SMAC 444 (AI experiment)

[Lord Avalon]

Decided to try this. Only 1 game (Univ, Lib) so far, a little over 100 turns in.

Morgan too aggressive? I'm sharing an island continent with him, so he was my first contact. He wanted Centauri Ecology for 25 credits (I already had Ind Base). I could have used them, and his mood was a bit on the hostile side (I forget what level), but decided no tech, no trade. Meanwhile, researching lasers seemed like a good idea. He later tried to trade again, and when I turned him down, declared vendetta.

I had already infiltrated his datalinks, so the next probe op got his map, then I stole some credits. When I had four recon rovers, I attacked. One died, but I took one of his three bases, and he decided to call it off. Maybe I could have conquered him, but decided to sign a treaty. He didn't even have any laser troops , so it seems a bad idea to go to war at that point, even if I was settling towards him and hemming him in.

The Spartans had been sailing through an isthmus where I have a base, making me wary and going for Nonlinear Math, then later when I saw their impact rover, High Energy Chemistry. They went south and landed on Morgan's peninsula, though, and declared on him. They haven't sailed east along my northern coast to discover my other bases yet.

I'd seen a Gaian transport off my southern coast from time to time, though it was a while till she made contact. Interestingly enough, I saw a land square where I didn't remember one. I thought, "There's no way I didn't have a unit on the square next to it at some point." I went back to an earlier save, and sure enough, it was water. So the Gaians had raised some land. Probe teams and skimship on the way.

[RGE]

Thanks for making an effort to teach the AI how to play the game. I had no idea it suffered so much from rushing facilities and SPs. Seems very counter-productive to give the AI all those bonuses on Transcend level, only to take them away in another part of the game. So I'm guessing it might have been a bug?

I am almost sure I can push AI to drill more boreholes. I think they already make more of them now, but it can be even better. Condensors, we will see.

I haven't played a lot of games, but I have seen the AI build condensers, but never a borehole or an echelon mirror.

What I would like to see would be a change in the rules as to where boreholes can be built. Not allowing them on slopes by making it impossible to build boreholes in tiles with lower land next to them should also make it impossible to build boreholes right next to sea tiles, since those by definition are lower than the coastal tiles. Instead coastal tiles are perfect for boreholes, which seems very wrong. Particularly for single tile islands, where it looks like a borehole is in the middle of the ocean. But I understand that I might be alone in this, and/or that it might be too difficult to change. (Though I wonder if the AI is using those rules, and thus has a lot more difficulty finding good spots for boreholes.)

It would also be nice if a borehole would collapse if the tile it is on becomes a slope. But that seems impossible to arrange, as no terraforming is ever destroyed by height/depth/rockiness alterations, as long as the tile doesn't change from sea to land or vice versa.

Like making the Ask_for_loan for much bigger money,

In my games the AI asks for plenty of money, and I can easily control this by spending a lot of money before contacting a faction, and then grant them a loan, which will keep them from asking for another until they have repaid the current one. I suppose that the AI could check my income rather than what I have left that turn, but what would it do? Ask to loan all I have left, or demand that I save up more money that it can ask for next turn?

[kittenOFchaos]

Two things I'm finding - btw I'm playing at Transcend level.

I think the AI needs relaxed support costs - too often they have only 1 or 2 minerals spare because of supporting too many units. An easy option to relax AI support costs would be a nice feature.

Also, the AI spends too much time looking around before building its second base. It is a good feature for it to spread out, but that second base should be built quicker to allow more colony pods to be built.

Between those two features, just abit more focus by the AI on base defense wouldn't be a bad idea. They are too easy to blitz - largely because they're slower to get going.

[kyrub]

Hey, nice crop of reactions here. I am surprised anybody gives a damn about my work. RGE, @boreholes are on the to-do list. @Avalon, AI raising land is actually very bad feature, since it is time consuming. I hope to get rid of it in the future.

I think the AI needs relaxed support costs - too often they have only 1 or 2 minerals spare because of supporting too many units.

Excellent observation! One of the biggest AI problem. I have seen this in the building decision (the AI takes into account how many free minerals it has before building another unit). And I remember it was very badly implemented. Still there are no easy solutions in this complex code.

