SMACX Thinker Mod

[Induktio]

I'd say one of the first, maybe even genre-defining, games of this type was MOO1. If you've played it you probably notice the empire management is abstracted at a relatively high level and there is little to none micromanagement. So can't really say excessive micromanagement is necessary ingredient for these games. Later games in that series deviated from that formula and added a lot more micromanagement though. Anyways, I already explained why complex game mechanics can be a problem (in some circumstances).

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

MOO1 has less micromanagement on spying but overall I wouldn't say it is. Ship design and rotation required a lot of clicks. Every planet production tuning. Constant diplomacy check. And moving armadas of ships every turn?

For complex problem here we are trying to make things run smoother.

[dino]

Regarding Eco Damage again.

Please separate facilities generating clean minerals from the beginning and removing ai eco damage cheat.
If you don't want to clutter ini file, just make facilities fix a default and remove the setting from thinker.ini
eco_damage_fac_fix
eco_damage_ai_cheat

Vanilla ai eco damage cheat will go a long way in helping to manage this issue.

***
I've forgot that orbital and nanoreplicator minerals are clean.
Micromanaging minerals production through workforce reassigment and tiles respeccing is too complex to bother with, so it leaves only two things to consider on the AI front:

1) When to build 50% minerals facilities: GF, RAS.
Do not build if building it would cause unmanageable eco damage.

2) When to build clean minerals facilities: TF, HF, CP,  ToP.
At the beginning of the turn iterate through the bases and check:
- If there are 5 or more bases above clean minerals treshold, with high eco damage.
- If there are 3, or more bases that could build 50% minerals facility, but won't pass a check from point 1)

If yes, consider clean minerals facilities in any base that doesn't has anything more useful to build left.

3) Not directly related but late game bases should maintain few formers each, so they are equipped to rapidly rebuild destroyed by war, or fungal pops infrastructure.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I honestly don't believe there is need for a cheat. If eco managing facilities are capable of keeping warming at bay - let AI just build them. If not - that is completely different subject of balancing eco damage magnitude.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Not sure if this is the right topic for that but since we have started discussing eco damage ...

TF and HF reduce damage caused by terraforming and they do their job well. Just two of these facilities is enough to completely eliminate this portion of it.
Mineral related eco damage reducing facilities are not working that good, unfortunately. They do not reduce the mineral count factoring into damage but only the portion that is above threshold actually causing the damage. Therefore, they will never reduce existing damage to zero. Same way PLANET and other factors work.

I don't know if this is by design or they just programmed it this way but this causes the implication of constant damage presented at major producing bases. The amount can be minimized but will ever present. And the more bases there are on a planet the more damage occurs. Raising mineral threshold is the only way to fight ever increasing damage.

The strategical problem I see with that is all these means on reducing mineral caused damage are only good when the damage itself is quite large already. CP will cut 50 damage by 25 but 10 damage only by 5. The raising mineral threshold activities and reducing damage over threshold activities are competing with each other. There is no synergy. When threshold is high enough to make some base completely clean such facilities becomes useless. One can as well sell them out.

What I propose is to rework the formula and make them reduce not the amount of already generating damage but the mineral count before threshold is applied. This way they will work in synergy with threshold raising methods and will always be useful. The more minerals in base - the more positive impact they will do on ecology.

This may actually solve inevitable global warming problem for both player and AI as it will be possible to keep damage in check.

[dino]

50% are huge jumps that can either cause a serious issues for AI, or AI may not build them at all if we make it too careful.
Clean minerals facilities are generally very costly and pretty useless otherwise, it's hard to determine with a simple formule when they are worth it.
Finally carefull micromanagement of minerals output would be another complex issue to code.

It's one of the more complex issues on the facility production selection front and Inductio didn't seem to be very excited by a perspective of working on it, so cheat would do for now.
AI has many cheats, so it's no different than the cost factor for me for example and it's already there, all I ask is to separate it from clean facilities fix.
Cheat will make it easier to tackle with simplier code, if facility production choices side of AI will be capable of handling end game without cheats, it can always be disabled.

> If eco managing facilities are capable of keeping warming at bay - let AI just build them. If not - that is completely different subject of balancing eco damage magnitude.

Eco facilities are capable: there are 16 clean minerals + 20 mild early pops + lets say 20 - 30 bases * 4 facilities = 120 - 160 clean minerals, before you have to consider throttling minerals output in some way.

[dino]

They do not reduce the mineral count factoring into damage but only the portion that is above threshold actually causing the damage. Therefore, they will never reduce existing damage to zero. Same way PLANET and other factors work.

Is this formula incorrect ?

Eco-Damage = (DamageFactor * Perihelion * Techs * Life * Difficulty * Planet) / 300
DamageFactor = Int{ [Terraforming - Cleanmins1] + [(Minerals - Cleanmins2 + 5*Atrocities) / (1+Goodfacs)] }
Cleanmins = 16 + # Fungal Blooms + # Tree Farms, Hybrid Forests, Centauri Preserves and Temples of Planet
Cleanmins1 = Cleanmins or Terraforming, whichever is less. If Terraforming is negative, Cleanmins1 = 0.
Cleanmins2 = Cleanmins - Cleanmins1.

