SE choices for AI - suggestions

[Yitzi]

Yitzi, I think you will find that if the player can't just create and destroy Centauri Preserves (the cheapest facility of this kind) over and over to increase the mineral limit, THEN the Planet penalty and ecodamage becomes much more significant. 

Somewhat, but not that much; he can still build a bunch of ICS-style bases and stick Centauri Preserves (and probably tree farms as well) in them; while he does have to pay maintenance for the preserves, it's not all that much when divided among all his producing bases.

And even if not...if he's got 12 bases (a fair midgame number) and a tree farm and hybrid forest and centauri preserve at each one, he can produce 50 minerals per base with no ecological damage, no matter what economics he's running.

But I'm perfectly willing to include the other version once I reach the stage where I finish the current batch and then change it so the new variables can be applied to existing maps without a hex editor (as I will be making the patch such that you can use either version).

[ete]

I think the clean minerals being globally raised to fairly high levels in mid/late game was a design feature to combat ICS, which would otherwise be strongly encouraged once bases were hitting their clean production limits. Unless either all bases produce eco damage (perhaps smaller ones more) or large ones can be made to not, it's going to encourage ICS. And doing the former.. well, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Perhaps it'll work very well.

[Yitzi]

I think the clean minerals being globally raised to fairly high levels in mid/late game was a design feature to combat ICS, which would otherwise be strongly encouraged once bases were hitting their clean production limits.

The problem is that the global raising happens via methods that are most effective when using ICS.

Unless either all bases produce eco damage (perhaps smaller ones more) or large ones can be made to not, it's going to encourage ICS. And doing the former.. well, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Perhaps it'll work very well.

The former is possible (though not doing it based on size) with my patch.  However, here's another idea that would avoid encouraging ICS: Remove clean minerals entirely.  No clean minerals means no large freebie that's multiplied by your number of bases (you'd still want a small freebie in the form of rounding down or similar, just so that you're not facing ecodamage almost as soon as you start), so there's no ecodamage benefit to ICS.  200 minerals faction-wide would be the same whether it's spread among 10 bases or 50.  (You would of course have to cut ecodamage substantially to compensate, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

[Nexii]

The former is possible (though not doing it based on size) with my patch.  However, here's another idea that would avoid encouraging ICS: Remove clean minerals entirely.  No clean minerals means no large freebie that's multiplied by your number of bases (you'd still want a small freebie in the form of rounding down or similar, just so that you're not facing ecodamage almost as soon as you start), so there's no ecodamage benefit to ICS.  200 minerals faction-wide would be the same whether it's spread among 10 bases or 50.  (You would of course have to cut ecodamage substantially to compensate, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

I would say that pollution should be on a per-base basis.  Logically only bases that pollute would have fungal pops.  Also, this adds some strategy in having mineral cities with eco facilities to offset.  The problem with eco facilities as they are is that they benefit all your bases by raising the clean mineral limit (a pro-ICS mechanic).

I would tie eco dmg to these factors only:
- Population size of the base
- Eco facilities (ideally, I think only the preserves.  Tree farm and Hybrid Forest are strong enough).
- Planet rating

How about this?

ECODMG =MAX(ECO_RATE*(MINERALS/BASESIZE^BASE_RATE)*(1-(PLANET*PLANET_RATE))-BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS),0)

MINERALS: minerals produced by the base
BASE_RATE: a small exponent to slightly benefit larger bases in terms of eco dmg.  I think this will be needed in the late game where you will have much higher mineral totals from Genejack, Replicator, etc.  May take some playing around but I would put this at a value of ~1.1.
PLANET: City owner's PLANET rating in SE
PLANET_RATE = 12.5% (for 12.5% more/less pollution per planet rating) seems reasonable.  FM would thus pollute quite a bit more than Green, as this is calculated before clean minerals are subtracted.
BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS: the base clean minerals for each individual base.  I think putting this around 8 would work, if you're looking to shut down size 2-3 bases each with a crawled borehole.  Though this also depends on if you keep the existing road/improvements as counting against it (I think).
ECO_RATE: a constant that can be also modified by difficulty rating.  Somewhere around 1 for lowest difficulty and 5 for Transcend.

