SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[bvanevery]

You are not almost equal. They are 50+% stronger.

Only by lame ass bonuses they shouldn't have.  My gun is the same strength as their armor.  They're only 1 level of MORALE better than me.  Allowing for the Territory bonus, that would only be 25% stronger.  Which shouldn't be a 15% chance of winning.  Alien Defense is stupid.  Plus there's probably probe team MORALE exploiting going on too.

Have you experienced any different in decades of playing???

Armored probe teams are an area of exploit that I've only become aware of in the past 2 years.

While we're on that subject, why are you letting ships have ECM ?  It's an exploit.

Why suddenly start complaining about it in the mod play testing that has nothing to do with this mechanics?

Because you kept the Alien Offense and Defense bonuses and they're lame.

Higher randomization in WTP serves the specific purpose of giving more winning chance to weaker unit.

Too bad it's also lame.  Janks the player and makes combat a bunch of unpredictable mush.  A lot of people don't want to fight a war with Play-Doh.  They want to use steel.  "My units can't reliably do crap" is a play mechanic in various games, like if you have untrained conscripts, or an army of zombies barely held together by guts and goo.  You have to throw sheer overwhelming numbers of things at enemies to get a result.  But it's not basically interesting to have to do that for all combat.

[Nevill]

While we're on that subject, why are you letting ships have ECM ?  It's an exploit.

In what way?

I was wondering for a while if it's possible to make ECM work for ships like it does for land units. Right now the cruisers advantage over the foils is that during a direct attack a cruiser has a chance to disengage, much like a rover against slower infantry. ECM would put an end to that.

However, what sea units would be considered "fast"? Cruisers only?

Disabling it for ships would probably be easier than inventing functionality for it.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

While we're on that subject, why are you letting ships have ECM ?  It's an exploit.

Don't remember touching ECM flags. It's allowed for land units only, as you can see.

Comm Jammer,            1, Physic,   ECM,       000010111001, +50% vs. fast units

[bvanevery]

Comm Jammer,            1, Physic,   ECM,       000010111001, +50% vs. fast units

Huh.  Well now I can't reproduce it.  I could swear I had the option to put ECM on a ship at one point, probably a foil, earlier in one of my WTP games.  Well I'll just have to watch for it in the future.  I wonder if it was some kind of unit design shuffling exploit that I accidentally discovered.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer/blob/master/wtp_changelog.md#version-187

Step toward returning sensor bonus into the game.


Some more thoughts about future sensor and bonuses development in general

• Sensor confers a small but universal flat and transparent bonus everywhere to all combat types: attack/defense, factions/natives, land/sea.
• Territory bonus is reduced to about sensor bonus or below so sensor contributes significant amount to territory combat as well. Optionally, it can be removed completely.

With above changes sensor bonus complements or replaces territory one. Since AI now build them again, it won't be deprived by that comparing to human. Sensors still can be destroyed but it takes time to wipe them out all, which delays direct base assault and give defender mobilization and counterattack opportunities. So attacker chooses between surprise attack against sensor protected base or improve odds by destroying them first. An acceptable trade-off. Sensors can also be placed quite dense.

Ocean gets earnable extra combat bonus on own territory. Again they can be easily destroyed before base attack by loosing element of surprise. One sensor - one turn of attacker's ship wasted.

I heavily advocate sensor bonus to be equal on attack and defense to encourage active defense and do not coerce defender into passive waiting. I feel like 25% is good enough universal bonus especially with territory bonus reduced.

I also started to believe this bonus should extend on natives as well especially with increased native life in WTP. Indeed, this makes faction internal land safer than outside wilderness. A natural distinction everyone would expect by investing into safety infrastructure. Need to remove their 100% collateral and review their odds against Trance defender in base to not overdo it. This is still debatable change but I started to like it.

