aliens

Author Topic: Brutal-OXCE 9.1.4  (Read 57599 times)

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.12.2
« Reply #30 on: December 21, 2023, 12:53:48 am »
I understand how I notice aliens shooting and throwing. Not sure about dropping. Is it somehow also gets the focus? Meaning at some far corner that I cannot see the camera shows the alien dropping stuff on the ground?
No, but dropped items are shown on the minimap. If you do a before and after-comparison you can see if new items appear on the minimap. Aliens usually don't drop stuff anyways. Players use it as an alternative to throwing, when it comes to smoke-grenades.

However, practically wise it is quite impossible for human to mark and remember exact spot of shooting/throwing origin. At times I recall where they were attacking from but not sure about exact tile. That is beyond my mental abilities. I guess, same for most other humans.
When you use lower projectile-speed and pay attention, you can tell it much better. I've seen this mostly done by Trauson, whom I learned a lot from. He deliberately sacrificed soldiers to then pay good attention to where they were attacked from and then carpet-bomb these locations with grenades. So I taught the aliens to do the same and at the same time be better at countering his strategy by moving after shooting instead of staying were they were.

With this in mind, would it be human like fair to not give AI a super specific location of action it cannot see? Maybe do the same to the human as well to maintain fairness?
With this I feel like aliens penalize the person accidentally farted by immediate shooting and throwing at their location.
😲
As I said before: This feature is completely optional and only happens when "Targeting behaviour for Brutal AI" is set to 3. So you can turn it off, if you think it's unfair.

Offline Alpha Centauri Bear

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.12.2
« Reply #31 on: December 21, 2023, 07:32:58 am »
Alien activity tracking tool.

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.12.2
« Reply #32 on: December 21, 2023, 12:14:30 pm »
Alien activity tracking tool.
Can you talk a bit about it. I'd be mostly interested in learning how it comes to this pop-up. Like is there a frequency how often it checks and will there be several checks for the same activity?

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #33 on: December 21, 2023, 03:59:38 pm »
Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0 - Smoother aggressiveness progression

Updated to OXCE 7.10.0.

Tim Nevolin:
Right aligned numbers in lists.

Xilmi:
Improved the heuristic of how the AI determines which item to pick up when having several options.

When an opponent is not where it was expected to be the algorithm that takes a guess where it could be instead now takes into account how far the opponent could have travelled since last seen.
This should help with completely unreasonable guesses.

Brutal-OXCE now has a different icon to make the executable easier to tell apart from OXC and OXCE.

Fixed an issue where weighted randomization caused AI-units to reposition over and over until all their TUs are spent leaving them with no chance to reaction-fire. The units will instead mark themselves as wanting to end their turn after the first non-attacking and non-peeking-move and only wake up again if any of their team-members finds something interesting.

Weighted randomization was merged with intelligence-scaling. The old intelligence-scaling that made the AI do random-moves was way too extreme in making the game easier, which was against the design-philosophy of brutal-AI. So instead intelligence now impacts the roll-range for the random-score-modifier of the previous weigthed randomization. The lower-boundary is 0.2 times intelligence. The upper boundary remains 1.0. Attack-moves are now also subject to the intelligence-roll.

Units that have made a move with the intent of getting into an attacking-position will no longer perform a second iteration of the movement-logic to check their time-unit-preservation in order to prevent indecisive behavior caused by application of a random score-modifier.

The way aggressiveness works is now way more gradual and doesn't alter the behaviour in extreme steps like the previous integration.
The way it works now is that an aggressiveness-based factor is applied to the "will to be closer to the enemy". This factor gradually shifts the behavior from careful to aggressive.

Baseline-aggressiveness can now be set with two numerical values from 1-9. One acting as numerator and one as denominator. So aggressiveness can be set up from 1/9th to 9.
The meaning of this value roughly is: "How strong do I feel compared to one unit of the enemy."

The aggression-mode-setting now has only the option to multiply unit-aggression with the baseline-aggressiveness instead of replacing it. This way the baseline-aggressiveness can be adjusted to the aggression-values used within the mod to produce the desired results. For example if 2 is supposed to be the avarage balanced behavior the baseline-aggressiveness should be set to 1 over 2.

The aggressiveness is now always impacted by both morale as well as a rough estimate of each team's total combat-power. This way the AI will situationally adapt to what's happening and decide if it shall be more defensive or more aggressive compared to the baseline.

Even at the lowest aggrssiveness the AI will be at the very most be as defensive as the previous aggressiveness 1 behaved. That means they will still move up to the closest tile they deem to be save based on their scouting-information.

