So I see someone figured out how to exploit the bot code bug I listed under BOT EXPERIMENT thread.

If you don't fix the max price in which bots buy tech, people will just sell their tech at 9k and the bots will buy it all.

I already see someone has 4k tech up @ 9k each. Whoever you are, in my opinion, you're a pathetic player. Use strategy not exploits!

weak!

pathetic player = noticed bug b4 you did. So what does that make you. What levels are under pathetic! Place yourself there.

I will defer to the other mods/dev team

Exploiting bugs for personal gain is and always will be frowned upon. At times, deleteable.

anyone mass producing tech at this early point in the game will not finish well. so i just laugh at the 9k tech being bought. enjoy your 5 million dollars now and all your wasted BPT.

HT, i do believe he noticed this already... and tried totell qz in his bot thread.

So your comment is unwarranted

Ebert , redo your maths

it is not me selling at 9k, however, if the bots were not ready for implementation, they should not be implemented. there are tons of things that can be "exploited" by the addition of the bots. they just changed how the game is played. i believe the goal was to add market stability, instead they just add to the chaos. ZOMG the bots do not retal so everyone farms them EXPLOIT EXPOSED!!! ZOMG the bots buy tech and military regardless or price, ZOMG EXPLOIT EXPOSED. the bots list their goods at plus or minus 20% of the market rate ZOMG EXPLOIT EXPOSED. people need to just play the game and get on with it. i compliment the person who listed and sold 9k tech, but again, good luck as i think it will just come back to slow you down in the long run.

?

No one said it was you

4k * 9k is not 5million

Everyone has the ability to furiously attack the bots for land. Not everyone can sell to the bots at ridiculous prices. Unless everyone went indy/techer

i know noone said it was me, just before someone goes there i was pointing that out. and you are right, 4k at 9k is 36 million. i can tell you that my normal startup nets me around 17 million by 8-10 PM tonight. so they get double the money but lost the BPT any good techer has. again, long term they get no benefit from teching a lot this early.

Well Express has been used as a kind of Beta testing (or even alpha testing :) ) for the bots and here is one flaw that has been brought to light. A success of sorts.

It is kind of hard to see how people can be asked somehow to ignore the true market situation. What price is it proper to ask for your tech? 2k a point, 3k, 4k, 5k? Price settles where willing sellers and willing buyers place it. With buyers willing to pay 9k there is no other "proper" price.

Perhaps the coding can be quickly changed.

Otherwise make it the "grab a techer" set and restore some balance that way. :)

You're missing my point Ebert. Selling tech @8000+ which basically autosells is an exploit. It doesn't matter if your strategy can keep up or not.

And mathematically you're still wrong.

Example:
36 million / 3000 tech = 12k tech

Resell at 9k each = 108 million (72 million profit off 1 turn)

Which means he could just buy / resell and build exclusively CS; passing you up in bpt easily.

Whats warranted is what I choose to post. Your not there to judge validity of posts, your there to make sure I don't tell people to fluff off. Or go f themselves, or go s u c k a big weenie. Not to judge my posts. Thank you.

lol

But 3 hours earlier.....

Have had a lot going on the last two weeks and haven't spent much time on the forums.. Congrats, bstrong, just noticed you were a mod now.

This is an exploit? A bug?

This has been a terrible idea, implemented terribly, which has also solved none of the proposed goals.

You are beyond retarded if you are seriously attempting to salvage a pointless mathematical argument with this drivel.

Has the wife been telling you off again, currydubs?

Nah, just been exposed to too much down syndrome lately.

I wouldn't worry. Even someone with Down's syndrome can overcome an inferiority complex eventually.

On the other hand, good nature usually comes as standard. So that may need a bit more work.

I've heard common sense does too.

I actually agree with ebert and currydubs on this. This is hardly an exploit. We're all participating in a market. If someone will buy tech at $9k then whomever can supply that need will let both parties be happy. One guy gets the tech he needs, even if it's $9k, and the other guy sells his tech for the $9k he had decided he was willing to part with it for.

The fact that these market players are bots that have no sense is no fault of any other person.

Further, how do you know that the person selling at $9k even knew it was a bot "exploit" when it could just as easily have been mrford?

^^ This

The only real "exploit" with these bots is how we are all happily farming them with no fear of retals.

I must agree with curry spice there, just another easy land base for netters. What happen to a war game?

