Stellaris Dev Diary #252 - Artificial and Automated Intelligence

[klopkr]

The most impactful setting is this one, the Designation

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Hey can we have a checkmark to turn off nanite buildings? I swear I always run a deficit because somehow somewhere deep in my giant empire there's a nanite hungry building. I'd love to be able to unselect it and make sure nanite are never used outside of the regions I want.

 

[Offe]

Thanks for


Thanks for the reply, I think I might try playing a Rogue Servitor once the patch is available as those have been the most annoying gestalts to manage.

Followup to your last point, I assume the automation will not redevelop the planets at all? Which is probably for the best as it would be pretty annoying for the automation to remove extra fortresses on a border mining planet for example, hehe.

no it will not replace or destroy anything

 

[grommile]

Perhaps they could start with hydrothermal vents? That's a high heat source available underwater.

Hydrothermal vents reach about 400°C; even a simple wood fire, using air as the oxygen source and with no special measures for ventilation, can burn hotter than that.

Refining metals by the carbothermic reaction (the lowest-tech way) generally requires temperatures of around 900°C, most conveniently achieved using forced ventilation and charcoal, rather than raw wood, as the fuel.

Melting iron requires temperatures upward of 1500°C; forced ventilation of the fire is mandatory.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

Hydrothermal vents reach about 400°C; even a simple wood fire, using air as the oxygen source and with no special measures for ventilation, can burn hotter than that.

Refining metals by the carbothermic reaction (the lowest-tech way) generally requires temperatures of around 900°C, most conveniently achieved using forced ventilation and charcoal, rather than raw wood, as the fuel.

Melting iron requires temperatures upward of 1500°C; forced ventilation of the fire is mandatory.

I do like to imagine how industrial activity would progress for aliens that live primarily underwater.

A Dolphin or Octopus society on Earth would have different challenges. The lack of manual dexterity (thumbs) in dolphins would delay tool use and for octopus societies their usually semelparous reproductive strategies would be limiting - death after reproduction means they lack the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and skills that parenting normally enables, no matter how intelligent they are individually it's harder to develop technology if you struggle to pass down what you learn to the next generation.

But in general I can imagine an underwater race first collecting pure oxygen bubbles from photosynthetic plants in a rather simple container (perhaps with an organic bladder/animal parts) even for a neolithic underwater society, and storing that under pressure. So they have a head-start there on quite a few industrial processes.

Spoiler: More thinking about the evolution of aquatic industry

And obviously almost any chemical could be harvested in significant quantities through organic processes and then reacted together when needed like concentrated stomach acids, organic peroxides like 1,2-Dioxetane made by fireflies or other luminous creatures, or metals like calcium found in bones, teeth and shells. Big underwater animals the size of a blue whale would produce significant amounts of stuff (70 tons of oil per blue whale for example would be great for building rockets if you farm the correct animal with the best biochemistry for the reactions you need to perform on an industrial scale).

Simple stone chambers would be easy to hollow-out from below to use for storage, drying, smoking and combusting organic products for a variety of different reasons:
1. A safe dry place to spawn that isn't vulnerable to birds for rearing creatures that lay eggs above the waterline.
2. Food security - initially using dry pockets to hide kills from predators and vermin, then drying, heating or smoking food to halt microbial activity and preserve it.
3. Used to preserve the honoured dead - like we embalm the dead the soft tissues of underwater creatures would be preserved by drying/smoking in special chambers
4. Store artwork and literature inked onto plant or animal hides that would otherwise be consumed by underwater microbial activity
5. Pressurised-Gas or Vacuum-filled chambers with a u-bend filled with water separating them for scientific pursuits
6. Toxic underwater mining operations with airlocks made of dry chambers to keep toxic waste in the water from spilling into and contaminating nearby bodies of water (with accompanying pumps and valves and safety equipment being developed).

Whatever the original purpose, storing dry organics in an oxygen rich environment would quickly lead to fire and an understanding of the chemistry and the potential there for technological progress, assuming there are no available geothermal opportunities available like vents and volcanoes.

Controlled fires in special chambers could then be used to produce ash and carbon dioxide that is then gathered and eventually piped-away to bubble up around plants for enhancing underwater farming or to acidify water to dissolve limestone or soften mineral shells of organic creatures or just to make some fizzy drinks.

Whatever the first use, once an underwater society has chambers containing pure or dried ingredients, different gasses like pure oxygen, pumps, pipes and bellows to transport those gasses the next steps are rather logical. Experiment with different ores and start smelting metals.... make spaceships.

