SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

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.

I have designed it for myself to not design over and over again every game. There is some merit to invest 50% more in production but lose them about twice as rarely. Do you think it's not the case?

[bvanevery]

I have designed it for myself to not design over and over again every game.

Never, ever, ever, use predefined units for player convenience.  Any predefined unit you make, tells the AI that it's something valuable.  Often the AI goes crazy with it.  Predefined units are only for teaching the AI what it should and shouldn't make.  Playtesting reveals what units the AI will and won't make, and what works in practice and what doesn't.  Another major problem with predefined units, is they may be appropriate for earlier in the game and become a total liability later in the game.

There is some merit to invest 50% more in production but lose them about twice as rarely. Do you think it's not the case?

It is grossly outweighed by an obsession with a unit that is not valuable in the quantity being produced, compared to other production concerns of the empire.  You're kneecapping the factions that discover the unit.

A historical example in the stock binary is the Pirates freaking out with armored Transports.  I had to ditch that.

[bvanevery]

New game with version 188.

faction_placement=0
alternative_combat_mechanics_loss_divider=1.0
combat_bonus_territory=15
15,      ; Combat % -> intrinsic base defense
25,      ; Combat % -> Fanatic attack bonus
Trance Scout Patrol, Trance Formers, and Trance Sea Formers removed from predefined units.

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

Details inferior

inferior

I was given a substantial fungal wall in front of me.  At least I could walk through it.  The Great Dunes are visible to the west, so I'm guaranteed not to have rainy land nearby.  The Usurpers do have -1 PLANET and I wonder if this has anything to do with the kind of start they get.  I'm counting this as 3 out of 5 starts good.  It remains to be seen if this is as bad as it looks.  What if the Monsoon Jungle is nearby and I have no competitors?

The Pirates are right next to me by sea.  Well at least interacting with them won't be boring.

[bvanevery]

Details 8 balled

8 balled

This is officially a lousy start, requiring me to be aggressive.  Yeah I know I'm the Usurpers, but I didn't choose that.  I guess we'll see if wiping out either the Data Angels or the Pirates goes ok.  I do have probe team capability already, just need to make some.  Along with everything else.

MY 2137.  The Data Angels' 1st conversation with me is to threaten.  Of course I refuse, and they declare war.  Well that certainly simplifies the dynamics.  Am I stronger or not?

Meanwhile, the Pirates wanted me to go to war with the Data Angels a few turns ago.  I declined, then.  They're Seething at me. 

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer/blob/master/wtp_changelog.md#version-189

Fix for break treaty - aircraft scramble. And probably for many other hidden ones since treaty break request is moved a lot earlyer.
Off by default. Didn't bother to check all corner cases. I believe it will work but who knows with SMACX.
Please enable and test and let me know if it is safe.

[bvanevery]

Details excess colonists

excess colonists

I don't want to deal with this anymore.  The lack of space and the forced fungal maze, totally threw off my colony production.  I also ended up with 1 more colonist than expected because I accidentally did a Completion when I was tired, before I had changed the production to something more useful.  Although I haven't lost any Colonists yet, it's just super duper annoying and obviously not the correct use of the situation.  I don't think I've had a battle this cramped on a Huge map in a long time.  So, it's definitely possible to get a lousy start with the stock faction placement.  No fungal towers though.

Really irritating is I couldn't get back around to Social Psych, despite my directed research.  I didn't go for it earlier because it didn't seem to be needed.  Now I need it badly and can't get to it.  Plus probe team production for tech theft is taking a long time.

If I had continued, a combo of war and shifting my colonization to the north, might have worked fine.  I thought about doing it peacefully with Transports.

1:30 AM.  Going to bed.

[bvanevery]

New game with version 189.  I have started using WinMerge to propagate changes, so that I don't have to keep editing the variables by hand.

faction_placement=0
alternative_combat_mechanics_loss_divider=1.0
combat_bonus_territory=15
15,      ; Combat % -> intrinsic base defense
25,      ; Combat % -> Fanatic attack bonus
Trance Scout Patrol, Trance Formers, and Trance Sea Formers removed from predefined units.

