K.U.N.G.F.U
kritters under no gods fighting uncontrolled
Author: Gooda

Please click one of the following:

Creature Combat Intro:
The basics of creature combat. Learn the various moves of creature fighting.

Training Methods:
Basic training methods.

Petting Your Creature:
See experimentation results of petting your creature before and after a creature battle.

Using Leashes in Combat:
Figure out for yourself what leashes to use or if to use them at all in battles.

Fighting Patterns:
Questions if the creature AI is really as complex as we all think it is.

Teaching Your Creature in Combat:
Talks about different teaching methods such as a controlled vs. uncontrolled regime.

Advanced Creature Combat:
Talks about how your creature learns how to fight and a more in-depth description of controlled training.

Creature controlled combat:
A more in-depth description of controlled training.

Creature minds
An in depth artical about creature minds.

I. Creature Combat Intro

The following is based upon the results of my personal experiment and research on creature combat in the game of Black and White™. The following tactics and methods might not work for eveyone, however I hope you find the content useful and I wish you a merry time in your creature training.

My aim is to train a creature which will be able to perform well during un-controlled creature combat. The term un-controlled means there would be no direction given by the owner of the creature or any kind of leash attached to the creature.

The combat skills of a creature is simular to “Kung Fu”. There is a certain pattern or disapline on how they will attack, when they will stop, and how and when to react to certain moves by the opponent. To make your creature able to produce your desired action and responce, you would need to fill his mind with experience and preferred method of combat.

To teach your creature Kung Fu, we should understand: what can a creature do during a fight and then how we want him to do it.

There are certain actions available in the combat rings which I have roughly categorized into the following general actions:

1) Attack 2) Block 3) Dogging 4) Pausing

A special note on pausing: When a creature is inexperienced, you would find that he pauses quite often. It is because he has no idea on how to respond to the target’s action or position.

There are other actions within the combat ring which is not controllable by your creature. This is to prevent the creature from winning too easily in a fight.

A) Swinging- When your creature has pushed the target out of the ring a few times, while waiting for the target’s return, he would swing from left to right, then right to left repeatedly.

B) Backing- When your creature has pushed the target out of the ring a few times, your creature would back off towards to the middle of the ring.

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II. Training Methods
To train a good creature fighter, we should teach the creature to have the right response to every action. First, we will look at how creature can learnt combat skills.

Currently there are a few methods to teach your creature Kung Fu in the Black and White community, I will analyse these methods with my personal experiments.

Some say it is better leave all the fighting uncontrolled and place your creature to fight different classes of creature minds. By different classes of creatures I mean, using a creature mind file which is hand trained by another player or yourself.

And If he did well after a fight, while he is showing off (either posing or pooping on the other creature), if you pet him, he will remember how well he did, and will improve his fighting skill base on that fight. The scale of reward depends on how much you like the fight.

A Black and White player, Dale/Razor suggested to pet your creature based on how much health he has left after the fight. If his combat health bar was full green, pet him to 100%, a bit off, 80%, more then a half 60% and so on. Another player, Joeri suggests that you should always pet him when he wins. From 20% for a fight that was not very good to a maximum of 70% for a good tip-top fight. The reason for you not to pet him to 100% is that he might be too dependent on you. This method could apply to both controlled and uncontrolled fights. However, it has been reported that by petting your creature while he is showing off will only encourage him to show off more; rather then as a reward for a good fight. This is difficult to confirm as there is no creature help message within the game to confirm if the rubbing after the fights is registered at all by the game and creature.

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III. Petting Your Creature
I have been doing an experiment on two different creatures, one which was trained with the post-fight rubbing, the other without. The experiment involved with two different full grown creatures. I have applied the post-fight rubbing before they begin to show off. This is to prevent the creature registering the post-fight rubbing linking it to the action of showing off.

On the 69th fight, the creature that was given a post-fight rubbing as explained above, was dramatically more aggressive in combat, compared with the creature that had been trained without such a training method. On the other hand, the creature that was trained without the post-fight rubbing had only begun to progress from the 95th fight. Yet it was not as effective in combat as the other creature. Therefore I believe post-fight rubbing contributes to the creature effective ability to fight.

