[MOD 0.12.20+] Misanthrope 0.3.7 -- Better Biter Mechanics

[toaran]

Hi Afforess

another crash found me

harpa_error.png (3.31 MiB) Viewed 7457 times

I had an "Micro"Harpa" in my power Armor ad was flying in a gunship(Natural Evolution mod) over some biters helping a friend... but is also happens when you walk towards any biters with this micro harpa...

I had to remove Misanthrope to clear the error in the savegame otherwise i would always crash...


Toaran

[Afforess]

I hopefully fixed your issue in 0.2.4. You're quite the bug-finder!

[Porter65]

Just reporting that your mod is increasing greatly my interest in Factorio. Now biters come to bite you, even if your pollution don't spill over their bases. That's just great. I had no particular trouble protecting my supply lines. Yes, it needs more resources, defenses and prudence, but I find that 'normal'.

[aureon]

Any way to make biters ignore completely rails&power lines?
Even having to build special, ignored versions is A-ok. But as it this, this doesn't work with RSO.

[Hexicube]

Obligatory shameless self-advertisement: viewtopic.php?f=96&t=21742

Stops biters targeting rails, so you don't need stupid amounts of defences.

Didn't include power poles, you can work around that by having localized power production...plus the poles look far more menacing that some planks of wood and steel beams that they can just walk over.

[Afforess]

Any way to make biters ignore completely rails&power lines?
Even having to build special, ignored versions is A-ok. But as it this, this doesn't work with RSO.

I play with Misanthrope with RSO, but I'm a sadist.

Obligatory shameless self-advertisement: viewtopic.php?f=96&t=21742

Stops biters targeting rails, so you don't need stupid amounts of defences.

Didn't include power poles, you can work around that by having localized power production...plus the poles look far more menacing that some planks of wood and steel beams that they can just walk over.

I totally approve of and endorse your shameless self-promotion. Nice work on the mod. In fact, I'll link to it from the OP.

Re: WIP / Alpha status of this mod - I'm planning on splitting this mod into two versions, a "Lite" AI-only version and a "full" version which is the current download, then moving this to General Mods. The Lite version will change no gameplay, add no new content, just change the biter AI... which allows it to be compatible with mods like Natural Evolution. The full version will remain exactly the same as the current release. Sound good?

[Hexicube]

Obligatory shameless self-advertisement: viewtopic.php?f=96&t=21742

Stops biters targeting rails, so you don't need stupid amounts of defences.

Didn't include power poles, you can work around that by having localized power production...plus the poles look far more menacing that some planks of wood and steel beams that they can just walk over.

I totally approve of and endorse your shameless self-promotion. Nice work on the mod. In fact, I'll link to it from the OP.

I wouldn't describe it as nice work, it's simple enough that a few monkeys could have probably produced the same result in a few months.

One thing that baffles me is that Misanthrope naturally accepts the fact that rails are no longer marked as player built. I see no explicit checks for this sort of thing, so I've got no idea why it actually works properly, but it does and I see in the logs that rails aren't being considered a target any more (and testing showed that they still attacked pipes).

Oh, and make sure you don't build exposed rail signals on the long stretches, those don't have immunity. I take no responsibility for crashes due to attacked signals...

Re: WIP / Alpha status of this mod - I'm planning on splitting this mod into two versions, a "Lite" AI-only version and a "full" version which is the current download, then moving this to General Mods. The Lite version will change no gameplay, add no new content, just change the biter AI... which allows it to be compatible with mods like Natural Evolution. The full version will remain exactly the same as the current release. Sound good?

Maybe you could have the extra entities in their own mod? Chances are there's going to be someone who wants those defensive structures but not the harder AI that comes with it. Personally, I'll be using the lite version, but that's because I'm in a phase of wanting to play with a set of mods that are more-or-less invisible (the only mod I've got that adds an item is smart trains, because it adds features arriving in 0.13.X).

[Dreadicon]

I have a suggestion which I had intended to fiddle with making a mod of myself one day (programmer by trade, though very short on spare time).