Huge map, 30%..50% land, average settings, random opponents.  I drew the Data Angels.  I sure seem to draw them a lot.

Details double Davy Jones locker

double Davy Jones locker

This is the 2nd turn in a row that the Pirates have been eradicated.  How does that happen?  I've never seen such a thing before.

My own land has some fungus but is lush.  Looks like a decent start.  I did not try to go to any heroics with avoiding fungus.  I put my first 2 cities right next to fungal clumps.

MY 2106.  A spore launcher just showed up to the west of my capitol.  Someone is stirring the pot.  I need to consider going into combat mode.  Don't want a repeat of last game where my front line was a bunch of colonists.

Details three times a charm

three times a charm

MY 2107.  OMG!  3 times in a row.  What did you break?  Ending this game, and no more playtesting until this showstopper is resolved.  Gonna go do life productivity stuff.  Yeah.

I found the autosaves available, and resaved them with dates on them.  Looking at them under the Scenario Editor, it's not clear to me what's going on.  I don't see any geographic anomaly.  Maybe after they settle their capitol, they're being eradicated by some bug?  And it repeats every turn.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

MY 2107.  OMG!  3 times in a row.  What did you break?  Ending this game, and no more playtesting until this showstopper is resolved.  Gonna go do life productivity stuff.  Yeah.

https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer/blob/master/wtp_changelog.md#version-190

Thank you for saves. You stepped on exceptionally sloppy programming vanilla bug when they count only specific predesigned colonies. I don't even understand how this could be done accidentally. Seems like they decided to cut on rare edge case which you discovered.
Made me sick in the stomach.

It seems to be a regular practice everywhere in the code. I recall first unpatched releases just crashed on me all the time. I was lucky to enjoy 100 uninterrupted turns in a single game back then.

[bvanevery]

Fascinating.  So a reveal, not something you particularly "did".  Commercial game production has often been a mess.  The complexity of something like SMAC, it really gets away from people.  I mean here we are, years later, putting additional person years of development into putting things right.  Keeping things monetized so the QA is actually stable, and keeping things within scope so they can be covered, solved, competent AIs written for them... surely a pile of tough challenges.

Will install 190 shortly.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

There is truth in it, generally. However, what I point at is that it would be cheaper, faster, and less error prone (= more money for less time) if they just plainly and routinely used functions as all normal people do. The amount of hardcoding is astounding. I have a feeling they did it purposefully to win nanoseconds here and there maybe?

Yet they failed at this miserably too. The one notorious example is calculating distance between tiles which is used like, err, everywhere. There is no function for this it is hardcoded everywhere. And their formula to calculate coordinate difference is: dx = abs(abs(x2-x1)). At first, I checked why they need second abs thinking maybe I missed something important but no - this is just how it is done. Everywhere. I guess for extra safety. 😂😞

[bvanevery]

Well, PCs of the period were definitely more limited in performance.  So I could definitely see avoiding function call overhead as a standard drill.  I can't see calling an integer abs instruction twice though.  Unless there was some register flag clearing trick involved in that, on Intel architecture.  I can't think of an integer pipeline reason to do it.  Seems like a complete waste.  Integers can't be denormalized numbers so... I'm drawing a blank.  I knew pretty much all the tricks back in that period.

What if this was expressed for some compiler limitation, some kind of inlining trick or workaround?

[scient]

I've seen instances of that double abs or other redundant code. If you look at map.cpp file for *_dist functions, you'll see where you could run into double abs on same coordinate values. I think a lot of it is compiler inline optimizations. There are certain ones I instinctively recognize the assembly now. Also, you have to remember the stock binary was compiled with ancient MSVC++ from 1998/1999. That plus less than stellar code base for some areas (especially SMACX code).

My laptop is currently being repaired by Apple, so I'm on my really old MBP that I haven't used in a couple years. On hiatus from working on OpenSMACX for a week until I get it back.

