posted 05-13-99 01:39 AM ET        

[DanQ] Now, from wentworth...
[DanQ] Seems like you have some explaining to do, Brian!
[DanQ] "Rover transports could be pretty useful. Why have you crippled them by slowing them down?"
[Brian_] The -1 movement for transports was implemented originally for ships & air units; I wasn't thinking much about...
[Brian_] the whole issue of ground units... Perhaps in an enhancement I'll correct that.
[Brian_] (done)

the time for that enhance ment is now! i'm sure you are asking why i'm so feed up with ground and air tansports well lets take a look at the stats

foil transport
0-1-3(1) cargo 2 cost 30
0-1-3(2) cargo 4 cost 30
0-1-3(3) cargo 6 cost 50
0-1-3(4) cargo 8 cost 60

cruiser transport
0-1-5(1) cargo 4 cost 40
0-1-5(2) cargo 8 cost 30
0-1-5(3) cargo 12 cost 50
0-1-5(4) cargo 16 cost 60

ok they are both useful and fair enough now here comes the most pathetic and usless of the bunch
air transports

gravship, needlejet and copter transports
0-1-4(1) cargo 1 cost 50
0-1-5(2) cargo 1 cost 30
0-1-6(3) cargo 1 cost 50
0-1-7(4) cargo 1 cost 60
a waste of resources! but i'll rant later

slightly more useful but not really ground transports

infantry transport
0-1-1(1) cargo 1 cost 20
0-1-1(2) cargo 1 cost 30
0-1-1(3) cargo 1 cost 50
0-1-1(4) cargo 1 cost 60

rover transport
0-1-1(1) cargo 1 cost 30
0-1-1(2) cargo 1 cost 30
0-1-1(3) cargo 1 cost 50
0-1-1(4) cargo 1 cost 60

hovertank transport
0-1-2(1) cargo 1 cost 40
0-1-2(2) cargo 1 cost 30
0-1-2(2) cargo 1 cost 50
0-1-2(3) cargo 1 cost 60

take one moment to digest those stats. You should already be angered by now! ready to protest! ready to inform firaxis that it's not right!
well here's some more things to think about.

air transports can only load and unload units in airbases or cities further limiting them. if your cities are placed where there is no overlap and they are beside of each other that gives you four spaces between your cities. so that means to get form one city to the next you need FIVE movement points. a fission powered air transport only moves FOUR, so you can't even fly from one city to the next in one turn. traveling on roads a rover moves SIX. to fly faster than a unity rover your air transports need a SINGULARITY reactor and then they traveling an amazing seven spaces! Wow! we're talking about acceleration now. maybe i'm wrong but i haven't been able to identify a situation when a slap myself in disgust and say, "Damn, if only i had of built a fusion needlejet transport! Stupid me! Next time this happenes i'll be prepared." I cannot understand why they lose half of their movement power, and can only carry one unit. If it is because being able to move troops rapidly from area to another unbalances the game, i have two responces for that. Orbital insertions and magtubes. So i am at a total loss as to why air tansports are so crippled.
Same thing with ground transports. A rover transport only moves one, you add some armor to it and it becomes really expensive. if you add antigrav struts to an infantry transport it still only moves one. antigrav struts will allow rover transports to move two and hovertank transports to move three. Elite infantry transports can move two and there are a couple of instances where they might actually come in handy for getting your elite infantry close to a city without using up it's movement points. Anotherthing about ground transports is you put drop pods on it and you load a unit in it and you do a drop, the loaded unit doesn't go anywhere. That is a bug and i wish everyday that is fixed in version 4.0 (and don't be fooled by the title, version 4.0 is really the third patch for SMAC, the actual game itself was version 1.0 the first patch was version 2.0)

Don't get me wrong i really enjoy playing SMAC and i don't hate the game at all i really like it. But when i see something that they could improve i voice my opinion. read the next post for i think can be done about transports.

p.s. and i have proof that Brian reynolds knows of the air transport drop bug

posted 05-13-99 02:02 AM ET            

foil and cruiser transports are just fine. i think that they are well balanced and although i have yet to fill up a singularity cruiser transport there have been a few times when i have loaded eight units onto afusion cruiser transport.

posted 05-13-99 02:56 AM ET            

Although I DISAGREE about Sub transports. As the computer can ALWAYS see your units, Subs are only good against other HUMANS.

I do think that a NEW Weapon slot/special ability should allow a unit to transport MISSILES. Come on Firaxis! I want to outfit a my units with Missile CHASSIS Launcher... This would enable you to outfit ANY chassis as a Conv/Planet Busting carrier/launcher.

posted 05-13-99 04:19 AM ET            

korn469, have you noticed that when you select the antigrav struts Special Ability in the workshop, the little detail below it says something like this: ".....(Reactor*2 for air)"?

