SMACX Thinker Mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I agree that changing these formulas is very risky. Remember I didn't insist just asked if you inclined to do something like that.

If you looking for reason it is explained here http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21046.0. I can repeat reasons for disabling healing here once more.
The multi round combat strongly skews odds toward stronger unit. As an example, with 3:2 odds you wins not 60% of the time as would be calculated directly from the odds but nearly 100% of the time. So slight strength advantage gives you almost 100% winning chance. Combined with healing it makes army of such units indestructible. You can build like 10 needlejects capable of knocking out enemy base defenders and just bomb-heal-repeat conquer them without casualties. Once such slight advantage is achieved it makes conquest expansion not even exponential but explosive like.
This breaks build-conquer balance. For AI it is even worse as it doesn't know about indestructible army tactics and doesn't use it. Humans do and that's why they beat it every time.
Disabling healing breaks this vicious win-heal cycle. Now fully healed more advanced unit still wins all the time. However, it irrecoverably expends HPs and is bound to die at some point. This alone makes casualties proportional to unit strengths ratio. No more indestructible armies and grades of weaker armor now do matter as they wear attacker down proportional to armor rating.

Unit cost is a different story. It doesn't help AI directly as it equally affects all players. So it may not lie in the path of your improvement. However, in its current form it makes infantry attackers ridiculously cheap. This again benefits conquer strategy where AI sucks. Changing this formula allows balancing attacker-defender unit effectiveness ratio to the extend where AI tactical choices becomes reasonable.
Once again, unit cost is kinda generic improvement. So I do not advertise it to you. Merely sharing my opinion about it.

[PvtHudson]

You can build like 10 needlejects capable of knocking out enemy base defenders and just bomb-heal-repeat conquer them without casualties.

So can them. AIs even before ThinkerMod were capable of amassing needlejets and destroying every former, colony pod and crawler in range, then switching to base defenders.

For AI it is even worse as it doesn't know about indestructible army tactics and doesn't use it. Humans do and that's why they beat it every time.

Sorry, I don't catch. AI builds units with highest available attack, and it uses healing, doesn't it? But probably we should talk about this in your thread, not here.

It's indeed time to summarize testing experience of ThinkerMod. It aimed at improvement of AI performance, and in my opinion it achieved this goal brilliantly. Faster expansion, aggressive land claim, crawler infrastructure help AI tremendously. Maybe it's just my poor skill, but I fear I have to abandon long-customary Transcend difficulty. Bravo, Induktio! Looking forward for future developments. Is it time to improve diplomacy?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You can build like 10 needlejects capable of knocking out enemy base defenders and just bomb-heal-repeat conquer them without casualties.

So can them. AIs even before ThinkerMod were capable of amassing needlejets and destroying every former, colony pod and crawler in range, then switching to base defenders.

For AI it is even worse as it doesn't know about indestructible army tactics and doesn't use it. Humans do and that's why they beat it every time.

Sorry, I don't catch. AI builds units with highest available attack, and it uses healing, doesn't it? But probably we should talk about this in your thread, not here.

Sure if you like I can copy your response and continue there.

[Induktio]

Oh, hellooo. I included a screenshot from the first test game I ran with these newest changes. It was a large random map with 4 standard factions plus Pirates and Antimind. Turn is 140 and the Gaian AI dominated throughout the whole game. Some of the fast growth is explained by the nearby jungle but it is not everything. Labs output here is about 4600 per turn, and the growth speed has been far above any typical test runs. Gaia would later transcend on turn 160 with labs output finally breaking ten thousand if I remember right. Manifold Harmonics contributed to this in a significant way probably.

So, develop version 20181107 is now available from downloads. Changes summarized:

- Rewritten colony pod movement algorithm
- Sea bases are now able to transport colony pods to land
- AI has an understanding of fungus production bonuses and will plant it if it's useful
- AI will build native units whenever psi bonuses are high enough compared to conventional weapons
- Other minor tweaks to production priorities

[DrazharLn]

Fantastic!