However, from the experiment I found that the rubbing only encourages the aggression in combat rather than a specific combat style or a certain move. Before my creature had gotten used to using the flip kick. He was already an effective fighter and has been petted to 70% quite often. However, he only adapted the flip kick in combat after losing a few fights with a top level creature. For his defeats, I didn’t apply any post-fight rubbing on the creature, until he was able to adapt the flip kick and then progress onwards.

It is also sensible to accept that the creature will take encouragement from the rubbing for his aggression rather than a few specific combination of moves during the fights. The creature AI registers the last action they do. In this case the victory of the fight. If you believe a creature fights in different sets of patterns, we could argue that the creature is registering your petting regarding the set of Kung Fu he has been using rather than the aggression. The game shows no indication on how the creature registers post-fight rubbing. So until we have formal confirmation from the programmers of Lionhead Studios, we can not be certain.

If the rubbing does apply on the aggression, then the theory on creature performance relies on the amount of your post-fight rubbing should be invalidated. Since aggression can not be dependent on the player during combat. Therefore, the scale on post-fight rubbing depending on the remained health from 100% heal for 100% petting to 0%Health for 0%petting would be more sensible.

Note: You can train an effective fighter with or without using the post-fight rubbing method.
Another method based on uncontrolled fighting is using the leashes. If the creature AI learns the same method outside of combat, then the leashes should also have an effect on combat behavior.

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IV. Using Leashes in Combat
Many players believe the leash of aggression (LoA) would make your creature perform better in creature combat, because it would make the creature attack more. By this theory, you could train your creature to perform differently during combat by having different leashes on, this also could mean by having the LoL, the creature would be able to learn combat skills faster.

Note on leashes: Out side of combat training, I was able to train a few different creatures differently. One of them was encouraged for destructive behavior and the other was more balanced. With the destructive one, when I used the leash of learning (LoL) to direct my creature near the enemy’s town, he would start to destroy the town and anything around it. On the other hand, the more balanced one would prefer to impress the village. But when I do use the LoA to lead the more balanced creature near the enemy’s town, he would be destructive also. Therefore I understand that I have encouraged one of my creatures to be destructive so much that it has became its nature to be aggressive.

My friend Unseul has conducted an experiment with the LoL on a new creature called Lil’git. Lil’git had only a small amount of controlled fighting experience. Including the combat training with the guide at the beginning of the single player game. The rest of the fights he had was uncontrolled using the LoL. With only 40 matches, Lil’git was already a highly skillful player. He was able to produce the appropriate response to a lot of situations by attacking, blocking, and dodging accordingly. At that stage he was able to beat some of the most well known hand trained creatures in the community such as SilentBob, Dog, and Scar.

Lil’git’s success it not only relying on the leash of learning. It also relies on a training system. The basic training system for an uncontrolled fight is to place your creature to fight many different creatures to learn different styles in combat, but Unseul narrowed the system more specifically.

He would set his creature to fight others in the following order:

3 lower level creatures> 3 mid level creatures> 3 computer controlled creatures(CCC)> 3 High level creatures.

The definition of high or low level depends on your creature’s skill.

The idea behind this training system is to produce a balanced level of fighting skills/moves for your creature and hopefully he will learn the best from it. Victory and defeat doesn’t matter here, but it does represent different skills level which your creature can be inspired from. If a creature is fighting a better fighter he would be trained to deal with high level creature, likewise for fighting a weaker creature. And by fighting a creature with the similar fighting skills could balance different actions.

This will benefit on both post-fight rubbing training method and without. But If you believe in the method of post-fight rubbing it is progressively useful if you apply this method after different levels of fighting.

Like a ladder system once he was able to beat a creature at certain level and have received plenty of rubbing, you could move on to a higher fighting level by fighting a greater creature. If you jump the level beyond what he can deal with comfortably, you would not get a chance to award him with high percentage. If more percentage means encouragement for higher aggression then you could have allowed your creature to benefit a lot more to fight a suitable level of creature.

No matter how you train your creature in combat, in time it will develop its Kung Fu/pattern of fighting. If you have been using the uncontrolled training methods, you should have realized that there will be a point that you can not provide such a large variety of experience to your creature and that he learns/changes his pattern much slower as he is already a highly skilled fighter.