Well, look in alpha.txt and you find that you can't put antigrav struts onto air units. Why don't you change it so that you CAN put antigrav struts on air units? (I think it's just a matter of flipping a bit from 0 to 1) Will it change anything? I'm curious to know.....

posted 05-13-99 05:14 AM ET            

thanks cous and mongoose we need all the support we can get! (i didn't know you omplained about this earlier cous i wasn't around here to like febuary or march or something)

darkstar i'd like to see your list of things that need improvement and fixes. personally i have been playing multiplayer lately and found it quite fun (alot more fun than single player) but some more bugs (the multiplayer kind) have came to my attention...

posted 05-13-99 02:03 PM ET         

Infantry have +25% attack against a city, but they are slow. One could imagine loading infantry on a transport, driving the transport into range of the city, and unloading the infantry to attack a city. This would effectively increase the strike range of infantry without giving up the 25% attack bonus.

posted 05-13-99 02:40 PM ET            

However, on large maps with large expanses of land, Rover (move 2 or better) and Tank Transports (move 2 (now) or better) would be able to transport Infantry to a muster point just outside your enemy's effective defensiable perimeter. If you had the Xenofungus SP that turns fungus into roads, this would make overland travel VERY fast, which could make a significant difference. Also, you could then build those 4-1-1 and 6-1-1 Suicide Fission Troopers and let the Transport ACT as its armor at TRANSPORT-Best Armor-Move. Or your garrison units could then effectively keep up with your Rover/Tank attack force.

I think that there should be a few Transport special features, like "FAST" (+50% Movement, limited to 1/2 of normal cargo capacity), "SLOW" (-50% Movement, double cargo), and of course the "MISSILE CHASSIS CARRIER" options as well.

Korn, I've spouted off about such things many times, including on mailings of bug fixes and game play improvements sent to the developers of SMAC. Don't worry, I will continue to do so. A monster game balance issue is the 2:1 attack odds... but that is another thread.

posted 05-13-99 04:04 PM ET         

DS, not trying to attack you directly, but I (having developed software in the past) get annoyed when people are constantly picking apart my work rather than just saying "Great game. There are things I might have done differently, but I LOVE the game, and think it rocks. Glad you made it!".

I'm not talking about bugs - they should be fixed. Sound shouldn't stutter, games shouldn't crash, etc. Personally (again, no offence), I've always thought that "balance issues" was a term that's overused by people who tend to stick to 1 strategy that doesn't work against a particular offence/defence.

AGAIN, not trying to flame. Just venting. Don't hurt me!!

posted 05-13-99 08:49 PM ET            

infantry unit's are great for busting bases but because of their speed it takes a long time for them to move across a large continant. ground transports would really increase the effectiveness of infantry. air transports could help a small army have better flexability.

it says somewhere that their are 32000 different combinations of units and i know that when they were programming this game they didn't take all of the unit designs into consideration. it would have been physically impossible for them given the time constraints to design each unit and balance them. the rules they have set up have done an outstanding job. but the rules need some tweaking when it comes to transports other than sea transports.

SMAC is a great game and it could get alot better. i don't mind not getting a single new feature for SMAC and only getting bug fixes if in the expansion they do all the tweaking and add all the new features. but i want and i hope that they will tweak ground and air transports so that for the minerals they will be just asuseful and viable as sea transports.

and the one thing that really lets me know that air and ground transports are not good units is the AI has never built a single one in all the games i have played. that tells me that nobody who programed the game thought they were important enough to use. so that means nobody probably thought of using anything but sea transports.

posted 05-13-99 09:52 PM ET            

Urban Ranger:

You can use ground transports as mobile repair units (with the Repair Bay special ability). Works best with elite infantry. Attack base, if still alive then jump aboard (heavily-armoured) transport. Ta-da! Fresh new infantry unit next turn.

korn469:

I believe there is another bit which you can set in alpha.txt so that antigrav struts can be used only on transports (like Repair Bays). Of course, you lose all those nifty Grav infantry/speeder/hovertanks, but if you want to emphasize transports, well, have you pick. BTW, the AI does seem to design a lot of Grav units for me.....

Darkstar:

posted 05-14-99 04:18 PM ET            

On the other hand, most programs are like art... you don't really want to let it go, because there is more to do before it is finished. And that is what management is suppose to do. Rip that baby out of your hands when its a saleable product.

