posted 02-16-99 04:53 PM ET        

After a good bit of study I have to say that the unit costs run against common sense. Now, I haven't gotten far enough in a game to build gravships (my save carried over from the demo kept hanging at a certain point.) so I don't have direct experience with how their costs scale with other units, but the ground units are WAY out of balance with the rest.

In reality infantry is cheapest, followed by tanks, then choppers then jets then small ships and finally large ships like carriers.

In SMAC rovers and hovertanks cost more than double what a fully loaded CRUISER hull! Not to mention terribly cheap njs and copters. And DARE to put the bombard option on an infantry unit and the price soars.

I've edited the rules file to try and fix this, but you can only change so much of it. There doesn't seem to be any way to make rovers cost a bit more than infantry, for example. They either cost massively more or the same.

I've about decided to make ships/planes more expensive. I really didn't want to do that because there are too few units on the map in my games as it is.

And while we're at it. What's with the bizarre transport capacities/movement penalties for air/ground units? Anybody ever hear of a C-5A or C-141? Air should be able to carry 2 units and move the same as their parent chassis. Same with ground transport. Again, I haven't been able to figure out a way to fix this using the rules files.

I don't really care if Firaxis did things the way they did for game balance. I understand that. I just want to be able to change things to the way I see them.