RandMax v3.0

Authors: Steffen Pietsch & Thomas Voigt

1. Introduction

2. Overview

3. Using Randmax

4. Detailed Operation

5. Formulas

6. Version History

7. Contact and Disclaimer

 1. Introduction

Randmax is a player addon for VGA Planets 3. VGA Planets 3 is a strategy game developed by Tim Wisseman. Most of the planet management is routine: Build factories, mines, defense posts and tax your natives and colonists. Randmax can help you do a lot of these tedious commands automatically. Controlled by a file (randmax.ini) that you can edit manually or generate automatically using the companion utility RANDGEN, randmax will automatically execute the actions defined in the ini file.

Randmax will read your player data in a subdiectory, perform the commands and write back the data. Note that you mustn’t run WinPlan, VPA, PCC or any other client while randmax is running, because they will eventually overwrite the player data when they exit, or even crash because randmax altered their data.

Randmax was invented and written by Steffen Pietsch and is now maintained by Thomas Voigt.

Note that version 3 is a new major revision that introduces new features (including base maximization). The main idea behind the rewrite is that you can use randmax “out of the box” without generating a randmax.ini file, so you can just call “randmax [Game_Dir]” and get a reasonable taxation for natives and colonists. The syntax of most commands remained identical even if there were redundancies (some commands were kept only for backwards compatibility), so most older randmax.ini files should work with this new randmax version. However, you may want to update your randmax.ini files to make sure that everything works.

However, a few changes were introduced (see version history).

 2. Overview

Randmax can do the following actions for you: – Randomize the friendly codes on all your planets – Automatically build factories, mines and defense posts on your planets, and sell supplies – buy defense posts or fighters on your starbases – tax your natives, either in a way that they grow fast but still allow you to collect money (growth tax), or in a way that they reach and maintain a certain happyness.

In order to build structures, randmax will automatically sell supplies.

Randmax is controlled by the randmax.ini file, which has 3 sections: “Safe” friendly codes, planetary orders and global parameters. The sections are separated by lines containing at least 3 stars at the start of the line. A “#” denotes a comment and all entries of a line after a “#” will be ignored.

• The first sections contains a list of friendly codes that should not be changed. Randmax will randomize all friendly codes not contained in this list. There can be at most one friendly code per line. Wildcards “*” and “?” are allowed. A “0” is treated as a wildcard that matches any numerical value. So for example an entry “000” would match any numerical value, while “PB0” would match any priority build order (PB1..PB0).
  A special entry is the word “default”, which will add the following special friendly code patterns:
  “NUK”, “ATT”, “PB0” (all build orders), “mf?” (universal mine field friendly codes), “bum”, “dmp”, “con”, “noc” and “000” (all purely numerical codes, e.g. “042” will be protected, but “42d” or “d42” would be randomized).
• The second section contains a list of commands for every planet. The first entry must be the ID of the planet, which is followed by an arbitrary number of commands, which will be executed in the given order. So for example a line “042 f50 m20 f n c1” would mean that randmax first tries to build factories until the planet has 50 factories (f50). If this is achieved and there are credits and supplies left, randmax will build mines until there are 20 mines on the planet (m20). After that it will build as many factories as possible (f) and tax the natives according to the grow tax method.
  A list of all commands can be found in section 3, Using Randmax. The grow and build strategies are explained in section 4, detailed operation.There can be an entry for a planet with id 000. This is considered a default order and will be applied to all planets that have no special order.

   

• The third section can contain various control parameters that are described in section 3, Using Randmax. Among these orders are configuration-related parameters like the maximum income per planet or the maximal number of hissing ships, and several parameters that control the taxation and build strategies.

Note: There are several levels where commands can be defined for a planet: The command line and the second and third section of the ini file. In case of contradicary orders, they will be resolved as follows:

• The most general orders are in the third section of randmax.ini.
• Command-line orders will override orders given in the third section.
• Orders given in the second section will override all other orders. Even a default order for planet “000”. will override orders from the command line and the third section.

Note : Planets uses several files containing checksums and information about the planets version. It is necessary for RANDMAX to find these files (otherwise the checksums would be wrong). Writing of these data depends on the client, however, if a client was run once for the game then randmax will find and generate the correct checksums and register information. These information can be taken from old turns, so if you used your client normally in the previous turn, unpack a new result and run randmax immediately thereafter, everything is fine.

However, if you unpack your very first result into a fresh directory and run randmax first, then randmax will create the shareware register information and your client may or may not report an error (for example planets.exe will report that the data was tampered with, while VPA should run fine).

