News from the mod testing labs

[Induktio]

It can be said the Alpha Centauri AI has its limitations to say the least. Recently I've been researching ways of improving the base AI by patching the game binaries.

But before that, look at this image and try to judge whether the Hive faction is player controlled or not:



We all know the AI doesn't build dense road networks or condensers or supply crawlers or... boreholes(?!) Well, this isn't the same AI anymore. Am I really trying to claim it achieved all of this in the game with zero player interference? Yes.

This screenshot was taken on the 150th turn with 3 improved AIs playing against 3 vanilla ones. On the upper right, you can see the areas captured from vanilla Believers with much, *much* less terraforming. Even though Hive became absolutely gigantic in this game, the new Morgan is still keeping the tech lead at the moment, but he's getting conquered by the Hive.

Here's how this works:
* This mod only changes AI build priorities, nothing else. Diplomacy, unit movement, etc is still the same.
* Factions in slots 1-4 are run by the new AI, others are the old ones.
* Does not matter which factions you choose for positions 1-4.
* Player-run factions are not affected.

During testing, I was able to get it spam out so many colony pods, it did not know what to do with most of them. I had to nerf it somewhat, so now the AI spams out formers and supply crawlers instead. It still does not know how to properly utilize all crawlers, however.

This is still a barebones minimal proof of concept, it does not attempt to make any sophisticated calculations about the new unit priorities. Even this minimal tweak seems to provide noticeable improvement in some situations. Still, the most problematic thing seems to be the unit movement code. During testing, it did not seem to know how to manage most colony pods or crawlers. But it should be now easy to test the both AIs side by side.

To install:
* Unzip files to game folder
* Start the game from terranx_mod.exe
* You will see "2.0-MODv" in the game version menu only if it's installed correcly.

[bvanevery]

I say AI controlled, because the Plasma garrison units on the coast are all in stupid positions.  The Probe Team is also vulnerable to getting killed, and there's no apparent tactical advantage to where it's standing.  Crawlers are also in some dumb positions in some cases.  Even if a player was making more Crawlers than they'd managed to send out Formers to work the square yet, the initial choice of square would be better.  Unless the Hive got the Xenoempathy Dome, Crawlers wouldn't be sitting on fungus either.  Fungus movement is a good way to get any unit non-mindworm killed, but especially a Crawler as they can't attack to end the threat.  A Crawler in principle could be sitting on a fungal pop, but in this screenshot, those northern cities aren't big enough or close enough for that to have happened.  A pop would have been within the city's radius, and that crawler on the fungus sits outside any city radius.

So that's the forensics of the screenshot.  I don't think it was a hard question actually.  Moving onwards to the substance of your post in a minute.

Late game, in my mod I've managed to make the AIs do ok by giving them more land and playing on bigger maps.  It takes awhile for a human to get to them, so they can get big.  The Pirates are particularly monstrous as I've made them Passive and pursuing Wealth.  They've got a moat, they just sit back and rake in the money and minerals.  They're consistently an endgame threat now.

I am wondering how your mod plays in early game?  This is an important time for AI survival.  I am consistently disappointed by AIs building too many units and running out of SUPPORT.  A frequent pattern is to see only the first 2 starter cities, spaced very far apart, which means the 2nd pod walked a long time before founding a city and starting to produce anything useful.  It's a bad opening strategy, especially on Enormous maps with plentiful land.  The AI is clearly thinking it needs to maximize its mid term land grab potential, but in many circumstances, that's an egregious waste.  You can grab more land overall by settling quickly and colonizing quickly.

[Induktio]

As stated, the problems with the unit placement are caused because it's still controlled by the old logic. The code relating to that is really complex, but there's probably some ways to override some decisions without rewriting unit movement in its entirety.

Often we can see AIs stagnate to 4-5 bases because they stop building colony pods way too early. What this mod really does is it forces them to build more pods and formers in the early game, so even Morgan should get more bases now. When the AI learns IndAuto, it will shift the focus to crawlers but the movement logic is quite lacking.

