SMACX Thinker Mod

[dino]

This colony pod argument is something I will mostly disagree with. Grabbing territory doesn't do much by itself unless it's populated by bases. Closely packed based can be defended more easily anyway. Each turn a colony pod spends on movement is a turn of missed productivity from a future base.

You're too much concentrated on how well it does isolated buildup, too little how its behaviour interact with other factions and human player.

Grabbing territory deny it to other factions, player controlled one specifically. For a player it's essential to have more land to work with than AIs to counter their cheat bonuses.
With current strategy I can easily corner thinker faction on my contient on a small piece of land and grab 2x more land myself.
Prevent war with diplomacy until I'm ready and after buildup 2x more land mean 2x more support minerals, easy future war.

With 3 tiles spread, infantry from neighbouring base can still reinforce threatened one within a single turn. More spread mean more special tiles per base, one extra food, mineral, or monolith tile early will offset 2 turns spent getting there.

When the amount of land is constant, than less spread mean more bases and faster utilisation of limited land.
But more spread in early game will result in 2x more land and 20% less bases in a given timeframe, but after buildup 2x more land equals 2x more resources and 2x more really good tiles that are crucial in early game.
Especially with growth bonus that gives AI popboom ability, at the same stage human player starts to popboom.

But denying land to human player is the main argument for a fast land grab.
Imo you should be a bit more concerned with how it interfere with what human player wants to do and how human can interfere with what it does.

***
As for unit upgrade, I remember experimenting with custom AI factions few months ago, I was curious what AI will do with excess money.
I gave Gaians starting money bonus and 10% interest rate, it was generating mad money.
It build tons of scout patrols early, at some point all scouts were gone and it had tons of plasma sentinels and it didn't lost scouts in war since it was only me and them on the continent.
I assumed it upgraded scouts at some point, sadly I didn't pinpoint the moment when that happened with a save, so I am not 100% sure it was the case, maybe it lost them to worms.

[bvanevery]

Makes it eco-suicide to spam more than one borehole per base. This would interfere with Thinker's current functioning.

Another option that would work in any alphax.txt without requiring a specific binary, would be to make Boreholes a lot more expensive.  I mean really, Thinker mod at this point seems to be built around major exploits in the game's rules.  I've plugged some of them, making Supply Crawlers and Boreholes available later in the game.  I didn't do that because of Thinker, it was already part of my mod design.  And it does help, as not every faction even makes it to being able to produce supply crawlers or Boreholes.  But really, should Boreholes be this cheap if the AI is so good at making them? 

Right before he left, Yitzi talked about the need for huge armies of formers bogging down gameplay. His proposed solution was to make all formers cost mineral an extra mineral upkeep regardless of clean reactors or support value but at the same time to reduce the time needed for terraforming in the alphax file.

What bogdown?  I just spend some turns executing all of Yang's Formers.  Yes he had an excessive number of them, but I'm not seeing the problem.  Fairly weak peons can kill the garden variety non-combat Former.

[bvanevery]

The formula has a wide range of variables but I think it does make sense to add "if enemy units inside borders" factor there.

Bear in mind that if I'm rail heading, I may not be inside the AI's faction's borders at all.  Until I instantly link the next base in 1 turn.  A core principle of -5 POLICE combat is you have to whack a base in 1 turn.  Rail heads are an excellent way to do that, but not the only way.  All techniques involve jumping over borders rapidly.  Air units and drop pods can reach right over borders.

It's just currently it builds too few units. When its adjusted to build more, the units should be mostly offensive in nature.

Beware of glass cannons and paper tigers.

Closely packed based can be defended more easily anyway.

That's the main thing I consider rails to be for.  Before I go on offense, that is.  Integrated empire for robust defense.  I don't build "close" bases like Thinker AI.  I build almost perfectly terrain covering bases.  I don't like wasting space.  Bureaucracy does affect me, whether or not it affects the AI.  I try to build my empire with a perfect radius, assuming I have the resources to do it.  I'm poor as dirt in Thinker mod and have to react to conditions.

Closely packing bases and then putting roads everywhere is lousy defense BTW.  No bottlenecks to choke and eliminate the enemy in stacks.

