Whereas my mod adds more things for human player to do.
Alpha Centauri Thought Control mod
Alpha Centauri Thought Control mod
This one. If it suits you. It is memorable. It's also good enough to have become part of my avatar in this forum.
I think the odds checker, which I always have turned on nowadays, is completely lying to me.
It does not agree with Part 2 of your analysis.
I think a lot of combat systems could work, if the displayed odds were actually true. A player gains instincts over enough iterations, if the phenomena are consistent.
Ok I finally get it now. A reactor gives you slightly cheaper unit costs, but that's it. No other benefit. That puts beginning of game units much more at parity with end of game units. Why upgrade?
Still working on my massive DAR, so not free to test this right now. Got some other life concerns too. But when I have time, I'll look at it.
Judging on thinker.ini, you've included an outdated version of thinker mod, or is it just outdated version of ini file by mistake ?
Judging on thinker.ini, you've included an outdated version of thinker mod, or is it just outdated version of ini file by mistake ?
I checked it and it matches v0.9. Can you point specific things made you think so?
Not sure what you mean by parity. End game units are much stronger.
1) Have cost fixed and level based like in thinker mod and have the cost of each level match development speed to extend the research beyond 300 turns
2) Make AI agree to trade only equal level techs as baseline, +- 1lvl depending on diplomacy standing, +- 1lvl depending on how much more or less traded techs are weighted according to AI weights.
3) If trade would be not possible according to the above rule, AI should trade for money according to tech cost, adjusted by diplomacy, commerce and AI tech weights.
4) Make probe steal tech action have a cost like base mind control, it should cost half the cost of research as baseline, modified by probe rating like mind control.
If you have 1/3 *combat round* chance, then the chance of the whole combat is much smaller than that, since after each damage taken the odds tilt even more in favor of the defender.
I assumed the odds of each round are adjusted for damage taken in the previous one. It'd 1/3 only if odds were always the same as in the first combat resolution round.
If that is the case with the combat function, please let me know, it's years since I've looked into it, I may misremember it.
The goal of the design presented is to make actively defending against AI ( by attacking incoming forces ) more difficult, without changing AI vs AI dynamics much.
Keep in mind that AI vs AI defender can replace/repair looses much faster and with thinker most factions remain of roughly equal power.
In vanilla AI mid game can conquer anything, *mostly* only after it gains a reactor advantage.
If you take reactor advantage out *and* tilt defenders odds so heavily as you did, in my opinion AI won't be capable of conquering anything.
Does AI use artillery to purposefully drop defenses to 50% ? With Tachyon field odds are already more in favor of the defender than in the early game.
If you calculate the odds, my proposal doesn't change base conquering odds at all from vanilla, only makes aggressor faction units take less damage in the open, from human defender attacks.
In my experience AIs with thinker are in permanent stalemate, I'd rather like to see more decisive actions between them, not less.
I'd love to have combat resolution function disassembled and it's source code as a part of the mod to tweak.
Or, you could just make 4 versions with binary tweaks: with/without collateral damage from loosing a unit in the stack and with 50%, or 75% facility bonuses.
With access to such tweaks I'd be interested in doing playtesting and experiments.
Some tweaks to the existing source code is the extend of my ability, if it comes to coding, so I can't make it happen myself
Yes, vanilla game favor an attacker in the open so much, that you can keep destroying a stream of units from a few times bigger AI opponent with almost no loses with a pack of cheap rovers and clever tactics abusing predictability of the AI. By removing collateral damage and increasing armor to weapon ratio you could make it impossible.
But after you increase armor ratio, you should imo proportionally decrease perimeter defense and tachyon field bonuses, or AI won't be able to deal with conquering bases, since it usually won't prepare an attack with artillery properly. While we are at artillery, I'd reduce max damage from arty to 50%, and max damage in the base to 70%, for the same reason: AI can't use it to the full potential, by nerfing it you even the playing field a bit, while still keeping artillery worthy of using.
These are my ideas to make it more difficult for a player, to fight against strong AI opponent, while keeping dynamics between AIs mostly unchanged.
I'll see if I can find and expose defense values anyway.
changes that would allow AI wear down player's defenses even when he concentrates power in a defending base.
It's interesting, that we see an opposite problem with AI :)
In my opinion without reactor advantage, it's not effective in the conquest enough and you think it's too effective already.