Although perhaps they wouldn't even use metal to do most things, like humans experimented with aircraft carriers made from Pykrete (ice + 14% sawdust) I could imagine a chilly Pykrete-style spaceship with engines fueled by whale blubber and bladders of oxygen managing to get to orbit from low-g planets that don't need much delta-v.

Personally I think aliens on high-g planets would have the most trouble at achieving regular spaceflight, needing very expensive energy-dense fuels and technologically advanced propulsion technologies to even leave orbit (like the situation on Earth vs any of the moons in our solar system).

I don't think underwater life should be any more challenging for humans to imagine that it would be for a technologically advanced fish to imagine how a human could smelt metals when land-creatures die with a wet bulb temperature of more than 35°C, have to use an atmosphere with a mere 21% oxygen in the air to try to reach 1500 °C, and die when Carbon Monoxide levels go above 200ppm (2% CO by volume) which is obviously made worse by the incomplete combustion you often get using so little oxygen. I'd imagine a fish wondering how we don't cook or suffocate ourselves and how we manage to even gather enough oxygen to perform any useful chemical reactions without doing any of the preceding steps that they normally perform underwater.

It's all fun to imagine.

 

[Verx90]

I do like to imagine how industrial activity would progress for aliens that live primarily underwater.

A Dolphin or Octopus society on Earth would have different challenges. The lack of manual dexterity (thumbs) in dolphins would delay tool use and for octopus societies their usually semelparous reproductive strategies would be limiting - death after reproduction means they lack the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and skills that parenting normally enables, no matter how intelligent they are individually it's harder to develop technology if you struggle to pass down what you learn to the next generation.

But in general I can imagine an underwater race first collecting pure oxygen bubbles from photosynthetic plants in a rather simple container (perhaps with an organic bladder/animal parts) even for a neolithic underwater society, and storing that under pressure. So they have a head-start there on quite a few industrial processes.

Spoiler: More thinking about the evolution of aquatic industry

And obviously almost any chemical could be harvested in significant quantities through organic processes and then reacted together when needed like concentrated stomach acids, organic peroxides like 1,2-Dioxetane made by fireflies or other luminous creatures, or metals like calcium found in bones, teeth and shells. Big underwater animals the size of a blue whale would produce significant amounts of stuff (70 tons of oil per blue whale for example would be great for building rockets if you farm the correct animal with the best biochemistry for the reactions you need to perform on an industrial scale).

Simple stone chambers would be easy to hollow-out from below to use for storage, drying, smoking and combusting organic products for a variety of different reasons:
1. A safe dry place to spawn that isn't vulnerable to birds for rearing creatures that lay eggs above the waterline.
2. Food security - initially using dry pockets to hide kills from predators and vermin, then drying, heating or smoking food to halt microbial activity and preserve it.
3. Used to preserve the honoured dead - like we embalm the dead the soft tissues of underwater creatures would be preserved by drying/smoking in special chambers
4. Store artwork and literature inked onto plant or animal hides that would otherwise be consumed by underwater microbial activity
5. Pressurised-Gas or Vacuum-filled chambers with a u-bend filled with water separating them for scientific pursuits
6. Toxic underwater mining operations with airlocks made of dry chambers to keep toxic waste in the water from spilling into and contaminating nearby bodies of water (with accompanying pumps and valves and safety equipment being developed).

Whatever the original purpose, storing dry organics in an oxygen rich environment would quickly lead to fire and an understanding of the chemistry and the potential there for technological progress, assuming there are no available geothermal opportunities available like vents and volcanoes.

Controlled fires in special chambers could then be used to produce ash and carbon dioxide that is then gathered and eventually piped-away to bubble up around plants for enhancing underwater farming or to acidify water to dissolve limestone or soften mineral shells of organic creatures or just to make some fizzy drinks.

Whatever the first use, once an underwater society has chambers containing pure or dried ingredients, different gasses like pure oxygen, pumps, pipes and bellows to transport those gasses the next steps are rather logical. Experiment with different ores and start smelting metals.... make spaceships.

Although perhaps they wouldn't even use metal to do most things, like humans experimented with aircraft carriers made from Pykrete (ice + 14% sawdust) I could imagine a chilly Pykrete-style spaceship with engines fueled by whale blubber and bladders of oxygen managing to get to orbit from low-g planets that don't need much delta-v.

Personally I think aliens on high-g planets would have the most trouble at achieving regular spaceflight, needing very expensive energy-dense fuels and technologically advanced propulsion technologies to even leave orbit (like the situation on Earth vs any of the moons in our solar system).

