New SMAC quizzes available.Test your Alpha Centauri knowledge! Chess is back.Challenge someone!
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Quote from: tnevolin on December 07, 2019, 04:19:16 pmIt does not seem like it was designed to support different play styles.You are conflating different play styles with different combat styles. They are not the same. Nobody said you have to play this game by focusing on combat. If you choose to be a Spartanesque war machine, yes your options are going to be narrowly channeled. Bigger weapons are better, thicker armor is better. You do have some combined arms variance. You do have some different naval, air, hovertank, and mindworm invasion options. The variety of what you can do to prevail in combat is limited, but it's not zero.I think it is difficult to establish what is a valid or invalid play style, when the AI is not competent enough to pursue many of them.
It does not seem like it was designed to support different play styles.
You are doing it for too long, man. I didn't say it is impossible. The fact that you did it doesn't make it easier for general public.
Nobody else bothers.
I meant exactly play style, not combat style.
QuoteNobody else bothers.How many nobodies are really under discussion though? I mean "nobody" mods SMAC in any huge way, if you get right down to it. I presume, based on public comments, that a lot of people change a few settings here and there, as they like.
Quote from: tnevolin on December 07, 2019, 10:28:38 pmI meant exactly play style, not combat style.Why should I agree with that then? You can colonize endlessly, you can extract every Artifact from Planet, you can grow big cities and vote yourself the Best Thing Ever, you can overrun your neighbors, you can dig Thermal Boreholes, you can pit factions against each other with covert missions. There's lots of variety for how you want to reach a victory condition.
Quote from: dino on December 07, 2019, 10:45:31 amFinetuning weights can improve AIs performance great deal though and for this reason it's worth playing with. For AIs you want to make it differentiate between factions less and only provide some slight flavour in a form different priorities and early short detours, while making sure that all factions will get essential techs not too far apart from each other.It sounds contradictory to what you and I said above about unpredictability of blind research. True, AI gets some technology set skew based on set priorities. However, the exact skew is 1) very unpredictable and unreliable, 2) very-very-very difficult to fine tune with research weights and tree dependencies, 3) dilutes very easily with technology trading. One probably can play thousand games and discover that certain priority set leads to certain technology set on average. However, slightest change in weights or tree build changes this and one would need to play another thousand games to understand how exactly.In summary, it's not worth optimizing.
Finetuning weights can improve AIs performance great deal though and for this reason it's worth playing with. For AIs you want to make it differentiate between factions less and only provide some slight flavour in a form different priorities and early short detours, while making sure that all factions will get essential techs not too far apart from each other.
Industrial Automation and resource lifting techs relatively early is essential, especially with thinker mod.
Getting at least 4/2 units early is essential for survival while having aggressive neighbour.
You can't make it satysfying replacement for direct research, but you can prevent AIs from shooting themselves in the foot in the early game.
The way thinker mod changes the weights is not effective, since many factions skip Centauri Ecology with its tech_ai feature on and also remain defenseless for too long.I've suggested Inducti0 additive, instead of multiplicative bonus to make it better, but don't remember if he implemented it. Just fine tuned weights in alphax.txt work even better anyway.
tech_balance=1 from thinker.iniThis feature multiplies ai weights from alphax.txt of selected few techs by 4.Problem was, if original weight is 0, it did nothing to direct AI towards this and the other extremely high weights would make some AIs skip some essential techs like Ecology.I suggested to make it additive +8 bonus instead, he agreed, but you'd have to find it in source, or patch notes, if he actually changed it.
If you use the latest thinker mod, it has a new tech cost formula that base cost on tech level, not on the number of known tech.Since you've reduced the number of tech levels in your mod, you should either edit the source code of the new formula, or disable this feature in thinker.ini.
Thank you for reminding me Thinker has this feature. I need to reread it. It was long ago. I should probably align my changes with this.
I think it's better kept disabled, you can achieve the same, or better just by editing weights in alphax.txt.