You know, you can get this digging effect yourself, but not in normal speed, if you speed up the game, lets say, hold the '1' key for a second or two, then move back and forth and youll dig just like them
Too bad its pointless unless you play against your friend and his bunker is blocked and its a pain in the ass to get a CoAD, sill pointless though

I was messing around with the Ultima and I found a good example of how around 1/3 of the earth is replaced and not destroyed.

Yes, some of it gets bounced.

This 'digging with your body' is actually caused by a hack in the physics engine to prevent from getting stuck when turning around. I'm working on a better solution which will still avoid getting stuck, but also not wear away the terrain.

The AI will also be using diggers properly in build 14, both on your team and the CPU team.

Cool, I was starting to worry that the engine had flaws with it

nice to know dat realms is listening to our calls. i was satrting to cringe every time i saw AI made holes that looked like digger holes but werent, just a bunch of bored skelis lapdancing. if they use diggers, does that mean they wont have unlimited resources?
and they have to get gold themselves for once.

has anyone else noticed that the guy you start with isnt used by the enemy AI? i use him as target practice for my rocket....SPLAT! hehe

thanks guys.

About the rockets not displacing earth realistically, this is a necessary part of the physics engine. When pixels of a material are knocked loose, three out of four of them (I think) disappear, and the remaining 1/4 will settle sooner or later and become solid material again.

Yeah I agree that it would be nice on certain situations to have all material displaced realistically, but it would also make CC pretty much unplayable for two reasons. Firstly the diggers would be almost useless, because the material that they excavated would fill up the tunnel that you had just dug and so it would not be almost impossible to dig deeper than the distance they can throw material backwards. Secondly, if all pixels were displaced when, say, a rocket crashed then they would actually have nowhere to go - 3/4 of them disappearing gives space for the remaining 1/4 to move around. This would have the effect of making them jam against each other and actually would make them solid so the rocket could not dig more than a couple of pixels down from the surface where the particles can escape upwards.

The only way to get around this would be to simulate the entire map (certainly the softer top layers) as a very viscous liquid where bits of it can be pushed around by movement of adjacent particles. Somehow I think that the average PC would not really be up to that.