An easy option to relax AI support costs would be a nice feature.

Hmm, interesting. Changing game rules is not exactly my way. But giving an option would be nice. Still, it requires a lot of work and I am lost in the option and scenario customization code. No real idea what is what. Maybe I could make a small special release with half support for AI... That's not very nice, I know.

Also, the AI spends too much time looking around before building its second base.

Good remark.

Between those two features, just abit more focus by the AI on base defense wouldn't be a bad idea. They are too easy to blitz

AI will build the "city walls" earlier, I promise. I have this one +- ready, it's easy. BTW, one of the biggest factors in bad AI defense is its habit to send all units to a monolith once it is discovered. For about 10 turns, all cities are empty. Incredible.


Thanks guys for trying the patch. More suggestions are welcome. But you need to be patient, my real life is lost in deep, huge fungus.

[kittenOFchaos]

Good luck with the fungus.

[waab]

I just installed SMAC again a couple of days ago and went back to my old apolyton.net to see if the community still was alive. Not only is it alive, a person is actually fixing the AI. So kyrub, thanks a lot for the effort! I will test it tonight!

[waab]

Just played my first 100 turns with the AI patch, as I am a little bit rusty I started as the Hive on the thinker difficulty on a small map. I started on the same island as Gaian, Morgan and Univ.

I have enslaved Morgan and Zakarohov, both now has two bases left, Gaian is wiped out by me. However the reason why I attacked Morgan was that I was losing ground fast. It was either I kill him now or he will kill me later. Really good terraforming from Morgan and he continues to have great energy production. The problem Morgan had was that he lacked in defensive capabilities, starting beside me and the Gaians, I think he should have more than one Synthmetal garrison per city, especially as he refused to sign a peace treaty with me.

Zakarohov cities was in worse shape than Morgan however I noticed that he has some proper ocean terraforming outside one of his remaining bases. Had a larger army than Morgan and put up a more proper fight. However felt that he was late with building prototypes.

Deirdre had a strong defense with both a proper amount of units and Perimeter Defense around each of her bases. Her problem was that she lacked probe teams so I those perimeters was not of proper use. However the reason why I attacked her was that she had got The Weather Paradigm and would have got The Citizens' Defense Force the next turn if I had not thrown everything against her.

Overall: The big improvement of the AI must be terraforming, the AIs I have met so far have all used forest and no mine + farms. The terraforming around Morgan Industries is great and I think he is running wealth + free market. I think that Morgan would have ended up with a great empire if he had not been boxed in early by the expansion by me and Deidre. I think the weakest AI was Zakarohov, but the reason for that might be that I cut his empire in two by placing a base in a good position. This left him with his terraformers on one side and one base in the funges. A really great game so far.

[jez9999]

Any chance this patch could incorporate what I did with mine (see here), which makes the game always play the Gaians' ambient music no matter what faction you're playing as? I find all the other ambient 'musics' absolutely terrible.

[Qloos]

I was angry enough to post in defense of the clearly superior Mirriam ambience!

[jez9999]

I was angry enough to post in defense of the clearly superior Mirriam ambience!

You've got to be kidding.

Look, I appreciate the whole way ambient "sound" (the term "music" can just about be applied to the Gaian styling, but I can't bring myself to apply it to the others, so let's call it "ambience" from now on) in SMAC is implemented is pretty cool. It seems, depending on the styling, to change based on your moving about the map, your terraforming, your building bases, and your opening the base screen. Maybe one or two other things trigger subtle or not-so-subtle changes to the "ambience" that I've missed. And I also get that they were trying to make the game feel like you're on a strange, slightly scary, weird, alien planet. I just think that given they've put so much effort into it, it's a shame that everything except for the non-Gaian ambience styling has come out IMHO God-awful.

For example, here's a snippet from the Believers' "ambience":
http://www.game-point.net/misc/SMACB...rsAmbience.mp3
For the first 30 seconds or so I did nothing, and it tails off to... silence. Then I started moving around the map and it starts up again. This is extremely distracting; I want something relatively constant to be played. And what about when it actually is making some sound? The best I could describe it as is a broken synthesizer output recorded onto a warped vinyl record. It's awful. Truly terrible. You might like it, but it makes me want to kill myself. It's bad enough having to listen to it for a minute, let alone playing an entire long game with it...

