dbc17 hacks: fearsome tweak v1.51

[francobaldo1]

Personalised service of the like never seen before by any patch maker or game developer. It's like you included steak and the finest wine.

I'll get a big fantasy league operating on Twitch when we get bowleds (which are done?) and mentalities a bit more obvious. I will happily watch any Twitch stream or youtube videos in the meantime.

I can't see myself having a PC any time soon though. I've gone from having a life spread out over three countries to having to really take stock of it all. I assume my rig is still in the Netherlands but who knows.

Does the AI shot selection mod include the bowled improvements?

I'd ultimately like a sort of International Cricket Captain with DBC graphics and gameplay. Where you can select the sliders and the batsmen behave accordingly, but you aren't controlling them totally, if that makes sense.

yes, you use the sliders to change batsman behaviour. We are getting close to have a "Cricket Captain mod" ^^ Using sliders also for the bowlers should be easy i think.
Also, i will "merge" the mod that incraeses the bowled/lbw with the new one (it's still possible to use to 2 mods together). However in the next update i will add the options to have
a different "shot selection" for the 2 batsman at the crease, didnt have the time to do that today. Right now they will use the same shots (but they still use their own mentality).

 

[Spoobir]

Wow, amazing stuff figuring this out @francobaldo1 !

I just tried it out and turned down both the "aggressive leg glance" shots to zero to see how it affected the bat-pad-smash shot. Basman ended up having a total 'brain-fade' moment and watching one spin onto his middle stump!

I'll do some more playing around I think.

 

[francobaldo1]

Wow, amazing stuff figuring this out @francobaldo1 !

I just tried it out and turned down both the "aggressive leg glance" shots to zero to see how it affected the bat-pad-smash shot. Basman ended up having a total 'brain-fade' moment and watching one spin onto his middle stump!

I'll do some more playing around I think.

thanks for testing. A shot is selected when the slider is to the right. So if you put all the sliders to the right and the aggressive leg glance to zero, it means that it will behave as usual but it
will never consider that shot.

 

[Spoobir]

Alright, after that brain-fade moment I changed the values on the aggressive/unorthodox to the following and bowled a bunch of spin. I left the defensive values untouched.

And here was the result:

My assessment is that the AI played very nicely. Barring that one brain-fade moment (which seemed to be a freak occurrence) and an atrocious run-out which likely had nothing to do with the mod running. I did see the whip through mid-wicket played a couple of times but there was not one hint of the bat-pad-smash and I played with a short-leg for the entire session. I could have had one more wicket but I dropped a superman diving catch at 2nd slip.

Bearing in mind that in the vanilla game if I play the same way I played this session I can bowl the AI out for <150 almost every single time this is a crazy development and exciting as hell for the future as we continue to fiddle with things.

I think next thing I will try is running the main Fearsome Tweak hack in conjunction with the AI shot selection one and see how the AI handles this and some pace bowling.

Once again, Franco you are a genius.

 

[blockerdave]

Wow! Top stuff this. Wish I had a gaming PC!

 

[Spoobir]

Alright, second session done and dusted. Activated Fearsome Tweak v1.23 (most stable version for me) and had a burst of pace after lunch before going back to spinners when the quicks got tired. All shot selection values unchanged from above.

Results:

My estimation is that the AI doesn't really play a whole lot differently to vanilla against pace, bearing in mind I use the tweak to increase the speed of fast-bowling. However I would say there was probably a reduction in ugly miss-timed areal shots which is a definite plus. Saw one bat-pad-smash this session off fast-bowling but no short leg was in place, again none against the spinners. The three wickets were all genuine: Back-foot prod nicked behind, Missed straight drive that knocked out off-stump and a missed back-foot push across the line to an off-break.

EDIT: There is one odd thing I forgot to mention. Occasionally the AI will play the 'advance forward defensive' against the fast-bowlers when the shot-selection mod is active. It doesn't seem to have any difference in gameplay compared to the standard forward defensive so far, but it does look a little funky.

I'm done for tonight but will most likely finish the innings tomorrow. I've never had the AI make above 254 against me in an unsimulated test match (although I don't play very many) and that time was when I was playing around with Franco's shot force modifiers and the ball was flying all over the place.

We'll see if they can beat that with this new mod. Encouraging signs especially considering two of the wickets were freakish in my opinion.

 

[francobaldo1]

edit:

@Spoobir thanks a lot mate, what i use in the first part of a Test is this (probably even more conservative):

and all the unhortodox disabled. Probably the behaviour of the batsman looked similar to the vanilla version because
you have all the defensive shots avalaible. With that setting the batsman has "too much" choice, and it will behave
as usual (because the "vanilla" version is actually every shot at 100%).