I don't think underwater life should be any more challenging for humans to imagine that it would be for a technologically advanced fish to imagine how a human could smelt metals when land-creatures die with a wet bulb temperature of more than 35°C, have to use an atmosphere with a mere 21% oxygen in the air to try to reach 1500 °C, and die when Carbon Monoxide levels go above 200ppm (2% CO by volume) which is obviously made worse by the incomplete combustion you often get using so little oxygen. I'd imagine a fish wondering how we don't cook or suffocate ourselves and how we manage to even gather enough oxygen to perform any useful chemical reactions without doing any of the preceding steps that they normally perform underwater.

It's all fun to imagine.

i mean, i know that i've only the examples of earth , but thinking is not realy that fast , and understanding the world is even a slower process . they would have no knowledge of chemical reaction, without trial and errors, and they would have no reason to actualy try , making even the most usefull creature around them completly useless till advanced civilization ; the only thing that matter is surviving and have food then evrything else come...

we started farming way before we started keeping cattle . so i guess the first thing an ocean race would be to start farming but they could start by having cattle as in the ocean there are way more "pacific" races than complex plants ... from there they can build a society , observing vulcano would inspire them to look for fire , but using "closed caves" would kill the flame quite fast and with no understand of oxygen they would require hundred of hundred of years to come up with a solution for that, so they would more likely simply use costal lands , and from there is the same evolution the human race followed, they would simply live mainly in the ocean .

another aspect of intellect , is that it require the race to be quite useless with natural advantage , the more natural advantage they have , the harder is to evolve intelligence ..

 

[WeeBigTerd101]

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​

Hello everyone, it is me Offe, one of the Humans working on Stellaris. Today I will bring you an update from the Custodian AI initiative. Before we dive into today’s dev diary let’s do a quick recap of the AI work that went into the 3.3 patch.


If you have been following the AI dev diaries you probably know that our main objectives for the 3.3 Libra patch was to improve the economy management of the AI, especially with a mid and late game perspective in mInd. The reason for this was to establish the AI empires as relevant actors beyond the early game and give their interactions with the player more impact.

Following some of the discussions here on our own forums and also on Reddit, my favorite topic has been seeing people react to AI empires suddenly being much stronger in the Galactic Community where they are passing resolutions against the players' will.

While the AI economy management still has areas which can be improved, we felt satisfied with the changes made in 3.3 to the point where we wanted to move our focus to other areas of the AI.

Goals for 3.4​

As the AI economy improved other areas of the AI started to become more obvious targets for improvement, namely the AI military fleet management and their diplomacy interactions with the player.

Military AI behavior changes​

First I would like to say that the changes coming to military fleet behavior in 3.4 are mostly bug fixes rAther than improvements on their decision making, so while there should be a very noticeable difference, the work made so far on the fleet behavior will not be as encompassing as the work made for the economy.

Let’s start with the Elephant in the room: AI splitting their fleets into tiny pieces.

View attachment 832396


While there were issues where AI would split their fleets too much, fundamentally this behavior of AI splitting fleets was by design. The AI would allocate just enough fleet power (with a +25% margin) to their objective in order to carry out as many objectives as possible. The main issue came from the amount of low fleet power targets such as unupgraded starbases which caused the AI to frequently split their fleets into 1000~ fleet power pieces.

In theory this approach is quite good, however, the main two main issues with this approach are that the player can easily just take one of their bigger fleets to go around and defeat the AI’s smaller fleets one by one which makes the AI somewhat incompetent, as well as that this playstyle from the AI can be quite frustrating to play against.

In 3.4 the AI will aim to have full fleets as their smallest unit to carry out military objectives, AI will actively try and merge all possible fleets during peacetime and the AI will during a war try and merge two nearby fleets when possible.

Cycling Fleet Orders

After having made the AI fill up their fleets, the next issue to tackle was AI fleet order cycling where the fleets get stuck alternating between two orders indefinitely. One coMmon cause for this was when the AI assigned several fleets to carry out an objective together, the fleets would try and regroup with each other by moving to the system of the other fleets causing them to switch places over and over.

View attachment 832358

Take Point

In 3.3 we made the AI obey the Take Point behavior again, but it didn’t work quite as well as we wanted. For example allied AI fleets would sometimes follow the players fleets when they shouldn’t. There were also issues where the AI would suddenly change their mind and stop following the player, and they would also not always follow the player with all their fleets.

