SMACX Thinker Mod

[Tayta Malikai]

Well, I was ready to rage-quit my current game, as Orange's unstoppable hordes of +55% mind worms rolled over both of my pact sisters and wrecked my earlier conquests; meanwhile, Teal somehow rose to become the premier superpower on Planet, landing probe teams on my continent and harassing my sea formers with cruisers, and I had to buy him off with tech so I wouldn't have to split my attention across two fronts.

But after stepping away from the computer for a bit, I decided there was still a chance to win; and what do you know, things have turned around since then.

The answer? NBC warfare. I first discovered this magic in a previous game, and have since honed it further. My first action as Governor was to repeal the Charter, and then start pumping out jets equipped with nerve gas. They are disgustingly effective at wiping out enemy bases, and there's little they can do about it. I'd combine them with a gene warfare attack: this would take the base down to 1 pop and halve the defenders' HP, and then a single follow-up airstrike would wipe out the base for good.

The downside to this is that this precludes any possibility of surrender, and also prevents you from capturing the bases for your own use. But it utterly cripples the opponent, and you can always leave any bases with juicy projects alive for later.

I'm not actually sure if anything could or should be done about this. Frankly, at +30% I need every edge I can get. And since I already can't use crawlers or popboom...

The other godsend I had this game was probe teams. I got lucky and managed to spark a war between the two capitalism-loving factions, which neutralized their commerce advantage and kept them busy while I got my affairs in order. The advantage of the AIs being so aggressive is that I can repeatedly probe them for tech without having to fear any penalty.

Here is how the game looks like in 2225. Rather interesting setup, with 5 factions on the lower continent and 2 on the upper. I'm Lavender in the bottom-left. The no-man's-land in the centre is where Olive and Orange's bases used to be.


Incidentally, Olive was the faction I mentioned before who got exiled to the seas. I had to exterminate him because he was being too much of a pest.

I came across an interesting quirk in the game. If you use a probe team to liberate an eliminated leader, they will reappear and then (most likely) immediately die again on the next turn, as there will probably be no space left for them to spawn. But it's possible to rescue them by calling them on the commlink and gifting them a base, preferably in a safe area. This can be handy to give you an extra vote on council proposals.

Once I've finished exterminating Orange I plan to run an experiment. I need more votes and energy, but I don't want to manage any more bases, plus that will kill my empire with B-drones. So I will ICS in Orange's former territory and then gift all the new bases to my puppet Grey. In theory, this will effectively resurrect the faction. It remains to be seen if they will actually all rebuild their "lost" facilities, or just get stuck in war mode forever more.

Curiously, the AI didn't immediately attempt to call the election for Governor when my term expired, even though Teal had the votes to win. I managed to stay in office for another 10 years as a result.

A question: Should the AI attempt to prioritize techs that lead to its preferred SE choices? Teal still has yet to research his preferred choice (Wealth, from a B4 tech) in 2225, even though he's grabbing level 5 and 6 techs left right and centre. On the other hand, this might make the AI more predictable and easier to manipulate (if you know an AI will focus on a certain tech, you can wait for them to finish it and then immediate steal or trade for it... but you can do this anyway with infiltration). Just a thought, anyway.

Tangentially, there seems to be a lot of people around here these days to talk balance and modding. Which begs the question... who's up for some PBEM?

This actually happened in one of the test games where one AI (guess which one?) ROFLstomped the others and was producing thousands of credits each turn.

I bet it was the Gaians. They always seem to become a superpower in Thinker; probably because they begin the game with a terraforming advantage, and have strong bonuses for early-game exploration and mid-game empire management.

[Induktio]

> Landbridge happened in my  game i was so surprised ^^ Will AI raise land bridge to attack other AI ?

Yeah, it might be an interesting surprise for new players. Currently the decision making there is very random, the AI will attempt to connect any disjoint landmasses that are near each other. I think I will incorporate some new logic there for the new version. I would already have enough content for a new release but let's see what other features will make it in there too.

> On topic of AI aggressiveness: Is it known why AI is so aggressive? I had 5x weaker AIs declare war on me for example.

We've been reversing various functions with OpenSMACX but to my knowledge neither of us have really touched on the diplomacy functions. I guess some of this decision making happens in enemy_diplomacy that gets called by faction_upkeep. Coincidentally, faction_upkeep main function is now fully reversed and the next release will replace the vanilla version. Diplomacy mods have been a long requested feature for Thinker but that just depends on if anyone will make the effort to actually reverse those functions.

