SMACX Thinker Mod

[T-hawk]

I don't know the details around which faction causes a fungal pop. I think the clean-mineral-raising might be tied to the interlude screen, so that it affects all factions once the human has seen it, but not sure at all.

Rushing production could be as simple as just rush in the HQ whenever they can and it has 10 or more minerals. That'll be enough to get them to just spend the money somehow, and within ballpark distance of optimal.

[induktio]

So here are the results after running the same scenario with the updated Thinker AI. Old Gaian AI is just using the pirate graphics set for clarity. Apparently due to the randomness of the bonus resources and tech choices the AIs were at near parity for about 60 turns until the new AI started deploying advanced terraforming in mass. I decided to keep running the scenario until the AI reached 1000 labs output and indeed it happened on turn 145 for the first time.

This is how the territory looked like at that moment:

   

Borehole pattern is pretty dense but not maximal though:

   

Here's the old AI:

   

Faction dominance charts:

   

So at the end the new AI had 1113 labs output and 302 economy output while the old (standard) AI had 214 labs and 119 economy. New AI had also built 74 formers and 91 crawlers while the old one obviously had only a tiny fraction of that and one(!) crawler.

But here's how it gets really interesting. Thinker was just about to discover Orbital Spaceflight and deploy satellites while it had also built genejack factories before. Many bases were topping 40 minerals at that point. After only two turns later it would cause a message to pop up announcing sea level rise of 333 meters during the next 20 years! And a couple of turns later it would promptly destroy around half of the tiles but the AI would still keep going at over 900 labs output. Wow, just wow. Looks like it needs to delay building tree farms until the first fungal pop or something like this is bound to keep repeating in other games. That is definitely some of the most irritating features of the game.

[T-hawk]

Damn, that's an amazing difference, well done.

I always get the first fungal pop naturally before any tree farms get built anyway. The pop comes within a few turns of one base working two uncapped boreholes, and Ecological Engineering for that comes before Environmental Economics to enable tree farms.

What is the elevation of the tiles on this map? It looks really flat, are they all near 0m altitude and thus vulnerable to a small sea level rise?

Do you know if the AI ever pop-boomed, how much of the growth was that versus normal food surplus?

The borehole pattern looks to be maybe 50% of max density, but that's probably good enough to leave that way for now and tackle easier improvements. It'll take a lot of dependencies (cities and other boreholes up to 4 tiles away) to know if a particular tile will fit the max pattern, and even more to decide if it's worth the extra effort to fix fungus or a slope on that tile.

[induktio]

Damn, that's an amazing difference, well done.

I always get the first fungal pop naturally before any tree farms get built anyway.  The pop comes within a few turns of one base working two uncapped boreholes, and Ecological Engineering for that comes before Environmental Economics to enable tree farms.

It's interesting to compare the human vs. computer approaches here because a human can easily understand large scale connections but the AI basically makes decisions in isolation of each other. Human player can rush minerals production in one city with crawlers etc. while the AI basically develops every base at equal importance. One of the problems is probably it did not use boreholes enough early on because of the lack of food.

Those former improvements are basically built using a greedy algorithm: for each tile the former visits, it checks if it meets the conditions for a condenser/borehole and tries to place them if possible. In this version I think the ratio is pretty reasonable between condensers and forests etc.

The map was all flat around 300m elevation just so that boreholes would not face any extra restrictions. So that's why half the files were destroyed in the first sea rise. In any case it's probably really problematic for the AI even though it knows to build pressure domes now.

I did not check it each turn, but I think neither of those AIs pop boomed (by switching to planned). The bases still have lots of extra food available.

[induktio]

Oh man, after all these years, I think we finally have a solution to the borehole worker allocation problem. I was able to create a patch that changes the governor preferences  in a way that it prefers to work the boreholes automatically.

It works by modifying the food intake calculation such that each borehole appears to produce 1 food, even though this value is not used in the production, only in the tile allocation. Using this method, no changes are visible in the tile yield values and the governor now prefers to work the borehole tiles 90% of time. It's also possible specify 2 food "value" for the boreholes, and in this case the governor will aggressively select boreholes tiles first without exception, even to the point of starving.

Technically it would be possible to make this patch a configuration option, but I think it makes sense to make it default behaviour (1 food version) for the governors of all factions, regardless if they are human controlled or not. Could save a lot of micromanagement.