AI Allied Wars

During a war with several involved AI Empires on the same side, one of the AIs will be considered leading the war (may be different from diplomatic war leader) and the other AIs will put their fleets to follow the “AI warleader”. This suffered from a similar issue as previously mentioned where the AI fleets which were supposed to follow would change their mind too often and never reach their intended target.

AI Outside Diplomatic War

In 3.4 we are adding an AI war state which becomes activated when the AI fights a mid or late game crisis, this state of war will continue until the crisis has been defeated. This means that AI will now enable their normal war beHavior against targets like the Great Khan even though they do not have a diplomatic war if they or any of their allies get attacked.

This has many side effects, for example:
- AI empires should now obey the players Take Point if the player is fighting a crisis
- Allied AI empires should now help each other fight crises when one of them are attacked
- AI empires will now seek out and destroy systems controlled by crisis empires et cetera.

We also addressed the issue where an AI empire would fight a neutral target such as a leviathan during an ongoing war.

AI War Preparation​

In 3.4 we are adding a state of war preparation for the AI which they will enter when they would have immediately declared war in 3.3. During this phase the AI will gather their available fleets and move them towards the border of their target.

If you have enough military intel you will be notified via an alert that hell is about to break loose and depending on how much intel you have you will get a more accurate estimation on when the AI will strike.

View attachment 832398


AI Diplomacy

Now that we have covered military changes coming in 3.4 lets go over the diplomacy changes

Federation AI changes

One of the biggest complaints regarding being in a Federation with the AI has been the unrelenting bombardment of proposals of changing the same federation law over and over again. Often resUlting in AI empires stacking the negative opinion modifier on themselves and eventually leaving the federation altogether.

In 3.4 we are introducing a 10 year AI vote cooldown for each law category. So let’s randomly select a federation law to use as an example: Free Migration. When an AI proposes to change the law of Free Migration then it will add a 10 year AI only cooldown which is shared between all AI federation members. This means that each time Free Migration gets voted down it will now take at least 10 years before it is proposed again.

Coincidentally this also fixes an exploit that the player could use against AI federations where the player would repeatedly ask to initiate a vote to invite the player into the AI federation. This allowed the player to repeatedly stack the negative opinion modifiers between the AI federation members causing their federation to break apart.

Envoys

Another common complaint regarding AI federations is how the AI would often not put any envoys into the federation. This was a symptom of a bigger problem which was the overall AI envoy usage.

The AI empires would frequently reassign their envoys to the same task, knocking out the envoy who was already assigned to it and starting the reassign cooldown. As a result the AI would often have all but one of their envoys on cooldown and not assigned to any task.

In 3.4 the AIs should be able to handle their envoys in a much more appropriate manner, both in terms of Federation and Galactic Community assignment as well as other diplomatic actions and espionage operations.

Galactic Community Changes​

While AI voting for seemingly completely irrelevant resolutions in the Galactic Community gave it a sense of uncomfortable realism there were a few issues that stood out to us:

AI would sometimes propose resolutions that were completely against their core beliefs, for example, a slaver empire would sometimes propose to ban organic slave trading. This was due to a missing willingness check when AI would propose resolutions, so they AI would propose the resolution they liked the most but wouldn’t check if they liked it enough to be worth proposing in the first place.

The AI was explicitly forbidden to withdraw their proposed resolution, while most of the time this does not make sense, there are situations where this may be the best course of action. For example, the AI may propose to reduce the council size but by the time the resolution is about to enter the floor their diplomatic weight has been reduced to the point where they would propose themselves out of the council.

Similarly the AI was also forbidden from opposing their own resolution, but the above situation could happen in a similar way where, for example, the player would enact the Emergency Measure to move the resolution to the floor before the AI has time to withdraw their resolution. In that situation it would make sense for the AI to oppose their own proposed resolution.

Additionally if you have enough intel on the AI you will now be able to see why they are voting the way they do in the Galactic Community. While this tooltip was already quite big, I knew I could make it even bigger.


View attachment 832399

Planet and Sector Automation​

While planet and sector automation isn’t necessarily AI, we have seen a lot of requests for previous AI iMprovements to also be available for the player. And even though the planet/sector automation uses a different system than the AI’s economy system we still felt that improving this would hopefully add a lot of quality of life value to our players.

The design philosophy for the new automation system is that “most players will be able to use some parts of it”. So the intention is not that all players will always use this and that it will be able to satisfy all players, rather that hopefully everyone will find something that they feel is worth using.