[bvanevery]

With current strategy I can easily corner thinker faction on my contient on a small piece of land and grab 2x more land myself.
Prevent war with diplomacy until I'm ready and after buildup 2x more land mean 2x more support minerals, easy future war.

You can kill a local enemy with any number of tactics, doesn't have to be anything fancy like you're saying.  How do you suppose your land grab is going to work with distant enemies, on a Huge map?  Answer: it doesn't.  You can't control distant AIs.  It doesn't matter how dedicated you are, how proactive you are, and I don't care what 4X TBS game you're playing.  You control whatever your logistical radius of early game control really is, and the AI fills in the rest.  Any specific AI can be a suicidal sacrifice.  In general the AI factions are spamming the map, spreading wherever you can't control.  If you are on a big map, they will gain their footholds somewhere, and you can't stop it.

My preferred technical term for this phenomenon is Whack-A-Mole.

If you typically play on Standard sized maps, you may not have noticed how "close quarters" your fighting always is.

or monolith tile early will offset 2 turns spent getting there.

I do game the popping of pods to get better starting resources for the earliest cities.

but after buildup 2x more land equals 2x more resources and 2x more really good tiles that are crucial in early game.

Another flaw in your claim is whether the human is actually willing to do 2x mouseclicks to play the damn game.  Yeah, sure you can win games by colonizing, colonizing, colonizing until you're blue in the face.  Do you personally have the stamina for that?  It's akin to grinding in a MMORPG, working the land so hard to get a result.  Now if you're sorta compulsive about colonizing, colonizing, colonizing, if you think that's fun and pretty much why you're playing the game, you need to recognize it's a specific play style and not everyone shares your joy in it.  Just as Infinite City Sprawl is a specific play style that I think is pretty lame too.

AIs don't get tired of doing very boring things over and over again.  That's a big problem with AI play mechanics that are mostly SPAM.  Does the human want to deal with all the cleanup required to win?  Does the human want to defend the same damn bases the same damn way for 100 turns in a row?  Sometimes the AI "beats" me because it has bored me to death.

It build tons of scout patrols early, at some point all scouts were gone and it had tons of plasma sentinels and it didn't lost scouts in war since it was only me and them on the continent.

It can lose them to exploration attrition.  It also doesn't have to upgrade.  It could disband, or give units to allies.

[dino]

Huge maps are boring. I never play on huge map, only on standard, or custom smaller than standard ( to keep standard rules ).
So land grabbing is crucial and thinker currently leave me way too much room for early expansion.

I also play with modded AI factions, that can popboom and have support bonus, so i need to have more land than them to have any chance at competing.
If thinker did spread more and kept bases defended from the beginning, it would provide serious pressure on me from the beginning.

If thinker spread bases more like I want, you would have less bases to conquer and manage later, not more.
Current almost ics style of placing in thinker is actually annoying and I advocate for less but bigger bases, as more fun singleplayer experience.
On top of being less annoying, it would be imo more challenging in right circuimstances ( buffed AIs that can popboom early ).

If there is no consensus, maybe we could have at least thinker.ini setting that would keep AI bases 3 tiles away.

[bvanevery]

Well at least you're testing something different than I am.  Even if Huge maps can get boring, I almost never play on Standard maps because there's no challenge to them at all.  At least on Huge, particularly the way I've modded SMACX AI Growth mod, AIs do have the ability to take root, establish real empires, and be genuine threats for awhile.

I don't think it's a good idea to expect support bonuses and pop booms when contemplating Thinker mod's design.  It's supposed to be compatible with the stock game and with other people's mods, and that's quite a set of assumptions about modding.  I don't believe in giving any faction a SUPPORT bonus, that's one of the things I removed because it is quite overpowered.  Everyone has to choose Police State (+2 SUPPORT), Fundamentalist (+1 SUPPORT), or Power (+1 SUPPORT) if they want more SUPPORT.

I arranged it so that the combo of Socialist and Eudaimonic will give +4 GROWTH and an unconditional pop boom in the presence of a Children's Creche.  It's also possible to pop boom with less than that if you make people happy enough for a Golden Age.  Those both take time to happen.  The exception is Lal, who is given +2 GROWTH as one of his major faction advantages.  Under Thinker mod he pop booms like mad!  Really scary.  I thought the Pirates were scary, but Lal is at least equally scary.