According to this formula you can bring damage factor to zero with clean minerals.
Goodfacs and Clean mineral facilities are different sets, the former provide clean minerals, the latter reduce ecodamage when it occurs.
Goodfacs = 1 each for the presence of Centauri Preserve, Temple of Planet and Nanoreplicator in this base, + 1 each for possessing the Pholus Mutagen and Singularity Inductor.
Clean minerals facs = 1 for each faction wide owned Tree Farm, Hybrid Forest, Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet

It's been a while since I've reached end game, but I recall 100+ minerals bases with 0 ecodamage, or my memory plays tricks with me.
Clean minerals facilities were undocumented in datalinks and manual, maybe you've never sumbled into revised eco-damage formula ?
https://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Ecology_(Revised)

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Goodfacs and Clean mineral facilities are different sets, the former provide clean minerals, the latter reduce ecodamage when it occurs.

I probably put too much words in my post and lost you. The above is exactly what I am saying. With an emphasis on that Goodfacs clean minerals contribution is a major factor of their usefulness. Whereas Goodfacs damage reduction effect sucks completely by definition. Therefore, player will be actually building them for their +1 clean mineral bonus. Not for their reduction capability.

If you look at the formula, you'll see that terraforming ecodamage reduction happens before clean minerals apply. But mineral ecodamage reduction happens after.

Code: [Select]

(terraforming ecodamage - terraforming ecodamage reduction + industry ecodamage - clean minerals) / (1 + Goodfacs)
In this form CP/TP reduce the actual ecodamage resulting from both terraforming and industry. That is not what they say in their description: "Reduces effect of industry on Planet's ecology".

I propose both of these reductions happen before clean mineral apply so they work in a similar manner.

Code: [Select]

(terraforming ecodamage - terraforming ecodamage reduction + industry ecodamage / (1 + Goodfacs) - clean minerals)
In this form CP/TP reduce only the effect of industry on planet ecology. Exactly as it stated in their description and as it is designed by separation of responsibilities between terraforming and industry reduction facilities.

[Induktio]

Hmm, reading the earlier posts I was just wondering do you understand how the clean minerals formula works? It's a little bit counterintuitive, but yes, you can have 100+ mineral bases with zero eco damage even if you run negative Planet rating for example. If mineral_intake <= clean_minerals then eco damage should normally be zero. We already have this setting enabled by default in Thinker:

; In vanilla game mechanics, eco damage on AI bases is notably reduced from player levels.
; This patch increases AI eco damage to the same level than what the player bases have.
; In addition, constructing Tree Farms and similar facilities always increases the clean
; minerals limit even before the first fungal pop.
eco_damage_fix=1

There's some more changes coming for find_facility to enable the AI judge the cost effectiveness of different buildings better. Also AI_build, AI_power etc variables should have more influence on the build decisions.

[dino]

My point was that I'd like to keep clean minerals before fungal pop always.

But would like to experiment with vanilla AI ecodamage reduction in case it'll be running into serious issues with ecodamage in my games.
And this setting seems to be enabling/disabling both.

[Induktio]

Well, eco_damage_fix is also specifically targeted to help the AI because it can just start building Tree Farms right away to keep the eco damage in check. Somewhat similar benefits than with auto_relocate_hq so the AI doesn't have to strategize about HQ relocation. Personally I don't find it interesting to implement it in other ways if they're more complex than that for the AI. Unless you meant something else?

[Induktio]

Uploaded a new develop build 20210416. This time no significant new features but many bugfixes and general improvements to production planner and movement AI.

AI now does more cost/benefit checks when deciding to build base facilities. This new build queue algorithm can reorder buildings to some degree if the benefits offered by them change. Regarding mineral multiplier facilities, 2 new choices are added to queue BUT they only get built under certain conditions.

AI will not build any more multipliers if the production is already very high (50-80 minerals). Most, but not all, excessive eco damage should be avoided by this condition which is always checked:
3*base->mineral_intake_2 > 2*(conf.clean_minerals + f->clean_minerals_modifier)

E.g. if the production after multipliers increases by 50%, will it push the base above clean minerals threshold?

[Induktio]

As you might have noticed, Thinker v2.5 added new unique name generator for bases. Currently it just uses Greek alphabet in the "X Y Sector" formula. This could actually be extended to hold multiple arbitrarily large wordlists which could be combined to create new names. I'm not going to add any faction-specific names though because that would defeat the purpose. They should be generic enough to be used for multiple factions.

Any good ideas what kind of wordlists to use here? Possibly they could also be customized for the map location or have each faction in the savegame use separate subsets of the wordlists, so they could be distinguished more easily.

[Buster's Uncle]

-If you wanted to go that way, I could dig you up oodles of old name lists.

[Induktio]

That might be useful. Even 2x30 words is enough since it gets us to 900 combinations if choosing one from both lists. Assuming they just make sense grammatically.