View attachment 832400

So how does it work? In 3.4 the planet automation will have an additional settings UI where players can toggle components on/off for each planet individually as well as setting default values for newly colonized planets.

The most impactful setting is this one, the Designation

View attachment 832401

This will cause the planet to build new jobs in accordance with the designation when there are no free jobs available. This setting is now much more restrictive in regards to what is considered to be in accordance with the designation, for example, enabling this for a mining designation will only construct the mining districts and the mineral purification plant and nothing else.

The other settings are:

• Amenities: Build new amenities buildings and also micromanage the priority of amenity producing jobs to minimize unnecessary amenity jobs by using the same system as the AI has been using since 3.3.
• Rare resources: Build new rare resource producing buildings to target a +3 monthly income of all rare resources. Additionally this will now take into consideration empire wide buildings in the building queue and only build one building at a time.
• Pop assembly: Build spawning pools, cloning vats, robot assembly et cetera.
• Housing: Construct additional housing, either districts or building when needed.
• Building slots: Automatically build a new housing district for the +1 building slot whenever there are no free building slots, especially useful to enable on automated planets like Science designation since they require many building slots.
• Crime: Build new crime prevention buildings when crime reaches dangerous levels.
• Clear blockers: Automatically clear blockers when it is preventing construction of new districts.
• Posthumous Employment: Builds the Posthumous Employment Center on planets with raw resource focus.
• Psi Corps: Build the Psi Corps building on all planets when possible.

The Designation automation setting is extra careful to not overbuild buildings whereas the other settings will build buildings even when there is no need for additional jobs.

All the automations except the Amenity automation (uses AI behavior in code) are fully scriptable for anyone interested in making their own automation mod, the files are found in:

game\common\colony_automation
game\common\colony_automation_exceptions

Sector Automation​

Sector automation is now a system built on top of the planet automation. Setting the sector focus will now change which designAtions planets will select when they are using the “automatic designation selection” in order to make them respect the sector automation.


View attachment 832402
Additionally there is now a Unity focus available for sector automation since Unity is now more important after the 3.3 patch, together with new Unity automation for planets to go along with it.


View attachment 832403


The requirement to have an upgraded capital building in order to construct Research labs and rare resource producing buildings has now been removed in order to make the planet automatioNs function properly for newly founded colonies with these designations.

We have also added several missing designations to different planet types in order to allow for more automation, for example, Ring World can now use factory/forge world designation and Hive Worlds can now use the fortress designation.

And that’s it for today’s dev diary. As always if you have any questions feel free to post them below and I will do my best to answer them all.

Lastly, I am sad to say that my designated time on the Custodian team has already been over for a while now, which means that this will be the last AI dev diary from me. But the AI initiative lives on and next time there is an AI update you may get the chance to meet a new Human. Again I want to say a special thank you to all the community members who have engaged in meaningful discussions regarding the AI improvements in the past months and tirelessly reporting the AI issues on the bug forum.

Thank you!

PS. Do not try to find me, I am safe, do not go here ptfwm://bdkqnf.hn/3XohUOb

Subterranean​

Hi! Eladrin tagging back in for a bit.

View attachment 832384​

This week Nivarias revealed the Subterranean origin. Tunneling underground is a bit more expensive than building on the surface, but has its advantages, especially when a hostile force attempts to bombard your cities.

View attachment 833173
Lithoids are unaffected by the growth speed penalty.​

The primary species of a Subterranean empire gains the Cave Dweller trait, granting additional mineral production at the cost of pop growth and empire size from pops, as well as a new Minimum Habitability trait. Cave-Dwelling pops are well sheltered from the environment on the surface, and treat any habitable planets below 50% habitability as if they were 50%.

View attachment 832386
I am a dwarf and I’m digging a hole.​

Living underground, Subterranean empires have a unique city set that replaces the normal view on planets.

View attachment 832389
Are you the king of the mountain?​

One of the achievements revealed last week, named Underlord, has to do with answering the question “Is it possible to dig too deep?”

Next Week​

Well look at the time, we’re coming right up to the release of Overlord, aren’t we?

The Stellaris 3.4 “Cepheus” patch notes will be coming next week, alongside details of the Progenitor Hive origin. After the patch notes, join us on the Official Stellaris Discord for a Dev Q&A, starting Thursday at 1700 CEST!

See you there!

Lithoid and masterful crafters will synergise so so well with cave dweller

 

[aveRAGEboii]

I actually like these changes to AI. It enhances the gameplay the most in my opinion.
Also, AI has basically an endless space for the improvements. I'm interested, if you get at some point in the future to separate AI capabilities for the various difficulties, so it is not just over-buffing their economy/military power.