The problem is that both of them being quite sloppy it is often happens that one side that somehow amassed numbers already just beat the crap out of other who cannot organize proper defense.
1) thinker AI can sometimes remain completely without army even into midgame, if it has peace with neighbours and it's threat level was never ticked, no amount of unbalanced defense bonuses will fix that.
It's equally easy for a player, to steamroll such defended mostly by formers faction btw.
2) AI won't upgrade units,
3) Support level that gives free units up to the base size, is completely overpowered in the early and early midgame,
Solutions:
1) Modify thinker production code so it always produces some units up to certain producion percentage dedicated to support, regardless of the threat level. I was thinking of making it configurable via thinker.ini for easy playtesting and tuning, I was thinking something like 35%( ini variable ) +- 5%* ai_fight ( so 30 - 40% depending on faction ). Tradeoff is 30% slower development, but AI would always be prepared for defense.
2) If 1) is implemented and player try to gain advantage by developing without any army ( more then 3x smaller army ), make *neighboring* ai_fight 0 and 1 factions without treaty change diplomacy status to vendetta ( with exception of early game ), or heavily deteriorate their disposition toward the player, if you could access this value.
3) Implement unit upgrade with money, in simillar fasion thinker implemented facilities rushing with money.
4) Modify SE settings and faction bonuses, so SUPPORT3 is not possible until MilAlg
It's not the combat odds that are real reason for a problem you've identified, and such significant changes favoring defender odds won't really solve them, but will introduce other issues of their own.
I was disabling human indestructible snowball army exploit by this.
I'll try to first give a shot to the values you've set and if I indeed encounter the issues I foresee, I'll start doing other experiments.
As for skipping collateral from defeated unit, there is a check to skip it if inside the base, it should be enough to modify its condition
I still cannot wrap my head around why you want to play with it? This one seems to be nicely designed and causes least problem. It is a natural defense against stack of doom when attacker can move ~100 unit stack of mixed attackers and defenders to the base and be sure none of their attacker will be even slightly damaged by preventive strikes from the base. Decreasing collateral damage from 100% in Civ 1/2 to 20% seems like a brilliant idea. Now you still can destroy whole stack but you need 5 successful attacks against it. If less then stacked attackers can still attack in their turn but with lower power.
I still cannot wrap my head around why you want to play with it? This one seems to be nicely designed and causes least problem. It is a natural defense against stack of doom when attacker can move ~100 unit stack of mixed attackers and defenders to the base and be sure none of their attacker will be even slightly damaged by preventive strikes from the base. Decreasing collateral damage from 100% in Civ 1/2 to 20% seems like a brilliant idea. Now you still can destroy whole stack but you need 5 successful attacks against it. If less then stacked attackers can still attack in their turn but with lower power.
For this reason I use only large stacks of speeders, or elite infantry, so I can move my stack and attack in the same turn with full strenght and without a risk of loosing from retaliation if I successfullly conquer the base. AI doesn't do this and their stacks are free game, so it's another nerf that should benefit AI much more than the human player.
It doesn't also makes sense, why should in lets say a 25 unit stack, killing 20% units completely doom remaining 80%
? It's not even necessary, with the way multiround combat works, even killing just 2 units in a stack renders remaing force completely useless for a base assault. It's a feature for a casual player imo, that prevents him from getting bored, evolution of which bacame 1UPT which ruined the CIV series. Of course such a huge change may break the game in a way that I can't foresee yet, but I always wanted to try it.
I hope you didn't loose too much time doing me these favors. I don't have any more of such ideas, so hopefully I won't bother you with more tasks ;)
[...] Real life works differently. But this is irrelevant to game design. Let's avoid such arguments.
[...] That is the whole point of any rule in the game - to counter some other tactics.
Sorry, I don't follow what ruined Civ series?1 UPT = 1 Unit Per Tile, from Civ 5 and onwards, introduced because of all casuals complaing about stacks of doom. Civ 4 is the last one I've played and I refuse to even try the new ones on that account alone ( there are plenty other reasons, based on online discussions ). I want to play a strategy game, if I wanted an abstract board game, I'd stick to chess. In a strategy game economy and logistics should win the war and tactics should be able to only trip the balance.
[...] With collateral damage I don't see a problem.In a strategy game of this scale, a confrontation between two stacks of units of equal power, resulting in a total destruction of one side with almost no loses on the other, being solely determined by which side happened to be the attacker is not acceptable to me and against AI, it'll almost always the player be an attacker and that alone kills most of the challenge in war part of these 4x games imo.
