Borg bugs and feature requests

[agoodman]

ah, ok. (re the former, I sometimes see the borg targeting the monster and seeing its exact hit points, and think that it can access that information directly. This is not of course necessarily the case...)

"The exact hp" is actually an estimate... at least it is supposed to be. The borg shouldn't have any information the player doesn't have

[eschiss1]

Which now makes me wonder why it drops/ignores useful items like rods of probing which would actually be pretty helpful that way

[agoodman]

Which now makes me wonder why it drops/ignores useful items like rods of probing which would actually be pretty helpful that way

because the borg isn't good at using them

[eschiss1]

ah, that makes sense. Another question: I understand why the borg keeps switching out a really good (randomly generated) artifact in favor of a normal mace of extra attacks, but why does it keep removing, lately, an amulet with the following description (which it was wearing for awhile):

"+3 intelligence.
+1 light.
Provides immunity to cold.
Provides resistance to acid, lightning, dark.
Slows your metabolism. Prevents paralysis."

in favor of wearing nothing at all around its neck? This removes its only immunity against cold, so it's not compensated by some other change it's made recently...

[agoodman]

ah, that makes sense. Another question: I understand why the borg keeps switching out a really good (randomly generated) artifact in favor of a normal mace of extra attacks, but why does it keep removing, lately, an amulet with the following description (which it was wearing for awhile):

"+3 intelligence.
+1 light.
Provides immunity to cold.
Provides resistance to acid, lightning, dark.
Slows your metabolism. Prevents paralysis."

in favor of wearing nothing at all around its neck? This removes its only immunity against cold, so it's not compensated by some other change it's made recently...

Here is how to tell. Fire up the game and load the save.
type ^zp and note the power level it thinks it has. Then, if the amulet is on, take it off and hit ^zp and note the power level it has. Repeat this when you think he inappropriately takes off the amulet. One trick to help catching him doing this is using ^zs (match string) and putting in the name (same case) as the random artifact. Hopefully he will only get "chatty" about the amulet when he is taking it off.

There are a few things that might be causing this.
1) are you a necromancer? If so, having a light generating artifact might be considered an issue. It is possible that the negative for having the light is more than the positive of immunity to cold... which may be a bad calculation. There is likely a lot of tuning that can be done with necromancers.
2) is it causing you to be over burdened? If it knocks you below some of ummm... baseline good speeds (+10, +20 etc) it might decide it doesn't want the weight and it is worth it to get rid of the amulet.
3) Maybe it thinks it wants to swap in another amulet and doesn't get around to it because it takes off the amulet and then someone attacks him and he gets busy. This seems unlikely but it is possible
4) some calculation it is doing could be "just bad". It is always possible that +3 intelligence got misread as -3 due to some bug. I list this but it seems unlikely since it seems like it would have shown up before now... but I have seen bugs that I thought were unlikely show up before.

[eschiss1]

Good points. Fortunately he isn't getting rid of the amulet, but was still carrying it as an alternate to his nothing-at-all (actually, he's gone back to wearing it, and his really good morningstar with extra immunities instead of relatively mundane weapons of extra attacks, but I will definitely try the power level comparisons and other suggestions when/if this happens again. (He hasn't been killing many uniques lately and there -are- 15 to go, though some are just versions of Sauron and one, Father Christmas, probably doesn't count... I mean, yes, on the one hand, he has the advantage that he's respawning/cheating/an experiment, but except for the Tarrasque and a few others who he may never figure out, he's still doing fairly well at reducing Sauron's summoning advantage... )
Thanks!

[agoodman]

another thing is... the borg isn't as good with random artifacts as with the standard set. It can deal with them but it sometimes makes bad choices. Some of the formulas are set up around the "this activation means this artifact means give it a little boost because we know it works well with this other set of artifacts". I have tried to keep the power settings more generic so random artifacts work well but sometimes there are old changes that aren't pure. You can even see this in advice I gave someone earlier on how to make it so the borg never dropped Ringil.

[eschiss1]

Ok, the borg does think it has noticeably more power with a mace of extra attacks and an amulet of trickery than an apparently-to-me much more useful artifact ball and chain and artifact amulet, just at the moment (it changes its mind according to other circumstances, which is also interesting. Anyhow, thumbs-up!

[agoodman]

Ok, the borg does think it has noticeably more power with a mace of extra attacks and an amulet of trickery than an apparently-to-me much more useful artifact ball and chain and artifact amulet, just at the moment (it changes its mind according to other circumstances, which is also interesting. Anyhow, thumbs-up!

If you want to take the next step and adjust how the borg thinks, go into borg.txt (in the user directory) and change
borg_uses_dynamic_calcs = FALSE
to
borg_uses_dynamic_calcs = TRUE
then go and make adjustments in between
[BEGIN FORMULA SECTION]
and
[END FORMULA SECTION]
If you want to go this path, I can try to explain any formula that isn't obvious and show you ways to get the values that are being plugged in. Note that running with dynamic formulas is slower.