Frustrating AI/behaviour and micro management

[Limdood]

so many of these suggestions would cause more problems than they'd "fix"

check for pathing/firefighting/medical more often?  way slower speeds

percentile based system where high priority tasks are just USUALLY done?  and people would be complaining about pawns not doing tasks they're assigned.

Haul stuff back to base automatically WHILE going about another task or returning to go to sleep? what if your stockpile is far from your sleeping spots?  It has nothing to do with situational awareness, just priorities.  THIS is their job, they're going to do THIS.  THAT never even comes up because its not what their job is.  If during their execution of THIS task, their work schedule changes, and the game checks job priorities, they will switch to THAT immediately.  If you don't like that, and think they should randomly NOT do their assigned tasks, or randomly prioritize other tasks first that they're not supposed to, can you even imagine the depth of annoyance and frustration of players when their pawns DON'T follow the instructions given?  You'll be flooded with "but Tynan, i instructed my pawns to sleep at X time and instead he went and grabbed something and hauled it halfway across the map to the stockpile on the other side of my base!  now he missed 2/3 of his sleep time!" 

Sure that might not be true for everyone.  But there is a reasonable explanation for why pawns drop what they're doing and go to sleep...that explanation is because you told them to (through their schedule).  How does the person who just lost half their pawn's sleep time fix the situation that he doesn't know WHY it happened because it was only coded in for "convenience?"

[Spdskatr]

There are already tips/workarounds for everything u mentioned.

-Have you cut all the plants in your home area, walking through a tree is pretty slow imo so colonists will avoid it and take a curved path.
-Set the manual priority for mining to 1, or if it is already at 1, then lower some other priorities.
-Biggest rookie mistake: Don't make your base too big! Home area should be about 100-150 tiles per colonist. Setting up outpost shacks all around the map is also a bad idea.
-Don't set too many tasks up at the same time! Colonists can only do x amount of work per day before they have to rest.
-Colonists' work finding algorithm searches for work in an expanding radius, if a pawn far away from the job has reserved it, then simply draft them and assign another pawn.
-For breaking tasks, if the task is in a closed room eg. cleaning up a hospital, then just draft the colonist, lead them inside, and then forbid the doors until they become idle again. Just remember not to starve them to death.
-Fire: Draft/Undraft all colonists, make sure manual priority for firefighting is set to 1
-Behaviour problems: See above, if that does not work, see above that.
-refusal of dumb labor: well some people are just as spoilt as that, and their personality just can't change. Euthanize them
-waiting hours on a long battle: Remember to engage them in battle and not plain wait, this mechanic was intentional and prevents accidentally starving them to death while drafted.
-Eating humanlike corpses DOES give a mood debuff unless they are a cannibal trait. I didn't get what you mean.
-The low expectations thing is a life saver in many regards, because it depends on your WEALTH. You don't want people having extreme mental breaks on the first day because they are totally joy deprived or don't have an I pressive bedroom.

Still, imo, the mechanic is pretty bad and should be more user friendly.
1 should be red, 2 should be green, 3 should be white, 4 should be gray.

[Bozobub]

Yeah, the only thing I scatter around the map is little 4-turret pillboxes (with a "+" of granite between them, to contain explosions), surrounded by sandbags and roofed =) .  It's hideously power hungry and silly expensive to build, and probably no more effective than a good killbox or other fun war crime, but overlapping fields of fire on literally every square meter of soil is mighty amusing for me; not so much raiders.

*RAID Alert*
*akka akka akka akka akka...*
"Run away!  Run aw-urk!"
Oo, look, more hats !

Moar dakka, mah biznitches.

[Rokdog]

My main criticism of the complaints the OP and others brought up about AI that I'm seeing is that these are all behaviors assumed to be "common sense", which is completely subjective. I see it from the opposite perspective I guess where I like the modular priorities and very literal AI. It allows me to have finer micro management and control over the colonists.

For example, many of you have mentioned hauling. If you specialize your population and practice division of labor, hauling becomes one of those jobs where you need multiple colonists dedicated to it to keep up. This would fall under logistics, which in the real world is a massive undertaking of resources and energy from corporations to armies. Getting stuff from point A to point B efficiently has been a major challenge for civilizations since they've existed.

