SMACX Thinker Mod

[T-hawk]

If you do anything with tech rate, I think it should just work like all the later Civ games, the cost of each tech is fixed depending on where it is on the tree.  Something like 20 labs for first-level techs, times 1.5^N for a tech of level N, would add up to roughly (and of course you could calculate it exactly) the current total cost for the entire tree but scale up more smoothly throughout the game.  This would also reduce the impact of beelining restriction lifting, since the level 4 and 5 techs would be more expensive compared to filling in more early techs.

That's a major change and not at all something you'd put into an AI-only mod, but if you've decided to take on broader scope, that's one of the most fundamental improvements from SMAC to all the later Civs.

[DrazharLn]

T-hawk, what else do you think the later civs improved on that might be worth sharing?

Maybe it would be interesting to solicit game design thoughts more broadly? I don't know what kind of changes you feel like making, induktio.

SManiaC was very well received when released. I'm not familiar with the more recent mods like Binary Dawn and bvanery's one, but there could be some lessons to learn. Edit: Probably more from the multiplayer mods because so much of other mods is messing with the AI in ways that don't really apply any more for Thinker.

Interestingly, SManiaC's description explicitly mentions infinite forest as a common effective strategy in multiplayer. Perhaps we can teach the Gaians to use it effectively to give them that different flavour.

[T-hawk]

The big one Civ 3 players rejoiced over was unit support paid at the nationwide level rather than having to micromanage it per base.

The other big one in Civ 3 is that your units can't use roads in enemy territory, so building them isn't a huge potential liability.

The big one Civ 4 players rejoiced over was no riots - only the unhappy marginal citizen ceases to work, not the entire city.

The other big one in Civ 4 is tracking production and tech per item, so if you change production or research orders, the invested progress stays with the original item.  That would be quite a task to implement in SMAC, for sure.

The big one for Civ 5 is that cities have their own inherent strength and hit points, no more wiping out a civ's best base or capital with a single warrior.

Some less major stuff:

Scaling tech cost by tree depth applies to diplomacy too, starting in Civ 3, techs at the trade table are worth money roughly equal to the labs investment.

Civ 4 significantly downscaled the load of worker micromanagement, by increasing their costs but reducing the time to build improvements.  You have half as many workers but each completes things twice as fast, same results, half the micromanagement.

And of course the culture subsystem for borders, although I don't know how you'd invent that from scratch for SMAC.  Although one subtle but welcome tweak would be that a tile at equal distances from two competing bases should belong to the older base, not the newer.  It's stupidly easy to steal territory by aggressive settling in SMAC.  I think Civs 4+ outright disallow settling in someone else's owned territory, which is a good rule, although SMAC's 8-tile border distance is a bit too much range for that.

[dino]

> Also what do you think of the default tech cost formula in the game?

It's very needed, half of the tech three has almost no playing time. When you start geting new tech every 1-2 turns, it's best to just tech away and skip few tiers of units.

1)
The big offenders are parts of the formula that reduce tech cost as the game progress: with turns passed and with amount of tech owned by leading faction.
These are mechanics meant to ease casual player. The second one could be left in place for ai, but removed for human player.

2)
The cost could use, some adjustable through ini file exponential modifier to number of techs count impact on the cost, to match exponential growth of thinker ai, or competent player.
So at the beginning it would be the same as vanilla and at the end of the tech tree cost could be few times higher ( lets say 2x, but adjustable variable would make it easy to playtest, adjust to personal preferences ).

Tech cost dependant on tech tier is an excellent idea, that would help ai, that can't consciously beeline the most necessary tech, but it's probably difficult to implement.

[DrazharLn]

Thanks for the response, T-hawk.

I'm not sure I'd want all of those, but it's interesting to hear your perspective.

Continuing to muse on SMAC game design, I'd like it if supply crawlers made a bit more sense, too. Perhaps more like the caravans that continue to move around the map. Obviously one would hope that it leads to interesting piracy opportunities and territory control issues, but I kinda doubt it would really make much difference.

[dino]

Crawled resources could be divided by a calculated by pathfinding algorithm amount of turns it would take a crawler to reach a home base.
Would make crawlers on better chasis, or building roads/magtubes to crawled tiles useful.

Interrupting supply line with ZOC of enemy unit, would lenghten calculated distance, or even cut out resource.
Crawlers sitting on resource are even easier target than travelling ones, so actually travelling them on the map wouldn't bring much to the table.

[DrazharLn]

I was thinking of a bigger departure from the system with a crawler going to an area, sitting there statically and sending resources back in caravans.

Anyway, I think it's a pretty off-topic thought

[Vidsek]

   Interesting crawler ideas.

  I've been wishing that there could be an option to give crawling resources a cost based on the distance to the base receiving, but a cost in *energy* (meaning fuel) not the resource being harvested.

  Having the crawlers actually moving about might run into one snag: they can send home stuff across water gaps they themselves cannot cross.  I usually just imagine invisible trucks and ships handling the relay

[Induktio]

If you do anything with tech rate, I think it should just work like all the later Civ games, the cost of each tech is fixed depending on where it is on the tree.  Something like 20 labs for first-level techs, times 1.5^N for a tech of level N, would add up to roughly (and of course you could calculate it exactly) the current total cost for the entire tree but scale up more smoothly throughout the game.  This would also reduce the impact of beelining restriction lifting, since the level 4 and 5 techs would be more expensive compared to filling in more early techs.

That's a major change and not at all something you'd put into an AI-only mod, but if you've decided to take on broader scope, that's one of the most fundamental improvements from SMAC to all the later Civs.