For our great suggestions about Thinker mod, I don't feel a need to say "spread your bases differently".  I would rather see it directly address this list of core problems:

• It's basically a Borehole exploit and that should be plugged somehow.  I'd mod the eco-damage formula if I had the knowledge to do it, so that the AI has to pay real costs for Boreholes and not just have them be this free candy.
• It ignores mandatory faction AI compulsions, resulting in goofiness like a Fundamentalist Yang chewing you out about not being a Police State.  This harms narrative and diplomatic game mechanics.
• It builds way too many roads.
• It has no meaningful concept of defense.  In late game I am currently slaughtering a home guard of Scouts.

On the positive side, it does respect research foci.  That was my big issue back in the day.  Even the monster superpowered factions, have followed the research trends I expect from my mod.  And they are severely different and noticeable, as for instance you only get weapons and armor by researching Conquer.

[Induktio]

You're too much concentrated on how well it does isolated buildup, too little how its behaviour interact with other factions and human player.

Grabbing territory deny it to other factions, player controlled one specifically. For a player it's essential to have more land to work with than AIs to counter their cheat bonuses.

That kind of stuff probably is not something that can be implemented by just having the colony pods walk more distance. For example, if there are fewer, but bigger bases, drone management becomes even more of a problem than it is now. It already builds the bases mostly 3 tiles apart which is the distance infantry can cover in a single turn along roads. Fast horizontal expansion is pretty much the key in this game, at least if one looks at this speed run. It's 3 pages long, the most interesting stuff is in the end.

I wouldn't recommend playing this mod on any maps smaller than standard. The AI needs some time to grow up before it can be effective. Even standard sized maps may be problematic here. The game still mostly has the old AI for combat unit movement, which in theory might be rewritten to assign new priorities for the units, but it would be a really big project.

That's why I slightly increased large map size to 50x100 in the recommended alphax.txt file. That file is also the configuration I use for testing this mod. Mostly it just has the standard game configuration values there. With few exceptions, I don't do separate testing with mods, although on these issues it probably has no effect.

[bvanevery]

Fast horizontal expansion is pretty much the key in this game, at least if one looks at this speed run.

He cheated by playing with Directed Research.  That's a baby's game.

In my mod, the Caretakers and Usurpers have been stripped of their free armor, stripped of their recycling tanks, and their Battle Ogres' main armament has been nerfed to strength 3.  They get E1 Progenitor Psych and C2 Field Modulation to start with.  The latter gives the fairly useless Cloaking Device and nothing else.  Unlike all other factions in my mod, they get 1 penalty to go along with their 1 bonus.  Most factions just get 3 bonuses and no penalties.  That's how powerful I consider Directed Research to be.  If you play it outside of Alien factions, you are cheating.

It's for people who couldn't make the cognitive leap from Civ II and whined and screamed about things changing.

[Induktio]

You might then want to go argue with T-Hawk whether the speed run is valid or not. Lots of tactics can be considered exploitable. The basic principles for expansion should work about the same either way.

[bvanevery]

I don't have anything to gain by arguing with T-Hawk, about a demonstration on his own website that doesn't purport to be anything other than exactly what it is.  But, you claimed it is an exemplar of how to win the game.  I don't agree with you, because his method relied on a very basic kind of cheating.  Just go to the biggest exploit of the game as quickly as possible to win it.

Notice furthermore that he took the research buff faction, on top of already having a directed research cheat.

If you took the Aliens in my mod, you'd have your few remaining Alien advantages, but you wouldn't have any research buff.  And it would be a long time before you got supply crawlers at all.  Even if you got the Weather Paradigm, it takes more time to get it in the 1st place, and more manufacturing cost.  There's no way you'd get all this done in under 100 turns.  That's 'cuz I've spent a lot of time rebalancing exploits and holes in the game.

[PvtHudson]

If there is no consensus, maybe we could have at least thinker.ini setting that would keep AI bases 3 tiles away.

+1. Or make it faction-dependent to add variety. If I remember right, vanilla Miriam preferred very wide spreading. I too have no stamina to play on huge maps and mostly use standard, and there colony pod wars become a minigame in itself.