It still seems weird to see Gaians with loads of boreholes and so eco damage. It would be great to see their philosophy reflected in their play, but OTOH boreholes are crazy good.

I can't see an immediate solution.

[k3v]

Played a new game with the latest version. Huge transcend in 2236.

This is the kind of carnage i wanted!

(click to show/hide)

Caretakers killed Morgan. Sparta killed Gaia. Then Sparta and Caretakers had an epic battle, with Sparta getting the advantage until Angels started attacking her.

Final Base

(click to show/hide)

Caretakers were booming so hard that a meteor took out his cap and 4 other bases lol. I think ive only seen this happen once before.

I thought my start was average, but turned out very slow. Missed WP+ME, had to disband formers to get VW in time lol.
Missed EG, slight beeline error, but I dont think it wouldve mattered, gaia goes straight for it. Hence lost Govenor. Didnt get governor till 2210! Two allies killed, forgot to set dont restart killed, so morgan came back but stayed on two bases rest of the game. So heaps of potential energy lost.

I think without a really good start, first governor is impossible due to how well the ai booms now, 60 pop at first governor (I had 46 with PTS, turn 70). Ive havent played with Lal in the game yet lol, that would definately be impossible.

Something ive never seen before was overall terraforming damage causing rising sea levels, because it was never a factor before (ai just didnt terraform enough). I lost a base and like 7 boreholes because of it.

Angels maxed at 1000 science at the end. I got a few level 6+ techs from AI's which is huge. Usurpers kinda sucked, even though they were isolated. I think they're unable to take fm+wealth, which hurts them alot as well as no commerce.

I think the only way to improve ai builder from here would be forcing them to play the builder strat. The AI cant really build space pods, cause they'll never get CBA and then only have a few bases with an aerospace academy. But with the 70% production boost forcing aerospace academies in all bases is easily doable. Do they treat pods as a base facility? Can they build more then 1 per base? I imagine space pods arent that easy for the ai to understand, but with the base spam they add up to a lot.

I'd love to have this mod on a double size huge map with all 14 factions, too bad theres so many hardcoded obstacles for it.

Anyway, the mod is amazing, really great work.

Saves attached if anyone wanted.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Hi Induktio.
I was playing your mod with all but Fission reactors disabled. Works right in the way that I cannot equip unit with any other reactor. However, I see that AI equip their custom units with Singularity one!!! Like rover formers and armored sea probes. That seems like a glitch in a game. When reactor is disabled AI somehow can pick it up for new unit design. I saw only non combat units with Singularity reactor so far, though.
Anyone observed something like that?

[DrazharLn]

If anyone has ideas how to get the SP movies working again, could be also useful to know.

You need movlistx.txt from scient's v2 patch. Attached here.

Scient added this file so that we can have different end-of-movie text for smac and smax (because hunter seeker alg does different things in each).

[Induktio]

Lots of interesting stuff here to address.

> Something ive never seen before was overall terraforming damage causing rising sea levels, because it was never a factor before (ai just didnt terraform enough).

Yeah, I bet the original designers didn't anticipate AIs with 50 boreholes. The speed of the sea rise is getting pretty excessive with this heavy terraforming. I should probably recommend players to lower this setting in alphax now? Maybe put recommended settings in Details.md for documentation?

1, 1     ; Numerator/Denominator for frequency of global warming (1,2 would be "half" normal warming).

> Angels maxed at 1000 science at the end. I got a few level 6+ techs from AI's which is huge. Usurpers kinda sucked, even though they were isolated.

I'm thinking the fact that aliens cannot engage in commerce is now a very significant limiting factor for them. With all the new energy being produced, the AIs seem to earn a lot from trade. This might be a good thing.

> The AI cant really build space pods, cause they'll never get CBA and then only have a few bases with an aerospace academy.

Do you just mean satellites here? They do build aerospace complexes and satellites pretty quickly after learning the techs. It seems your game ended almost just after they learned spaceflight. :-/

> I'd love to have this mod on a double size huge map with all 14 factions, too bad theres so many hardcoded obstacles for it.

