|
Tomn posted:Yeah, sure, but why "bots"? How can "bots" possibly be construed as some kind of troll trigger? It's not like the guy in question didn't say worse stuff, like "horrible unfinished poo poo" or "money grab" or "unstable, unfinished and terrible," so why would he choose to focus on the fact that he refers to AI as bots like most people I know do? Because then he has to acknowledge that the guy actually said that. Better to ignore it and focus on a non-issue. Classic politician move. Neruz posted:Are you guys seriously trying to understand the inner workings of Mecron's mind? Some people like Chaos Theory.
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 09:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 05:17 |
|
|
Isn't 'bots' more FPS player lingo than strategy player lingo? Maybe he's trying to avoid addressing his points by insinuating that he's a generic Call of Duty player, and that the fact that he allegedly likes popular first person shooters obviously means he has horrible taste.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 09:50
|
|
|
We're trying to impose
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 09:52
|
|
|
Ulvirich posted:We're trying to impose You can no more understand the Mecron than you can understand the mind of a madman for they are one and the same. Any attempt at rationality, reason or reality directed at the Mecron will simply fail due to operating under the false assumption that the Mecron is sane. Nobody knows what goes through the Mecron's mind, not even the Mecron himself. That is the problem.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 10:23
|
|
|
The Sharmat posted:Isn't 'bots' more FPS player lingo than strategy player lingo? Maybe he's trying to avoid addressing his points by insinuating that he's a generic Call of Duty player, and that the fact that he allegedly likes popular first person shooters obviously means he has horrible taste. This is my vote as well.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 14:11
|
|
|
The Sharmat posted:Isn't 'bots' more FPS player lingo than strategy player lingo? Maybe he's trying to avoid addressing his points by insinuating that he's a generic Call of Duty player, and that the fact that he allegedly likes popular first person shooters obviously means he has horrible taste. "bots" is and has been for a long time, a term referring to any AI opponent in games. Other synonyms: 1) AI 2) AI player 3) computer player 4) the computer 5) etc... They're all one and the same. Pretending someone referring to them as "bots" means they are too stupid to know what AI is (which is what Mecron is doing) just points out your own ignorance. Edit: Not saying you're ignorant on the matter, that was aimed in a Kerberos direction.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 16:17
|
|
|
Tomn posted:Yeah, sure, but why "bots"? How can "bots" possibly be construed as some kind of troll trigger? It's not like the guy in question didn't say worse stuff, like "horrible unfinished poo poo" or "money grab" or "unstable, unfinished and terrible," so why would he choose to focus on the fact that he refers to AI as bots like most people I know do? Because if you respond to that stuff, it looks like you are taking the bait. When you want to dismiss someone as inflammatory in a public setting, it's important not to engage on the inflammatory stuff, that makes you seem purely reactionary. You use the fact that they said inflammatory stuff to implicitly say that they're an rear end in a top hat but in your example point to something more neutral that makes it less likely you will be perceived as just getting mad that someone called your game "horrible unfinished poo poo". What is he implying about the poster? The statement is purposefully vague and as you can see there's no shortage of answers you can come up with. Some people take it to mean that the poster offended Mecron with the word bot. Some people take it to mean the usage of bot implies a COD mindset. The real answer is: it doesn't matter. You've successfully dismissed a poster, and provided an explanation to the people that are watching (a fake one).