 

[rubert]

I actually like these changes to AI. It enhances the gameplay the most in my opinion.
Also, AI has basically an endless space for the improvements. I'm interested, if you get at some point in the future to separate AI capabilities for the various difficulties, so it is not just over-buffing their economy/military power.

While actually improving AI for the harder difficulties would be great, I think the priority after making economic, military and diplomatic AIs semi-competent would be to add more visible behavioural differrences to different AI personalities, ethics and other considerations. Currently every AI empire behaves mostly the same during war or peace.

I posted some thoughts on that last year during the earlier AI dev diary.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

i mean, i know that i've only the examples of earth , but thinking is not realy that fast , and understanding the world is even a slower process . they would have no knowledge of chemical reaction, without trial and errors, and they would have no reason to actualy try , making even the most usefull creature around them completly useless till advanced civilization ; the only thing that matter is surviving and have food then evrything else come...

we started farming way before we started keeping cattle . so i guess the first thing an ocean race would be to start farming but they could start by having cattle as in the ocean there are way more "pacific" races than complex plants ... from there they can build a society , observing vulcano would inspire them to look for fire , but using "closed caves" would kill the flame quite fast and with no understand of oxygen they would require hundred of hundred of years to come up with a solution for that, so they would more likely simply use costal lands , and from there is the same evolution the human race followed, they would simply live mainly in the ocean .

another aspect of intellect , is that it require the race to be quite useless with natural advantage , the more natural advantage they have , the harder is to evolve intelligence ..

I know this thread is going really off-topic so I'll try to keep it short and hopefully informative... but honestly I'm not quite sure what you're saying. I agree that scientific intelligence is a rare trait on earth, while many animals show more social intelligence, but nothing you said relates to water in any way.

Living underwater has different challenges to land. Oxygen is life-or-death underwater in a way that it rarely is on land. Mostly because you would experience on a regular basis the complete lack of oxygen in the water called "dead-zones" often caused by things like algal blooms: Algae grow in huge amounts then die in huge amounts, as they die they rot, and as they rot the oxygen is used-up leaving the water toxic to fish, the fish suffocate and die. Similar low-oxygen environments occur for other reasons like the water gets too warm causing less dissolved oxygen or the water is too still and it doesn't get aerated by the wind.

In farming terms... it's quite easy to dig up some mud and silt underwater and then carry it to the surface to spread out minerals that are low in the water (iron, nitrogen, phosphorus etc.) and if a fish did this it could quickly grow a large amount of microscopic algae and cause an artificial bloom. That would be good (algae is food for larger creatures) but the smart fish doing this would learn very quickly that adding too much nutrients causes a bigger bloom and that the bloom can kill all the fish they are trying to farm, and kill themselves too!

On land we only discovered and isolated oxygen extremely recently (1600-1800AD) which is a bit ridiculously slow considering there is evidence for controlled fires 1 million years ago (wood ash) and flint from 300k years ago. It took land animals a very long time from starting our first fire to understanding why stuff burns. But only a very short time to go from that first discovery to building space rockets. It took a lot for us to understand chemistry.

I think it would be much easier to understand oxygen and combustion when you have oxygen naturally occurring in bubbles on plants and understanding the chemistry of your farming methods is literally a life-or-death situation. Why is the river and the lake lethal today when it was nice and green yesterday? How can we increase the ocean yield without accidentally creating a dead-zone and killing ourselves? Maybe we move gasses around to fix it, or to stop it from happening in the first place?

These would all be very simple starting questions for a technologically-minded fish that would serve as a stepping-stone to spaceflight.

 

[Verx90]

On land we only discovered and isolated oxygen extremely recently (1600-1800AD) which is a bit ridiculously slow considering there is evidence for controlled fires 1 million years ago (wood ash) and flint from 300k years ago. It took land animals a very long time from starting our first fire to understanding why stuff burns

I think it would be much easier to understand oxygen and combustion when you have oxygen naturally occurring in bubbles on plants and understanding the chemistry of your farming methods is literally a life-or-death situation.

we had fire , evrywhere around us it happened . we could see what burned and what didn't .

an ocean life would have bubble and understanding that the air theyr breath , but they would have no fire . what they would have is heat from volcanos and thats it.

i think you give life too much " scientific method" when we started using it in the last 0.001% of our existance .



i'm not saying that an ocean intelligent space fearing life is impossible. i'm saying that if it existed , it would be the most alien techonology evolution we could think of . because sure as hell, they didn't progress with the use of fire as we did.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

we had fire , evrywhere around us it happened . we could see what burned and what didn't .

an ocean life would have bubble and understanding that the air theyr breath , but they would have no fire . what they would have is heat from volcanos and thats it.

i think you give life too much " scientific method" when we started using it in the last 0.001% of our existance .



i'm not saying that an ocean intelligent space fearing life is impossible. i'm saying that if it existed , it would be the most alien techonology evolution we could think of . because sure as hell, they didn't progress with the use of fire as we did.

