Thinker mod attempt 12

[bvanevery]

Details March Thinker mod development version

March Thinker mod development version

Induktio released a new development version of Thinker mod in March.  I have been testing it in combination with my own SMACX AI Growth mod.  His AI abuses Condensers, Supply Crawlers, and Boreholes to the hilt.  I've been working on various cost increases and technology delays to curb this abuse in the game.  I think I can only curb it, not end it.  I believe he's on a development trajectory where he adds new and better AI capabilities, but never removes the buffs that were given to the "fairly stupid" stock AI.   I view that as a big problem and hope he changes his mind someday.

One can reasonably ask, why am I doing all these tests?  Is it to hurl rocks at Thinker mod?  No, it's to improve my own SMACX AI Growth mod.  That's the short version.  I've commented at greater length in previous attempts.

The last attempt, in particular, showed me the difficulty of trying to serve 2 masters.  Game changes that might work just fine in the stock binary, can be seriously amplified by Thinker mod AI behavior.  Sometimes there's a middle ground, but the stock binary's behavior is stable and Thinker mod's behavior can change radically as it's developed.  So if the design imperatives are pulling in different directions, I always have to consider the stock binary a higher priority.  There are a lot more people playing it.

Things I am testing this time:

• using stock binary faction placement, not Thinker mod's new version
• Peackeepers in my mod no longer get +2 GROWTH.  No easy pop booming.
• Pirates in my mod get -1 INDUSTRY and -1 SUPPORT to offset their +1 sea minerals.
• Hive gets +1 GROWTH as in the original game.
• Believers get +1 SUPPORT and their FANATIC attack bonus, but MORALE bonus is removed.  Erratic personality.
• Inherent base defense lowered to +25%, same as the stock game.
• Perimeter Defense available at tech Tier 3, not the beginning of the game.
• Skunkworks available with C3 Applied Physics.
• 2 unit abilities available with C4 Organic Superlubricant.
• Weather Paradigm 1.33X cost, increased to 400 minerals.
• Soil Enricher 0.75X cost.  I've always hated waiting for those to complete.
• Advanced Ecological Engineering is now a Build 5 tech.
  
• Condenser 2X cost and moved to Advanced Ecological Engineering.
• Raise/Lower Terrain 2X cost.
• Industrial Automation is now a Build 6 tech.  It gives Supply Crawlers and Thermal Boreholes.
  
• Supply Crawler on infantry chassis: 80 minerals for Fission reactor, 50 minerals for Fusion reactor.
• Thermal Borehole 2X cost.
• Bio-Engineering is now a Build 6 tech.  It gives Genejack Factories.

In short, this is a fairly serious retooling of the Build portion of the tree.  Minerals won't become plentiful until late midgame at least.

In attempt #11, I got a seriously bad start.  No room to expand, totally 8-balled behind 2 factions.  One of them was the Believers who immediately went to war with me.  If I see evidence of a bad start again, I'm quitting.  I'm playing this one partly to see if my bad start was a fluke or a fairly common occurrence.

[bvanevery]

Huge map, 30%..50% land mass with my large continents and large oceans, average settings.  Transcend difficulty, default Thinker mod cost_factor.  Thinker mod's faction placement algorithm disabled by setting faction_placement=0, as it has been unfair in every test game I've played.

Now in the last game it was grossly unfair anyways.  I actually went and looked at Induktio's code to see if I could find any bug, like if it wasn't really turned off.  The logic of the code looks fairly straightforward.  There's a DLL init where faction_placement is turned on by default.  Then thinker.ini is parsed, a value for faction_placement is extracted, and that value is written to a structure.  In principle, it should work.  In practice, I'd have to understand more about DLL initialization and whether it can have race condition.

Details they shall all be worm food

they shall all be worm food

The Hive and the Believers shall be in the game and played by AI factions.  I want to test whether my changes to those factions improve their performance.  Otherwise random factions.  I draw the Cult of Planet.  Usurpers, Pirates, Peacekeepers, and Cyborgs also in the game.

[bvanevery]

Details polly want a mindworm SQUAAAK!

polly want a mindworm SQUAAAK!

MY 2107.  On my 1st turn, I pop the comm frequency of the Pirates.  We sign a Treaty.

Details polly wanna drown SQUAAAAK!

polly wanna drown SQUAAAAK!

MY 2112.  The Pirates trade techs and sign a Pact.  They are near neighbors.  These fools don't seem to have settled their sea bases yet.  Last game the Pirates were eradicated at the beginning of the game, resulting in them restarting somewhere.  Maybe they're spending too long looking for stuff?  Maybe someone else stirred up an Isle of the Deep and it came to devour them.

[bvanevery]

Details volatile neighbor

volatile neighbor

MY 2114.  Someone set off an earthquake just north of my mindworm.  I will be proceeding with caution.

Details Alien life forms

Alien life forms

It's the Usurpers.  Well at least in my mod they aren't any stronger than anyone else.

[bvanevery]

MY 2115.  Svensgaard still doesn't appear to have any bases.  What's going on with that?  I save the game for later dissection.

Details bad neighbor policy

bad neighbor policy

MY 2117.  Two neighbors?  This doesn't smell like stock binary behavior at all.  This is happening like every time I play the game.  Well, I said I'd quit, and I meant it.  Firing up the Scenario Editor to see what's happening.