Oh and Celphi since you know not of whatthe hell your babbling about. Don't try cross-post crap dude. Your having a hard enuff time with math from what I can see. Let alone any sort of comprhension

Hard time with math where?

Unless any of you program, it's going to be very difficult to understand how to perfect an AI program to function as a player.

The current bot program has a series of functions. These functions execute every 140 mins. Will it stay at 140 forever? Probably not. But in order to test the other functions, some standard format time is given to all the bots in the meantime.

This is what happened with the buy tech function. The buy tech function was given a variable of buying tech at $9999. This value was not meant to be permenant, but the value was necessary to see if the program is even capable of buying tech in the marketplace without crashing. That is how many of the functions on these bots are. Most of these functions are incomplete and in their infancy.That's why you may have seen food at $27 @ one time.

At some point these variables will use a better system to average market trends and sell units/tech at the appropriate price. I keep reading about the complaints of 'free land' w/o consequences. This will obviously change soon too. It's not meant to be something permanent.

If you've noticed each set the bots have been improved: names generated, no longer defenseless, no longer massive amounts of cash on hand. As each set goes by the program will be improved; however!, just because the program (bot) buys tech at max price (regardless of price) doesn't mean you should devise a plan so as to exploit it.

I address this exploit more so because it has the potential to change the entire server drastically. Which it has.

i wouldnt call this an exploit in the first place.. the bots are an addition to the game and not the game code.

its bot development and we have to start somewhere. So far it has been moving in a positive direction. Celphi is making sense of the codes and he is helping from what i can see.

Just play the game already... whiny pricks. :p

It's obviously exploiting the bot code. Dont be ridiculous

then the people who implement the changes without first assuring there are no exploits, they are the cheaters.. your dev team created an environment where somebody excelled.. nobody is to blame other than, well, the people entrusted to keep us all in line..

if we prove they are incapable of, well, administering or moderating then.. you can't exactly call us out for doing what, literally, you are allowing us to..

also, people still play express? i wonder how many people passed me since i got deleted for hacking the game and, again, dominating an environment created for me by, well, thos entrusted to ensure the game works.. ha, fun times, heh

You are still a fool I see.

You act like qz has 20 minions hid away swiping at keys to make game code. As far as i can tell, its just him. So, yes, exploiting something he may or may not have done of purpose or over looked is against the rules.

If the bots cannot readily be programmed to interact with the market w/o this problem then I guess they could quickly be re-programmed not to interact with the market at all.

Maybe that would save this set for the players.

That would lose the benefit of using Express as a Beta testing ground and slow down the development of the bot programming.

If people want the bots to develop quickly and are willing to be Beta testers then just let the exploit run and remember any techers who finish at the top of the scores list have had the (enormous) benefit of this exploit and its various effects on the tech market. Those who compile records can simply leave this set out as being one in which the server was devoted to testing rather than wholly to competitive play.

Exploiting something he may not have done of purpose is against the rules.


A++++ moderating, would moderate again.

If the code for the bots wasn't open to everyone, it'd be much harder for you to figure out how to exploit it. ;)

Actually quite the opposite. Open source allowed me to spot the error. The market exploit was actually discovered by someone else last set. Some people just didn't catch it in his comment. When I read his comment I searched the code as to why the bots were buying at max price. I've posted the single line that needs to be changed a couple times but qzjul appears to be too busy to adjust it. (Which is understandable, he has a life outside EE and he's done all the coding solo.)

It's really as simple as changing 9999 to like 4000.

function buy_tech(&$c, $tech = 't_bus', $spend = 0, $maxprice = 9999){

Of course 4000 shouldn't be a permanent fix but rather a quick fix.

Would even be interesting to have max price at "standing orders" x 2 or something, to avoid having a fixed cap

Bots were put into multiple servers around the same time btw. Express was first, but only by a week or so.

Personally, I believe the best price in which the bots could post are from the history tab, by taking the averages of last two 4hr blocks.

So for an example:

0400-0800 average tech price 3000
0800-1200 average tech price 3300 <<<<
1200-0400 average tech price 3200 <<<<


The bot would then post their tech for 3250.

Which is easy to code. just lengthy...

As the code stands now, which some of you still miss is that you could sell your medical tech at 9999 and it would sell. ANY type of tech.

The maxprice variable applies to all tech, not just res / bus. I'll have to recheck which tech he has the bots buying. I recall a rand command which randomizes which tech is more likely to be bought.

This is no doubt an exploit.