Then you can have the preserves give +1 PLANET or some such, if that's possible.   Or they could increase BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS if that is not.

[Yitzi]

I would say that pollution should be on a per-base basis.  Logically only bases that pollute would have fungal pops.  Also, this adds some strategy in having mineral cities with eco facilities to offset.  The problem with eco facilities as they are is that they benefit all your bases by raising the clean mineral limit (a pro-ICS mechanic).

Well, they also benefit the base in which they are built, but I'd agree with having each facility only affect the base where it's built (projects should affect the whole faction, though.)

I would tie eco dmg to these factors only:
- Population size of the base
- Eco facilities (ideally, I think only the preserves.  Tree farm and Hybrid Forest are strong enough).
- Planet rating

Having it based on base size rather than mineral production (and removing the effects of terraforming entirely) is an interesting idea; it's not to my taste, but once I start taking modding requests I should be able to add that option.

Making it not depend on techs is also interesting and would greatly change the game effects; not for the better, though, IMO.  I like the idea of ecodamage becoming more of a concern later in the game.

ECODMG =MAX(ECO_RATE*(MINERALS/BASESIZE^BASE_RATE)*(1-(PLANET*PLANET_RATE))-BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS),0)

MINERALS: minerals produced by the base
BASE_RATE: a small exponent to slightly benefit larger bases in terms of eco dmg.  I think this will be needed in the late game where you will have much higher mineral totals from Genejack, Replicator, etc.  May take some playing around but I would put this at a value of ~1.1.

Interesting idea, but fractional exponents are fairly hard to pull off, and as written larger bases would actually produce less ecodamage (as basesize will grow as fast as minerals).  As for being needed, I think that removing clean minerals would allow for an across-the-board 90% slash to ecodamage, which will make higher mineral totals a lot easier to handle, assuming you build stuff like preserves/temples/nanoreplicators and get a higher PLANET rating in the late game.

Actually, with baserate>1 and BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS=8, you'd almost never get any ecodamage, as you'd need to have more than 8 minerals per population, which is unlikely at any stage of the game.

PLANET: City owner's PLANET rating in SE
PLANET_RATE = 12.5% (for 12.5% more/less pollution per planet rating) seems reasonable.  FM would thus pollute quite a bit more than Green, as this is calculated before clean minerals are subtracted.

Could work, though I think a 20% would work better with no clean minerals.

Overall, your ideas are interesting, but I'm not sure that they'd be any better than the following (far easier to implement) formula:

ECODMG=MAX(0, [(MINERALS/(5X(1+FACILITIES))+(TERRAFORMINGX(1-(FORESTFACILITIES/2)))]XTECHSX(1-PLANET/5)/20)XMAPMODIFIERXDIFFMODIFIER

FACILITES=All facilities in the base, and projects in the faction, that are marked as "reduce the effects of industry on Planet's ecology)
TERRAFORMING would be calculated as before.
FORESTFACILITIES are tree farm and hybrid forest.
MAPMODIFIER is 1.5 for heavy native life, 1 for normal, 0.5 for light native life.
DIFFMODIFIER is 1 on Thinker and Transcend, 0.6 for Librarian and lower.

Thus, even in the lategame with 300 minerals in a base, you have at least 3 facilities (nanoreplicator, preserve, temple) cutting it down to 15XTECHSX(1-PLANET/5)/20)XMAPMODIFIERXDIFFMODIFIER.  So with 86 techs on a normal map on Transcend running Green, that's 38.7...uncomfortable*, but not unreasonable for an endgame high-mineral base.

*As it should be; as the game progresses, the native life should become a very significant factor.

[Nexii]

Actually, with baserate>1 and BASE_CLEAN_MINERALS=8, you'd almost never get any ecodamage, as you'd need to have more than 8 minerals per population, which is unlikely at any stage of the game.

Looking back, it's not really 'clean minerals per base' that I was subtracting.  It's a flat 8 off of eco damage at the end and is not multiplied by population.  In effect this works like a clean mineral limit but it really is not.

Your formula fits the game descriptions of how the base facilities work, and it's close to how it is now.  I do agree that eco damage should be tied to tech (as Planet approaches its Transcendence). 