[Induktio]

Well well, now we have a new develop build (version 20190314) available from the downloads. This update is focused on the build priorities and terraforming:

* Thinker now supports formers based on all triads. Design_units will also create gravship formers when the techs are available.
* Formers will build less roads and try to avoid placing them on forest tiles when they're not needed.
* Other smaller tweaks to former priorities.
* Military unit production priority is now notably increased from previous amounts.
* Whenever AI loses bases to conquest, this also triggers an extra priority to devote nearly all available resources to building new units.
* During peacetime these modifiers will have a much lesser effect, so economy building should still work.
* Small changes to social_ai to prefer priority category models more often. But social priority/opposition effect values (e.g. PLANET) have no effect because of the engine, and are still ignored.

It needs some more testing to determine if the military buildup is enough now. The next step would probably be to implement credit rushing for production items, currently it does not do that. It would be pretty powerful, since now rushing is basically a human exploit.

This update doesn't change anything with the base spacing though. For example the new road building method would need yet more changes if the spacing was changed from current values.

[dino]

I know you didn't change anything, but this time all bases were spread 3 tiles apart ( no base within borders of another base ).
If it looked like this in my previous game I wouldn't complain at all. Maybe I had weird map geography previously, will see after more games.

Idea regarding upgrading units: Just automatically disband all units, that are inside base and have both attack and defense values half, or less of maximum available.
Exception: Don't scrap scouts when laser/synthmetal available, wait for the next tier.
Half their mineral value will be returned toward production and can be always performed, no funds needed. It'll also free support minerals for non military production, if currently not threatened.

First impressions:
Level of military buildup probably would be suitable in late 2100s, for an early game it seems a bit too crippling.
Positive is it would be really hard to conquer it early. I'll continue with this game to see if AI will recover from a slower start.

If it doesn't, possible suggestion ( maybe I wrote it too early and should see how midgame plays out first, but since I've already typed it, I'll leave it here ):
Keep it like it was before, for the first x number of turns ( possibly make it dependant on mapsize, plus small random factor, you could also make it variable in the ini, so we can playtest to find the best value ).
If it looses a base during early game ( these x number of turns ), engage something less aggressive than "almost all production towards military".

[Induktio]

I know you didn't change anything, but this time all bases were spread 3 tiles apart ( no base within borders of another base ).
If it looked like this in my previous game I wouldn't complain at all. Maybe I had weird map geography previously, will see after more games.

There is only one known exception to the 3 tiles between bases rule that Thinker follows currently. If a colony pod is on a jungle tile, then it is allowed to have one base within 2 tiles, otherwise the next base has to be within 3 tiles or more before a colony pod is deployed. It might be easy to miss this factor if the jungle is covered in forests etc.

Idea regarding upgrading units: Just automatically disband all units, that are inside base and have both attack and defense values half, or less of maximum available.

Something like that could be done. It might also be possible for the AI to run out of design slots in the late game, especially after new reactors are discovered. Not sure how often that is a problem. There always seems to be some obsolete designs lurking around. It might be even better if it upgraded the units, but have to investigate more how that could be implemented. Hmm.

First impressions:
Level of military buildup probably would be suitable in late 2100s, for an early game it seems a bit too crippling.
Positive is it would be really hard to conquer it early. I'll continue with this game to see if AI will recover from a slower start.

Early game is quite tricky to manage especially if the faction has support problems. When the bases reach 20+ minerals the problem would pretty much solve itself. Early on there might be also the problem of lacking any viable armor/weapon techs. If the new version is somehow crippled in the early game, then I might write some fix for that. But if the AI is at war with a close enemy, then it should probably be building lots of units regardless.

[bvanevery]

+1. Or make it faction-dependent to add variety. If I remember right, vanilla Miriam preferred very wide spreading.

She does, but it's not faction dependent, it's Explore research focus dependent.  This phenomenon was observed by several modders previous to myself.  I brought it to its logical conclusion in SMACX AI Growth mod.  The inputs of faction personality and research foci do partly govern AI behavior in the stock binary.  Most factions in my mod use Explore as part of their focus.  For instance Morgan is not a Build faction, he's an Explore, Build faction.  Zhakarov is Explore, Discover.