SMACX Thinker Mod

[dino]

AI making competent long distance invasions is awesome, should add another missing dimmension to the game.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You can also take a peak at WTP code regarding threat and military spending, a more naunced solution than simple rule I came up with above can be derived from it.

Unfortunately, this is still in development stage.

[Induktio]

I started a new test game on the same map with two Peacekeeper factions with identical resources. This time I just made the other one vanilla AI with no modifications, but I thought it would be fitting to give them the Firaxian faction graphics set. I also found a simple AI modification which enables Thinker to send aircraft towards an invasion point, which might be very important. Here's a screenshot from turn 170.

It's played with tech stagnation on and Thinker took a really long time to discover some key techs. At the beginning it sent aggressively sea colony pods forward (new behaviour) to establish foothold in the middle but funnily enough, it couldn't defend most of them against vanilla AI probe team spam. Things changed after Thinker started to churn out Fusion Chaos Battleships in mass and quickly proceeded to sink the Firaxian navy. In the screenshot most of the forces are gathering towards an invasion point on the mainland enemy region. It has not been attacked yet, because skirmishes happened in the middle of the map.

[Induktio]

I did add these changes to the newest develop build 20201224. Testing this kind of AI and then dealing with legacy code seems to be really developer time intensive.

The air units are now able to move really long distances to the invasion area but there seems to be something really flawed with vanilla airpower AI or it just doesn't attack nearby targets enough, even when it has a stack of units available. I may have to develop some kind of a fix for it too. But there's other new features:

* New option: rare_supply_pods will reduce the frequency of supply pods to around one third of previous levels and instead places bonus resources on random maps. This option is a lesser version of "no unity scattering".
* Changed territory_border_fix to increase the expansion of coastal base territory into ocean to an equal amount of actual sea bases.
* AI will occasionally use Drop Pods ability to deploy troops to other bases.
* Foil probe teams will now also attack coastal bases instead of only sea bases like previously.

[Rocky]

I just want to say thank you for all your hard work on this AI. I've been slowly getting back into SMACX and I'm really enjoying it with your AI mod. I especially like the customization and smoother tech progression. I was surprised to see the Gaians make use of fungus when terraforming. It really adds to the flavor.

[Rocky]

There were two things I noticed in my current game.

- The Hive has been eliminated by another faction but still can be contacted in the comm menu. (No Headquarters/no council votes)

- The Gaians and Morganites have terraformed most of their terrain into fungus. The Morganites switched from Green to Free Market and are now having tiles they're not using due to the resource penalty.

[Induktio]

> The Hive has been eliminated by another faction but still can be contacted in the comm menu. (No Headquarters/no council votes)

Did you actually get the popup that says a faction has been eliminated? Otherwise they might have a colony pod alive somewhere that prevents faction removal. Might need to look at the save.

> The Gaians and Morganites have terraformed most of their terrain into fungus.

That happens by design if fungus is more productive than forest tiles. What resource penalty are you referring to here?

Anyways... there are some areas that are somewhat unfinished in the new AI code. I might look into some game mechanics changes for these issues.

* Collateral damage rules are very destructive for the AIs. It is also very complex to plan the movement in such a way that the AI units won't end its turn next to enemy units and get obliterated due to collateral damage. It's especially noteworthy Civ 3 disabled stack damage altogether.
* Zones of control also cause issues in movement planning.
* Pathfinding needs some tweaking to recognize and avoid neutral territory when selecting attack paths.
* New pathfinding also needs some tweaking to work better on Huge or larger map sizes.

[Rocky]

Did you actually get the popup that says a faction has been eliminated? Otherwise they might have a colony pod alive somewhere that prevents faction removal. Might need to look at the save.

Stupid of me. I thought I made a save but I seem to have overwritten it. I then tried from an earlier save and ran different games under different scenarios but I was not able to recreate the problem. (Or find a colony pod from the Hive) Each time the Hive was eliminated a popup appeared as it should.

In summary:

1. Hive lost its capital. The only remaining Hive city "Manufacturing Warrens" became the new capital.
2. This last base was conquered by the Pirates next turn but the Hive was not eliminated.
3. A few turns later the University takes over Manufacturing Warrens from the Pirates. A pop-up appears that the Hive has been eliminated by the University.

EDIT: I did some more testing but I can't recreate it. Either it was just a one time bug or (more likely) I have overlooked a base or colony pod.

That happens by design if fungus is more productive than forest tiles. What resource penalty are you referring to here?