However, if you start having colonists do automatic "mini-behaviors" that you think should be there, it would mess with the play style of players like me who rely on the AI having a "one-track mind". This also puts Tynan in the position of trying to figure out every single little thing players might think should be "automatic" or "common sense."

I prefer his current solution: Keep control open-ended and give the players lots of tools to fine-tune behavior as they see fit. I just came back to Alpha 15 after an extended break, and never before has the game had so many ways to do this. We have:

- Manual labor priorities control WHAT colonists do for work
- Lockable doors and zones control WHERE colonists work
- Schedules control WHEN colonists work
- The player's strategy and agenda decides WHY the colonists work

The only thing left for us to control is HOW the colonists work, and this is not something that has a "one size fits all" solution, because not everyone wants their workers to work the same way. I happen to like my autistic, laser-sharp focused colonists. Their behavior is predictable, easily controlled and in a worst case scenario even DIRECTLY controllable.

Also, a tip for you guys: If you want your colonists to do something else or go eat or sleep but they won't stop their current task, quickly draft and un-draft them. This clears their current task and causes them to go back through their "What do I do now?" routine. They'll first check their bio needs (rest, food) and then start their usual search for tasks by priority & proximity.

Long-term, it might be Tynan's goal to give players the ability to 100% automate their colony, but having accomplished that in other village-sim games, it can quickly become boring as you now basically have a fancy digital ant farm, and you just sit there and watch it run itself. You have to initiate new construction, wait for an incident, etc., to be forced to actually take action.

Finally, as milon said, as someone else with programming experience (not AI, but large network environment scripts & utils), to me what Tynan has accomplished is really impressive. Not only has he gotten quite a large number of moving parts and numbers to all play along quite smoothly, they also scale well. There's a "sweet spot" when it comes to these kinds of things between quality and quantity. Want one colonist with 1000's of AI routines or nearly 100 colonists with dozens of routines (which we have!)? I'm happy with the latter, with likely more complexity to come as new systems are added.

Sincerely,

- A fan who likes the AI and level of control

EDIT: Read through some more of the recent replies. Lots of great points brought up by Spdskatr and Limdood. Glad I'm not the only one!

[RemingtonRyder]

There are some good mods to relieve some of the stress caused by AI.

I made a mod called Please Clean The Mine which compares the priority of the mining and cleaning jobs and gives work to pawns according to where I thought they should spend their time.

A perfect AI which could run your colony for you isn't necessarily the best. If it could do that, why would you play the game?

That being said... Tynan is willing to make changes to the design in the face of evidence that it doesn't work as expected.

[Xav]

It would be quite convenient to have the option to order a pawn to do all of one task in an already defined space.

(i.e. cleaning an entire room, doctor everyone in the room, haul everything that is set to be hauled out of the room, etc...)

Just a thought...

[Bozobub]

Simply forbid the door once they are inside the room containing the task, and only restore it to normal once they are complete

[Xav]

Simply forbid the door once they are inside the room containing the task, and only restore it to normal once they are complete

You are correct; you've stated a work around, but I didn't request a work-around as I already knew about most of the work-around stated in this topic.

I want the pawn to be able to leave the area to eat/sleep/joy and then return to the ordered task until it is finished.  After the task is finished then the work priorities are applied.

Also, it would be 'nice' if manually ordering a pawn to do something would automatically un-assign any other pawns assigned to doing the task.  For instance, I want a pawn 1 with high construction to build a table, but pawn 2 has already been assigned the task.  Currently, the workaround I use is:  draft pawn 2, assign pawn 1 the build, and then un-draft pawn 2.  Why shouldn't ordering pawn 1 to build the table automatically un-assign the task from pawn 2 and have pawn 2 refer to their priority list for the next assignment?

These 'nice tweaks' I mention would be built on an already present foundation of features currently in A15.

I like the game with its flaws.

I'd like it more without them, of course

Good day!

[bclewis]

It would be quite convenient to have the option to order a pawn to do all of one task in an already defined space.

(i.e. cleaning an entire room, doctor everyone in the room, haul everything that is set to be hauled out of the room, etc...)

Just a thought...

...flick both these switches.

[edit: It wasn't until right after I posted this that I realized a partial workaround for my switch flicking annoyances might be to just assign everyone to 0 on flicking by default and micromanage the work priorities when I need switches flicked]