Details super weird

super weird

5 of us are on an east-west supercontinent.  3 of us are clumped together.  Globally, there's plenty of land.  Locally, I'm in danger of being shut out by my 2 neighbors.  I concede that this kind of clumping is possible in the stock binary.  I've seen clusters of 3 with a turn in the land that the game doesn't understand is a problem.

Details mindless Pirates

mindless Pirates

These Pirates have lost their minds.  I think they've just been sitting there with No Orders.  One of them took a wound, I presume from an Isle.  I bet in my last game, they just sat around and did nothing until they died.  I wonder if I can observe that in the previous game?

[bvanevery]

Details game 11 MY 2104 Pirates do not move

game 11 MY 2104 Pirates do not move

Yes, it happened in the previous game too.  Seeing a slightly wounded Sea Colony Pod, is evidence of a previous Isle attack where it got badly wounded but survived.  And then sits in place until it heals to 80%.

Details game 11 MY 2115 Pirates do not move

game 11 MY 2115 Pirates do not move

Details dead man's chest

dead man's chest

2 turns later they die.  I recorded it as MY 2117.

Details game 11 MY 2156 evidence of fatal earthquake

game 11 MY 2156 evidence of fatal earthquake

A later saved game shows evidence of that supply pod triggering an earthquake.  It crushed the Pirates to little tiny bits of kelp!

I've been testing Pirates with -1 SUPPORT and -1 INDUSTRY.  Could the lack of SUPPORT be causing them to think way too hard about where they should settle?

Or did the pathfinding code explode?  They're in a smaller body of water that twists around and connects to a larger body of water encompassing the entire map.

Or did setting faction_placement=0 break it?  Affecting only the Pirates for some reason?

[bvanevery]

Ok, let's try some variations.  Pirates required to be in the game, otherwise random factions.  No other conditions changed.  I draw the University.  I play the 1st turn, activate the Scenario Editor, and switch to watching another AI play.  I let it run to MY 2020.  How are the Pirates doing?

Details MY 2120 substandard Pirates

MY 2120 substandard Pirates

Well this is not very good progress for 20 turns.  One city has inappropriately made a land Colony Pod without making a Transport to take it anywhere.  They have plenty of minerals though.  I really can't see -1 SUPPORT and -1 INDUSTRY as any kind of resource barrier to their progress.

Details Pirate puddle

Pirate puddle

I doubt they had pathfinding problems as they got stuck in a small landlocked sea.

[bvanevery]

I tried watching a few AI only games to see if I could duplicate the problem.  At least under the Scenario Editor, the Pirates always settled their cities.  I wonder if the turn order matters, or the other factions in the game?  Could factions that trigger a late start on the map, such as the Caretakers, the Usurpers, and the Cult of Planet, trigger something bad to happen?  I will try duplicating the factions and their order from one of the games where the Pirates didn't move.  The canonical order for testing shall be based on this game 12:

• Cult of Planet
• Hive
• Believers
• Usurpers
• Pirates
• Cyborgs
• Peacekeepers

Details game 12 factions and order

game 12 factions and order

I know that when I set up the Hive, Believers, and 5 other random factions, the Hive and Believers were in the #2 and #3 slots.  So I think this window in the Scenario Editor is an accurate listing of faction order.

Details test game factions and order

test game factions and order

Let's see if I can get immobile Pirate sea colonies with these factions in this order.  I'll keep trying until I get the same result or get bored.

Well I guess "until" was a bit of a stretch.  Should have said "until I get bored".  I ran 4 test games, stopping on turn 2 to check if the Pirates had started moving.  In all cases they had.  This makes me suspect that the bug is map dependent.  Maybe it has to do with factions in the game, their order, or their proximity.  Maybe it doesn't.  But it's not going to reproduce easily.

So, I note that I had 2 games in a row with weirdly frozen Pirate sea colony pods.

[Induktio]

MY 2117.  Two neighbors?  This doesn't smell like stock binary behavior at all.  This is happening like every time I play the game.  Well, I said I'd quit, and I meant it.  Firing up the Scenario Editor to see what's happening.

Details super weird

super weird

5 of us are on an east-west supercontinent.  3 of us are clumped together.  Globally, there's plenty of land.  Locally, I'm in danger of being shut out by my 2 neighbors.  I concede that this kind of clumping is possible in the stock binary.  I've seen clusters of 3 with a turn in the land that the game doesn't understand is a problem.

That kind of clumping is for sure possible with the default placement, that's why faction_placement feature was created, although there have been some bugs in the implementation which will be fixed in the next version. But I haven't seen any race condition or anything similar in the config parsing, if the value is set to 0 the feature is turned off always. The default algorithm has a very high bias to set the starting location to coast tiles, so looking at the screenshots it seems likely the new placement was turned off.

I've noticed that pirate ship problem in testing, it seems to sometimes trigger when a colony pod meets an isle of deep early. The weird thing is that those units are supposed to have move orders set, but they do not seem to follow them. Probably some kind of an unusual situation in move processing code.

[bvanevery]

Game 13 proves it's possible to get a decent start without any neighbors.  I'm just scratching my head as to why it took so long.  The cramped starts have a pretty severe effect on the viability of my faction, as I have expensive burdens of defense that I simply don't have when I'm off on an island continent by myself.  In game 13 I've made 1 Command Center and all it does is make Trance Scouts!