With vanilla rules, I can indefinitely hold off an AI faction of equal power to mine, by dedicating only 10 - 20% of my economy to it, while AI will burn all it's production on the same war.
I want rules that would put me under enough stress, to loose turns advantage against other uninvolved in war AI factions if I get attacked.
Sorry, I don't follow what ruined Civ series?1 UPT = 1 Unit Per Tile, from Civ 5 and onwards, introduced because of all casuals complaing about stacks of doom. Civ 4 is the last one I've played and I refuse to even try the new ones on that account alone ( there are plenty other reasons, based on online discussions ). I want to play a strategy game, if I wanted an abstract board game, I'd stick to chess. In a strategy game economy and logistics should win the war and tactics should be able to only trip the balance.
Casual player can't stand when he ends up in unwinable position, while giving him tools to save the day even when confronted with superior power, provides him a great satisfaction. This the design goal behind 1UPT, or stack wipes, which allow wins against many times stronger AIs. What is the point of playing with rules like that, if you are a competent player ? I instead want to be destroyed, if I fail at "build" part of 4X.
[...] With collateral damage I don't see a problem.In a strategy game of this scale, a confrontation between two stacks of units of equal power, resulting in a total destruction of one side with almost no loses on the other, being solely determined by which side happened to be an attacker is not acceptable to me and against AI, it'll almost always the player be an attacker and that alone kills most of the challenge in war part of these 4x games imo.
Of course I may not like it in practice, when I actualy try it ;)
Removing collateral damage helps AI attack human. However, it also helps human attack AI and in much greater proportions since human will exploit it better. You are solving one problem but creates bigger one at the same time. I am up for the challenge with my both hands but this one in particular is a questionable fix. Did you think about reducing it to 10-20% maybe? That would almost not hurt AI since it does not stack too much of them together but will still prevent human from humongous stacks of doom.As I explained, there is little that prevents me from safely using homongenous stacks of doom already and my stacks almost never suffer collateral from AI attacks, while I wipe enemy stacks quiet often. Removing them completely only removes this huge advantage from me, in return I gain an advantage of being able to use slower, but cheaper infantry units with +25% bonus on base assault, instead of only speeder chasis and that is only if I can't produce elite infantry anyway. Without collateral, a disorganised stream of AI units should have more chance of building up at my gates, into a stack that can overcome my defense.
Still you want some combat balance to provide you a cushion of protection from slightly stronger opponent.This is why I fully agree with increasing armor values, I was only worried that maybe you are increasing them a bit too much in mid-late game.
Maybe leave vanilla, except for "max damage" < 1, generate a random float (0-1), if it's smaller than "max damage" defender receive 1HP damage.
In your very extreme example, there would be 26% chance to deal 1HP damage.
I thought bonuses are additive ? Isn't it 1 + ( 2 + 0,25 + 0,25 ) = 3,5 ? In which case it'd be 33% chance for artillery hit.
In the previous post, aren't the axes on the graph mislabeled ? Shouldn't axis x be first round winning odds and y battle winning odds ?
I'm also excited to play your creation, so it's not only you...
Except you kept comming up with new stuff and I've kept postponing my playing, since I didn't want to burn my desire on unfinished product ;)
But since the last release, weeks of playing are guaranteed at some point and it's years since my last binge playing of SMAC.
> * Land and sea borders should be 8 and not restricted by shore.
That also always annoyed me, but the soultion is simple:
Just make coastal bases count as both, sea and land bases for the purpose of border spread, done. Inland bases shouldn't be able project influence over sea tiles imo.
Oh sure, I agree the radius on sea should be increased to 8, but as far as connecting the realms, coastal bases should be the bridge imo.
As for AI, the vanilla code already favors *very heavily* placement of coastall bases and it's already a part of the thinker source.
Except thinker currently uses it only to give an initial goto order for a colony pod and then overrides this code the moment the pod leaves the base radius, to pop a new base as soon as possible.
I, for a long time think, that this is a mistake, the original code for base placement could be improved and then allowed to guide pods to a bit more distant, but better destinations and the gaps of empty arid terrain should be filled last. Benefits could be numerous: faster growth, faster land grab denying human player terrain to spread on without conflict and plenty of coastal bases like in vanilla.