> A question: Should the AI attempt to prioritize techs that lead to its preferred SE choices?

The preferred way to do this is usually with the tech weights (EBDC). The research in this game is semi-randomly directed towards those techs that have matching weights with the faction priorities.

> I bet it was the Gaians. They always seem to become a superpower in Thinker; probably because they begin the game with a terraforming advantage, and have strong bonuses for early-game exploration and mid-game empire management.

Hahaha, yes.

[EmpathCrawler]

Raising land is so much more preferable than AI attempted naval invasions! I loved it when a Miriam really ruined my day by connecting our continents and pouring over the land bridge with a horde of her crappy rovers.

Is there a way to teach an AI that gets ejected from all their land bases to try to turn things around by becoming sea-oriented? They kind of linger on in a constantly pissed off mood off the coast until somebody bothers to conquer them, even in the early game when there's plenty of time for them to expand over the ocean.

[EmpathCrawler]

I might try increasing the global warming denominator to 3. The AI is cooking Planet before anybody discovers Advanced Spaceflight!

[Induktio]

> I might try increasing the global warming denominator to 3. The AI is cooking Planet before anybody discovers Advanced Spaceflight!

Were you previously using the default value 1/2 ? It might be convenient to adjust this also for the new release.

I might adjust the base placement a little bit for sea bases, it emphasizes coastal locations maybe too much to be optimal. But I've been also busy trying to develop better methodology to reverse some of the bigger functions in the binary. There's some serious challenges.

[EmpathCrawler]

Were you previously using the default value 1/2 ? It might be convenient to adjust this also for the new release.

I might adjust the base placement a little bit for sea bases, it emphasizes coastal locations maybe too much to be optimal. But I've been also busy trying to develop better methodology to reverse some of the bigger functions in the binary. There's some serious challenges.

Yes. I had been playing the previous version with 3/5. I'm not a big polluter myself so 1/2 was a little too aggressive in my games. I reverted to 1/2 for these tests. Might try 2/5 in my first test game. It's possible my personal alphax's 1,2,0 forest nerf is slowing the general rate of tech research Planet-wide, but I did that mostly to hurt myself! The AI surely gets most of its energy from advanced terraforming?

I might adjust the base placement a little bit for sea bases, it emphasizes coastal locations maybe too much to be optimal. But I've been also busy trying to develop better methodology to reverse some of the bigger functions in the binary. There's some serious challenges.

I wonder if their love of coastal tiles was Firaxis trying to stop the AI from wasting base squares on deep sea tiles they can't develop. Yet they often ring enemies with sea bases so they get no benefit at all from land tiles... I think getting them to settle even one tile offshore would be a big improvement. Or maybe any deep sea tiles within the base squares is deeply penalized by the placement algorithm. At one point in my last game, Santiago decided she wanted to colonize an entire shallow sea quite abruptly and very methodically. Maybe she saw the writing on the wall with all the global warming, lol.

Good luck! I wish I knew C++ but alas I do not.

[Tayta Malikai]

It's 2251 in my current game, and I think we're approaching the beginning of the end. With any luck, I'll be finished right as the new dev build comes out.

I had to postpone the AI resurrection experiment, as despite running Demo/Planned for a cumulative +5 GROWTH and PTS-ICSing like there was no tomorrow, the AI still had more population than me.

Upon learning the necessary tech, Teal immediately tried to become Supreme Leader despite not having the votes. I suppose he was hoping that I'd let him win out of frustration; I almost did for a moment there. As it happened, this mostly had the annoying effect of making me wait for another 20 years before I can launch my own bid for Supreme Leader.

My plan was therefore to launch a limited offensive to seize his naval bases, denying him votes, and then sit back on Demo/Green/Wealth raking in cash while the remaining AIs fight among themselves. Since I still had some leftover rovers from the Orange Extermination War, I decided I'd use a needlejet transport to drop them behind enemy lines and wreak havoc as a diversion.

Well, the diversion went too well and now I've found myself invading Teal's homeland with 3 rovers*, a stick, and a rock. (Let us not forget the expensive needlejet and cruise missile strikes that cleared a path for them, much like how the 300 Spartans were supported by a real army and navy too.) The AI has a lot of Perimeter Defenses and Aerospace Complexes, which slow things down a bit, but still doesn't have enough armoured defenders to man all of its bases.