Basically, vanilla lore is that the biters rapidly 'evolve' in response to threats and changes to their habittat, at least for free play mode. They also are pretty dumb, but that makes sense; most things they can just throw more biters at and stop/kill/dominate. But the player, being smart, can build hardpoints their waves crash into and get slaughtered. My idea was to add increasing intelligence AI to the evolution; not just aggression levels, but intelligence to. Thus they would evolve from mindless and impotent zerglings to hive-minded lethal swarm. I was still working out the details, but basically they still try to get to high pollution buildings, but are smarter about it; they amass for attacks, or attack from many directions at once, often at night (natural instinct plus no solar power can run power reserves dry if using lasers at night). They might evolve protection against lasers if the player over-specializes, or bullets. Basically, give them tactics as they evolve. On the matter of 'gurilla tactics', that's a pretty advanced tactic requiring meta-thinking to some degree, and I would personally reserve it for the highest evolution factor for rails, and second highest for power lines and non-military non-pollution buildings. Another thing would be to have 'leaders' who command them, and they loose cohesion if you kill the leader. Just some thoughts

I am well aware that AI is seriously tough stuff, so my compliments for the mod as-is. These are just my musings on the matter. Already happy you came up with a mod for this; biters needed some, well, bite

[Porter65]

Is the mod working right regarding evolution progression? How can I end up with almost the same % at the start and then at the end of 900 seconds of 'peace' with a 0.40% increase per minute? Evolution should have gain 6% if my maths are right. But it is increasing by perhaps 0.5% over the whole period.

[Hexicube]

Is the mod working right regarding evolution progression? How can I end up with almost the same % at the start and then at the end of 900 seconds of 'peace' with a 0.40% increase per minute? Evolution should have gain 6% if my maths are right. But it is increasing by perhaps 0.5% over the whole period.

It looks like the code that shows that number is wrong, 0.4% really means 0.04%. EVOGui has the same issue.

[Porter65]

Oh ok, that would explain if over a full cycle from peaceful>normal>expansion, if I don't kill any hive, then % globally decrease?

[BlakeMW]

I've been enjoying playing Misanthrope (with higher enemy settings, of course).

The Tank with a micro HARPA is especially fun, finally the bugs flee in terror of the rampaging Tank.

But I was thinking about the lack of ways of dealing with biters other than killing them. What might be cool is if the Tank is intrinsically scary to biters, and in front of an oncoming Tank is the last place they want to be. This would be the basic concept:

The Tank projects a "Cone of Terror" in front of it which causes biters to flee or scatter in panic, biters will still try to attack from behind and the sides, and will attack from all directions if the Tank is stopped - the size of the Cone of Terror would depend on how fast the Tank is going.

For even more fun:
Initially the Biters don't recognize the Tank as a threat, but every biter you kill while in the Tank causes the "Tank Scariness Factor" to increase, which increases the size and potency of the Cone of Terror. Not using the Tank for a while results in the TSF slowly degrading.

Why this would be useful:

In Misanthrope you tend to encounter far larger groups of biters and the Tank can tend to get bogged down by sheer numbers, if you could scatter the biters it'd make the Tank more useful beyond the small biter era and free up reliance on a micro HARPA. Also I think it fits in the idea of making the biters a bit smarter, the biters are still pretty dumb so they may not recognize the real threat of bullets, but their little primal brains can understand a big hulking roaring monster bearing down on them and crushing their friends to death.

[Hexicube]

Oh ok, that would explain if over a full cycle from peaceful>normal>expansion, if I don't kill any hive, then % globally decrease?

Experimenting showed that evolution decreases at a notable rate during any phase other than peaceful and normal. It'll hover at around 30%, assuming the only factor is time, rising above 30% due to the time component then going back below from being in passive aggressive.

[Leshrac]

You might wanna check this out. I ran into a problem regarding your mod with it saving extreme amounts of data and making me unable to load my savegame due to it.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=21827

[Afforess]

One thing that baffles me is that Misanthrope naturally accepts the fact that rails are no longer marked as player built. I see no explicit checks for this sort of thing, so I've got no idea why it actually works properly, but it does and I see in the logs that rails aren't being considered a target any more (and testing showed that they still attacked pipes).

You're right, I never do check for forces. My immediate guess is that attack commands on neutral force objects are disregarded by the game engine, but this is pure speculation on my part.

Maybe you could have the extra entities in their own mod? Chances are there's going to be someone who wants those defensive structures but not the harder AI that comes with it. Personally, I'll be using the lite version, but that's because I'm in a phase of wanting to play with a set of mods that are more-or-less invisible (the only mod I've got that adds an item is smart trains, because it adds features arriving in 0.13.X).

You're talking about the HARPA stuff?

So are you proposing this kind of split for the mod?