The problem with eliminating the clean mineral limit entirely is that the game is balanced around running 0 eco damage for most players, most of the time.  Even tiny bases will be triggering fungal pops in the early game.  Now this is probably how it should be, but with how the boils progress they will quickly get out of hand.  Even running Green and all facilities will not really be enough.  As you showed, you will be creating 39 eco damage for every 300 minerals produced, and that's late game when all facilities are even available and built to cut down pollution.  If you're running FM and no facilities it's ~413 eco damage for the same 300 minerals.  Facilities should be strong, but I think that they have way too much an impact if clean minerals are taken out.  They'd be more or less a requirement and late game captured bases would be pretty much just a burden by the pollution they make.

For example, Green in early-mid game (25 techs) with no facilities (nano and temple are very late game, and preserve is mid-game), is 60*TECH/20*0.6, or 300 mins -> 45 eco damage (across any number of bases).  With FM on it's 120 eco per 300 minerals.  This is a lot higher than current eco damage numbers.  Add into this that the AI will now be polluting as well (assuming you don't code them to just cheat around it).

I think the real issue is that the boils progress very sharply.  They are balanced around a very all-or-nothing model of eco damage (which means surpassing clean minerals but not till the very late game typically).  What if the boil frequency was triggered by Eco damage, but the size/power was tied to tech rather than the number of pops?  And then getting rid of native mass captures and free energy for stack killing.  As it stands eco damage can really be exploited as a good thing, when it should only ever be bad.

[Earthmichael]

I would say that pollution should be on a per-base basis.  Logically only bases that pollute would have fungal pops.  Also, this adds some strategy in having mineral cities with eco facilities to offset.  The problem with eco facilities as they are is that they benefit all your bases by raising the clean mineral limit (a pro-ICS mechanic).

This is not a pro-ICS mechanic, but just the opposite.

With ICS, any particular base produces only 1/4 - 1/6 or less of what would be produced in a non-ICS scenario.  When you do not allow eco facilities to have a general effect, then this actually promotes ICS, so that you can keep the production of any city smaller.

Non-ICS requires the current mechanism to be competitive with ICS.  If you get rid of the current mechanism, you force players away from large cities, and toward ICS to minimize the production at any particular city.

[Nexii]

I would say that pollution should be on a per-base basis.  Logically only bases that pollute would have fungal pops.  Also, this adds some strategy in having mineral cities with eco facilities to offset.  The problem with eco facilities as they are is that they benefit all your bases by raising the clean mineral limit (a pro-ICS mechanic).

This is not a pro-ICS mechanic, but just the opposite.

With ICS, any particular base produces only 1/4 - 1/6 or less of what would be produced in a non-ICS scenario.  When you do not allow eco facilities to have a general effect, then this actually promotes ICS, so that you can keep the production of any city smaller.

Non-ICS requires the current mechanism to be competitive with ICS.  If you get rid of the current mechanism, you force players away from large cities, and toward ICS to minimize the production at any particular city.

The eco damage subtractor is not needed.  You could get rid of it if desired, and just make the whole pollution linear to minerals produced.  Which is also logical.  The base exponent would also make larger bases pollute less than an equal number of smaller bases.  For example, a size 10 base making 64 minerals would pollute as though it was 10^1.2 -> ~10 size 1-bases each making 4 minerals.  Or in other words, the size 16 city would pollute at (10/10^1.2) or ~63% the rate of all the small cities combined.

[Yitzi]

Looking back, it's not really 'clean minerals per base' that I was subtracting.  It's a flat 8 off of eco damage at the end and is not multiplied by population.  In effect this works like a clean mineral limit but it really is not.

I got that; what I missed is that it's subtracted after multiplying by ECO_RATE.  Although in that case, it still gets wonky in that the larger a base grows, the smaller its ecodamage is.

Your formula fits the game descriptions of how the base facilities work, and it's close to how it is now.

Which I think is an advantage, both in terms of coding and balancing.  The main differences are that it has no clean minerals, and that there's an across-the-board ecodamage cut.

The problem with eliminating the clean mineral limit entirely is that the game is balanced around running 0 eco damage for most players, most of the time.  Even tiny bases will be triggering fungal pops in the early game.

That is a concern if it happens with small enough bases, but subtracting even just 1 from the ecodamage chance, together with an across-the-board proportional cut will prevent ecodamage from showing up too early.