Here's a snippet from the Gaians' "ambience":
http://www.game-point.net/misc/SMACGaianAmbience.mp3
This is much more tolerable - even quite nice - to my ear. It's constant and never tails off into nothing, even if you do nothing. Much less distracting. Moving around the map subtly changes the key of the playback, and (not in the recording) the "ambience" changes when you finish terraforming too. IMHO the one place they screwed up with the Gaians' "ambience" is that when you build a new base, it changes permanently to something a bit more upbeat-yet-distracting, and never returns to the original style. I usually save/load immediately after building a base to get around this.

The point is that different people like different ambiences, I guess. I know the binary can be hacked to always force the Gaian ambience, because I did it. It would be nice if it were configurable, either in-game or even via a setting in a text file. I'm sure we could extend the patch to allow that.

[jez9999]

Hmm, I'm just trying this patch out, and the version number is 5.0. I had patched my original terran.exe to version 4.0. Is there an 'official' 5.0 patch? If so, I haven't seen it!

[jez9999]

Looks like you applied the "SMAC Win 2000/XP Update" from the Firaxis site before applying this patch? I hadn't done that and was still using SMAC 4.0. WTF did they do to it? That is more than a Win 2000 Update; suddenly the map in the bottom-right looks all distorted and horrible! All the bases are kind of ugly blobs, whereas before they were neat squares. The borehole cluster looks like some kind of concrete wells, instead of metallic alien things! lol... I'm sticking with 4.0. Please tell me if you ever patch that. They totally screwed things up in version 5.0!

[weirwood]

Hey kyrub!

I'm afraid I have to report some bad news - whatever change you have made to the shipbuilding priorities seems to have been a bit too much. I've just watched a SMAX game, random leader personalities. Both Deirdre and Cha'Dawn got very strong and opted to go for sea power. They had about 10/15 combat ships, but 60/70 transports... land units were in the 45/60 range. Can you cap the number of transports ships? total land units/6 might be in the ballpark.

For everyone else here: kyrub is still interested in updating AI terraforming. One thing that would be very helpful would be if someone who knows the game very well could come up with a set of conditions under which the AI should build advanced terraforming: boreholes and condenser farms, for a start.

The AI can't really use most of the tricks that humans use - crawling resources doesn't work reliably, for example, or using specialists rather than workers.

Another area that could be improved is early terraforming: how to strike a good balance between farms and forests, for example.

It's quite simple to help with this project: install kyrub's patch, and set up an all AI game. Then keep some notes on any glaring mistakes that crop up, or anything that could be easily improved.

[kyrub]

the shipbuilding priorities seems to have been a bit too much.

Thanks for feedback. Yes, I hope I can do more than what I did previously. I needed more space in the code. Now, I did a little practice on dll injection, let's see where it takes us.

The AI can't really use most of the tricks that humans use - crawling resources doesn't work reliably, for example, or using specialists rather than workers.

Crawling: Am I the only one who thinks crawlers are broken? All the special crawler techniques sound to me like exploit. I banned myself from using them entirely in my games...

Using specialists... now, that is another story. What should AI do on this field? When? Triggers, conditions... Help me, please.

[weirwood]

Crawlers and specialists go hand in hand - a common strategy is to use crawlers on condenser farms and mines to supply all the nutrients and minerals you need, and then make all your citizens into specialists, once the advanced types are available, i.e. engineers. The labs/economy boni you get from them are not subject to inefficiency, and a base where everyone is a specialist won't have drones. But that's all advanced strategy from people who used to play competitive multiplayer. I don't think the AI needs to emulate that. For now, we should focus on the basics. If the AI can get some good balance in early terraforming, that would already be of great help.

One other thing: from the same game I mentioned earlier: Lal was stuck on a small island, barely large enough for 3 bases. But after some attempts to expand were defeated, (he lost a city he had built on the mainland), all he did was build scout rovers - so many that he didn't have and mineral production left due to upkeep.