Neat - this does seem like it works a lot better now (at the least my units go brain-dead while mining a lot less often). Going to play with this some more, appreciate the updated files.

It sounds like (and I've observed this, too) when there are more than one Gold Dig AI actor mining in close proximity, they're all trying to path to the most easily-accessible gold, which is the exact same bit, due to them being close together. One actor mines that bit of gold out, and the other two begin scanning again, finding the bit that the active miner is just about to hit. This is why spacing them out over a few screens avoids that issue. Any time I attack, I establish separate mining pits apart from my Brain's foxhole.

Good catch Mirefrost, I will add a bit of randomness to the gold selection and see if that helps.

Direct mining is just as buggy, half the time they will try to go around to the surface to mine down, and then cancel. I would like to suggest that if a unit that is given a ‘go to’ and currently hold a mining gun It should move directly to the objective without avoiding obstacles.
also ive noticed it is impossible to order a unit to mine through cement, this may have something to do with the mineing defect.

A possible thought to help: Leave the Go-to AI as is, and make the diggers add a new pie menu option that makes them just move in the proper direction digging, totally ignoring obstacles. I'm not sure how viable that would be since I don't know what the limits of pie menu functionality are.

I've been using the HumanBehaviors.lua and HumanAI.lua files that were posted and they work very well. My miners are now mining like crazy which is excellent since before they did no mining whatsoever.

A side effect of this is that I now massively outmine the AI as the AI only tends to mine with their brainbot and never mines at all once they have a bunker constructed. This makes the AI easy to defeat once you survive their first couple waves of troops. This could potentially be an easy fix of just telling the AI to build a couple dedicated miners.

Another side effect is that my miners tend to continue mining even when the next day when I'm designing my bunker (not in a battle). I'm building my bunker and they are mining away all the gold from the map.

Excellent game though. I look forward to the many improvements that are sure to come.

When I first saw this I thought: the AI can't handle a bot with no weapon. I give the bots a sidearm and they mined fine.

Another similar issue: if the bots have a scanner, they use it like a digger and just sit there scanning as if they were digging. You have to make them drop it.

This is old. You can download the latest fix here


First, thanks for all reports and suggestions. Very helpful.

The gold dig behavior now circumvent the path finding and just go in a straight line for the gold. This will probably cause some other problem but since the path finding is done in the game engine this is the best I can do. The bug that cause the AI to mistake tools for diggers is also an issue with the game engine, so it is not fixed. This fix include patches to targeting and alarm events and affect all actor types, not just humanoids.

Again I might have broken something else in the process so any help you can provide with play-testing is much appreciated. Please consider reporting your experience in this thread if you test it.

Back up the old files and copy the all new files to Base.rte/Actors/AI/

Wow thanks! Much better mining AI, no more micro mange required.

Going to try this right away, thanks!

eagle

Gold dig now quite effective. I've noticed just a single flaw so far, sometimes (not always) when unit digs somewhere and then fall below that point it stucks holding his digger above his head digging the air and probably tries to dig that point which became unreachable. Everything get's back to normal if you select that unit, it just starts digging elsewhere.

I wonder, has there been any more work on this?

Are these experimental fixes part of the A.I mod thats doing the rounds? Will it conflict with that?

The guy who made the AI fix to make the AI actually shoot at range and to fire back when fired upon has declared he isn't working on his any more. Would it be possible to get the firing upgrades meshed in with the gold mining upgrades from here, since they are static now? It would be amazing if the AI could both mine to call down more units, and then actually be able to use those units.

Thanks for the feedback weegee. It looks like that particular problem is gone now, so I'm uploading it here in case there are any other problems. Remember to back up the old files before installing.