Now this is probably how it should be, but with how the boils progress they will quickly get out of hand.  Even running Green and all facilities will not really be enough.  As you showed, you will be creating 39 eco damage for every 300 minerals produced, and that's late game when all facilities are even available and built to cut down pollution.

Yeah...but in late game where you're producing 300 minerals in a base, you should be able to afford the empath units and super formers to keep it under control anyway.  And 300 minerals is a lot even in the late game unless a single base is crawling far more than its share.

If you're running FM and no facilities it's ~413 eco damage for the same 300 minerals.

Firstly, there's no real way to get that; no facilities means no nanoreplicator, and that cuts down your mineral potential.
Secondly, even with facilities, 300 minerals is assuming you've got a lot of forests and/or fungus; if you want to run FM in the late game, you're probably going to prefer farm/solar which is a lot lower in mineral production (especially when you consider that minerals directly from Nessus stations don't count).

Facilities should be strong, but I think that they have way too much an impact if clean minerals are taken out.  They'd be more or less a requirement and late game captured bases would be pretty much just a burden by the pollution they make.

Keep in mind that no facilities also means no mineral-multiplying facilities, which means you're looking at a maximum mineral production of 50 or less, which will compensate for the lack of ecological facilities.

For example, Green in early-mid game (25 techs) with no facilities (nano and temple are very late game, and preserve is mid-game), is 60*TECH/20*0.6, or 300 mins -> 45 eco damage (across any number of bases).  With FM on it's 120 eco per 300 minerals.  This is a lot higher than current eco damage numbers.

Actually, it depends how many bases you're looking at.  Under current rules with 25 techs and +2 PLANET, 45 eco-damage (assuming normal native life, transcend difficulty) is 45X300/2/25/5=54 minerals over clean minerals.  (That is, with 54 non-clean minerals you'll be looking at 45 eco-damage; 54X2(LIFE)X5(DIFF)X25(TECHS)/300=45.)  Thus, to get 300 minerals with only 45 eco-damage requires that 246 of them be clean minerals; assuming that there have been no fungal pops yet, that requires 16 bases, which isn't going to happen in the early-mid game without ICS.

So no, it really isn't higher than current eco-damage numbers; it's just that in the early-mid game your entire faction usually isn't producing anywhere near 300 minerals.

I think the real issue is that the boils progress very sharply.  They are balanced around a very all-or-nothing model of eco damage (which means surpassing clean minerals but not till the very late game typically).

You mean how a small increase in minerals produces a large increase in ecodamage?  Part of the point of the formula I described is that that doesn't happen.  Also, the boils don't seem to progress all that sharply (keep in mind, though, that without my patch building ecological facilities after the first pop causes boils to progress as though they were pops, which may be why they progress sharply in your experience.)

And then getting rid of native mass captures and free energy for stack killing.

I believe native mass captures are already impossible, and I know that ecodamage-caused worms can't be captured at all.  Planetpearls could do with some reduction, though.

This is not a pro-ICS mechanic, but just the opposite.

It really depends on what you compare it to.  Compared to "remove clean minerals for facilities, don't change anything else", the current system is more anti-ICS.  But compared to "remove clean minerals, decrease ecodamage across the board to compensate", the current system is more pro-ICS.

The base exponent would also make larger bases pollute less than an equal number of smaller bases.  For example, a size 10 base making 64 minerals would pollute as though it was 10^1.2 -> ~10 size 1-bases each making 4 minerals.

Your numbers are off.  10^1.2~15, so your 64-mineral base would produce as much ecodamage as one size-1 base with 4 minerals.  Which is pretty absurd.

[Buster's Uncle]

I believe native mass captures are already impossible, and I know that ecodamage-caused worms can't be captured at all.

That turns out not to be the case - late-game, you start getting that "A more powerful mind seems to be controlling these worms", but up to then, I've captured upwards of 20 ecodamage-caused worms at a stroke; I did it just today.

[Yitzi]

I believe native mass captures are already impossible, and I know that ecodamage-caused worms can't be captured at all.

That turns out not to be the case - late-game, you start getting that "A more powerful mind seems to be controlling these worms", but up to then, I've captured upwards of 20 ecodamage-caused worms at a stroke; I did it just today.