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V. Fighting Patterns
I have began to doubt the ability of the creature’s AI by having seen a representative fighting pattern from my creature, which has been in over 500 fights. My creature would try to produce the same moves in the same order in certain stages during a fight. I then did some experiment to see how fixed this fighting pattern is. I have once did a quick save when my creature is near its combat training creature, so that I can just click on the other creature to start a fight without having to look for it too far. I reloaded the game and fought for 10 times on the same location of the combat ring. As the result all ten fights were 100% exactly the same. Both creatures fought in their own same pattern in these fights. The creatures perform their moves in the same time and position in all five of these fights. This means that not only the result was the same, but the position where they were knocked back and even the distribution of the waves of attack was the same. I was basically watching the replay.

There are a lot of things that is saved by a save/quick save. If you have any damage the moment you did a quick save even if your creature has been fully recovered, the damage will reappear the moment you reload. A quick save also stores the creature’s damage and by watching the reparative results of creature combats. I believe all fights are fixed and each creature carries a fighting pattern before entering the combat ring. The quick save also have stored the particular fighting patterns that both creatures decided to use.

Note: You could do a simple experiment on how much info a save store by doing a quick save during the creature doing a poo. After he has finished, if you load the game again you will find him wanting to poo again.

But surely not all fights featuring the same creatures are just the same as a reply, there must be a randomization which has disguised these pattern.

I did another experiment by placing my creature in to 60-70 fights with a constant creature. Both of these creatures are high level fighters. Not only did I spot that both creatures tend to perform a same order of attacks, blocks, and dodges at a random stage during each fight, but from the experience of watching the creature’s movement carefully, I was able to tell who will be the winner of the fight from their first move.
There was at least four sets of fighting patterns and each have an unnoticeable difference. Whenever the opposite creature moves forward to produce a claw attack as the first move I would know that he will win the fight. However, whenever he did the slide kick first I would win. And the damage that I will have after the fight would be around 30%. Also if my creature blocked his first attack which is the slide kick I would win and be left with around 10% damage.

Note: Sometimes the damage very depending on hunger which directly effecting on fatness then it effect on damage. But the different is minimum

As you can see, though the combat might seem random and depending on the actual fight, there is certainly a pattern that will reappear from time to time. So I believe each creature carry a few set of fighting patterns and will use different ones randomly like a game of paper scissors rock.

From this experiment I believe that there is no creature which can be trained to be able to beat every creature. If we placed two creatures in a combat ring of similer skills both will have different sets of fighting styles and both will have a set of kung fu that can beat the other creature and a set that would shows a lot of gaps. It will be depending which set they will choose to use in order to conclude the result

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VI. Teaching Your Creature Combat
The pattern theory does not mean the creature will just repeat an action blindly, regardless of what the opposing creature’s action is. In fact it is all about response towards a target’s action. But his choice of response is directly related to the set of pattern he will be using. We know from my experience of reloading a save that a fight results in an exact replay. Thus we know this pattern comes in a set rather than just a few combos. We can call it the pattern of response. A creature can be using a set of pattern of responses that will strike a lot of the time if he sees an incoming attack or a pattern, that he will attack, block, dodge and pause depending on target’s action. All these can be taught and will be depending on the target’s response to conclude victory. Each of these responses can be taught.

There are people who believe that controlled fight are the makings of a robot fighter and would rather believe in their creativity in the style of their fighting by only putting the creature into uncontrolled fights. This idea is to expect, that in time the creature will fight differently on each fight. Yet he will be able to find the most effective way to defeat the other creature.

This idea also believed that by fighting a better creature: in enough time he will improve and learn from it. So my question is will the creature be able to learn form another creature and spot what is good for him?

I did a rough experiment by using a creature which has never fought before. We call this a blank creature. I placed it through over 100 uncontrolled fights with a computer controlled creature. Which is the one you get from any skirmish default map. Before the creature first entered his first fight I duplicated a copy of the creature files (Mind and PHY files) so I have the same creature at its blank stage. Then I placed him into over 100 combats with one hand trained creature mind, lil’git. After the first 100 fights the results make very less difference. They both have a certain inconsistent fighting style. They have the occasion good fight such as attacking in waves and some victories. However it is inconsistent and there is no obvious contrast.