• Misanthrope-Lite
• Misanthrope-Structures
• Misanthrope-Evolution

I have a suggestion which I had intended to fiddle with making a mod of myself one day (programmer by trade, though very short on spare time).

Basically, vanilla lore is that the biters rapidly 'evolve' in response to threats and changes to their habittat, at least for free play mode. They also are pretty dumb, but that makes sense; most things they can just throw more biters at and stop/kill/dominate. But the player, being smart, can build hardpoints their waves crash into and get slaughtered. My idea was to add increasing intelligence AI to the evolution; not just aggression levels, but intelligence to. Thus they would evolve from mindless and impotent zerglings to hive-minded lethal swarm. I was still working out the details, but basically they still try to get to high pollution buildings, but are smarter about it; they amass for attacks, or attack from many directions at once, often at night (natural instinct plus no solar power can run power reserves dry if using lasers at night). They might evolve protection against lasers if the player over-specializes, or bullets. Basically, give them tactics as they evolve. On the matter of 'gurilla tactics', that's a pretty advanced tactic requiring meta-thinking to some degree, and I would personally reserve it for the highest evolution factor for rails, and second highest for power lines and non-military non-pollution buildings. Another thing would be to have 'leaders' who command them, and they loose cohesion if you kill the leader. Just some thoughts

I am well aware that AI is seriously tough stuff, so my compliments for the mod as-is. These are just my musings on the matter. Already happy you came up with a mod for this; biters needed some, well, bite

I'd love to do something like this, but the interface for AI control is just too primitive to do something like this yet. Right now mods can issue basic commands, or chains of commands to biters, or issue general area-wide commands for biters. Unfortunately, I stick to the area-wide commands because issuing individual commands to biters is too expensive in terms of performance. I'd like to see mods be able to "replace" the base game AI, but right now, I just have extremely large carrots and sticks I can use to sort of cajole biters with the existing AI into some semblance of intelligence.

There's also a lot of really weird biter behavior that is odd to work with. Biters farther away than 150 blocks from any sort of player structure doesn't get regular tick updates, and can't really be instructed to do anything.

Is the mod working right regarding evolution progression? How can I end up with almost the same % at the start and then at the end of 900 seconds of 'peace' with a 0.40% increase per minute? Evolution should have gain 6% if my maths are right. But it is increasing by perhaps 0.5% over the whole period.

It looks like the code that shows that number is wrong, 0.4% really means 0.04%. EVOGui has the same issue.

Probably because the same person wrote it in both places! I'll make sure to get that fixed.

Oh ok, that would explain if over a full cycle from peaceful>normal>expansion, if I don't kill any hive, then % globally decrease?

Basically in any non-peaceful / normal phase, evolution rate decreases based on the intensity of attacks. In peaceful and normal evolution, the rate increases.

In addition, the longer the game is, the faster the evolution rate increases. Initially it increases 1/4 as fast as vanilla, after 12 hours, evolution rate will increase as fast as in vanilla, and after 64 hours, it will increase about 4x as fast. It caps out there. Using any HARPA structures makes the evolution rate increase 50% faster as well.

I've been enjoying playing Misanthrope (with higher enemy settings, of course).

The Tank with a micro HARPA is especially fun, finally the bugs flee in terror of the rampaging Tank.

But I was thinking about the lack of ways of dealing with biters other than killing them. What might be cool is if the Tank is intrinsically scary to biters, and in front of an oncoming Tank is the last place they want to be. This would be the basic concept:

The Tank projects a "Cone of Terror" in front of it which causes biters to flee or scatter in panic, biters will still try to attack from behind and the sides, and will attack from all directions if the Tank is stopped - the size of the Cone of Terror would depend on how fast the Tank is going.

For even more fun:
Initially the Biters don't recognize the Tank as a threat, but every biter you kill while in the Tank causes the "Tank Scariness Factor" to increase, which increases the size and potency of the Cone of Terror. Not using the Tank for a while results in the TSF slowly degrading.

Why this would be useful:

In Misanthrope you tend to encounter far larger groups of biters and the Tank can tend to get bogged down by sheer numbers, if you could scatter the biters it'd make the Tank more useful beyond the small biter era and free up reliance on a micro HARPA. Also I think it fits in the idea of making the biters a bit smarter, the biters are still pretty dumb so they may not recognize the real threat of bullets, but their little primal brains can understand a big hulking roaring monster bearing down on them and crushing their friends to death.