I'm starting to think Will to Power may have a point with regards to totally nerfing offense. xD
*not even Elite rovers! smh

The AI has indeed begun building a few Geosynchronous Pods here and there, which posed a minor complication as my cheap 2e jets are no longer effective against unarmoured rovers. I'm now concerned they might start building Flechette Defenses to neutralize my missile spam tactics.

Teal also built a planet buster at some point. I'm not sure what he was planning on doing with it. It would've been somewhat hilarious to see him use it and then get swamped in worms as a result. (I reinstated the charter after finishing my chemical genocide of Orange.) I think he was trying to use it when he moved it to a frontline base, but I destroyed it and now he's building a new one.

I also saw that he managed to spend over 1,000 credits in a single turn. I'm not sure exactly what he spent them on.

Something I've noticed is that I'm consistently attacking with units that are lower in tech than the AI's. This is probably because they can build whatever they want with their snazzy +30% bonuses, but I can't afford to sit around waiting for stronger units to build, so I just spam a lot of weaker ones instead. I can concentrate them a lot better than the AI does.

It would be nice if the AI was a little less mindlessly dogmatic on occasion. While it's natural that Gold would hate me (he loves Free Market, and I can't run Free Market), you'd think he might moderate his tone a little after Teal captured half his bases and left him as a pipsqueak on the power graph. But no, he's totally going to personally crush me, any day now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Okay, granted, I was the one who started the war between Gold and Teal in the first place with a probe team. Maybe he's just pissed about that.)

RE: eco-damage. I've been playing with global warming set to 1,1, because I never actually see it otherwise. So far, two global warming events have been triggered, once by me and once by Teal. Both of us are now running Green, so it doesn't seem that we'll be polluting too much more. We'll see.

Tangentially: it turns out that two enemies pacted with the same third faction can both store their units in their bases at the same time. Diplomatic immunity!

Unrelatedly, while I remember to post about it: the AI now loves to use probes in stacks, attacking a single base multiple times in a turn. This is great. But they always use the same probe action in a given stack, and if that action is Infiltrate Datalinks, you'll see the AI using 5 probes to Infiltrate Datalinks in a row. This seems like a bug.

[Induktio]

AIs be like... "Human wants to have an easy victory.... hmm not today, hold my beer."

> I wonder if their love of coastal tiles was Firaxis trying to stop the AI from wasting base squares on deep sea tiles they can't develop.

That's not the original AI actually. Thinker always controls the movement of colony pods and decides base placement. The reason it settles so often on the coastline is that it can later transport colony pods to the land quite easily. Needs only a small priority tweak.

> The AI surely gets most of its energy from advanced terraforming?

A large part of it is usually from boreholes. Some AIs can also generate quite an hefty bonus from trade if they just manage to avoid wars.

> Tangentially: it turns out that two enemies pacted with the same third faction can both store their units in their bases at the same time. Diplomatic immunity!

Interesting, I didn't even realize this was possible!

> But they always use the same probe action in a given stack, and if that action is Infiltrate Datalinks, you'll see the AI using 5 probes to Infiltrate Datalinks in a row. This seems like a bug.

That sounds like a flaw in the game engine. Have to look into it if time permits.

Here's a hint of what features I've been planning recently. Looks like something related to this can be built into the next release:

[EmpathCrawler]

Ahh, I thought I saw colony pods rolling out of sea bases! That's a cool hack.

Very excited!

[Tayta Malikai]

> AIs be like... "Human wants to have an easy victory.... hmm not today, hold my beer."

Haha, yes. It looks like I will win this game (as humans always must, in the end), but it was a damn hard slog to get there.

> The reason it settles so often on the coastline is that it can later transport colony pods to the land quite easily. Needs only a small priority tweak.

Okay, that is a pretty cool trick. I've noticed the AI builds a modest number of transports in its sea bases, and this would explain why. They just need to build the colony pods to go with it. xD

Can't wait for SMACX AI to learn the art of realpolitik.

[Tayta Malikai]

The game is finally over in 2266. I won a crushing Diplomatic Victory with 1163 votes against 133.

As another poster observed earlier in the thread, the AI performs at its best in the rover era of technology. After jets and missiles become available, it builds them but doesn't use them as effectively. And as for any kind of combined arms tactics... forget it.

There was an interesting period where the AIs suddenly became more conciliatory towards me: Teal offered a truce without preconditions (all the other times he demanded tech), and Gold was suddenly willing to sign a treaty with me if I helped him against Teal (I declined to preserve my Noble rating). I think this was when my population was at its peak, before I started gifting bases to Grey: the power disparity was so great that even Transcend AIs felt the need to cower. But when I started giving bases away, the disparity shrank and the AIs got cocky again.