However, after I switched the creature which has been fighting a CCC into fighting a hand trained creature, he become much more effective in combat then the other creature which has been fighting with the hand trained creature. They both have the same amount of fights of 150 fights each. The only difference is that one has been fighting 100 times with the CCC and then 50 with lil’git, a hand trained creature and the other copy of the same creature has been fighting with lil’git 150 times with no switch.

Note: After the first 100 fights for both creatures, the result is concluded by placing both creatures fighting with the hand trained creature lil’git for 20 fights. The further 50 fights began after I restored the creature minds back to the stage where they have only had their 100 fights.

Having been watching different blank creatures combat developments. I analyzed on how creature AI benefits from this training. I believe the creature gets used to a style/pattern from its first fights. Thus early fighting's are important for a creature. Once you see its pattern in the first few fights you will see it evolve around it throughout his fighting career, unless you have been applying controlled fight training. If you were to place him with a high level creature to start with it would get used to the style with coping with the target rather then copying the target’s action. Therefore if you place him in a fight more with a high level fighter he might not attack as much if you were to let him fight with a lower level creature where it will get more chances in attacking.

Each creature has an instinct to attack, dodge, and block in a fight. It will “learn” by getting used to how to achieve the goal under the experience of different situations. If he gets used to that he can do a slide kick from a long range, then he more likely to perform a side kick whenever he is in range. On the other hand, if he has been attacked by a side kick whenever he is in range with the target, he would prepared for a block instead.
Going back to Unseul’s method of switching fighting targets for his training for lil’git. He provided the targets for the creature to train with progressively. From fighting CCC then moving on to higher level of hand trained creatures granted him success in creature combat training.

If we do support this theory on the creature's’s learning ability in combat, which is what they got used to. Then this will automatically support the method on using leash of aggression for the creature during combat. From personal experience using the LoA does make the creature behave more aggressive, therefore by placing him into many fights for being aggressive he should develop an aggressive foundation.

So is the creature AI able to decide which is the best move to perform under different situations? The answer is at the beginning of its fighting career it is aware of the available moves at a certain position. Such as knowing that the slide kick can start from a long distant, just like a fireball can shoot from a long range outside combat. However he would get used to his habits under different situations and it would become a more and more fixed pattern as he become more experience.

You may ask, why did the creature which has been fighting 100 times with the CCC, become a much better fighter after 50 fights with a high level hand trained creature? Should it not be a much greater fighter when it got used to beating up somebody pretty badly?
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VII. Advanced Creature Combat
After my creature was established with his fighting regime. I continued to try to improve his fighting style and how he should respond to a target’s action. It was however at the stage of fighting around a fix pattern. He has already fought nearly 600 matches with many different creatures. From my friend’s creature minds to fighting with other online players. I believe when your creature reaches to the stage of an established fighter, he would not learn too much from uncontrolled fights. Its just like training your creature outside of combat. The creature will have its instinct and natural response with the environment. However when you have trained your creature into a more established fashion, he would often repeat what he has encroached for and what has been showed. When you want him to perform a certain action that is outside of his usual routine it does require your direction. I began his first controlled fight training.

From a realistic point of view, if a creature does not change into a more effective fighting pattern after 600 fights. I would rather to give up my romantic idea of freestyle and creativity in creature combat for awhile and direct him to fight in to a more desirable style such as placing him into 20 controlled fights.

On further studies on how a creature takes note from your direction during a controlled fight. . . to put it simply, it will respond to one single action to each situation. These responses are also depending a lot on its distant between the target and moves.

IE If you told your creature to slide kick whenever the target is in range many times, then he will do so more often. And if you tell him to flip kick the target when it is close, then he will take note. By doing the these two actions you will realize your creature will do these two actions as a combo whenever he is in range. That does not mean he is aware of what a combo is or has a plan that he will slide kick and then do a flip kick. The creature thinks in one single action at a time. It just happened that he ended up really close to the target after the slide kick and his reaction to the position being close to the target is to produce a flip kick.

On the other hand, if you told your creature to block a slide kick whenever he see one and if he is not producing any action at the time he will learn to block it when the slide kick is produced at certain range.

Of course if he blocked it and the target ended up close enough, he will produce the response you have encouraged him for. Which is a flip kick at close distant.

By understanding which moves will be produced at which position. You can shape up your creature in your desired style through controlled fights.