Aggressiveness of 1 is now similar to how prvious aggressivness 2 behaved.

An aggressiveness of "1" is now a threshold for two behavioral shifts: Below that threshold there is an increasing score-bonus for being indoors. The reciprocal of the aggressivness is multiplied with the score of a tile, when this tile has a roof above.

The other shift is that above a value of 1, the AI no longer will prefer reserving time-units for breaking line of sight over performing an additional attack.

The previous completely reckless behavior now is only possible with units that have the Leeroy-flag and at aggression-mode 2. Otherwise high aggressiveness-values will not put a lot of emphasis of taking cover but will still make use of existing cover if it is opportune while closing in.

Also non-Leeroy-units that know they have been seen during their turn will always want to take cover regardless of how high their aggressivness is.

Changed the defaults for the aggressiveness-numerator back to what the previous version's aggressiveness was and and adjusted the denominators accordingly so that the AI's behavior is roughly similar to what it previously used to be.

Adjust aggression-defaults for the presets too.

Offline Alpha Centauri Bear

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.12.2
« Reply #34 on: December 21, 2023, 04:02:19 pm »
It shows sectors (regions/zones) with 5+ hours of continuous untracked UFO activity. Pops once new region/zone comes into list.
The continuous counter is reset when there is no more untracked UFO activity in sector or there were actual UFO detection.

Currently all hardcoded but I surely can add multiple parameters to it. Not sure it makes sense, though. 5 hours seems to be a good spot. Lower values would generate many false positives for fly throughs.

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.12.2
« Reply #35 on: December 21, 2023, 04:19:29 pm »
It shows sectors (regions/zones) with 5+ hours of continuous untracked UFO activity. Pops once new region/zone comes into list.
The continuous counter is reset when there is no more untracked UFO activity in sector or there were actual UFO detection.

Currently all hardcoded but I surely can add multiple parameters to it. Not sure it makes sense, though. 5 hours seems to be a good spot. Lower values would generate many false positives for fly throughs.
Sounds good! :)

Offline Abyss

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #36 on: December 22, 2023, 12:32:08 am »
Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0 - Smoother aggressiveness progression

Hi Xilmi!
Thank you for the newest release!
I've got too much work to do before the NY, but want to play vs new BAI scoring levels badly.
How can you estimate new intelligence options, compared to old ones?
And... Actually, why won't you make some subthemes in forum?
Changelog section only, will show the amount of work you've done.

Cheers!

Offline Alpha Centauri Bear

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #37 on: December 22, 2023, 01:29:34 am »
I think I am able to formulate my concerns more clearly now. Keep in mind these are just out loud thoughts without intent to persuade anyone. This is your mod and I won't cry if this won't get into it.

Point of view #1: formal fairness

Game engine is a platform providing (theoretically) equal experience to either party. Besides, in turn based strategy, such platform should also be a storage of all the data pertained to each party and should provide them on demand at any point unlimited number of times as needed for the party to make a decision. The great example is indication of spotted enemy unit. Once spotted, the engine provides this information to both AI (in form of variable stored for the whole duration of AI turn) and human (in form of visible figure on the battlefield). Player can save the game at this moment and return to it in a year and still have access to all information available to them to take a decision.

The knowledge of the "attack origin" is not like that. Engine indeed saves it and makes it available to AI for how many times it wants to recheck it but not to human. Player has to be very sharp in marking all attack origins in memory, then be able to remap all their visual cues to the actual map, and maybe even draw a paper map for themselves so multiple locations won't fall from the memory, etc. I hope the point is clear.

Point of view #2: playability

Besides the chess like mind wrestling, ground combat is still part of bigger game that has to be playable to be attractive. With this in mind it is probably wise to not introduce any super strong or super weak strategy/exploit to not diminish importance of other game elements. Otherwise, it turns into one trick pony getting boring very fast.

Ability to detect when opponent's unit shoots, throws anything (including smoke grenades, flares, grenade relay, or even just passing equipment to each other), or even simply drop some unneeded equipment, or just fart - seems like such overpowered ability. Heck, it is now dangerous to even freeze in panic or become unconscious letting your weapon rolling out of your hands. Meet the grenade next turn and your unit is dead.

Such extra detection outweighs spotting by order of magnitude in quantity and efficiency. No distance limits, no visibility limit, practically whole player squad can be pinned on a map without even approaching enemy. Makes other risks tiny comparing to this one.

