Development on the NPCs has been going better than expected. The following items are already live on Express:

1) Better destocking
2) Better NPC logging and reporting

The logging framework has already been invaluable in debugging and finding issues. At some point in the future, we may open up NPC log files from previous resets to players if there's someone else out there willing to help with NPC development. That's still undecided. Going back to the other post, these items are remaining:

3) Better public market purchasing
4) Better public market selling
5) Misc issue clean up
6) Add retals for bots

I've already done a fair amount of work on 3) and have that code running on our AI test servers right now. Currently, the NPC countries can engage in market behaviors that are unnatural and can lead to problems, the most prominent of which is buying tech at nearly any price, even late in the game. It's important to fix these market issues to make different strategies more strategically on par and to allow us to increase the number of NPC countries as desired. I do wish to increase the number of NPC countries on Express to achieve more efficient markets and to add more variety and challenge for players. Country counts on Express fell pretty quickly to around 120 even recently after it was created. At this point, almost no one remembers what Express was like with a higher country count. I think that it will be a better experience for players.

One thing that some players lose sight of is that the goal isn't to have all NPC countries look the same. In terms of my thinking right now, I want to have hundreds of NPC countries that mostly behave like humans. Human players run a wide variety of different strategies of varying levels of effectiveness. Even as NPC code improves it does not mean that the NPC countries will be too strong for players to land grab. Ideally there will be many weak countries, a few countries strong enough to compete for top ten, and many countries somewhere in between. I also think it would be cool if NPC countries land grabbed other NPC countries.

Going back to 3), I had to make a choice in terms of how NPC countries prioritize between tech and military. Currently, many NPC countries go quite heavy on tech for a while (and get farmed as a result), but eventually are able to buy a large amount of military after their techs go up. I don't think that all countries should follow the same pattern. Some countries may prioritize military over tech early, making them poor targets in the beginning of the game but good targets towards the end of the game (after they've fallen behind). Some countries may prioritize tech at the start, making them good targets in the beginning but poor targets for the end. Some countries may do something in between. In any case, I'm being cautious with these changes and plan to have them live on April 13th. There will likely be no noticeable NPC updates for the reset beginning on April 6th.

Thank you for playing Express! Feel free to leave any comments or questions about the NPCs on this thread.

All of these changes sounds great

One thing that I am still wondering about is whether or not the strategies are balanced for NPC countries as well?

Like do you have the same number of farmer, techer, casher, indy NPC countries or is there any thought put into that?

I don't know if it is true or not but it certainly seems that a vast majority of the NPC countries run farmer strategy, which floods the food market with cheap food

Cheers,

Very good changes so far! Way to go Slagpit!

I'm excited for how this server will evolve moving forward.

They are even. But a farmer makes more food than a casher+an indy+a techer eats together.

As of right now it's roughly 20% for farmers. On the AI test servers, this is too many farmers. They have a really tough time. I plan to try to rebalance the strategy counts once some of the market behavior is corrected. Even though 20% farmers is high from a server consumption percentage, it still might be okay for Express.

The most important thing for the NPC farmers is to supply the server with food, especially in the early game when most humans will sell on PM, and on servers where humans are unlikely to play farmer (such as Express). The NPC farmers do a great job of that, but they probably prioritize selling food on public a bit too highly. As part of the selling fixes I plan to make them sell on private market more often, such as when the public market is flooded with food. Farmers with unsold bushels don't really help anyone because they can't participate in the market properly.

This current round of Express is interesting because food looks pretty good to me despite the apparent lack of human demo techers: the food SO price is just $30. Farmer is going to have a tough time being competitive on servers with smaller turn totals, but I plan to increase the PM sell price to $32 soon on Express. It would also be trivial to make the NPC techer countries recycle bushels when possible, but I can't decide if that would be a good thing or not.

Here's a fun picture from one of the AI test servers with the new tech buying code in place: https://imgur.com/a/5ym69CU

The server is odd in that the server total turn count is huge at 8640. Tech prices aren't too high in the beginning because demand is low. Most countries are spending nearly all of their money on buildings. Once that ends, tech prices become quite high. The extremely large number of total turns means that tech will be profitable at any price, including $9999. Once countries have bought a lot of tech, they are no longer willing to buy expensive tech because it stops being profitable. As a result, the tech price falls over time. Tech keeps selling throughout the reset though.

I think that might be the first AI server I've ever seen with a tech market that actually makes sense.

nice goals

ive been spying bots a fair bit recently and the public market purchases arnt ideal

i think they decide to buy then just buy everything available, which can lead to a huge or tiny buy, which is nice from a randomness point of view but not from a country strategy one

and good to here the goal is to have countries doing different things, previously it felt like all bots tried to do as well as possible to code then the rainbows were added to be the 'bad' countries


for express if you wanted to make countries go for t10 for casher and farmer which can live without selling the easiest id consider coding some who play delayed, both to wait for food to rise above 29, and tech to fall, as well as preventing them from being grabbed as heavily early

indy is obviously going to survive ok with high defence, and techer can have high $/acre with a survivable endgame price floor but both of those wont thrive with full delay play

being able to run a 99+360 turns startup for a farmer or casher would allow a decent amount of tech purchases to be added to the market early to mid game as well for the first day boosting income then saving income at the end to buy some defence, countries could be coded to pause running turns if not enough tech was available

actually in express you could even consider doing something like allowing buying magic tech at 9999 or 10000 and see how that effects empty markets