Before I move on to my analysis on the creature combats moves, here is the summary:

*Creatures can learn differently using different leashes.

*Post-fight rubbing should contribute to the aggression during combat.

*Creatures could establish its fighting style by what he has gotten used to.

*Creatures might carry a few fighting patterns/behaviors and should apply them differently before each fight. These patterns behavior could based on the respond on the target’s action. Such as the behavior that tends to block rather than strike while under attack, etc.

*Creatures take note from your direction during combat rather if you use leashes or not

*Creature should have no idea on what “combo” moves are. It should perform based on range, position and target’s action.

*Nobody expects for the programmers from Lionhead to know all the answers on how the creature would improve or learn in combat. We can only rely on our experience.

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Creature controlled combat: K.U.N.G.F.U. 2
The idea of controlled fight is to train your creature to get used to producing a certain response under different situations.

The following notes are based upon my research on the part one of this article, which I believe creatures learn their combat response based on what he has been getting used to. Also creatures can carry a few sets of fighting patterns, for more details, see part one.

The ideal concept of controlled fighting is that in time, your creature would copy all of your directions.

From my research, there are a few ways I have been looking at the fighting pattern. I began my experiments by focusing the creature fighting pattern on their combat moves.

There are two main factors would be helpful to understand, which are damage and interruption.

Damage is caused when the attacking part of the creature body touches the target, which means if a move that is slow and covers a large area, it would do better damage than a fast move that covers only a small area.

Each strike also has a knock back factor, when an attack is land, it will first produce damage, then a knock back and finally recovery the attacking part of the body back to the ready position to strike again or other actions.

So it is a disadvantage if your creature block a move which is already half landed (at the stage before the knock back is produced) because he would allow the arm or leg to drag across its own body without being knocked back.

The other important factor is interruption. If interruption move usually have a fast producing time but low damage, the slide kick is an example of an interrupting move, it is fast and its useful to gain distinct, but the damage is low.

This two factors would help to find the right balance of response. The whole game is similar to paper, scissors, and rock, there is no one move that is better than other.

Here are some description of moves based on my personal observation:

Kicks:

Frontal kick, a kick that can be produced in mid distance, mid speed, mid recovery time and a large knock back, but it can not be produce too close.

Slide kick, the fastest kick that you can produce, it is a useful move, because it gains a close distance to the target, fast recovery time, and short knock back but rubbish damage.

Flip kick- a move that can be produced under a short time, close to mid distance, slow recovery time, low to mid damage.

Claw:

Most claws can be produce under very short time, with minimum recovery time and cover a large area of the target’s body, which mean they can be reproduced very quickly and can create great damage.

Upper Claw:

Strike begin from above the target and run across downward and produce a short knock back, a useful stopper for flip kicks.

Side Whack:

Claw across the target from right to left and produce a largest knock back under the claw category.

Lower Claw:

Claw that knocks the target’s balance, knocks the target a side under minimum distance. This move can kill a smaller creatures models from full health if strikes successfully and repeated.

This is also the sheep’s model’s killer move when they do the lower spin.

Note: Smaller model such as a horse.

Different moves are efficient under different situation, but for a more advanced creature, it is just like a game of paper scissors, rock.

Since I have been directing my creature on producing the most effective move under different situations, I have developed an early theory on how it adopts your direction form controlled fighting.

One of the perspectives is that, a creature carries patterns and would produce offensive moves by a certain order. If your creature has a pattern of attacking with two claws in a roll, then if the creature is in the right distance to produce a slide kick, he would walk forward towards to the target and claw.

But the pattern would be reset if your creature is knocked out of the ring, then the next move would based on his response that he got used to under the situation. If the creature got used to producing a claw at the edge of the ring while the target is waiting for him to return, then he would walk towards to the target and try to produce the claw, there is a high chance that the creature would be knocked out again due to his forward step, and if he still wanting to reproduce his attempt of the move, then it is likely to repeat the process and turn into a waves of knock out’s

After further observation, I began to look at the over all fighting pattern on how the creature develops.