[bvanevery]

Details final condition

final condition

MY 2270.  I'm too bored to continue.  What you see here is mainly the work of only 2 ships over a long period of time.  There's nothing particularly wrong with my empire.  I have tremendous buying power.  I can drop cash to finish expensive projects like the Neural Amplifier.  But this is all long distance unit pushing, and conquering cities that aren't worth anything.  I don't realistically see how or why I'd finish this game.  I certainly wouldn't wait around for a Transcend victory, as that would be even more boring than the waiting I've done so far, to make my bigpox empire strong.  Destroy everything in a blaze of nuclear armageddon?  It seems like the only way you'd actually get rid of all of these cities.

So far I'm not convinced that changing expansion_factor matters.  For instance, the Morganites have 52 cities.  I think they're just geographically constrained.  5 active Colony Pods, 1 in production.  4 of various types of sea colony pods, 3 in production.  It's time to try something drastic, like expansion_factor=1.

I'm also going to try eliminating the Trance Scout predefined unit.  The AI's use of them as a "Defensive" unit, looks awfully lot like a stock binary obsession to me.

To me the only real lesson of this game, is the Caretakers were much farther away from me operationally than I thought, and not actually a threat.  Just because they're "south of me" doesn't mean they can or will bother me.  I could have completely ignored them and spared myself the busywork.  Which means I'm just playing the isolated island game, and wondering what to do with myself on that basis?

[bvanevery]

New game with version 187.  Huge map, 30%..50% land, average settings, random opponents.  I drew the Data Angels.
expansion_factor=1
faction_placement=0
alternative_combat_mechanics_loss_divider=1.0
Trance Scout Patrol removed from predefined units.

Details tough spore launcher

tough spore launcher

I thought indigenous life forms were supposed to be weak as crap on turn 1.  I didn't think hurrying 1 square would be the death of my Scout.  I'll be quitting this game.  My immediate landing site is not great.  No supply pods, dry and scratchy, and my starting square has fungus next to it.  Time to activate the Scenario Editor and see if there was something great and compensating nearby, like the Monsoon Jungle.

Details underwhelming

underwhelming

Nope.  It's not great land.  It's not awful, there are some Rainy bits.  It's not a hardcore fungal maze but there are fungal obstructions.  I'm on a large east-west continent that's only shared with the Peacekeepers, so this might have been an isolation game.  The Caretakers are in the game though, so they could have come to claim part of this land.

I do notice there are no fungal towers immediately near me.  Nor are there any near the other faction starts, with the exception of the Morganites, but they're not bottled up by them.

Out of 4 tests of the stock faction placement, this is the worst one I've seen so far.  I'm taking it as a sign that I should go to bed.  1:30 AM.

[Tayta Malikai]

So after I made that post saying I didn't have time to play SP anymore, I went and played some more SP. Version remains v160.

In Mission Year 2228, one of the AIs finally conquered something.

The Monoculture seems to have forgotten that it was in a war, as all it had to defend that base were half a dozen scout patrols. And it was still building economic facilities even as the Stewards were breaking down the door with 6-6-1 infantry and artillery. And it's supposed to be a warmonger faction!
Thankfully, it now has an ECM Silksteel defender in production at the HQ. Better late than never...

On a whim, I called up the Edenists and they proposed a pact with me. Even though they're a free Free Market and I'm running Green. In fact, they haven't made a peep about my running Green. I don't think this is a WtP thing, but it's interesting nonetheless. Maybe they just decided I was too strong to fight?
Regardless of their reasons, this means I now have pacts with 5 out of 6 AI factions. I think this is mostly the result of my custom factions' orthogonal SE preferences, which are generally nicer and more compatible with each other's than vanilla's.

Speaking of which, Green is a pretty cool SE once you've built up all your major bases. I'm basically stuck at 7 pop per base for the near future, but the +2 TALENT gives me drone control without having to put energy into Psych, and the +2 PLANET is a big help now that my HQ is at 44 minerals and causing fungal blooms every other turn.