Can you link a save of the game, by any chance?

[Buster's Uncle]

I can, but I already used up those units, so no point. 

I've got Voice of Planet now, so I'm getting no more ecodamge worms this game - I'll capture a stack for you next time, though that won't be for several days...

Oh wait!  I've actually got a freshly captured eco-stack, avec screenie, because there's something buggy going on - hold on a minute.

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay, I was already working up screenies for something else, and having to use this old game - the one I used for testing the timewarp loading between games thing you had me do recently.  Coincidentally, in the process, I'd let everything go for several turns and gotten a number of fungus pops, and a few hours ago, captured a NL stack (the second time today, in different games).

I saved this because that city-thing kept popping up among the ecodamage native life - boy, are they tough, too.  It's generally a sign a game is bugging and about to crash, but I see these once in a long time - the last was a bad load of Kil's LE crossover GotM last year.



So in the save, you want to check 44,42 - not what I'm doing with the active formers on the other side of the map.  For once there's no custom factions to complicate things; it's a really old game.

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's a better view of the city-looking thing - and an uncaptured one stacked with another unit.  Attack it with the active unit, and reload the attached save over until you capture those two.  It shouldn't take all night.  This is how the game normally behaves - it's not capture-able because the game's gone buggy.



scient wants me to get the game to crash, and I've still not finished the other thing I was working on, and it's late, so...

[Nexii]

Re: Boils:

Yea maybe it's different in your patch.  I've seen games where boils progress to 20+ stacks of Elite Locusts.  These stacks could not be captured and took no collateral damage..  It seems like this was after only a dozen pops or so.  They seemed controllable at any amount of minerals because a base can only produce one unit/facility a turn (something else that imo should be changed, but would be very hard to code).

I know I have captured large (10+) stacks of Mindworms in the current 2.0 (GOG) patch.  I'd have to test this more in a game where I try to pollute.  They may have been randomly spawned stacks but I don't believe this was so.  Usually all you see spawned is an Isle of the Deep with 2 mindworms in it, and the occasional roaming mindworm/locust.

Re: Eco facilities:

300 faction minerals is mid game faction-wide production.  Certainly not early-mid.  That's 10-15 bases, around size 7 with 2 crawled boreholes each, and no mineral multipliers. 

I forsee two problems.  Nanoreplicator, Temple, and Pholus Mutagen are very late game.  In addition, facilities reduce eco damage way too much.  As they are, each eco facility reduces eco damage as follows:
#1: -50%
#2: -66%
#3: -75%
#4: -80% (Pholus Mutagen with all 3)

The first facility is like going from 0 to 2.5 Planet alone.  In fact, it's even stronger if you are running FM...taking you from an effective -3 Planet (1.6) up to +1 Planet (0..  Now you can argue the absolute benefit of the facilities is the same for all SEs, but this does show their extreme power even against a strong +/- 20% pollution per Planet modifier.  For example going from 0 to 4 facilities with FM on is equivalent to going from -3 Planet to +3.2 Planet.  While I don't think you can actually exceed 3 Planet, this shows that their effect is more than the difference between the most and least polluting SE settings.  In your late-game example (Green and 3 facilities), you're cutting eco damage down by 85%, and it's still quite a high amount to deal with.  While I think Planet rating and facilities should matter, the effects of running FM and/or no facilities will be too devastating to even contemplate these options. 

What is the cap on +Planet?  I assume it's +3, as there's no benefit past that on the SE page.  What if rather than being the divisor for minerals, facilities and Pholus Mutagen each increased Planet rating by +1, up to a max of +3 rating?

---

Yea I butchered the numbers really badly on the city size idea.  My head's been a bit off today.  What I meant was that a base would have its eco damage reduced slightly by a function of its size, which is anti-ICS.

The pollution in a base would scale down by a factor of [N/(N^1.2)], where N is the city size.
size 1 - 100% (1/1^1.2)
size 2 - 87% (2/2^1.2)
size 3 - 80%
...
size 10 - 63%
size 16 - 57%
size 25 - 53%
size 50 - 46%

Therefore a size 50 city making the same minerals as 50 size-1 cities, would pollute at 46% the rate.  Sorry, I made this really unclear.