It is also pretty easy to hurt the AIs by making them build *too much* colony pods or formers, because then they will neglect the defense buildup, and other AIs might easily conquer them early. That mostly applies to the map sizes smaller than "huge".

Also forget to mention, the test shown in the image was run on standard sized map.

[bvanevery]

I like that your patch can be put side-by-side with an existing text-only mod and doesn't do anything to interfere with it.  That makes it easy to test in my own mod, which attempts to improve the apparent AI performance by giving more favorable conditions.

Details Usurper Formers

Usurper Formers

I hope you can adjust the number of Formers, because right now they're cranked up too high for the early game.  This is Mission Year 2147 on an Enormous 80x160 map.  The Usurpers do have +1 SUPPORT from my version of Police State, but their terrain development is way ahead of what they can actually work.  These Formers have also done a poor job with working the resource bonuses available to them.  The right move would be to put Forests on those flat energy and nutrient specials.  Probably the AI doesn't understand that at all though.

Details Believer former supported from Courage To Question

Believer former supported from Courage To Question

In my mod the Believers don't get any SUPPORT bonus.  Fundamentalist gives +1 SUPPORT but they haven't researched it yet.  4 Formers is an awful lot for 2 bases without any SUPPORT bonus.  There's other things that need doing, like growing at all.  I'm the Caretakers, to the south with 5 cities and a road network.  I could wipe these guys out at a whim.  I'm nice, I allied with them.

There's also a weird bug where 1 of those Formers is being supported from the Usurper capitol.  I'm supposing a bug or unintended side effect from your patching?

Details Consciousness Formers

Consciousness Formers

The Consciousness has way too many Formers for 5 cities.  Those Mine sites are actually doubled up with 2 Formers working on them.  Far more island development than they can use.  They've gotten off the island and made a 6th city, because in my mod, Doctrine:Flexibility is a C1 tech with no prereqs.  In the ordinary game with a longer time to get D:F, they'd be completely up a creek, stagnating in this small space.

Details Alpha Prime needs vitamins and minerals

Alpha Prime needs vitamins and minerals

Alpha Prime did most of the Former building, and its units are about to collapse.  That forested minerals bonus is being worked by Phi Consensus and probably it was being worked by Alpha Prime earlier.

[Induktio]

The test version has a small adjustment factor to reduce the former building as the number of game turns progresses but it shouldn't ever stop completely building them. It should be pretty noticeable as the game progresses to turn 100 or so. In the next version I'll probably introduce some better logic for balancing the different production types though.

[bvanevery]

I'll look forward to that next version.  This one, I think I've playtested to the degree it's presently worth.  Definitely meets the bar of "a proof of concept that Builder behavior can be changed."  It's currently a bad opening game though, that makes the extant SUPPORT problem even worse.

So much could be solved if you could find the magic line that says "keep 4 minerals as a reserve" or "only build what you can support" or some such.

[Induktio]

These forums seem to be pretty quiet nowadays. I was kind of hoping to see some comments from other people too. There should be plenty of people still playing this game. Oh well, things are progressing anyway.

[bvanevery]

My analysis of the lifecycle of this forum, is it was rather active 5 years ago, long before I came on the scene.  I've done my part to revive things a little bit, mainly by posting my work on Reddit and thereby causing a few people to wander over here.  But it is a trickle.  I don't know what the magic would be about promoting SMAC more than I already do.  Reddit has a lot of people, and when people complain or say bad things about SMAC, I make sure their complaints are fair and don't go unaddressed.  The reason I'm still playing this game is it is, frankly, better than most 4X games.  Arguably all of them, but I haven't played several of the most recent titles, so maybe someone finally did something right somewhere.  SMAC has plenty of wars as we both know, but the genre hasn't improved much since its time.

[Geo]

These forums seem to be pretty quiet nowadays. I was kind of hoping to see some comments from other people too. There should be plenty of people still playing this game. Oh well, things are progressing anyway.

The most active forum owner is a bit on hiatus I think.