I absolutely welcome smart AI making me utilize each and every bonus in the game, maneuver, use tools, get prepared, research, get visual cues, compute in memory, etc. However, when most of the time battle can end in 1-2 turns it kind of ruin playability and interest in strategizing in general.



Here are few thoughts what can be done about it, should you be interested, of course.
If you want to keep it for AI it would be nice to show same information to player in permanent manner. Like arrows after detecting movement on the scanner.
Other option is to blur this information to AI imitating not exact human perception. I.e. introduce random location error or something. More difficult, I think.
Maybe reduce AI perception to see such event within certain range.
Since AI units rarely drop things, use smoke grenades and flares, maybe exclude these events? If not all of these, then maybe only dropping items? Otherwise, unconscious soldiers will become dead in a matter of seconds. No use in saving them (will just lose a medic as well).
« Last Edit: December 22, 2023, 01:36:22 am by Alpha Centauri Bear »

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #38 on: December 22, 2023, 02:08:24 pm »
How can you estimate new intelligence options, compared to old ones?
Well, to be honest I was/am a bit afraid of the feedback of those who used the old one. The old one led to the AI being severely nerfed and playing a lot worse. The new one makes it only slightly weaker than previously just using "Weighted randomization" but at full intelligence. Repeated reports about the AI doing something really stupid and then seeing that it's because of all the random moves it does, triggered me a bit in this regard.

Similar is true for how the aggression works now. They won't just jump to doing completely foolish and selfless things at higher aggressions and also won't play completely passive at the lower ones. It's more narrow in the sense of staying in a window of viability.

Changelog section only, will show the amount of work you've done.
The complete change-log can be found on the github-page. I made a threat linking to it.

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #39 on: December 22, 2023, 02:33:41 pm »
@Alpha Centauri Bear
I like the idea of adding indicators for the player about where enemy-activity was noticed. The information is already tracked anyways because Autoplay also makes use of it. Using the same yellow arrows as provided by scanning shouldn't be too hard.

This could be a better solution to level the playing-field without having to disable the AI's capabilities.

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.0
« Reply #40 on: December 22, 2023, 02:54:29 pm »
This could be a better solution to level the playing-field without having to disable the AI's capabilities.
And here we go. :)

Offline Alpha Centauri Bear

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.1
« Reply #41 on: December 22, 2023, 05:16:20 pm »
By the way, how player can tell what level these yellow arrows are? I never could understand this after using scanner. However, the scanner does not reveal the level too. So, I thought, that is acceptable.
In visual AI detection level matters, though.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2023, 05:36:07 pm by Alpha Centauri Bear »

Offline Alpha Centauri Bear

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.1
« Reply #42 on: December 22, 2023, 05:35:23 pm »
Quote
Holding the Alt-key will now highlight the locations where enemy units have last been spotted in the current or previous turn in addition to showing the result of using a motion-scanner.
If both applies the motion-scanner result will be used as it is more current.

1. You may need to clarify what "current or previous" turn means. Maybe just clearly state that these are location where motion scanner detected motion in player turn + places where they shoot, threw, or dropped items on the ground in last alien turn.

2. What is "if both applies"? Meaning they detect something in the same tile? Then, obviously, player would see the single arrow there. Do you mean scanner somehow can override or remove any of the alien turn detection?

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.1
« Reply #43 on: December 22, 2023, 05:39:45 pm »
By the way, how player can tell what level these yellow arrows are? I never could understand this after using scanner. However, the scanner does not reveal the level too. So, I thought, that is acceptable.
In visual AI detection level matters, though.
You are right. In multi-story-houses it can get confusing. I noticed this in my own play-testing.

The z-axis always gets set to the current one when drawing the arrow. I'll experiment what happens if I don't do this.

Offline Xilmi

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Re: Brutal-OXCE 7.13.1
« Reply #44 on: December 22, 2023, 05:45:20 pm »
1. You may need to clarify what "current or previous" turn means. Maybe just clearly state that these are location where motion scanner detected motion in player turn + places where they shoot, threw, or dropped items on the ground in last alien turn.
Current means during the turn of the player. For example when the alien reaction-fired. And previous is when it was the alien's move.

2. What is "if both applies"? Meaning they detect something in the same tile? Then, obviously, player would see the single arrow there. Do you mean scanner somehow can override or remove any of the alien turn detection?
I mean when an alien was both spotted during their turn and then scanned during the player's. The problem occurs in combination with your last remark. The scanner-information is more up-to-date but lacks the information of the z-coordinate. If I make sure to show the right z-corrdinate for the spotted unit, then overriding it with the scanner will ruin that information. So I need to think about a better solution.