The AI in general also seems to have experienced a sudden surge of competence in building projects, as the Edenists and Stewards both managed to grab a couple, the former spending some of their huge reserves of energy to hurry some.

I still got all the good ones, though.

Thanks to the zillions of energy I'm pulling in every turn, I was the first to needlejets. I remember someone (lolada?) observed that they were not as useful in WtP. We'll see about that.

I was unpleasantly surprised to see that air transports got nerfed into expensive trinkets. There goes my plan to unload a dozen shocktroops on an enemy base after I was banned from using APCs. Curses, foiled again!


You've seen 6 vs 1 going wrong, now get ready for... 12 vs 1.


Okay yes, the odds were more like 9 vs 2 after the bonuses were factored in. And I did win the battle and go on to take the base. (Protip: Amphibious Pods not required to disembark into empty shore base!) But you have to admit, this does look a little silly.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

expansion_factor=1

This is Thinker property that gets overridden by my production code. May not have any effect in WTP now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I was unpleasantly surprised to see that air transports got nerfed into expensive trinkets. There goes my plan to unload a dozen shocktroops on an enemy base after I was banned from using APCs. Curses, foiled again!

I didn't do anything specifically about them.

[Nevill]

I was unpleasantly surprised to see that air transports got nerfed into expensive trinkets.

You might be used to playing with my transports? I increased their capacity because they are remarkedly useless in vanilla.

Speaking of transports... Alpha Centauri Bear, since you are fixing various bugs in the code, did you know the right-click context menu options do not have the same checks in place that most actions normally require? The most infamous of those was the lack of Airdrop check, allowing units to airdrop from anywhere on right-click instead of only from bases with Aerospace Complexes. This was banned in every MP game, and so was one of the first things scient fixed.

I) What he didn't touch were less known bugs:
- Normally you are only allowed to load and unload cargo from air transports in bases and airbases, as evidenced by the text message that appears when you click a unit inside an air transport. (Why, though? Choppers aren't even considered proper air units, and the eplanation for their loss of health is that they are making emergency landings). Right-clicking Action -> Unload Transport lets you bypass that.
- Normally land arty units are not allowed to fire when transported across the sea, and there is a promt to that effect if you try to press "F" while in transit. Right-clicking Action -> Long Range Fire Here lets you bypass that.

What is your opinion on these things? Since there was talk about adding an option to terrain-detonate busters (by copying code from Fungal/Tectonic missiles), I thought this falls under menu functionality.

II) Unrelated to those two things. One of the annoying aspects of SMAC is the lack of group control. There is functionality allowing you to select multiple units in a group... but you can't do anything with them except move them between bases. I was wondering if it would be possible to:
- move a selected group to where the cursor is pointing by adding a right-click menu option "Group Go To Here". It would issue a "Move To Here" order to all units in the group.
- allow group terraforming... somehow? Formers are easily the most numerous and most-often selected group. Can you imagine the tedium of selecting 100 of them and manually ordering every one? Pressing "B" 24 times to drill a borehole? Maybe there is a way to issue groups orders to former teams, aka "Group Terraform Here"? Or select a group of formers and make a terraforming order apply to them all? This might be trickier as normally a terraform command is issued at the tile where the former is standing, and a group can contain units from multiple tiles. Might require some checks or even additional grouping options like "Exclude units not in the same tile" and "Exclune non-terraformers".

III) One of the most disappointing things about AIs is how they use air units. They just move them between bases, very rarely doing anything except take potshots at an occasional former. They never use them to ruin terraforming, and are very conservative about attacking. I noticed two options on the right-click menu: placing units on Alert, and ordering Bombing Runs. Placing air units on alert makes them either wait at the base, patrol inefficiently in a very small radius, or attack occasional unit with no rhyme or reason (a copter attacked a few passing cruisers, but ignored most of anything else). A bombarding run made jets attack a base... sometimes, and copters just move close to it and crash land. And stay crash landed indefinitely... or at least for 10 turns. That's not just weird AI, that's a violation of the rules - choppers are not supposed to have enough fuel to do that. Half the time ordering a bombarding run made units just skip their turns forever.

