SMACX Thinker Mod

[Rocky]

> The AI is building Cruiser Probe Teams in landlocked cities.

That's really strange. Is there any chance the land altitude around the base was changed after building that unit?

I checked the save from the beginning. There were no changes in altitude. Around 4 land bases from the Pirates built these probe cruisers. I checked later saves and no further probe cruisers were built inside land cities. None of the other AI's did this so maybe it's a one-time thing. I'll try to keep an eye on it in future games. (I'll include the Pirates to see if they repeat it)

By the way, would Thinker be affected if I disabled some of the chassis in alphax.txt for my next game? (For example Choppers or Sky bases) Would Thinker use other units instead?

[Induktio]

> I checked the save from the beginning. There were no changes in altitude. Around 4 land bases from the Pirates built these probe cruisers.

Another player sent me a savegame showing a similar issue and this bug has been identified. With some settings combinations, prototypes created by design_units feature can become corrupted in the savegame. This issue should be fixed in develop build 20210301 available from downloads. When you open an old save in the patched version, the game just prunes the inccorrect prototypes and recreates some of them. After that, don't reload the save in an unpatched Thinker version because the bug might reappear.

> By the way, would Thinker be affected if I disabled some of the chassis in alphax.txt for my next game? (For example Choppers or Sky bases) Would Thinker use other units instead?

Disabling Choppers is actually recommended, Thinker just selects other types of chassis that are available.

[Drinniol]

Just made an account to say that this is a great mod!  Really amps up the game and is actually quite difficult on transcend if you use the standard 7 on the cost_factor.

I actually like helicopters, they are a great defensive unit but harder to use offensively.  They force your opponent to crawl in with defensive AAA units but they aren't unbeatable.  The big problem is that they should probably be more expensive and also should straight up die if they run out of fuel instead of just losing some HP.  If their default moves was 8 they'd probably be fine.   

Speaking of cost_factor, do you have any intention to further break that up?  Right now cost_factor affects minerals, nutrients, and tech together, but I'd kind of like to be able to control them separately. 

Also, on planetpearls, is it possible to have planetpearls on default native life and fungal towers but not on the eco/story triggered forced spawns?  I think the planetpearls are a fine reward for exploring early on and for actually clearing fungal towers out, but when you get thousands of free credits on eco pops turning what is supposed to be a nuisance into a huge payday that's a bit degenerate.  I've also never understood why you only get them offensively. 

Also, I notice that even with collateral_damage on 0, one successful attack kills a full 10 stack of forced pop mindworms.  Is there any way to change this?  Again, it makes those lategame eco spawns too easy to deal with when one empath song rover or tank can deal with like 30 mind worms in one turn. 

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

That could be bug in AI production selection. As far as I remember it is impossible to manually select sea unit without adjacent sea.

[Induktio]

Okay, just uploaded the new develop build 20210310. Changes in this update:

* Combat target selection logic for AI has been updated to take into account more factors.
* When using aircraft, AI tries to prioritize enemies that are close to friendly units.
* AI tries to avoid wasting Choppers because of fuel exhaustion.
* Config options for social_ai have been expanded.
* Added new config options for unit repair rates (9 options in total). This is the exact same implementation than in Will To Power. It's not yet tested for all possible cases but found no issues so far.

Bonus content: this might be a good soundtrack for this mod.

> Speaking of cost_factor, do you have any intention to further break that up?

Hmm, dunno about that. Is that necessarily important?

> Also, I notice that even with collateral_damage on 0, one successful attack kills a full 10 stack of forced pop mindworms.

That behaviour also applies to probe team stacks. When one unit loses, the whole stack is destroyed. It's surely one of the weak spots for the AI because it tends to stack so many units in one square. I've been thinking of changing that for balance reasons.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Awesome, man. The work is going on.

Bonus content: this might be a good soundtrack for this mod.

That is one awesome soundtrack. Definitely make it a default! It seems that there are few similar but slightly distinct recording on this theme on youtube.
😎

> Also, I notice that even with collateral_damage on 0, one successful attack kills a full 10 stack of forced pop mindworms.

That behaviour also applies to probe team stacks. When one unit loses, the whole stack is destroyed. It's surely one of the weak spots for the AI because it tends to stack so many units in one square. I've been thinking of changing that for balance reasons.

That is inbuilt feature for probes and native worms. I don't think faction worms can be destroyed all at once.

[Induktio]

Or how about this song also. It could be titled "Thinker gathering naval invasion forces". Just too bad about the copyrights.

[Rocky]

How do I install the new develop build? I think I did something wrong because I'm getting an error that there's an unknown configuration option in Thinker.ini.

[Induktio]

> I think I did something wrong because I'm getting an error that there's an unknown configuration option in Thinker.ini.

Did you extract and replace using the files from the zip?

[Rocky]

> Did you extract and replace using the files from the zip?

I opened the zip and extracted all files into the Alpha Centauri folder and let it overwrite existing files.

After this I got the message, although as far as I can tell the Ai still works perfectly.

I also put the new thinker.ini from the zip file in the Alpha Centauri directory but I got the same message.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You better paste message screenshot here. It may have an indication on specific line where the problem occurred. Although it may be not obvious at first glance.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Using the opportunity I like to thank you, Induktio, for working in combat AI enhancement. That was the most time consuming task for me at a time and I never seriously dived into it. With your efforts, I feel I may never need to.
😁

[Induktio]

> I also put the new thinker.ini from the zip file in the Alpha Centauri directory but I got the same message.

Well, I'm pretty sure thinker.ini bundled with 20210310 is the correct one for this dll version. Note the latest release date was *10 not *01.

So there's two chances now: a) thinker.ini loaded by the game is something else, b) thinker.dll is some other version. But this warning is useful for just this kind of issue. Either one of these files can be mismatched, so it's good the engine gives a warning about it.

> That was the most time consuming task for me at a time and I never seriously dived into it.

If you have examples of how this new AI performs in real world scenarios, feel free to post them. But yeah, this part of the codebase basically doubled the size of movement code...

[Rocky]

> Well, I'm pretty sure thinker.ini bundled with 20210310 is the correct one for this dll version. Note the latest release date was *10 not *01.

So there's two chances now: a) thinker.ini loaded by the game is something else, b) thinker.dll is some other version. But this warning is useful for just this kind of issue. Either one of these files can be mismatched, so it's good the engine gives a warning about it.


Thinker.dll in my directory is from 20210102? Is this the wrong version? All the files in the zip were from 20210310. (thinker-master)

The error message was "Unknown configuration option detected in thinker.ini. Game might not work as intended."

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Rocky, do a clean install first when you face unresolvable problems. Download the game from GOG and apply mod on top of it.