[bvanevery]

BUncle is on hiatus?  Well that would explain quietude in some places but not others.  Some of these subforums, he never really posted anyways, so I didn't notice his absence.

[Buster's Uncle]

No - just in a low-energy phase.

[bvanevery]

Ah ok.  That certainly happens.  I'm downright exhausted from iterating on this mod.  I think I'm almost done, but I have to solve the problem of Fission vs. Fusion vs. Quantum vs. Singularity engines somehow.  My technique of pushing Fusion etc. to the endgame works fine... until you actually get to the endgame.  Then there's this sort of ridiculously annoying cliff, where you just go "Wheee!" and have all these super weapons.  Also you get spammed with upgrade requests 3 turns in a row, it's really annoying.

The main thing that has recharged my energy, has been a growing amount of input from other people.  Not necessarily on my mod, although that has happened, but some people showing up that are interested in modding issues in general.  Makes me think I'm not just throwing this mod into the void.  I'm thinking it's all a "long tail" effect from advertizing my mod and AARs on Reddit.

[Green1]

I am interested in any AI improvements.

Particularly things that solve the terraforming, too many defenders, and the tendency of some factions to stagnate if bombarded by a spore launcher instead of killing it.

Forum activity has died down since a lot of us got distracted by new shiny stuff or -life- but do keep this on a hard drive no matter how many cores the computers get up to for an occasional spin.

Thanks.

Now... You get it able to do all the factions at once.... God hood may be in order.

[Induktio]

Ok, to look at the progress so far, these things are already implemented:
- Complete rewrite of the base production AI, including selecting new prototypes.
- Terraforming overhaul. Now the AI starts planting forests from turn 1 and building boreholes after the advanced techs.
- It's possible to give the AI e.g. free formers at the start.

However, these things of the default AI are still very problematic in some situations:
- Sending colony pods halfway across the map and wasting time.
- Not researching several key techs at all. Sometimes AI doesn't research ecology for the first 100 turns for example.

These problem areas still need some fixes for the AI to reach its highest potential. The problem with patching movement logic is that it's by far the most complex function in the whole binary, so reversing it is pretty slow.

[bvanevery]

Do you have your work available in some kind of open source repository somewhere, so that it is possible for others to reproduce your results?  Or are you building off of someone's library of functions to access the game?  Myself, I've had basically no interest in going at this thing from scratch and reinventing the wheel, as to what does what.  But I do have all the programming knowledge necessary if I was working with a functioning interface of some kind.

The Centauri Ecology problem is easily solved at the text modding level in alphax.txt.  Here is the relevant line:

Centauri Ecology,           Ecology, 0, 1, 2, 3, None,    None,    100000000

The 4 numbers are the rating of the tech for Conquer, Discover, Build, and Explore respectively.  A faction researching only Conquer will never discover Centauri Ecology.  Unless all other possible Conquer techs have been discovered, at which point a random tech would be researched.  In my mod I had problems like this with Information Networks.  I had it 0'd on Conquer, Build, and Explore because in my mod it's a "pure" Discover tech.  Well I had to unpurify it, because it was too formidable a barrier in practice.  Civs would stagnate in technical development due to never learning how to make Network Nodes.

The problem with the Spartans in the regular game is they focus on Discover, Conquer.  Their research rate is not fast enough for them to figure out Formers in a reasonable period of time.  In my mod, I recognized the fundamental truth that building roads is a method of conquest.  Thus:

Centauri Ecology,           Ecology, 1, 0, 4, 3, None,    None,    000000000

Hmm actually looking at that, maybe I should up the Conquer weight to 2, to be consistent with what I've done elsewhere.  Anyways, any non-Discover researcher will figure out Formers.  In my mod, the Cybernetic Consciousness and the University of Planet are pure Discover researchers.  However their research rates are so fast, that they do get around to discovering Centauri Ecology fairly readily.  It's because in my mod the Discover research path is "thin", so it's simply not possible to keep getting a lot of Discover techs in a row.  The "no Discover techs can be researched" condition is met quickly, and then these factions get random techs.  Which happen to include Centauri Ecology.