Under Green/Cybernetic fungus gave the Morganites 2 nutrient/1 mineral/2 energy. (Gaians got 3 nutrient instead of 2 due to their faction bonus)

Under Free Market/Cybernetic the Morganites get 1 nutrient/1 energy. They running lots of transcendi specialists and avoid using fungus tiles (unless necessary) but it hurts their production.
 

[Rocky]

After playing a few more games over the week the issues in my previous post never appeared again. Deirdre was the only one who consistently uses fungus and it works for her.

I'm very impressed with how the AI builds up its military. In one game I build up/upgraded an army of around 50 AAA Shard Shock Troops, 12 Shard Tanks, and around 20 AAA Shard Cruisers. I was planning to take on the Morganites (nearest neighbor) because he was running away with the game. (It turns out he had 3x times the technology income I had) I was shocked to find out he had double the amount of military units. Dozens of Elite Quantum Tanks, Elite Drop Quantum Shock Troops, Elite Quantum Rovers, a dozen Elite Shard Penetrators and around 12-15 Shard (Quantum) Battleships.

I was really glad I first infiltrated his Datalinks. I was so used with Vanilla AI to invade without much thought but I can't make that mistake with Thinker. If I had declared war it would have been very bad for me.

The Pirates are monsters in every game I played. They expand incredibly fast, and consistently colonize a nearby continent early on. This usually makes them the largest empire in a game. They were never a frontrunner in tech but they definitely were the undisputed rulers of the sea. In my last game they had at least 30-40 Fusion Cruisers/Shard Battleships and around two dozen Shard Choppers/Penetrators.

The Gaians are also impressive. They usually have relatively small empires but are almost always a techleader for a majority of the game.
 

[Induktio]

It has to be noted, the last update mainly changed the unit movement. I didn't make many changes to production choices with some exceptions. V2.3 increased the priority given to faster land/sea units because I noticed the AI built way too few rovers in some test cases. AI should also build foil probe teams earlier and more often. That should help with scouting because one play tester reported, in the earlier versions, the AI took really long time to make contact with other factions.

Speaking of test games, I think the AI should now be an adequate opponent on Veteran's map. Combined land/sea operations are very hard for the AI but I think Thinker is getting there. It might be very interesting to setup some kind of a multiplayer style "always war" scenario on that map. In test games it took Thinker about 230 turns to completely conquer vanilla AI on the other side of the map, so there we have it. Tactically the AI might still make many errors that cost numerous units though.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd be grateful -and this is aimed at all the other modders, too- if the mod, and future major updates, could be uploaded to our Downloads section, too.  AC2 benefits from hosting content, you can crosslink with GitHub -please!- it makes the mod easier for random SMACers on the net to find, AND it's something I can promote on Facebook and at CFC and other places.

You also get an autopost in the Chiron News Network subforum when you post to Downloads, which promotes your mod on our Front Page.

Everybody wins, thank you.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Definitely, man. I'd be glad to. Can you provide step by step instruction how to upload GitHub project there? This is not a single file and version changes all the time. So may be somewhat tricky.

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe Windows will generate a .zip folder of multiple files for you.  There's a lot of easy options for making .zips around.  Then go to this page http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;cat=6 scroll down and find the Add a download button and upload the .zip - it's pretty intuitive.  Good idea to put some advance work into your description text, and if you have any images, even just a logo, to include, that would look better on the Front Page and be excellent for branding purposes and my own and other promotion of the mod.

-I'd be glad to make a dedicated category for whole game mods, or whatever you guys want to call it, or more than one to separate .txt and .exe - if y'all want such a thing.

[Note: our Downloads does suck for huge files, for reasons way above my tech grade to do anything about, but I can sometimes workaround by directly uploading to the server.  Work with me and I'll work with you.  Thanks.]

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Oh. ZIP I can upload. In fact all of my releases are ZIPs. I just thought maybe you have some magical way to reference GitHub so I don't need to upload **every** release! 😁

Actually, never mind. I see that it accepts file OR URL. So I just pointed to my release page.

Can you correct the name of my download and remove parentheses from title? I didn't notice you have a base game field already.

[Induktio]

One flaw that I see with the current setup is that Dropbox doesn't show any download counters whatsoever. And neither does Github for the attached files. That would be an interesting stat to collect.

But unfortunately I don't see it as a viable choice to start hosting every file on this site. There's the question of maintainability and simplicity to consider. Maybe somebody wants to create a backup archive of them and it's okay, but there's not much point to promote multiple download sources to users. Newest changes are visible in the repo and it's not a given I would announce releases separately on the forums even though most of the time I did so.