains a lot.  laugh 2

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