Lots of replies here it seems, so this tech rate issue has been bothering other players too. It does feel somewhat broken if the end game techs get compressed into only 10 turns of gameplay or similar. I would also identify the tech cost function as the main point of interest for inclusion in the next Thinker release.

I've been digging through the relevant parts of code and it seems implementing the tech cost change shouldn't be too difficult. After all, we're just reimplementing a function that returns a simple integer. Of course, this change hasn't been implemented yet in the develop builds, and I don't generally promise to implement any particular things because motivation lol. Just to note, this mod isn't "only" about AI, it has also a rewritten random map generator, so this kind of change isn't entirely off the theme.

Later Civ games changed some fundamental game mechanics mainly for balance reasons and also to help the AI. Coindicentally T-Hawk also mentioned some of those mechanics which have been talked in this thread previously. Nationwide unit support to name one of the most important ones. But now I'm probably going to look mostly into the tech cost issue when I'll have more spare time to dig through the code. I kind of prefer the idea that costs should follow a formula like 20 * 1.5^N, scaled for map size (square root?) of course.

[Rocky]

Induktio, would it be possible to add a setting in the AI config files that allows the player to set the amount of bases the factions can build?

Your AI does an amazing job with expanding but on larger maps it gets so many bases that any kind of war becomes a drawn out fight with lots of micro-management. Several times I considered trying to stop a neighboring faction from becoming too powerful by invading them, but at that point they have so many bases (somewhere between 20-40) that I end up going for a more peaceful builder-game instead.

I like the option/idea of the Gaians having a different terraforming process as was discussed earlier. With the Gaians having fewer Boreholes, would it be possible to encourage the AI to place higher priority on building Tree Farms/Hybrid Forests? (Unless that was already the case) It would fit their nature theme.

[Induktio]

Well good news, it seems it is very feasible to rewrite the tech cost function. As a proof of concept, I implemented a patched version of tech_rate function that can change the costs for any tech. Changes are immediately displayed in the infiltration window etc. Now the main thing remaining is to decide how to do the cost scaling in this new version.

On a standard sized map with default tech rate, the first tech costs normally 14 labs. Using T-Hawk's formula the first one would cost 20*1.5^1=30, so not sure what to make of that. Level 16 Transcendent Thought would cost 13 thousand labs. That's maybe too much. There's also some other mechanics that could be used here:

1) Tech costs can be combined from a linear and an exponential factor. The latter should become more relevant towards the end of game to account for all the energy increases.
2) Use tech costs as an anti-runaway faction mechanic. Researching a tech for the first time should be much more expensive than researching it when all the other factions already know it.
3) Should we equalize tech costs for human and AI factions or keep them somehow dependent on the difficulty level?

In any case the new system should probably be based on these elements: 1) tech costs are mainly dependent on the tech's level, 2) map size scaling should stay the same as previously.


> would it be possible to add a setting in the AI config files that allows the player to set the amount of bases the factions can build?

Well sure, I've been thinking about that. But the main thing is that the bases have both an upper limit (40 bases on Huge) and another scaled on map size. It might need two different config options to have it adjust sensibly on different map sizes. Maybe a percentage multiplier for the default map scaled limit and another value to set the global upper limit?

[DrazharLn]

I think the base limit setting could be the number for standard size maps with a comment explaining how it is scaled with map size.

Re: tech costs, I think techs get shared around OK already through trade, so if everyone else knows a tech it is cheaper to get it.

I think bonuses for the AI should be decided experimentally, it's just about getting a good play experience.

[T-hawk]

The factors of 20 and 1.5 were just an off-the-cuff guess, adjust it however you want for the higher tiers to come out right.  Or never mind a formula and just specify some reasonable sequence directly like 20, 30, 50, 80, etc.  Do remember there's often only about two techs per tier up at the high end, unlike the later Civs, so it could be okay if they cost quite a bit each.

The existing formula already includes discounts for a faction trailing in tech and for AI difficulty level.  I think those are good enough to just keep the same rather than mod.

[Induktio]

> I think the base limit setting could be the number for standard size maps with a comment explaining how it is scaled with map size.

In the next update, base limit setting will get a new configuration option called expansion_factor. It multiplies the default expansion limit by a percentage. Default limit will now be scaled proportional to (MapWidth*MapHeight)^0.4. Smallest map sizes will get some additional scaling because otherwise space would run out so quickly. It will be a very nice addition to the other difficulty config options. Planet factions will also build less boreholes in the next update.

However, the main thing I've been thinking is of course the tech cost update. It requires some more number crunching before I'll deploy a new version. One of the oddities of the default tech costs is that the first tech is dirt cheap, and then it multiplies very quickly after that. I might even try to replicate the same costs for say first 3-4 techs in the new formula. Level 1-3 costs should probably stay close to their previous amounts, but it might be hard to factor in various tech beelining tactics that were used with the old formula. First notable cost increases should appear on levels 4-5.

> The existing formula already includes discounts for a faction trailing in tech and for AI difficulty level.  I think those are good enough to just keep the same rather than mod.

But there's one gotcha here: human players could purposefully avoid learning redundant techs because having a lower known tech count, they would gain an advantage in "trailing" tech level mechanics. If the discounts are only tied to how many factions know a particular tech, then it might be harder to exploit.

[DrazharLn]

Those sound like good changes

Did you explore the effectiveness of a forest-heavy approach?

I wouldn't worry too much about exploits, but decreasing cost by number of other factions with tech does make more sense.