Instead of giving rocket launchers to your units in tunnels, give flak cannons. They don't blow your face up even if you are against the wall (yes, they do, but if you get like, 5 cm away from the wall and shoot it won't hurt you). And you always put them on top of the stairs (or the beginning of them dunno, lol), facing a wall where the enemies come down from. When one or four-hundred of them come you just tap the mouse and the thing that might kill yourself would be the enemies' bodies.

Im talking about when the ai is in control of my guy, if its me then I can fire a rocket launcher in a tunnel fairly safely, just because, as a human, I can figure out about how far down the tunnel to shoot and be safe. Sometimes though, you need a rocket launcher. Lets say you are fighting the unitech faction and they are sending in their mechs. Those are impervious to bullets and fragmentation blasts, nothing but a direct HE to the face will hurt them. In this case, I need my soldier, who I placed in a tunnel, with a rocket launcher, to use his rocket launcher on the opponent, because nothing else he has will even touch the mech. Although in this case, the soldier would probably only have a rocket launcher with no backup to swap to, since I don't expect him to live past his first mech either way.

That's just the way you're using explosive weapons though - for me, when I'm moving across the surface with a team of four and an enemy jumpjets into us, I don't want my missile guy to blow himself/everyone around him up when we're no doubt about to gun the guy down anyway. Even in tunnels I'd rather be in charge of the self blowing up if it comes to it, if there's a mech about to drop down in front of me I'm sure I can find time to handle it myself.

Hay, would it be feasible to incorporate your lovely changes with those of [this engineer's] to further the cause of having an all-around Smarter AI? The twitter feed indicates such gold diggin' ai upgrades are already in motion, but ive no idea what kind of time frame we can expect. I also dont know how difficult such a merger would be. I dont even know if just having both files coexist (one renamed) would magically merge the changes in the way that having two faction mods allows both to exist. The ways of your deeply mysterious lua voodoos are not for hill folk such as myself to guess about. All I do know is that ive used yours and his separately and they were both too beneficial to choose between. Sidenote: Ive not encountered the situations others have reported (failure to murder doors, unit slumber parties, nor those sparking the intense Cerevox/Beagle ethics debate on possible self-destruction policies, though I will note that clones have feelings too, you monster).

Ethics? It is more of an efficiency question. I simply believe that if a troop with a rocket launcher is engaged by an enemy so close that firing the launcher would kill the troop, then any action would result in the troops death including swapping to an alternate weapon, so the course of action with the highest value to me would be for the troop to fire the rocket launcher. The moment the enemy closed to that range the troop was written off, it just has not yet been determined if he will take an enemy with him or not.

Also, when commanding flesh soldiers I never let them get into that situation, I only send troops into tiny little narrow tunnels with explosive weapons when they are either 100% mech/ai or when they are tough enough to survive the blast.

Yes indeed sir. Your argument has been phrased pretty clearly and even Mr. Beagle hadnt argued that the math was wrong. His latest point seems simply to have been the judgement that he would rather lose a unit he wasnt paying enough attention to than risk any collateral damage in other equally realistic scenarios in which that AI disposition might kick in. Both points make sense to me.
It will be interesting to see where you go from there, but in any event Im still going to protest your cruelty with my fellow space-hippies on Midas. What right do you have to tell an AI that he doesnt deserve a feelings-simulator chip. I, for one, am nothing but courteous even to my sentient Techion-brand laser toaster.

My AV is set to flag emotion.exe and any of its variants and delete without prompt. After all, I wouldn't want my dummy soldiers to panic when they have to march over a field of their dead predecessors as they assault a fortified position. Although I will admit, I do treat culled clones in a similar manner by stuffing 10+ of them with blunderpops into a dropship as a slightly aimed bomb, although they can hardly be called a real person, even if they are made of flesh.

The best possible option would be to either have the troop consider what else might be in the blast radius of his target to avoid friendly fire, or possibly to have a toggle in the pie menu where you can switch them between cautions mode and aggressive mode, although I suspect this might be beyond our reach since we are just trying to get them to shoot back when shot upon and to mine gold instead of trying to pick their nose with their digger.

Really, either option is better than the current vanilla state. I will take snipers and assault troops who actually engage targets without needing to tap them with the rifle barrels over a slightly cowardly rocketer any day.

Testing out the mod now hope it works well!

combat AI isnt what bothers me its the super stupid mining AI that drives me nuts!
can u pretty please fix the mining AI!!

There is a mining AI fix linked to higher up in this thread. Sadly, it still isn't perfect, and the range AI fix and the mining AI fix can not be installed at the same time. Hopefully they will merge the two soon.

Well, just tested it and you can notice the change. The AI isn't godlike, but it seems to be better.

Why don't you contact Abdul and work with him in the AI?

Yea the AI works a lot better now and they aren't brain dead. Though it is annoy how easy it is to sneak up on them. I don't know if increasing their awareness is possible.

They're just plaintext files - can't we just diff them and merge whatever's different between the two? Shouldn't be hard.

I can't seem to be able to install it. Does it work on the mac version of the game?

If it does, here are the two messages displayed when replacing the old base.rte file with the new one.

1) RTE Aborted! (x_x) Failed to load palette from bitmap with following path : Base.rte/palette.bmp. The last frame has been dumped to 'abortscreen.bmp'
2) RTE Aborted! (x_x) Failed to load datafile object with following path and name: Base.rte/Effects/Glows/YellowTiny. The last frame has been dumped to 'abortscreen.bmp'

Can anybody help me out on this?

Why yes, that is possible. Ive opened them with notepad++ and run the text through diffchecker.com and, indeed, I could take all the green parts and paste them over the red bits but heres the trouble: to we, the uninitiated, little of it can be understood. Take for example these two different blocks:


There are many differences such as these. I dont know what they do. I dont know how the format is suppose to flow, I dont know which clauses wouldnt have been closed up properly, I dont know how they interact with the preceding elements that may depend on them.. I dont know if either segment is vital to either purpose. I also dont know which bits were vanilla and juggling further comparisons to the vanilla file while keeping everything lined up strikes me as tricky. For those as unenlightened as we humble sheep, It isnt as intuitive as adding the line:

After a couple hours spent analyzing these blocks to my meager best, perhaps my mutated Frankenstein file might even manage to not crash the game, but all in all I figure it would be best left in the hands of someone who at least knows what a GapList is and what happens when you JumpWpt in pairs. (what is a Wpt? why are we jumping over it? is it spikey??)



-- As to Ninthbox, im afraid all I can say is that the files referenced in that error dont sound like they shouldve been altered by this mod. This mod only contains one altered HumanBehaviors.lua file burried in a series of folders that were intended to merge along a file path beginning with the folder named base.rte. All I can suggest is perhaps reverting your change (which would mean re-installing if you didnt make a backup) and then digging through those file paths in both the downloaded mod's base.rte file and the install directory's base.rte to arrive at the intended destination of HumanBehaviors.lua, then replace the install directory's version with the mod version directly.
This would reduce the chance that it was placed in the wrong spot or the chance that something went wrong in the merger. This would be completely useless if that wasnt the problem (perhaps some crucial referencing difference between the two platforms, or interference from another mod), and its worth noting that any folders in the install directory will apparently be loaded; You cannot simply rename a folder to make it disappear from the game's perception. I tried to do that when backing something up before and the game got very upset with me. <3