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 16:36
|
|
|
Rakthar posted:Because if you respond to that stuff, it looks like you are taking the bait. When you want to dismiss someone as inflammatory in a public setting, it's important not to engage on the inflammatory stuff, that makes you seem purely reactionary. Yeah, but why "bot" of all things? In general usage it's so completely and utterly neutral that to hear it being used this way is like hearing somebody say "Ah, yes, of course you would support Obamacare - after all, you have brown hair." The strategy may be sound in theory, but the actual execution is just plain puzzling, and it really makes you curious as to what the hell the other guy is thinking to come up with such bizarre crap.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 16:54
|
|
|
Tomn posted:Yeah, but why "bot" of all things? In general usage it's so completely and utterly neutral that to hear it being used this way is like hearing somebody say "Ah, yes, of course you would support Obamacare - after all, you have brown hair." The strategy may be sound in theory, but the actual execution is just plain puzzling, and it really makes you curious as to what the hell the other guy is thinking to come up with such bizarre crap. An audience can fall for that kind of misdirection. It might need to be more intelligent sometimes, rather then "Your hair colour.", but it still happens.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 16:58
|
|
|
I am not so sure Mecron is the political master mind you make him out to be. He is just a supper sperging dude who lives in a fantasy world where saying bot makes you a super hardcore FPS fan. In this world FPSs are in fact directly responsible for the demise of all good video games. Any one who has ever played one clearly incapable of understanding good game play mechanics and would never find a 4x fun. So their opinion on SotS2 does not matter.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 17:38
|
|
|
Hagop posted:I am not so sure Mecron is the political master mind you make him out to be. He is just a supper sperging dude who lives in a fantasy world where saying bot makes you a super hardcore FPS fan. In this world FPSs are in fact directly responsible for the demise of all good video games. Any one who has ever played one clearly incapable of understanding good game play mechanics and would never find a 4x fun. So their opinion on SotS2 does not matter. Unlike Mecron, I believe you are correct in your opinions.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 17:54
|
|
|
Hagop posted:I am not so sure Mecron is the political master mind you make him out to be. He is just a supper sperging dude who lives in a fantasy world where saying bot makes you a super hardcore FPS fan. In this world FPSs are in fact directly responsible for the demise of all good video games. Any one who has ever played one clearly incapable of understanding good game play mechanics and would never find a 4x fun. So their opinion on SotS2 does not matter. He uses the same technique to dismiss other criticism, it has nothing to do with being a political master mind - the analogy is useful because politicians often act as 'representatives' in a public setting and they are in a position of speaking to a crowd and dealing with their interactions. If you present to people sooner or later you run into the problem of people saying inconvenient things and you have to come up with a solution. In this case the articulation you state above is the way Mecron saw it. What is important to understand is that he sees it that way pretty much every time (this person's opinion is invalid), but the reasons for dismissing the person's feedback change each time. That means it's not that this one person's feedback was dismissed because he mentioned bot which makes it clear he's an FPS player, it means that this was the most solid dismissal he could build from what the person expressed. It means Mecron is looking for reasons to write off 'hostile' feedback and the easiest reason that would be ok with the audience this guy gave him was that he called it a bot, which leads to the line of reasoning articulated above. Earlier in this very thread people noticed Denbo dismissing a critical review of SOTS2 by attacking the author as having an axe to grind against them. At no point did she discuss the review - the guy has an agenda, so his opinions are not valid. Same thing, different way of doing it.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2013 18:17
|
|
|
MadJackMcJack posted:It's literally the techtree file in the sword of the stars ii/assets/base/tech folder. Use ctrl+f to find all the instances of "Researchpoints" and knock off a couple of zeros. Two Zeroes off every research is pretty cool but it really needs to be played at 50% research speed with those costs. If there wasn't a metric fuckton of techs I'd change it to a less severe factor. Something like 7 or 6 should be perfect. If anyone can find a way to cut the maintenance costs (either complete for a quick and dirty solution or by a factor so it can be finetuned) that'd be great. There seems to be an easy way to increase tax income across the board, but that would also increase research speed, and it's really just the maintenance that's killing the AI. And I did realize finally that maintenance costs make no sense. Maintenance exists to keep down station counts and fleet counts, so an economic advantage doesn't snowball into an extreme military advantage as quickly - but that's dumb. Both fleet and station counts are already limited by Admirals (maximum number of fleets) and Station slots (maximum number of stations). The only thing maintenance actually does in practice is gently caress the AI over hard.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 01:32