Another perspective to see your creatures pattern is rhythm. I have trained a creature as a tiger to produce frontal kick by clicking/aiming on the middle to lower part of the target for over 20 fights, as the result the creature developed to be quite a good fighter at mid range while uncontrolled. When I change the creature type into a Brown Bear, he would continue to produce mid range attack such as a fast frontal jab. As any experienced Brown-Bear-controlled-fight-player would know, to produce a fast front Jab, the area which you should aim for is the high upper body of the target.

This proves that the creature does not take direction of where you click, otherwise take note of the rhythm. By rhythm, I mean the time to attack, block and dodge. For example, if you have been directing him to produce attacking moves that has a very less recovery time, he would do so regardless what moves it takes to match his attacking rhythm.

From this theory, we could train a creature to be a reckless attacker by understanding the attacking moves and use the ones that has the least recovery time, landing the attack one right after the other.

In reality, this reckless attackers are limited by the reaction of the target and its own movements.

A reckless attacker could react very quickly to produce his next in range and in time move, however, the target ‘s back step often move quicker than a close range attack, since he is out of his close range but automatically fit in to the mid range, the attacking creature would produce a mid range attack. If the target decided to step forward once again, the time he react to his movement would result him to step back and find his target in range, resulting two creatures moving forward and backward and try to find range for their in range and in time attack.

If I was to see the fighting pattern as a rhythm as the explained theory above, we could understand why the game would produce an exact replay every time we reload it if we save the game right before a creature combat (for more detail see part one). Because I believe it is easier for the game to record a rhythm which is time, than to record the exact movement of what the creatures would produce in order.

This is also evidence by the aggression and defensive tags in the creature cave. A controlled fight creature often easily to increase their aggressive tags, since your direction within the combat ring establish beyond time. By that I mean, the creature would produce the move without the process of “thinking” and finding range but to produce whatever move that is in range.

In Part one of K.U.N.G.F.U. I suggested that creature learns by what they gotten used to combine with their natural instincts of attack, block and dodge, if the rhythm theory applies, combining with the theories established in part 1, then controlled fighting contribute a great deal in developing your creature combat, and can skip many uncontrolled fights using the progressive level combat training as suggested in part one. (See training history of a creature named, lil’git)

By understanding the range, recovery time and knocks back on each moves, you could develop and change your creature’s rhythm creatively.

To trick all these limitations of getting into the rhythm, I once developed a fighter using a so called, ”Fake Hand”.

The term, Fake Hand is a term is used by real Kung Fu combatants. It is a movement that trickier off the opponent’s reaction, for both defensive and offensive purpose. You could say a fake hand is to test of your opponent or an attempt to scare him. A good example is the combat between Bruce Lee anted Chuck Norris in the movie, Fist Of Fury. While Lee was under attack and did a fake hand by only showing his palm and place Norris into defensive mode.

In Black and White, this trick also works in some situation, a fake hand would mean to make your creature blocking under unusual situation. For offensive target, many creature would attempt to approach at close distinct, which could leave some weakness for your creature, of course, your creature must know how to deal with the situation of post-fake hand, otherwise it would be an disadvantage.

Summary:

Creature could learn his uncontrolled fighting skill from controlled combat.

Creature could adopt the rhythm you have been directing him rather than the exact location where you been clicking on.

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Creature minds:

Allthough your creature is undoubtedly intelligent, its mind works differently from ours, Knowing
what to do in these situations can realy help you train him,

The first land in eden is for you to train your creature the basics, and many people rush ahead to
land 2. Pay attention to your creature's mood, Its not wise to have him wandering around your village
when angry. He might start casting fireballs or eating your villagers, if on the other hand your
little bundle of joy is feeling playfull by all means bring him to your village, its the perfect place
for him to share his feelings, It is advised to keep the creature help at its highest for beginners,
as it will inform you on its behaviour.

Your creature notices nearly everything going on around him, even off the leash. It tries to copy
most stuff you do, From throwing people around to watering crops. Be carefull what you teach your
creature, bad habits are hard to break. If your creature starts performing odd things, its basically
because you inadvertently taught it to,

Many people get this problem with there creature, He wont eat the food when given to him, He just throws
it over its shoulder, and the instant we see this, we slap him. You should never punis your creature for
this, Creatures throw stuff over their shoulders when they are unsure what to do wih the object, its just
a reflex action, Its sometimes hard to get a creature to understand the objects property, Again i stress,
Teach them what to do when there young.

Nauge

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