I feel like the population numbers got absurdly high in this game. By mid-game both Teal and I were sitting on at least 300 pop each, and at the end I had nearly 600 pop with another 200 gifted to my puppet Grey. Granted, a large chunk of that was from conquests: Teal conquered a bunch of bases from Gold, and then I conquered all of Teal's land bases in turn. The other chunk was all the degenerate PTS-ICSing I engaged in, back when it seemed like Teal's rise was unstoppable.

The AI resurrection experiment didn't run for very long, but the initial results weren't too promising. It built some formers and facilities (mainly Rec Commons), but mostly it just focused on pumping out military units. This fits with previous observations that the AI doesn't do very well transitioning back from war to a peace footing. It also didn't know to move its HQ from its reservation to a more central location, so most of its energy got lost to inefficiency.

I also forgot to give them any drone control measures with the bases, so soon their entire gifted empire was rioting. Oops.

But hey, I still got a nice chunk of commerce out of the setup, so the theory is sound. Even if it is totally exploiting the game mechanics.

The tech rate didn't seem as crazy as in my earlier game, but maybe I just didn't play long enough to see it. My energy income was rather poor throughout the 2100s, as most of it got eaten up by facility maintenance; I'd be lucky to hit double digits with a 50/50 split most turns. It then rose steadily in the 2200s to 100-200 and suddenly spiked hard around 2252 to 400-600. By the end of the game I was researching a level 9 tech in 4 turns...

Oh, and I forgot to mention this before, but I have the tech rate set to 75% in my games. So it would probably be even worse otherwise.

I think part of the reason for this is that the gaps between techs become proportionately smaller as one goes up the tree. Going from level 3 to 4 is a roughly 50% increase, and the gap from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 is similar. I notice that research tends to stagnate around this time, with tech times in the double digits: all the early techs have been eaten up, AI trades become rarer, and factions' energy income hasn't developed yet. However, the gap between levels 4 and 8 is roughly 300%, while energy incomes have shot up 1,000% since that time. So the time it takes to research higher level techs ends up being about the same as what it took to research lower level techs, and then declines as the game goes on.

And that's without building massive crawler energy parks or satellite constellations. I've heard you can get something like 2,500 energy per turn that way, which is utterly game-breaking.

Amusingly, despite all this, nobody researched Advanced Spaceflight (D8) throughout the whole game, so Planet was just left to cook by itself.

All in all, good game. I'll probably have to go and do something actually productive now before the next build comes out. :V

[EmpathCrawler]

As another poster observed earlier in the thread, the AI performs at its best in the rover era of technology. After jets and missiles become available, it builds them but doesn't use them as effectively. And as for any kind of combined arms tactics... forget it.

Same here. My "solution" has been to disable copters, increase missile range and decrease its price, and decrease needlejet range. Copters are just too powerful and I'm too tempted to wreck the AI with them when given the chance. Missiles are nice because the AI does seem to build them and they will end up killing units when they hit. Needlejets are also extremely powerful so I took away my ability to do long range strikes deep into AI territory with them. Plus the AI can't stray too far from its own bases.

I justify it by telling myself that the factions on Planet don't want to repeat the early days of Earth flight with primitive instruments and line of sight weapons. If they want close air support, a needlejet works well. For long range strikes, they would use an unmanned missile not a B-17 style needlejet.

Amusingly, despite all this, nobody researched Advanced Spaceflight (D8) throughout the whole game, so Planet was just left to cook by itself.

Interesting. I wonder if that's been a problem in my games, too...

[Tayta Malikai]

Same here. My "solution" has been to disable copters, increase missile range and decrease its price, and decrease needlejet range. Copters are just too powerful and I'm too tempted to wreck the AI with them when given the chance. Missiles are nice because the AI does seem to build them and they will end up killing units when they hit. Needlejets are also extremely powerful so I took away my ability to do long range strikes deep into AI territory with them. Plus the AI can't stray too far from its own bases.

I justify it by telling myself that the factions on Planet don't want to repeat the early days of Earth flight with primitive instruments and line of sight weapons. If they want close air support, a needlejet works well. For long range strikes, they would use an unmanned missile not a B-17 style needlejet.

I don't disagree - jets, copters, and missiles are all nerfed in the mod I use*. But I'm somewhat averse to changing stuff in the game just to make the AI work better. One of the things I like most about Thinker is that it makes the AI perform so much better regardless of whatever alphax.txt one happens to be running.