Bear summoned me, so had a quick look at last few posts in thread. Definitely lots of issues with right click vs short cuts. The problem is mainly there isn't unified code for both. There are separate large Console and MapWin class functions that pick up hotkey and other for right click context menus. So if there aren't certain validation checks inside sub-functions, there is inconsistency between them. Definitely area that will need a lot of work.

As for faction elimination, yep that's really dumb code. I can understand having checks if BSC_COLONY_POD or BSC_SEA_ESCAPE_POD are non-zero for player_data.protoIDActive. This would save time versus cycling through all units. However, if both those checks fail it should have logic to look for any other units with pods before eliminating the faction. I'll integrate a fix into OpenSMACX code base. I'm pretty sure I've run into this as well where a faction is eliminated for seemingly no reason. Thanks for the heads up!

[bvanevery]

New game with version 190.
faction_placement=0
alternative_combat_mechanics_loss_divider=1.0
combat_bonus_territory=15
15,      ; Combat % -> intrinsic base defense
25,      ; Combat % -> Fanatic attack bonus
Trance Scout Patrol, Trance Formers, and Trance Sea Formers removed from predefined units.

Huge map, 30%..50% land, average settings, random opponents. 

I drew the University.  Ugh, this is likely to be a stinking pile of doo.  A mere +2 RESEARCH is no kind of advantage against even the inflated performance of stock binary factions, let alone WTP.  And for that I get a -2 PROBE penalty.  And a kneecapping drone penalty.

Details trashed

trashed

My start was not that good.  Fair amount of fungus, and not particularly good land.  Fortunately, some pods popped some resource bonuses that made up for it.  Mt. Planet was visible to the southeast, but it turns out Yang was sitting on top of it.  He declared war on me.

One of the pods near my capitol burst a spore launcher and a mindworm, surrounding my Scout.  The mindworm died attacking the Scout, but it got so badly wounded, that it had to retreat and heal up at the monolith.  A 2nd Scout came up to attack the spore launcher, and it died.  This left the spore launcher free to shell me without mercy.  It trashed both the mine and the forested nutrient I had built at my capitol.  That's a lot of turns of early productivity down the drain.  It took a long time to get units up to deal with it, because I was in the middle of building a Command Center due to Yang's threat.  He also came threatening me by sea, although he didn't actually shell.  This close quarters pressure has kept me from getting much in the way of Completions, although I did slip a ship out to the south, which is popping pods.

I think I'm willing to say, that a "surround" pop this early, this close, is pretty grossly unfair.  I don't think that happens in the stock binary.  It's also worse in WTP, because you can't be sure of offing the offender.

So, this proves that faction_placement=0 can definitely give you a kind of bad start.  No fungal towers though.  That seems to be the consistently good thing.  It remains to be seen whether I make progress against Yang.  I do have both the Command Center and the minerals productivity.  I will radiate Scouts towards him and see what trouble I can make.  Of course it's Yang with Perimeter Defenses, so this might not go so well.  I do have probe team capability, but they're pricey and mine are going to die after every mission.

I did manage to Complete a Laser Skimship prototype, so I can send out Recon Rovers when that's appropriate.  First I'll sweep with Scouts though.

[bvanevery]

Details insulting

insulting

I'm buying techs from the Cult of Planet.  That's how lame I am, and how useless my +2 RESEARCH is.  Network Nodes don't do you any damn good if you can't even get your cities settled.  In my mod the University has no PROBE penalty, no extra drones, only suffers half of POLICE penalties, and it's still kinda crap to play with.  For a long time I even gave them free Biology Labs to go with the Network Nodes, but something shifted in the AI performance that made that unnecessary.

Details peon armies

peon armies

Yang believes in Scout spam just as much as I do.  I have my mineral deposits, but he has Mt. Planet and farmland to go with it.

I Completed a Foil Probe Team and infiltrated Yang.  Surprisingly, my probe didn't die, so soon I'll steal his map.  It seems I just bought the techs that he'd gotten ahead with.

[bvanevery]

Details fast exploit

fast exploit

I don't think anything but an infantry chassis should be able to have ECM.  Yes the original game is flawed that way.