I am certain that the functionality of these orders is fundamentally and completely broken. I suspect that AI might be issuing those orders to their units, and is strongly affected by the associated bugs.

Can you look into these and at least make a reasonable guess at what they were supposed to be doing?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Alpha Centauri Bear

You can call me Bear for shorter typing.

, since you are fixing various bugs in the code, did you know the right-click context menu options do not have the same checks in place that most actions normally require? The most infamous of those was the lack of Airdrop check, allowing units to airdrop from anywhere on right-click instead of only from bases with Aerospace Complexes. This was banned in every MP game, and so was one of the first things scient fixed.

Yea. There is a lot of plain broken stuff there. Fixing everything is a job for Scient's OpenSmacx project. I usually hesitant about complete rewriting beyond few lines here and there for tweaking mostly.

- Normally you are only allowed to load and unload cargo from air transports in bases and airbases, as evidenced by the text message that appears when you click a unit inside an air transport. (Why, though? Choppers aren't even considered proper air units, and the eplanation for their loss of health is that they are making emergency landings). Right-clicking Action -> Unload Transport lets you bypass that.
- Normally land arty units are not allowed to fire when transported across the sea, and there is a promt to that effect if you try to press "F" while in transit. Right-clicking Action -> Long Range Fire Here lets you bypass that.

Added both to TODO list. Will look into them.
Whenever you ask for UI fixes, please also try to make up a case about how much game disrupting they are (you usually do). There are tons of them. So may only spend time on those making serious playability impact.
Big number of them can either be ignored or banned on agreement.

- move a selected group to where the cursor is pointing by adding a right-click menu option "Group Go To Here". It would issue a "Move To Here" order to all units in the group.
- allow group terraforming... somehow? Formers are easily the most numerous and most-often selected group. Can you imagine the tedium of selecting 100 of them and manually ordering every one? Pressing "B" 24 times to drill a borehole? Maybe there is a way to issue groups orders to former teams, aka "Group Terraform Here"? Or select a group of formers and make a terraforming order apply to them all? This might be trickier as normally a terraform command is issued at the tile where the former is standing, and a group can contain units from multiple tiles. Might require some checks or even additional grouping options like "Exclude units not in the same tile" and "Exclune non-terraformers".

Some minimal ugly additions probably could be added but cannot tell now - never modified UI.
For group terraforming something like extend terraforming order on all idle formers in tile.

Same request for playability impact case. Lacking these could be annoying but not to the level people would break their monitors.

III) One of the most disappointing things about AIs is how they use air units. They just move them between bases, very rarely doing anything except take potshots at an occasional former. They never use them to ruin terraforming, and are very conservative about attacking. I noticed two options on the right-click menu: placing units on Alert, and ordering Bombing Runs. Placing air units on alert makes them either wait at the base, patrol inefficiently in a very small radius, or attack occasional unit with no rhyme or reason (a copter attacked a few passing cruisers, but ignored most of anything else). A bombarding run made jets attack a base... sometimes, and copters just move close to it and crash land. And stay crash landed indefinitely... or at least for 10 turns. That's not just weird AI, that's a violation of the rules - choppers are not supposed to have enough fuel to do that. Half the time ordering a bombarding run made units just skip their turns forever.

I am certain that the functionality of these orders is fundamentally and completely broken. I suspect that AI might be issuing those orders to their units, and is strongly affected by the associated bugs.

This is certainly a call for complete override. Not sure if this features are needed to be preserved, though. I believe simpler and better approach is just to let mod code control AI units directly. Which is what Thinker does to extent. May not cover air units yet. There is a lot  uncovered stuff there. A lot of work. That is why I called for AI designer but no one responded yet.
😞

[bvanevery]

Can you imagine the tedium of selecting 100 of them and manually ordering every one?