I think that there is very little game balance in SMAC, and that is the reason that each patch has included changes to the game balance itself. A game with so many possible options should make each option as equitable a decision or strategy path as any other. However, I do not think they did this. I have posted, to this forum and in email to the SMAC developers, such thoughts. And will continue to do so for a while longer.

I do occasionally take a break to send them "Kudos" letters or posts on the forum though. That might be difficult to believe, but I think they did a good job on many aspects of the game. As a professional software developer, I KNOW the value of just one user saying "Thanks!".

At this point, I really don't expect serious game balance/play issues to be balanced in a patch. Maybe SMACX, the expansion, will (I hope) help redress some of the balance issues, but I doubt Patch 4 will. I expect it will be a less buggy version of 3.

As far as game balance issues... Aside from the extreme favoritism of Attack over Defense, I think that there are MANY issues. The inability to run a large empire on a huge world due to the inefficiency limit... If you have +7 efficiency or +4 efficiency, a city beyond 25 tiles from your HQ WILL NOT EARN ENERGY. But if you place standard buildings in it to prevent Eco-damage and what not, you lose energy overall. This limits the effective size of your empire to something less that Huge and Large maps, cutting down on the Isolated Builder paths and options, as well as the Great Imperial Empire approach. The only workaround to the Great Empire expanse not being able to allow cities to pay for themselves is to LOSE YOUR CAPITAL and never retake/replace it.

The Social Engineering system, while a step forward, doesn't go far enough. It always cost X amount of energy (based on game difficulty) to swap a setting, and takes a turn. This is regardless if you have 1 city, or 80. This sounds like someone forgot to add a simple empire size variable to the costs formula. This lack leads to SE'ing for diplomacy.

That AI Diplomacy is horrid. If I have been Deidre's dear ally for 100 turns, swapping out of Green to something else shouldn't cause her to immediately declare war on me just because we have communicated while I am NOT Green. Such heavy handed scripting of AI reactions trivializes Diplomacy.

I don't say that SMAC needs a lot more cooking time due to not being able to win it in whatever manner I chose... I can (at least in Single Player). But there are a great many things that the development team INCLUDED without insuring that it worked well, or in the manner they thought it should. It's a massive project, and I can understand things slipping by, but why include Economic Victory when it didn't work until Patch 2 or 3? An entire PATH of winning, was non-functional.

If I complain about the balance of something, its not *just* whining. There are many ways to adjust SMAC to better balance the options it includes so that one style of play isn't favored over others. While what I might suggest is not as good as others, it can make for a starting point for any programmer that is told to go fix it. And if you don't believe that happens, then don't use Diplomatic or Economic or Cooperative Victories... Those are all things that were demanded by the beta testers. And from the number of BUGS in the program, we just paid Firaxis for the privilege to be Beta Testers as well...

posted 05-17-99 02:51 AM ET            

i guess one problem with those changes is, that the ai has also to be modified. otherwise the ai wouldnt be able to use those transportunits and this may make the game a little, lets say unbalanced.

posted 05-17-99 09:05 AM ET            

Why doesn't the AI have an overview of the requirements of war, such as mobility. Then when say grav struts are made available, the AI will say: `Grav struts? let's look up the data base to see what they do. Ah, they make units faster. I've always wanted a faster troop transport. Guess what I'll prototype now.'

Firaxis made a mistake in not making SMAC customisable enough! (Yes, truly!) If they had, we could change all the rules, including the capacity of air transports.

Looking ahead, it won't be SMACX unless the customisations are the first thing extended.

I really miss those wacky Civ2 scenarios (Fantastic Worlds, etc); I'd absolutely rather have diverse scenarios than the 3D rotating units.

posted 05-17-99 10:23 AM ET            

Gotta agree with Darkstar about the tricky diplomacy. When it comes to communication of important messages from other factions, the game leaves something to be desired.
Case in point: you're going happily along at peace w/ Gaians, Green econ and all, when something catches your attention during the blink-of-an-eye scrolling of messages between turns (kelp expands near Jersey City, forest expands near Sheboygan). "Gaians have pronounced vendetta", "Gaians and Believers have joined forces against us" -- then back to the Iowa farm report.

Now, it strikes me that if they have pop-ups and/or voice-overs (or at least the options for them) for "production complete", "terraform has ended", "resource shortfall", and so many other things, then there should have been a similar means of notice for "state of war".

Not that it's a huge problem (there... I said it: I LOVE THIS GAME), but sneaking vital info past me is not a good thing (yes, the joy of saying "hmmm, where did my commerce with the Gaians go?", or "since when was I in vendetta vs the Spartans?").

Just a little extra challenge, I guess.