Fire is just one manifestation of an exothermic reaction that we find useful for crafting metal tools. It uses oxygen. But I'm specifically saying that ocean life would need to have a complete understanding of that specific chemical reaction even if there aren't any open flames underwater. Without a solid understanding of the chemistry those fish would quickly kill themselves. The same basic reaction that occurs in every cell in your body C6H12O6 + 6O2 → 6CO2 + 6H2O is a life-or-death matter for fish because even basic farming at sea would be equivalent to weapons of mass destruction on earth today.

From experiments in 2012, just 100 tons of iron (less than a single blue-whale full at 140 tons) for example spread on the ocean surface results in a 10,000 square mile algal bloom (1/10 the size of the UK). Obviously they'd use other missing nutrients that they find easier to collect for early farming like river silt but the concept is the same. Humans are studying ocean seeding currently because when those ocean creatures die-off, if they are dense enough (usually because they have tiny shells) then they drop down into the depths of the ocean taking with them any carbon in their bodies and locking it away as sediments deep on the ocean floor as one rather extreme way of tackling climate change.

But for fish, their farming methods would have to be tightly controlled and regulated to stop entire regions being wiped-out from overenthusiastic farmers trying to boost krill numbers to feed whales to collect their oil and meat just as we used whales for meat and oil. I think after the first use of nutrient seeding as a weapon to wipe-out entire regions it would be vitally important to understand the chemistry around oxygen, especially creating and storing it for emergencies like we store food or water, which is easy for a fish as it literally bubbles up from plants or can be separated from water with electricity (called Electrolysis, and there are even electric fish like Electric Eels that could do this without any generators or fancy technology, just some bits of metal and the electricity they use every day to stun fish).

I can imagine that life underwater could easily reach human level technology in a multitude of interesting and distinct ways. Since chemistry isn't different where you do it, just the pressures and temperatures you do it at, then I'm sure most things would actually be very familiar to us rather than particularly alien or unimaginable. Though it's obviously speculation without any evidence as we only have a sample size of 1, just our weirdly wonderful Earth.

But the short of it is, I don't think ocean life evolving spaceflight is particularly implausible as for it to be implausible there would be no plausible path for things to develop and I can imagine many. I also don't think any of those paths being less likely actually matters as there are a lot of stars in the sky, even a 0.0001% chance over the stars in the milky way (100+ billion) would be 10,000 species developing. And that's just in one galaxy, there's another 100+ billion of those. So even if something is possible but the odds of something are ridiculously unlikely, even being a billion times less likely it would still happen a huge number of times in the universe.

It's known as the Drake Equation, an inspirational bit of maths to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilizations in the milky way. Even being very conservative and skeptical assuming all life needs Earthlike conditions you end up with very big numbers of possible alien civilizations that could occur. And honestly I think people are too dismissive of environments extremely dissimilar to Earth when I can imagine many of those environments being more conducive to space-age technology than Earth happens to be.

 

[HawkSeraph]

I just wanted to note that I really appreciate the commitment to AI improvements. It's in my opinion the weakest part of Paradox games, so it's great to see some work put into them.

 

[A2ch0n]

I just wanted to note that I really appreciate the commitment to AI improvements. It's in my opinion the weakest part of Paradox games, so it's great to see some work put into them.

I think the only AI improvement i would like to see is the ability fo high level difficulty AI empires to compete without the heavy boost in resources. Don't know it feels often weird to have a AI in 2200 that have more than double fleet even if i put everything into it to defend myself.

So maybe a question to Master @Offe: How is your opinion about reducing AI bonus resources for high difficulties? Is there even an alternative for this?

 

[rubert]

Better to keep bonuses as it is now as players will get better and the player can always choose lower difficulty level. Maybe the bonuses could be tweaked in the future once there is more data on what the improved AI strugglee. Before the AIs had trouble with strategic resources so if that's still the case the bonuses could increase a bit and reduce parts where AI isn't having trouble.