|
|
|
I'm not sure the ai even knows there is maintenance.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 01:39
|
|
|
Which is the big problem. I have a feeling maintenance is hardcoded though - but I also hope it isn't.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 02:24
|
|
|
I guess you could achieve something like that by increasing economy efficiency while cutting your research efficiency. Of course this would mean that colonial maintenance and shipbuilding would be "discounted" too by the same amount.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 06:01
|
|
|
So I've now removed corruption (well, at maximum research there's still about 4% even though the corruption modifier is at 0.0, but it's minor), drastically cut maintenance (by .1 for ships, .01 for stations) and got rid of the Stimulus randomization. Holy crap does the AI suddenly know how to play the game. They have fleets, they have research, they have colonies. It's a whole new ballgame. I've even found settings for individual menaces, so I could get rid of the stupid ones (spectres, meteors?) and keep the cool ones (Slavers, Pirates, Swarmers, Von Neumann, etc.). As a sidenote - the Stimulus randomization is loving stupid. Mining Stations are far more expensive even at the lowest possible value than they would be if you built them yourself, while freighters range from dirt cheap to super expensive depending on how you roll. And it makes no difference how large the freighter is - there's only one roll. Oh yeah and all those values are completely decoupled from the actual costs of things - you could give one race a freighter that costs a million and the stimulus freighter cost wouldn't change a bit. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 14:44 on May 19, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 14:42
|
|
|
Hmm this sounds both interesting and promising; where do you edit these values? I want to try experimenting.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 14:47
|
|
|
DatonKallandor posted:So I've now removed corruption (well, at maximum research there's still about 4% even though the corruption modifier is at 0.0, but it's minor), drastically cut maintenance (by .1 for ships, .01 for stations) and got rid of the Stimulus randomization. Hahahah, that stimulus poo poo is really funny. Turns out the reason they were being so opaque about the mechanics is because they were really loving lovely. Way to go Mecron. Distant Worlds is an example of a well done "civilian sector". The civ colonies also don't work properly, they have no civ pop growth. I think meteors and spectres are really lame, so you could take them out. But keep those weird pod-creatures they seem interesting. If you manage to mod it into a better game please release it. I promise Mecron cannot take it down here but I can't protect you if he registers and starts berating you for making GBS threads on his perfection.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 14:50
|
|
|
It's in assets/base/commonassets.xml Some hard earned advice though - don't cut research costs (location for that given by the awesome goon earlier) by .01 - it's too much. I did that and now I had to fiddle a lot with tax, maintenance and (during in-game setup) with research and economic efficency to get the research times to not be stupid low. 50% research costs is probably a great middle ground, especially because: Lower maintenance means more money for research. Lower corruption means more money for research. You can still adjust the costs up and down from the default value in-game between 50% and 200%. Edit: Thanks Keisari - I'm just trying to make this goddamn game's strat layer work so I can get to the tasty center that is Tactical Combat. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 15:00 on May 19, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 14:53
|
|
|
DatonKallandor posted:Holy crap does the AI suddenly know how to play the game. They have fleets, they have research, they have colonies. It's a whole new ballgame. I wish I could say I was surprised. On the other hand sounds awesome. Please release this because the AI is 80% of what's wrong with the single player right now. The UI and dumb fleet mechanics you can sort of get used to.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 15:22
|
|
|
I might reinstall it if the AI worked and it didn't take 40 turns to research breathing.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 18:24
|
|
|
Yes, please release this in some form.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 18:26
|
|
|
You are a true goon hero! Please share your bounty with us!
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 19:28
|
|
|
I'd rather not until I'm sure it actually works as intended. While releasing immediately without testing would be in the spirit of SotS 2, I'm trying to get ahead here.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 20:52
|
|
|
DatonKallandor posted:I'd rather not until I'm sure it actually works as intended. While releasing immediately without testing would be in the spirit of SotS 2, I'm trying to get ahead here. The second you release that, mecron will want to unironically murder you. So... Carry on, goon sir/ma'am. 