So I just looked at the code. And just to give an idea of how off they are:

The Indy bots buy only res bus agri tech each below 140% which then change to 160% each (which I haven't fully examined the if/then condition he has there.: (currently doesn't buy Indy tech)

if($c->money > max($c->bpt,30)*$c->build_cost*10){ //buy_tech
//out("Try to buy tech?");
$spend = $c->money - $c->bpt*$c->build_cost*10;
if($c->pt_agri < 140)
buy_tech($c,'t_indy',$spend*1/2);
if($c->pt_bus < 140)
buy_tech($c,'t_bus',$spend*1/4);
if($c->pt_res < 140)
buy_tech($c,'t_res',$spend*1/4);

$spend = $c->money - $c->bpt*$c->build_cost*10;
if($c->pt_agri < 150)
buy_tech($c,'t_agri',$spend*1/2);
if($c->pt_bus < 160)
buy_tech($c,'t_bus',$spend*1/4);
if($c->pt_res < 160)
buy_tech($c,'t_res',$spend*1/4);
}

The rainbow bots buy any type of tech. So if the server made any rainbow bots this set, your medical tech could sell for 9999. It's all based on this randomizer code:

$mil = rand(0,25);
$med = rand(0,5);
$bus = rand(10,100);
$res = rand(10,100);
$agri = rand(10,100);
$war = rand(0,10);
$ms = rand(0,20);
$weap = rand(0,20);
$indy = rand(5,40);
$spy = rand(0,10);
$sdi = rand(2,15);

The casher bot buys res / bus and the farmer bot buys bus / res / agri. All their values are well below what they should be, but you get the picture.

In truth, all of this wouldn't have been discovered unless it was implemented on a live server. So for those of you who say don't add it until it's s finished product don't understand programming. It's all about trial and error and fixing those errors.

Perhaps an alternate solution would be to allow creation of a dual player / bot server, but again that's alot of work. So to get the most errors fixed, express seems like the most logical choice. The only other option may be to make the AI server identical to the express server and allow players to play there. Currently on the AI server it's a turn every 2 minutes., which is hard to xfer the same strategy to a different type of server.

And before you ask:

rand(min, max)

So it works like this:

$mil = rand(0,25); pick a number between 0 & 25
$med = rand(0,5); btwn 0 & 5
$bus = rand(10,100); pick a number between 10 & 100
$res = rand(10,100);
$agri = rand(10,100);
$war = rand(0,10);
$ms = rand(0,20);
$weap = rand(0,20);
$indy = rand(5,40);
$spy = rand(0,10);
$sdi = rand(2,15);

At the end of each cycle it buys that much tech based on the randomized #.

The bots cycles through it multiple times based on how much $ it has and other variables. That's why you see massive news feeds when bots buy from you.

Im really amazed with the work Qzjul has placed into this project. Even with it incomplete, it's some creative programming methods he used.

I just noticed something. There's a typo in here:


if($c->money > max($c->bpt,30)*$c->build_cost*10){ //buy_tech
//out("Try to buy tech?");
$spend = $c->money - $c->bpt*$c->build_cost*10;
if($c->pt_agri < 140) <<<<<<<<<< TYPO HERE SHOULD BE.... pt_indy not pt_agri!
buy_tech($c,'t_indy',$spend*1/2);
if($c->pt_bus < 140)
buy_tech($c,'t_bus',$spend*1/4);
if($c->pt_res < 140)
buy_tech($c,'t_res',$spend*1/4);

$spend = $c->money - $c->bpt*$c->build_cost*10;
if($c->pt_agri < 150) <<<<<<< ERROR same thing
buy_tech($c,'t_agri',$spend*1/2); <<<<<< ERROR same thing but t_indy
if($c->pt_bus < 160)
buy_tech($c,'t_bus',$spend*1/4);
if($c->pt_res < 160)
buy_tech($c,'t_res',$spend*1/4);
}


So in other words if agri tech is below 140 buy indy tech. And when you can buy 10 turns of BPT, then use a different formula, which reads : if agri tech below 150 buy agri tech. This doesn't benefit an Indy at all.. Just a small typo.

does the same bug apply to food? because I like to stockpile, and I wouldn't want to be called a cheater if the bots bought my food for 500 a bushel

That's ok mine are at 399 so your safe. tehe tehe

They would buy off their pm before paying that much for food.

The condition is still the same:
pm < public + taxes (buy from public)
Pm > public + taxes (buy from private)