[induktio]

Thinker version 0.7 is now available from the downloads.

Most important changes:

* Land-based former code rewritten
* Formers will attempt to raise land bridges to nearby islands
* Crawler code improved to choose better tiles
* Prototype picker values fast units and useful special abilities more
* Design_units configuration option added. Produces improved probe teams and AAA garrisons.
* AI produces now planet busters. Amount depends on the UN charter status and aggressiveness settings.
* AI prioritizes secret projects that match their interests
* AI builds secret projects now in their top third mineral output bases
* Tech requirements now fully moddable in alphax.txt
* Governors of all factions will use more borehole tiles
* Scient patch v1.0 added

With the auto design units feature it would be good to know what kind of special units the AI is lacking/should produce. It's now possible to specify all the proper tech requirements/special abilities in ANY combination and have the AI build the units too.

[ellman]

Those screenshots look amazing!

RE: UI improvements
The major UI improvement I always wanted was a way to add the same build que into multiple cities at the same time on the F4 screen. Maybe allow ctrl and alt to select multiple cities at the same time on the F4 screen?

Re: borehole spread

Could you do something like, once turn 20 or tech for borehole has been discovered, look at the possible borehole grids for maximum boreholes(B,x,B,x,etc.) you could overlay on the currently discovered map. Then choose the layout that has the fewest borehole spots currently taken by cities, monoliths, water and to a lesser extent rocks, fungus and squares needing elevation changes. Then you could determine which layout is optimal and then "reserve" those spots for future boreholes so you don't waste time terraforming them or putting bases there.

RE: Global warming
The alphax.txt #rules can be edited to reduce global warming. In my own games I have it set to happen 1/99th as often and I never see it go off.

[induktio]

The major UI improvement I always wanted was a way to add the same build que into multiple cities at the same time on the F4 screen.  Maybe allow ctrl and alt to select multiple cities at the same time on the F4 screen?

I'm probably going to say there's not going to be UI redesigns on this patch since it's about AI improvement. We have some collaboration going on with the Pracx patch and I actually think those kind of stuff would fit very well there. It already changes the UI in many ways.

Could you do something like, once turn 20 or tech for borehole has been discovered, look at the possible borehole grids for maximum boreholes(B,x,B,x,etc.) you could overlay on the currently discovered map.

If you mean display this information for the player faction, probably not, but the AI planning algorithm will probably get some updates. Currently it has some problems finding good spots on uneven terrain. So there may not be monster AIs if the terrain is very hilly.

Let's call this problem "maximum borehole packing". Formally speaking it's clearly some kind of optimization problem, but how difficult? The map can be treated as a graph where each vertex has 8 edges to nearby tiles. Since boreholes can't be adjacent I think it reduces it to an instance of finding a maximum independent set. It's very difficult to find an optimal solution to NP-hard problems but we don't necessarily care about the best solution that much. It's pretty meaningless if it can only fit 18 instead of 20 boreholes on a given terrain. Probably it can be done quite well if the algorithm attempts some number of greedy solutions and picks the best one. "In planar graphs, the maximum independent set may be approximated to within any approximation ratio c < 1 in polynomial time"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independen...ph_theory)

[induktio]

Just a reminder for people who download Thinker mod, the most recent features are usually found from the develop builds (if the build date is newer than latest release). It's a testing ground for new features, but they don't really make the game unstable by any means. Installation steps are the same as usual.

[induktio]

New release version 0.8 is now available from downloads. Changes since the last release:

* New combat logic for land-based units attempts to do counter attacks more often
* New code for selecting social engineering priorities
* AI understands the value of fungus and will sometimes plant it
* AI sometimes builds native units when the psi bonuses are high enough
* Faction placement option added: avoid bad spawns on tiny islands and equalize distances to neighbors
* Landmark selection options added to config
* Experimental load_expansion option added
* Many other fixes and adjustments
* Scient patch updated to v2.0

This new social engineering AI is probably really significant in boosting the AI capabilities. It should be able to fairly reliably pop boom via SE if +4 growth is just attainable. It also takes into consideration the distance to any enemies and might decide to switch out of Free market (or any other model with -police) to avoid the pacifism penalty.