Now, nerfing stuff to ensure Balance^TM between human players, that I can get behind. :D

But yes, the ability to conduct long range strikes deep into enemy territory makes SMAC very swingy at mid-game. Having a generalized territory defense bonus like in WtP suddenly seems like a good idea after observing that.

*I say 'the mod I use' and not 'my mod' because I didn't actually come up with it myself. Someone else came up with it over a decade ago and we dug it out again for our PBEM games together. I like basically all the changes it makes so I'm low-key trying to get him to finish it and spread it around more, but he's rather busy lately...

Interesting. I wonder if that's been a problem in my games, too...

It could just be luck. As the modders tell us, the AI's tech selection is totally random. ;)

Depends on whether you've made any tech tree changes, as well. For me, C6 Retroviral Engineering is a second-order preq for Advanced Spaceflight (replacing Fusion Power), and nobody bothered to research that either.

It also turns out that none of the AIs ever researched the tech that allows 2 special abilities (B5 Bio-Engineering in my game). I actually realized this at one point and made a point of denying it to them. This should definitely join the list of AI-prioritized techs Thinker has.

Oh, another thought I keep forgetting to write down. Is it possible to make any changes to the mechanic that taking a base destroys half its facilities? I realize that war is supposed to be bad, and that collateral damage is inevitable, and that seizing fully-stocked bases might overpower an attacker too much; but those facilities represent over a century's worth of investment, and if one loses a substantial chunk of them, it becomes very difficult to recover in any reasonable timeframe. Even if you take the base back, it's already effectively lost to you - at least in any timeframe relevant to winning or losing the war.

If this could be changed, I propose that fewer facilities be destroyed when a base changes hands - say, 30% or so. Still a penalty, but less crippling.

[lolada]

Changing combat that defending unit deals some damage to attacker even if outclassed really  nerfs copters. They are not nearly as  good in WTP due to randomness. Vanilla has snowball combat so one copter can kill ton of units. WTP copter gets damaged pretty much always and can kill _maybe_ 2-3 armored units in the field and will die. If armor is good it can kill 1 and has to retreat or risk dying. Downside is that sometimes (rarely but it happens since there's so much combat) you have scenario where weaker unit just stomps stronger unit.. spearman kills tank scenario.

Attacking the base with armored defender in - copter kills 1 unit max usually.. if there's AAA or aerospace complex its just not smart to risk copter dying. Cheap Infantry with +25% is way safer option.

When i used it in WTP - due to territory bonus - they really couldn't kill multiple armored units. For example they can sniper several unarmored formers. And they are still awesome for its movement and they are quite strong defending unit and counter to anything lightly armored. Same logic goes for needlejets - their advantage over copter is higher range.

Missiles i found almost useless in vanilla - because they "die". If combat is skewed that attacking unit has real chance to die (as in WTP) then missiles actually become useful and even cost effective.  They are not op as they are countered by AAA and aerospace complexes and they are not cheap. But their range and power really makes them interesting to spam in backward bases.

[Induktio]

> The tech rate didn't seem as crazy as in my earlier game, but maybe I just didn't play long enough to see it.

Originally I planned the costs in the tech formula pretty conservatively so that they would not diverge from the old values that much. Based on these reports it seems feasible to go way beyond that. Currently the base cost formula was 3 * Level^3 + Level*117. I think I'll change it to say 5 * Level^3 + 115*Level in the next build. This will proportionally increase the costs for the later techs much more.

> This fits with previous observations that the AI doesn't do very well transitioning back from war to a peace footing.

Did the AI still had vendetta status with other factions? Otherwise I can't see what would be the issue here.

> Is it possible to make any changes to the mechanic that taking a base destroys half its facilities?

I mean sure somebody can mod that easily by patching capture_base function, but I haven't considered how necessary that would be.

> Changing combat that defending unit deals some damage to attacker even if outclassed really  nerfs copters.

So talking about the WtP patches, the issue I see here is that combat mechanics are pretty complex and with Thinker Mod I've really tried to avoid extensive binary modding. With very few exceptions, the patches just work by writing new call pointers to the game binary and then the main logic gets executed inside dll. Looking at those combat patches they seem to require pretty extensive modifications to the main battle functions on the binary level, so I'm not sure what glitches can be hiding there. And then if I do merge them, it would seem to go against the spirit of the mod to make new combat mechanics enabled by default. I just can't feel it's necessary enough to just go patching these new combat mechanics in there. Maybe I'll import a couple of the non-combat patches though.