Growth vs. Wealth

[bvanevery]

All of the techs in alphax.txt have the following important parameters:

; power    = military value
; tech     = advance-of-knowledge value
; wealth   = infrastructure value
; growth   = colonization value

In any given FACTION.txt are similar parameters:

; ai-fight    = -1,0,1 (willingness to use force to achieve goals)
; ai-power    = 1 or 0 (interest in power)
; ai-tech     = 1 or 0 (interest in knowledge)
; ai-wealth   = 1 or 0 (interest in wealth)
; ai-growth   = 1 or 0 (interest in population growth)

For blind research we have the respective choices of Conquer, Discover, Build, and Explore.  I have found the latter 2 categories to be ambiguous and confusing.  What does it mean to "Explore" ?  Since the Gaians are the "pure Exploration" faction, I was misled to believe that it had to do with mindworms, being planet friendly, and indigenous guerrilla warfare.  But when I took Explore interest away from the Believers, they did a pathetic job of expanding.  I am now thinking Explore actually means pretty much what most factions need to do ok at the game.  That it needs to be looked at from the AI standpoint, not any pure conception about categories.  If you don't tell the AI to use ai-growth, it sucks.  Some evidence for this from an old archive post, where someone talked about using ai-growth to increase factional prowess in a mod they did.

I would not be surprised if the AI does not actually have an Exploration algorithm of any strategic importance.  Rather, it has a Colonization, Expand, make an empire algorithm, and the whole idea of calling it "Explore" is marketing fluff.  I bet exploring is actually implemented by just setting a few units to auto-explore and calling it good.  If they're mindworms, fine, but otherwise I bet there's not much to it.  Need ships to get out on the water, ok, whatever.  But past that, no real value in conceptualizing the AI's actions in terms of "exploring".  I bet it simply doesn't think that way.

Acknowledging that we've been using wrong words, what does "Growth" mean?  I'm guessing it means making new cities, and making sure the people are happy in the cities that you've got.  It means population growth.  That's important for lots of things in the game, but it's especially important for Diplomatic Victory.  So I'm thinking any facility that makes people happy, such as a Recreation Commons, the Human Genome Project, or the Virtual World, should be regarded as Growth.  Technologies that award those, should be Growth technologies, i.e. they should appear as green colored "Explore" techs in the tech tree.

What is Wealth then?  Well I'm supposing it's definitely energy credit production, and possibly minerals production.  The term "infrastructure" is ambiguous.  Every facility you build in a base is "infrastructure", it's not a helpful descriptor.  But I am supposing, "what you need for Economic Victory" would be the guiding principle here.  That doesn't give clear guidance on minerals, but by calculation elimination, what other category would it fit?  I'm thinking either Wealth, or no category at all.

In my current mod, I've been trying very hard to break techs apart into pure categories.  A conquer tech, for instance, should only award options that are directly related to conquest.  The truth is, the vast majority of gewgaws you get in the game, are for conquest.  Marketers may have tried to divide the tech tree up equally between Explore, Discover, Build, and Conquer to make it "seem fair" to all the factions, but that's just not how the gewgaws are actually structured.  They thought up far more ways to kill stuff or avoid being killed, than they did to make energy credits, research, or new colonies / happy citizens.

I've scrapped all of that, and re-weighted everything, but now I'm realizing I've been telling the AI wrong things about "Growth".  A mindworm is for Conquest.  It doesn't help you make a colony, and exploration doesn't even matter.  Any unit can explore.  Scouts explore; I made a Truck unit and the AI started using it to explore.

So now, I have even more re-weighting work to do.  I hope I get factions that play more competently at the end of this, because it'll be a solid month's worth of full time work by the time I've debugged and deployed this mod.  If it doesn't actually improve the game, then the game is a lost cause.  Unless someone comes afterwards, looking at my work, and figures out something about tweaking the settings that I didn't.

[Tawnyaz]

What I see in this forum is where the content comes from.

[bvanevery]

A lot of the stuff I did in my mod (see the SMACX AI Growth mod thread) is working, at least for opening games on Standard sized maps.  I'm only now starting to test midgames on Huge maps.  It was always my intention to have factions do better on larger maps, where they start farther away from human players and have time to build up and gain strength before being assaulted.  I wonder whether the Believers' intended "population boom" weapon will actually end up working?  A human player can do it fairly easily, but I don't know about the AI.