To avoid to "leave" problem, when the batsman doesnt play a shot, you should have at least 1 shot at 100%,
better if it's a shot that can guard the wicket (usually cover/straight defence). I usually use cover defence front at
80%, and cover defence back at 100% (so it looks more like a "panic" shot).

I tested it in an AI vs AI game between England - New Zealand and it was really great. I was using an England team that i had downloaded,
which strangely had one spinner (Moeen Ali) and Adil Rashid as medium pacer (something is wrong with the ECB).
NZ went to 90-1 after 25 overs, with Kane Williamson making a 50 with 80 balls, and Guptill 25 out of 80 balls.
The batting was really good, i only had to adjust some slider every 2-3 overs. It really felt that
England was in trouble because of the team selection and soom poor tactics, which i guess is realistic.

 

[Spoobir]

edit:

@Spoobir thanks a lot mate, what i use in the first part of a Test is this (probably even more conservative):

View attachment 197145

View attachment 197148

and all the unhortodox disabled. Probably the behaviour of the batsman looked similar to the vanilla version because
you have all the defensive shots avalaible. With that setting the batsman has "too much" choice, and it will behave
as usual (because the "vanilla" version is actually every shot at 100%).

To avoid to "leave" problem, when the batsman doesnt play a shot, you should have at least 1 shot at 100%,
better if it's a shot that can guard the wicket (usually cover/straight defence). I usually use cover defence front at
80%, and cover defence back at 100% (so it looks more like a "panic" shot).

I tested it in an AI vs AI game between England - New Zealand and it was really great. I was using an England team that i had downloaded,
which strangely had one spinner (Moeen Ali) and Adil Rashid as medium pacer (something is wrong with the ECB).
NZ went to 90-1 after 25 overs, with Kane Williamson making a 50 with 80 balls, and Guptill 25 out of 80 balls.
The batting was really good, i only had to adjust some slider every 2-3 overs. It really felt that
England was in trouble because of the team selection and soom poor tactics, which i guess is realistic.

I see! That's my bad for not looking at the "defense" tab close enough. I assumed it was just all the blocking shots which is why I left them all full. I see that 'block advance front' is on there as well which is likely why I was having that issue.

 

[Gamer Pradosh]

Wow seems like this mod is must try..Will do whenever I can and get back.. Nice test @Spoobir good to see you back in testing ways..

 

[Langeveldt]

Amazing stuff. Would you be able to implement a general slider for the mentalities or do we change each of the sliders individually? (Kind of irritating if say Cook and Stokes are batting together).

Don't mean to pester and I personally won't be able to try it for a while. Fantastic work as usual.

 

[Spoobir]

Finished the innings. Not such a great score but still better than vanilla when I bowl this much spin and went the entire innings without seeing a bat-pad-smash wicket.

Plenty of bowleds there for you @Langeveldt. Also for some reason Mukund is the keeper despite Saha being in the lineup so not sure what was going on there, but all those catches were by WK. And you can see absolutely no wickets caught in the ring/deep which is obviously good.

I think what I'll do now is switch to bowl as Pakistan and I'll edit the sliders to 0 for all 'attacking' and 'unorthodox' (except maybe sweep) and also remove some of the 'defensive' shots I see as problematic; those being the front foot cut which often goes in the air to cover/point and the on-drive which results in a lot of edges.

EDIT: I just realised but I've never said I'm playing on Veteran difficulty. Which is actually something to think about because the reason I don't play on Legendary is that I find the AI is far, far too aggressive, which can obviously be curbed using this shot selection mod. Very interesting...

 

[francobaldo1]

ok, i tried to record a session, unfortunately for the only wicket (a nice lbw by Jimmy Anderson) i forgot to hide the mod window, which covers the game window.
The rest didnt look very interesting, but it was only a test. Will try again tomorrow.

@Langeveldt yes every batsman will have his own shot settings (probably different also against fast bowling and spin).
I have more tools/knowledge now, last year it would have been complicated.

 

[Spoobir]

ok, i tried to record a session, unfortunately for the only wicket (a nice lbw by Jimmy Anderson) i forgot to hide the mod window, which covers the game window.
The rest didnt look very interesting, but it was only a test. Will try again tomorrow.

@Langeveldt yes every batsman will have his own shot settings (probably different also against fast bowling and spin).
I have more tools/knowledge now, last year it would have been complicated.

I've also had a couple of nice lbws in the session I'm playing now (India in a spot of bother).

What AI difficulty do you have it set to in your game Franco?

 

[blockerdave]

@francobaldo1 - i appreciate this is nothing to do with your mod, but I am wondering is there any of your tools that would enable me to access the player appearance variable list and see what they are?

 

[Spoobir]

@francobaldo1 - i appreciate this is nothing to do with your mod, but I am wondering is there any of your tools that would enable me to access the player appearance variable list and see what they are?

I think one of @Wouldubeinta 's tools might be able to do that? Not sure though.