 3. Using Randmax

3.1. Command line parameters

The basic use of randmax is calling randmax.exe with at most two additional parameters specifying the working directory (the directory where the player data files are located) and the name of the initialization file (default randmax.ini).

So “randmax c:\games\planets\vpwork1 my_randmax.ini” would tell randmax to process all game data in c:\games\planets\vpwork1 and execute commands defined in my_randmax.ini. Observe that paths that contain whitespaces must be put in paranthesis.

A number of options can be used to control the behaviour of randmax on a command-line level. Most of these commands are kept only for backwards compatibility and should better be put into randmax.ini. However, command line parameters do override entries in the third section of randmax.ini.

• -h: (help) show a brief summary of randmax usage and commands and exit
• -pN: randomize only planets of player N (1..11)
• -r: don’t randomize friendly codes
• -cN: tax colonists on all planets with growth-tax if there are at least N million
• -nN: tax natives on all planets with growth-tax if there are at least N million
• -tN: tax colonists on all planets with safetax to happyness 70 if there are at least N million
• -aN: tax natives on all planets with safetax to happyness 70 if there are at least N million
• -d: dump a default randmax.ini
• -sN: on all planets with more than N supplies, sell the excess supplies
• -w: Winplan compatibility (obsolete, winplan files are detected automatically)

3.2. Planetary orders (2nd section of randmax.ini)

A planetary order starts with the ID of the planet, or 000 for a default order that is executed for all planets without an order. Leading zeros are optional (042 works as well as 42), but the randmax.ini looks somewhat nicer if you stick with 3-digit numbers.

The planet ID is followd by the build and taxation orders. All orders are executed in the order in which they are given. There is no check if there are contradictory orders, so if you put “t40 n” in your command line then the resulting tax will be according to the growth method (the taxation routine is invoked twice and the later one wins).

The following build orders for randmax are available. All orders can be given with or without a numerical parameter which gives the maximal number of structures to build. If no such parameter is given then randmax will build as many structures as possible. (So “f40” will build up to 40 factories, while “f” will build as many factories as possible.)

• f: Build factories.
• m: Build mines.
• d: Build defense posts.
• bd: Build starbase defense posts (up to 200).
• bf: Build starbase fighters (up to 60).

There is a number of taxation and sell orders available. For a description of the taxation strategies see section Detailed Operation. Here N always stands for an arbitrary integer value.

• n[N]: Tax natives with the growth method. Once they reach their population maximum, tax them with safetax to happyness N (if no numerical value is given this value will be defaulted to 70).
• t[N]: Tax natives with safetax, aim for happyness N (default is 70).
• c[N]: Growth-tax colonists (similar to n).
• a[N]: Safetax colonists (similar to t).
• mnN: (min natives) Tax natives only if the number of clans exceeds N.
• mcN: (min colonists) Tax colonists only if the number of clans exceeds N.
• ntc: (no tax colonists) Don’t tax colonists at all. (Overrides the ctx command in section 3.)
• ntn: (no tax natives) Don’t tax natives at all. (Overrides the ntx command in section 3.)
• s[NNN]: If the planet has more than NNN supplies, sell the excess supplies.
• l: don’t sell supplies (overrides the -s command given in the command line).

All other commands are simply ignored. This allows other utilities to add their own configuration (for example randgen may store orders here).

3.3. Configuration parameters (3rd section of randmax.ini)
The configuration parameters control several aspects of the working of randmax. Note that some of these commands work globally.

Some commands take an optional numerical value, or a yes/no value. The convention to use commands who allow both types of parameters is as follows:

• If no additional parameter is given, “yes” is assumed. The numerical value is set to some default.
• If a numerical parameter is given, “yes” is assumed.

Example:

• “ctx” or “ctx yes” would enable colonist growth taxation.
• “ctx 1” would enable colonist growth taxation with parameter 1 (at least one million clans).
• “ctx no” would disable colonist taxation.

Other commands will allow only a numerical value or a boolean value. If these commands with boolean parameters are issued without a boolean value, “yes” is assumed. (So “cda” is equivalent to “cda yes”.) Commands that take a numerical value are ignored if no parameter is given. The following parameter affect taxation: [yes|no|N]

 4. Detailed Operation

Todo:

• explain growth and safetax method
• how does growtax work (incl. switch to safetax)
• how is tax adjusted for maximum income
• explain borg assimilation safetax

 5. Formulas

Todo: List all used formulas

 6. Version History

 7. Contact and Disclaimer

This program is provided ‘as is’, with no explicit or implied warranty. I disclaim all warranties with regard to this software, including all warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any damages resulting from the use of this program.

For suggestions and bug reports you can mail me at [email protected].
To contact the original author, send a mail to [email protected].