There have been many modding ideas, but this is actually the one that will *never* happen without a full open source port. Consider the fact that there are exactly 8 bits in a byte, and single byte values are used all over the binary to store faction boolean values. Now you get the idea.

> However, I see that AI equip their custom units with Singularity one!!!

There was a bug in the old code where it didn't check properly for disabled techs. It is fixed in the most recent version but it can't undesign already designed units in an old save. It should work properly on newly started games of course.

> You need movlistx.txt from scient's v2 patch. Attached here.

So this file is basically a verbatim copy of movlist.txt if expansion is enabled? If I were to keep this feature, I think the game should read those modded values from ac_mod folder just like the other modified files if expansion is disabled. Does not feel useful to distribute a copy of a standard file with the patch. I'm not sure if some other files might have to be put into that folder too, currently the list is: alphax.txt, helpx.txt, conceptsx.txt, tutor.txt, labels.txt

Also, what do the players think about these things:

- Should the AI build armored crawlers in mass? After fusion reactors armor becomes so cheap I'm tempted to have them build crawlers with armor installed.
- Is the colony pod production rate good enough now or should it be changed? Maybe the difficulty level should affect the desired AI expansion rate?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

> However, I see that AI equip their custom units with Singularity one!!!

There was a bug in the old code where it didn't check properly for disabled techs. It is fixed in the most recent version but it can't undesign already designed units in an old save. It should work properly on newly started games of course.

You mean in your old code? Good to know. Cool man. Thanks for fixing this! I can continue crunching unit costs now.

[DrazharLn]

So this file is basically a verbatim copy of movlist.txt if expansion is enabled? If I were to keep this feature, I think the game should read those modded values from ac_mod folder just like the other modified files if expansion is disabled. Does not feel useful to distribute a copy of a standard file with the patch. I'm not sure if some other files might have to be put into that folder too, currently the list is: alphax.txt, helpx.txt, conceptsx.txt, tutor.txt, labels.txt

The text files in scient's patch are generally better than the ones that come with the game. If I were you I'd just expand scient's installer (code available) and add thinker to it. If you really don't want to use movlistx.txt either make a copy on first run or just change the binary to use movlist.txt?

This reminds me: have you had a look at the save-game logic? It would be good to save a list of the active factions in or related to each save game: at the moment you will end up with the wrong art etc. for factions if you load a scenario and you have to keep fiddling with alphax if you use custom factions a lot.

[Induktio]

The text files in scient's patch are generally better than the ones that come with the game. If I were you I'd just expand scient's installer (code available) and add thinker to it. If you really don't want to use movlistx.txt either make a copy on first run or just change the binary to use movlist.txt?

Hmm, yeah. Basically there are two behaviours one could choose from:

1. If expansion is enabled, use "movlist.txt"
    Else use "ac_mod\movlist.txt"

2. Use a filesystem call to copy movlist.txt to movlistx.txt if the latter is missing.

Movies would work fine after either of these two steps, but not sure really which one is better. Option 2 would work better if one also plays the Scient-patched game without Thinker but I don't currently see any other reason to use it over option 1.

[DrazharLn]

In scenario 1 what is the difference between the two files?

And if you're distributing one of the scient variants why not both?

[Induktio]

> And if you're distributing one of the scient variants why not both?

I'm not distributing any of the txt files currently. Probably it's better for people to install the Scient patch files separately if they want all the stuff. My plan is to just have the binary either work with those or with the stock files provided by the game installer. The preference is to allow installing this mod without having to overwrite any other stuff. Keeping it very minimalistic with the dependencies.

I'm not sure how much use the load_expansion feature is going to get or how much time should be spent on it, but in theory it would be nice to have a way to turn off the expansion related features.

[DrazharLn]

I think SMAC is the better game, so I'd vote for it

As for movlist this seems pretty trivial:

if (expansion && exists(movlistx.txt))
    use movlistx.txt
else
    use movlist.txt