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 20:56
|
|
|
You better release your mod as a pack entitled "Mecron's Folly" so I can watch the shitstorm unravel on their forums 
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 21:09
|
|
|
Nah I don't wanna taunt Kerberos - I like what they tried to do. They just couldn't execute. And if I can fix it with a little bit of simplistic fiddling it means they missed it by an inch, not a mile.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 21:58
|
|
|
Call it "AI Works Now" or something.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 22:32
|
|
|
"AI and research tweaks" to be more diplomatic. The other half is eliminating fleets and admirals so the asteroids don't come and kidnap them anymore.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 22:41
|
|
|
SIGSEGV posted:"AI and research tweaks" to be more diplomatic. That or they're so stupid that they honestly cannot tell the difference between the ship they just launched and a pile of rock heading in vaguely the same direction.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 23:12
|
|
|
Inspired by Daton, I've tried to fix my pet peeves too but I'm not having as much success. I want to have stations build modules pre-installed, like how the starting Naval station is ready-equipped, so there's no need to faff around with them. The naval station seems to have module entries like this corresponding to the pre-installed modules: code:As it stands, the best I've got is altering the .module files under assets\base\factions\*\modules\sn_*.module to zero the prices & construction costs. I've tried folding the bonuses from the modules into the station base stats & removing the module slots, but alas the module requirements for upgrade seem to be hard-coded so that didn't help.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 23:35
|
|
|
Splicer posted:I like to think that the admirals just get so sick of their horrible military that they hop the first mobile object out of there. First one works well but second one is entirely excusable since I'm fairly sure the turret placement on asteroids is better than on most SotS ships. Like SotS1 Tarkasian missile destroyers. Or point defense in general.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2013 23:53
|
|
|
So wait...there's actually a perfectly serviceable AI under this game that is hidden under a bunch of bloat, crippled only because they refuse to remove some worse than useless "realistic" features like upkeep? That...makes perfect sense actually. Mecron!
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 08:37
|
|
|
DatonKallandor posted:They have fleets, they have research, they have colonies. It's a whole new ballgame. DatonKallandor posted:I'd rather not until I'm sure it actually works as intended. While releasing immediately without testing would be in the spirit of SotS 2, I'm trying to get ahead here. We could help you test it though. For example, it will be hard to know whether those fleets research and colonies are worth a drat without a lot of test games. They could still be running fleets of missile boats with no PD 90% of the time and you might not notice without goon help. I think the stupid ones are okay they just need to be less frequent. I've had one colony hit by meteors five times in a row and it's just dumb. However I would add pirates to the stupid list. As far as I'm concerned pirates will be broken until police cutters are fixed. You can have a goddamn dreadnought fleet patrolling with a high reaction admiral and you'll still lose at least one freighter all the time and all freighters half the time. The current implementation of pirates is a boring unskippable cutscene in which you're almost guaranteed to lose something. Maybe if you could fool the game into thinking a police cutter section was a pursuit section they would be tolerable. Could you do that? Like, just c/p the ID so that the game thinks that a cruiser with the overdrive section is a police cutter? Then they would be justified in their upkeep cost and function, although the freighter spawn location would continue to be a problem. This is really minor compared to having an AI that more or less works on the strat layer so maybe ignore it instead? Give us the fillleeesss so we can test it. I want this game to work goddamn it.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 09:37
|
|
|
Oh god. I removed pretty much all the random events (pirates, spectres, asteroids etc) to leave only the semi-random ones (swarm, von neumann etc). The result was a galaxy populated by approximately eleventy billion swarm queens and von neumann motherships. I'm not sure if i just broke the game entirely or if changing the probabilities also changes the spawn rates or something.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 10:14
|
|
|
Neruz posted:Oh god. Truly a cursed reality. Will the hive mind of the AI or the insects triumph? Whoever wins, we lose!
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 10:31
|
|
|
The Von Neumann tear the Swarm to pieces, the Swarm are actually perfect Von Neumann food because they spit out a huge amount of small ships that the Von Neumann can rapidly and easily reclaim with their bullshit beam weapons. A Von Neumann Mothership in a Swarm system is basically an experiment in exponential growth.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 10:35
|
|
|
Neruz posted:Oh god. This actually sounds like more fun than SotS2 on release.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 11:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 05:17 |
|
|
Yea keep it that way, I'd rather have those hijinks than pirates and meteors. What about protean pods? I hope you left those lil' cuties in they are pretty awesome.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2013 11:27
|
|