One thing you gotta watch out for, is that putting 0s in something creates a hard barrier to it being researched by that focus.
there is too many absolutely essential techs and too many useless ones and bogging down on useless stuff early can even cut your development speed in half.
What is the point of using blind research, if you feel the need to mod it in order to direct it to your liking anyway.
Finetuning weights can improve AIs performance great deal though and for this reason it's worth playing with.
I think blind research is stupid feature for a player to use
, there is too many absolutely essential techs and too many useless ones and bogging down on useless stuff early can even cut your development speed in half. What is the point of using blind research, if you feel the need to mod it in order to direct it to your liking anyway. The tech tree in this game is not designed to provide different balanced paths, supporting different playstyles and that would be necessary for a blind research to be fun to use by an advanced player.
Finetuning weights can improve AIs performance great deal though and for this reason it's worth playing with. For AIs you want to make it differentiate between factions less and only provide some slight flavour in a form different priorities and early short detours, while making sure that all factions will get essential techs not too far apart from each other.
However, exact technology value distribution is absolutely not visible to user and is not even reflected in datalink. One should browse alphax.txt research tree to understand each technology value combination and build a graph of dependencies to be able to trace research progress and tweak it correspondingly. Which is, of course, not user friendly.
Instead I tried to distribute features across technologies more or less evenly
so you don't have an absolute empty technologies (like Optical Computers) anymore.
One thing I've noticed, is I highly suspect that cashing an Artifact for tech, typically gives you a tech outside of your usual research focus. That could be deliberate, or it could be it simply doesn't use weights to decide what's learned, so you have pretty good odds of hitting something you're not looking for.
2) very-very-very difficult to fine tune with research weights and tree dependencies,
3) dilutes very easily with technology trading.
In summary, it's not worth optimizing.
For both artifact and pod discovered technology you get the cheapest one combined value one.
2) very-very-very difficult to fine tune with research weights and tree dependencies,
False. It's actually rather straightforward. I've fully implemented an example of how to do it in my tree. The rules I've followed are:
It does not seem like it was designed to support different play styles.
It does not seem like it was designed to support different play styles.
You are conflating different play styles with different combat styles. They are not the same. Nobody said you have to play this game by focusing on combat. If you choose to be a Spartanesque war machine, yes your options are going to be narrowly channeled. Bigger weapons are better, thicker armor is better. You do have some combined arms variance. You do have some different naval, air, hovertank, and mindworm invasion options. The variety of what you can do to prevail in combat is limited, but it's not zero.
I think it is difficult to establish what is a valid or invalid play style, when the AI is not competent enough to pursue many of them.
You are doing it for too long, man. I didn't say it is impossible. The fact that you did it doesn't make it easier for general public.
:D
Nobody else bothers.
I meant exactly play style, not combat style.
QuoteNobody else bothers.
How many nobodies are really under discussion though? I mean "nobody" mods SMAC in any huge way, if you get right down to it. I presume, based on public comments, that a lot of people change a few settings here and there, as they like.
I meant exactly play style, not combat style.
Why should I agree with that then? You can colonize endlessly, you can extract every Artifact from Planet, you can grow big cities and vote yourself the Best Thing Ever, you can overrun your neighbors, you can dig Thermal Boreholes, you can pit factions against each other with covert missions. There's lots of variety for how you want to reach a victory condition.
Finetuning weights can improve AIs performance great deal though and for this reason it's worth playing with. For AIs you want to make it differentiate between factions less and only provide some slight flavour in a form different priorities and early short detours, while making sure that all factions will get essential techs not too far apart from each other.
It sounds contradictory to what you and I said above about unpredictability of blind research. True, AI gets some technology set skew based on set priorities. However, the exact skew is 1) very unpredictable and unreliable, 2) very-very-very difficult to fine tune with research weights and tree dependencies, 3) dilutes very easily with technology trading. One probably can play thousand games and discover that certain priority set leads to certain technology set on average. However, slightest change in weights or tree build changes this and one would need to play another thousand games to understand how exactly.
In summary, it's not worth optimizing.
Industrial Automation and resource lifting techs relatively early is essential, especially with thinker mod.
Getting at least 4/2 units early is essential for survival while having aggressive neighbour.
You can't make it satysfying replacement for direct research, but you can prevent AIs from shooting themselves in the foot in the early game.
The way thinker mod changes the weights is not effective, since many factions skip Centauri Ecology with its tech_ai feature on and also remain defenseless for too long.
I've suggested Inducti0 additive, instead of multiplicative bonus to make it better, but don't remember if he implemented it. Just fine tuned weights in alphax.txt work even better anyway.
tech_balance=1 from thinker.ini
This feature multiplies ai weights from alphax.txt of selected few techs by 4.
Problem was, if original weight is 0, it did nothing to direct AI towards this and the other extremely high weights would make some AIs skip some essential techs like Ecology.
I suggested to make it additive +8 bonus instead, he agreed, but you'd have to find it in source, or patch notes, if he actually changed it.
If you use the latest thinker mod, it has a new tech cost formula that base cost on tech level, not on the number of known tech.
Since you've reduced the number of tech levels in your mod, you should either edit the source code of the new formula, or disable this feature in thinker.ini.
Thank you for reminding me Thinker has this feature. I need to reread it. It was long ago. I should probably align my changes with this.
I think it's better kept disabled, you can achieve the same, or better just by editing weights in alphax.txt.
You use the latest release version 0.9, while I'm up to date with his develop builds, it was the source of my confusion regarding missing variables in the thinker.ini, the new tech cost formula is not implemented in 0.9Thank you for reminding me Thinker has this feature. I need to reread it. It was long ago. I should probably align my changes with this.
I think it's better kept disabled, you can achieve the same, or better just by editing weights in alphax.txt.
The only advantage ( or not ) of the thinker bonus, is that it affects AIs, but not blind research for the player.
In the 0.9 version weights of selected techs are multiplied, in the latest develop build there is additive bonus probably, you can always check the code to be sure.