Interesting thoughts. I like the idea of a "scariness factor" and having biters flee after a certain point. I wonder if it could be applied more broadly to the player in general (a player with a bunch of combat robots is pretty scary too!), and not just a particular vehicle.

Then maybe a player with a high "scariness" approaching worms or biter spawners would cause worms to flee underground (and disappear) and the bases to just deconstruct into a bunch of biters that flee off into the distance. The downside might be that scaring biters away boosts your evolution rate really quickly.

Anyway, an interesting concept.

You might wanna check this out. I ran into a problem regarding your mod with it saving extreme amounts of data and making me unable to load my savegame due to it.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=21827

Oh boy. Not the first time I've seen this error... but it was with another mod. I will take a look and get this fixed.

[Porter65]

About how biter % evolves, when I mean that over a full cycle it decreases (for me) I mean over the full peaceful+normal+passive expansion, it decreases. I tend to take pollution into account when developing myself (for example I won't exploit an ore patch at maximum speed by having drills everywhere).

Basically the game is easier in Misanthrope than without. Because 12 hours play time before being at the same rate as vanilla is a very long time to me!

[Hexicube]

One thing that baffles me is that Misanthrope naturally accepts the fact that rails are no longer marked as player built. I see no explicit checks for this sort of thing, so I've got no idea why it actually works properly, but it does and I see in the logs that rails aren't being considered a target any more (and testing showed that they still attacked pipes).

You're right, I never do check for forces. My immediate guess is that attack commands on neutral force objects are disregarded by the game engine, but this is pure speculation on my part.

Possibly, but you scan for specifically named entities and for some reason a pipe (with an interest of 75) is prioritized over a rail (with an interest of 750) in the same chunk. Some voodoo magic is making it work...

Maybe you could have the extra entities in their own mod? Chances are there's going to be someone who wants those defensive structures but not the harder AI that comes with it. Personally, I'll be using the lite version, but that's because I'm in a phase of wanting to play with a set of mods that are more-or-less invisible (the only mod I've got that adds an item is smart trains, because it adds features arriving in 0.13.X).

You're talking about the HARPA stuff?

So are you proposing this kind of split for the mod?

• Misanthrope-Lite
• Misanthrope-Structures
• Misanthrope-Evolution

Something like that, yeah. Maybe just a Misanthrope-Evolution and Misanthrope-Structures, since lite would be evolution.

Is the mod working right regarding evolution progression? How can I end up with almost the same % at the start and then at the end of 900 seconds of 'peace' with a 0.40% increase per minute? Evolution should have gain 6% if my maths are right. But it is increasing by perhaps 0.5% over the whole period.

It looks like the code that shows that number is wrong, 0.4% really means 0.04%. EVOGui has the same issue.

Probably because the same person wrote it in both places! I'll make sure to get that fixed.

Didn't even realise you made both...

[Hexicube]

Just realised why my mod actually works nicely with this one, there's typos in "lib/map.lua" on the two lines for rails. They should be "straight-rail" and "curved-rail", but use underscores instead of dashes.

If it's changed, could you either add direct support by detecting my mod or check that each entity is in fact flagged as player made before adding it to the list? You might also want to add entities by type, as opposed to name, and do a scan for entities of the type during the map initializer.

[aureon]

Any recommended tuning for brewing this with Marathon?
Defaults are going end up.. well... harshly.

[Afforess]

Any recommended tuning for brewing this with Marathon?
Defaults are going end up.. well... harshly.

It does support Marathon and RSO out of the box. Evolution rates rise a bit more slowly if either mod is in use.

Otherwise, just make sure you take out biter nests early.

Didn't even realise you made both...

No, but I've contributed a number of features to evoGUI.

Just realised why my mod actually works nicely with this one, there's typos in "lib/map.lua" on the two lines for rails. They should be "straight-rail" and "curved-rail", but use underscores instead of dashes.

If it's changed, could you either add direct support by detecting my mod or check that each entity is in fact flagged as player made before adding it to the list? You might also want to add entities by type, as opposed to name, and do a scan for entities of the type during the map initializer.

Ah. I caught some similar misspelled names, but not those two. I think the reason is that I started this mod back with Factorio 0.11 and 0.12 changed a bunch of names, and those were just missed. I am going to start checking that items are not neutral forces, so that should allow your mod to continue to work.