 

[Douglas2341]

Glad to hear you are working on a mod for it!

It is quite limited yes, sadly. One of the reasons for the more restrictive "less is more"-type approach for the new automation. The only automation that sort of both needs buildings and districts is the forge style designation which has 2 buildings, in this case the planet will make a few industrial districts, then the forge building, some more districts and then the ministry of production later on.

Some of the problems I described are reasonably easy to work around. Others were rather more difficult, or even impossible. Some of your comments here sound like the worst of those might have been changed in 3.4, but aren't fully clear yet. Can you please confirm the following:

Is automation now strictly limited to building only the things listed in applicable automation scripts? In particular, if the only applicable automation scripts for a planet list no district types at all, will that force automation to never build districts on that planet? When I tried this in 3.1, the planet started building a generator district.

If a designation's script lists no district types, will automation ignore the districts to buildings ratio, and build the script's listed buildings no matter what the resulting ratio is? For example, if a Tech-World script lists no district types and only research labs, will automation completely fill up the planet's building slots with research labs while leaving all district slots empty?

Is the should_planetary_automate trigger defined in game_rules/00_rules.txt now the only condition, aside from player controlled configuration in game, for whether automation should try to build something? To be clear, suppose that:

• Automation is enabled for a planet.
• Designation based automation is enabled.
• The automation stockpile holds more than sufficient resources.
• should_planetary_automate = yes returns true.
• The designation's automation script has its available trigger evaluate to true.
• A building listed in the designation's automation script has its available trigger evaluate to true.
• The building's requirements and prerequisites are met.
• All districts and all other buildings are not listed in any applicable automation script.

When all of those are true, does that guarantee that automation will build that building?

For a practical use case, suppose I add a decision that flags a planet as being planned for development into an ecumenopolis, and I change should_planetary_automate so that, when that flag is set, it ignores all other factors and always returns true. I also mod the designation automation scripts for it to build industrial districts, alloy foundries, ministry of production, and nothing else. Will this force automation to keep building industrial districts until the planet is completely full, no matter how many unworked jobs the planet ends up with?

For another, suppose I mod should_planetary_automate to check energy income, and when energy income is negative, only allow automation on planets designated as Generator Worlds. Would this allow automation to attempt to fix an energy deficit?

In 3.2, there is hard coded logic that prevents automation when too many jobs are unfilled, or when energy income is negative, and in some other circumstances I couldn't figure out the details of, no matter what should_planetary_automate is modded to check. I haven't tried to test that in 3.3, but I haven't read anything about it being changed. To summarize all my should_planetary_automate questions: is that hard coded logic all removed in 3.4?

 

[PedroLuiz]

now that you mention it, i should definitelly change the settings next time I play

i did, and damm the game was way harder I lost to Unbidden 1.5x by 2350

 

[PedroLuiz]

Yep, humans are well known for coding messages saying they're human into things

01011001 01100101 01110011 00101100 00100000 01100110 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 01110111 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 00101100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 01101110 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100101

 

[UltimateTobi]

let's see again then.

Hmm this question is very good, honestly I am not entirely sure. Would have to go investigate further, the mechanics weren't made with a federation/alliance perspective in mind.

It would be slightly problematic for them to gather all their fleets and prepare for the war, only for it to be voted down by the other federation members. Or in the other case where they prepare and it gets voted through, that proposing AI would have been the only one preparing for the war (which is still better than none of them of course).

Having some form of federation count down from when a war is voted on and to when it would begin could be cool, but it would be pretty far outside of "normal" AI work

Thank you very much for replying.
I hope something like your suggestion could be implemented (successfully voting on a war initiating a countdown in which AIs enter preparation mode).

 

[PedroLuiz]

let's see again then.

Hmm this question is very good, honestly I am not entirely sure. Would have to go investigate further, the mechanics weren't made with a federation/alliance perspective in mind.

It would be slightly problematic for them to gather all their fleets and prepare for the war, only for it to be voted down by the other federation members. Or in the other case where they prepare and it gets voted through, that proposing AI would have been the only one preparing for the war (which is still better than none of them of course).

Having some form of federation count down from when a war is voted on and to when it would begin could be cool, but it would be pretty far outside of "normal" AI work

perhaps the federation could have the vote some months before the actual declaration of war?

 

[Calvax]

perhaps the federation could have the vote some months before the actual declaration of war?

Perhaps an option in the vote. No, Yes, Yes in 6 months.