Not really.  I used to play games with high numbers of Formers pretty routinely, and I don't remember amassing that many.  A pile of Formers is used to drive a land bridge and rail to an enemy.  Once you've got enough for that job, you don't need more.  Otherwise I terraform every square in my empire by hand.  There's only so many units I'm going to build for that, and my empire is only going to be so big, and I'm only going to march so many troops around too.  There's just sort of a human attention span limit to all of this, and I don't think trying to "level up" with ever vaster numbers of units is really a goal.

1 turn might take a long time.  But if a lot gets done in 1 turn, that's ok.

III) One of the most disappointing things about AIs is how they use air units.

Yeah in the stock binary they kinda suck.

[bvanevery]

Started new game with version 187, updating to 188 as I write this.

BUG: changelog for 187 says territory bonus was lowered to 25%, but combat_bonus_territory=50 in thinker.ini.  Seems to be fixed in 188 though.  Not sure where thinker.ini lives in the Git repository.  Nor where the faction files are, for that matter.

Huge map, 30%..50% land, average settings, random opponents.  I drew the Hive.

BUG: Hive's IMMUNITY to EFFIC is undocumented in the faction description.  This is true of the stock game, but it is still a bug.  I have used language such as "EFFIC never goes below zero" and some hand wavy explanation.

Modified the settings:
expansion_factor=1
faction_placement=0
alternative_combat_mechanics_loss_divider=1.0
combat_bonus_territory=25
Trance Scout Patrol removed from predefined units.

Details Usurper brawl

Usurper brawl

My starting land was fairly fertile.  No substantial fungus obstructions, just a few patches.  Mt. Planet available.  Definitely a good start, absent the Usurper encroachment.  They're at war with me.  Have a Treaty with the Cyborgs to the north.  Gaians started out at war, but a few turns later accepted my Truce.  I'm now making Rec Commons because the Hive doesn't get Police State fast enough to be of use.  Am building a Skunkworks, on a base that got some Completions so is ready to grow larger.

So, faction_placement=0 is now 3 for 4, better algorithm.  Note the lack of fungal towers.

[bvanevery]

Details bad odds

bad odds

MY 2193.  Getting rid of the Trance Scout predefined unit, I may have induced a few better units to be built.  The Usurper defense is still overwhelmingly Scouts, but it does at least have 11 ECM Plasma defenders.  And it has managed to build one here, at this city I've had to shell forever.  I had the deployment drop on the Usurpers a long time ago, but my one Missile ship just didn't have the oomph to punch through.  Even a Scout defender would do 50% damage to it, and there's no chance of it denting anything resembling a real unit.

IMO this means that defensive capabilities are dialed up too high.  Bases should not have a 50% inherent bonus.  That just rewards the AIs for spamming endlessly, creating strongpoints everywhere.  Territory is still dialed up too high.  If an AI puts down a base, then boom, 50% for base and 25% for territory = 75% bonus to defense.  Way too high.  That's like instant armored Scout with the free minerals when making a base.  How much do you think you'd have to spend to get an equivalent in the field defensive unit?  Yep, it makes the colonist the one true pillar of victory.

Gonna knock base and territory both down to 15%, each worth a PLANET bonus.  In my mod and the stock game, base is 25% but there's no territory bonus.  So 30% total is roughly equal.

While I'm chewing up alphax.txt, a Fanatic Attack bonus of 50% is stupid high.  Back to 25% it goes.  Generally speaking, 50% bonuses should not be handed out like candy.  It's grossly imbalancing.

Oh, and this game pretty much proves that expansion_factor has no effect at all.

Wow, the unit readout says the Cyborgs have produced 79 Trance Formers, with 19 in production.  That is clearly an obsession, and indigenous life isn't remotely threatening enough to justify that.  That's another predefined unit that must be eliminated.  The Gaians also caught this obsession.  And the Morganites.  Wow.