SMACX Thinker Mod

[Induktio]

> Santiago had a lot of units which could wipe him three times over, but was content to send only occasional artillery to harass his terraforming.

I think it would help looking at the saves here. It's like you're saying the behaviour in this case was not quite normal from the AIs. But I haven't decided anything about the next release.

Probably the most complex part of AI programming here is the unit movement, particularly in combat. There's just so many different strategies to consider each turn for each unit. Vanilla AI uses Goal structs to keep track of various AI objectives. These have been reversed and that's important because they would probably have to be integrated in any improvement for the combat movement AI.

If I were to rewrite this part, maybe the first thing to consider would be the allocation of units to offense/defense duty. AI could maybe rank bases on how threatened they are and assign more units to vulnerable border bases. Then the other part would be to come up with a better way of selecting priority attack targets, so that the other units don't just "sit" in the bases.

> Zakharov is sitting in the jungles on powerhorse bases that produce up to 20 minerals with the help of crawlers (and those are WTP minerals and crawlers, so his bases are one of the best equipped in the game)

Now this is something that very well could be affected by the WTP mod. It does change a lot of cost variables not to mention the AI code, so I'm not going to comment here unless this also happens in vanilla Thinker. If you come up with some kind of an improvement there, it could be merged in a pull request of course. Keep in mind upgrading units is not currently implemented for the AIs. Now that could be possible, but there's potential problems if the units in the field get upgraded mid-turn to something much more advanced, players would consider that strange.

[EmpathCrawler]

Does the AI know how to disband units?

[Induktio]

> Does the AI know how to disband units?

I don't think it ever does that other than forced disband due to mineral shortfall.

[temporicide]

Hello!

I am new here, registered to report what seems to be a bug. I accidentally found out that AI factions have formers (perhaps other units as well?) that require no support because they have other factions' cities set as their home bases. I know this is supposed to be an old issue, but I think it only happened when the player set home base for a unit to be a base of a pact brother/sister. I only have the Thinker and the GUI mods installed and the GOG version of SMAX. I checked some of my old saves (no mods) and found no evidence of this bug.

Also, I would like to ask for advice regarding customized map generation. I like to play with 30-50% ocean and my problem is, I am tired with playing weak erosion maps and having to terraform-level all those rocks. If I change erosion to strong I get only about 30% land instead of the promised 50-70%. Is there a way to change that, perhaps by editing the alphax.txt?

Thank you for the mod! 

[dino]

Not only they are support free, but also despite not showing on the support list, they take away free support, or minerals, from the pact base, very annoying if it happens to you during early game.

This bug was fixed in Ytzii's patch, I remember since I've reported it to him, unfortunately Ytzii is not around to give easy pointers.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I have corrected the reassignment condition in WTP.
Originally it reassigned to bases with mineral_surplus < 2. WTP patch reverses the condition so units are assigned to bases with enough minerals.

Other than than I didn't bother. This involves formers only and exclude human factions from reassignment. So no harm to human player.

[Induktio]

> I have corrected the reassignment condition in WTP.

So how did you correct, e.g. which commits deal with that issue? Do you think you can create a pull request out of those changes?

> If I change erosion to strong I get only about 30% land instead of the promised 50-70%. Is there a way to change that, perhaps by editing the alphax.txt?

When erosion is set to highest amount (least hilly), the amount of land is vastly reduced. This is a feature of the default terrain generation algorithm, and while I attempted to do some mitigations on it, this behaviour cannot be eliminated by alphax.txt editing alone.

Now it would be pretty interesting to rewrite the whole terrain generation process but it's not that fun trying to integrate that code into the game binary without glitches. Procedural content generation with fractal noise could achieve some impressive results in theory. Maybe a simpler way to mod it would be to influence how the terrain height is determined. Currently this project is on a kind of a hiatus but we'll see later when I'll get back to it.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

> I have corrected the reassignment condition in WTP.

So how did you correct, e.g. which commits deal with that issue? Do you think you can create a pull request out of those changes?

de0d4e807759830e8967c81b6af16a337ef9f304

How do I create PR to another repo?

Keep in mind that I didn't disable functionality completely. Just corrected the condition that seemed like an error. The functionality itself may help AI with support so I left it there.

[EmpathCrawler]

Also, I would like to ask for advice regarding customized map generation. I like to play with 30-50% ocean and my problem is, I am tired with playing weak erosion maps and having to terraform-level all those rocks. If I change erosion to strong I get only about 30% land instead of the promised 50-70%. Is there a way to change that, perhaps by editing the alphax.txt?

Thank you for the mod! 

Rather than go mad trying to figure out the world builder settings, I would just change the level terrain job to take 1 turn and play on the settings that work for you.

[temporicide]

Currently this project is on a kind of a hiatus but we'll see later when I'll get back to it.

Cool!

Rather than go mad trying to figure out the world builder settings, I would just change the level terrain job to take 1 turn and play on the settings that work for you.

Yes, that would solve that particular problem. But there are other problems with mountainous maps. They usually consist of large areas of rainy tiles  and large areas of arid ones. Flat terrain is more even.

[EmpathCrawler]

Yes, that would solve that particular problem. But there are other problems with mountainous maps. They usually consist of large areas of rainy tiles  and large areas of arid ones. Flat terrain is more even.

Lower the hill and peak values in alphax until you're satisfied.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I think there is a bug with free formers. Progenitors and Planet Cult don't get them.

[temporicide]

Lower the hill and peak values in alphax until you're satisfied.

Yes, that worked. Thank you.

[MercantileInterest]

May be good to bring this up here as well:

When playing multiplayer some time ago (before your mod), my group noticed that transports and isles of the deep have a very high chance of fishing alien artifacts out of sea pods. Irritating little bug.

[EmpathCrawler]

Got a feature request idea while poking around the morale function: Any chance you can expose these turn thresholds for native lifecycle increases in thinker.ini?

https://github.com/b-casey/OpenSMACX/blob/master/src/veh.cpp#L113

It would be really cool to be able to tweak those since they don't seem to scale to difficulty or anything.