In fact it's on the top of my list of things I wanted to work on, but unfortunately I am too lazy to start ;)
Inductio's idea to make tubes on enemy territory count as roads and make AI build tubes again.
Land units should cost less for the same firepower, I've added 1 to the cost value of everything below hovertank.
That said thinker already doesn't build tubes anyway, so it doesn't matter and with all gameplay changes already implemented you could reenable tubes for AIs even without this feature and it'd already help them. Because each base assault costs many lost units now, and repairing damaged ones takes few turns, so unless you have few times units more then enemy, it's already impossible to take too many bases in a single turn and tubes would help AI to retaliate before you can repair your invading forces.
make tubes cost 1/6 movement point, instead of free.
There is no reason to stack more and more defense bonuses, you'll make it impossible to conquer anything.
If you get consistent 1:3 odds in SMAC, you'll make it impossible to conquer without 4:1 economy advantage, do you really want that ?
Also homeland defense bonuses already exist, they're called sensor array and children creeche.
You also need a lot of artillery to damage in the base and since you've made arty use defense rating in duels, attacking arty is at the same disadvantage during artillery duel as regular units during their base assault.
Just make AI mix in some decent proportion of arty units in later stages of the game, no extra bonuses required imo. The most important thing now, would be to make AI build enough units to dedicate around turn 40, something like 20-30% ( depending on AI fight ) of production to military support, even if not threatend and in later stages of the game it should be even more, also disband/upgrade obsolete units.
I've usually post on a gaming forum where people are edgy and annoying all the time for fun and needlesly carried some of this attitude here.
Regarding homeland security bonus it doesn't sit well with me, the main advantage of homeland is better logistics and there is already sensors array bonus.
So, I'd rather give 0,8 Attack disadvantage everywhere outside owned territory, due to supply difficulties.
As for defense, I'd introduce 1,25 Defense entrenchment bonus, to each defender that still has all its movement points ( was not moving, or attacking during its turn ).
As far as I'm concerned you've fixed the combat already, we are just exchanging loose ideas about minutae details, mostly for the fun of it, at this point.
So I'm not bothering you with trying to implement them, if they don't resonate with you.
Civ games have entrenchment, it solves the same issue as all other defense increases you've implemented, but in more interesting way, that adds some new tactical consideration, with one simple rule. But you are right again, because generally defenders on homeland territory would be entrenched, except for fresh reinforcements and with increased armor in this mod, it'd be still effective to sit in a base and let enemy entrench while he awaits his reinforcements and strike him back only after surviving his assault, so the end result would be very close to your more abstract homeland bonus and not worth the hassle of implementing. It would also probably benefit player more than AIs.
I have to stop trying to be contrarian this much, but at least thanks to this exceange, I've warmed up the idea of homeland bonus, because I've realised it serves the same main purpose as entrenchement bonus, which I always liked in Civ games.
Further playtesting is suspended until this imbalance is addressed. It is a dealbreaker.
What happens when I drop my own SMACX AI Growth mod on top of The Will To Power?
[..]
So here goes: The Will to AI Growth mod. Version 43 of Tim's, version 1.41 of mine.
consequence of the upgrade bit hack
My bogus ability bit hack, which is used to prevent game confusion for unit upgradeability, unfortunately makes a Clean Former ridiculously expensive.
- colony pods are more expensive - i like that - it stops base spam race somewhat. What i don't like is Rover colony pod and AI building it early.. Its more expensive and does more harm than good.
- terraforming - i think the best thing for AI would be to just give Centauri ecology to everyone at start of the game - its that important it would made AI much better overall. In cases where AI somehow skips the tech - they are cripped forever.
Forests: didn't play much yet - but i found them mostly useless for Gaians. Double nerf might be too hard on them but we'll see. Energy nerf really hurts + its 12 turns to build them. Gotta play non-gaians tho.. forests spread like plague so it could be deserved nerf. I planted few forests and quickly realized i don't need them (being gaians).
Fungus: seems maybe overpowered (playing Map of panet.. there's lots of fungus there) with Gaians and Manifold harmonics. With forest terraforming slowed and weaker.. i found using 2-1-0 fungus very atractive.. then energy ramp up quickly and these are quite good tiles.. with 2-1-2, 2-1-3 early.. then 3-1-2, 3-1-3 progress (gaians have +1 fungus). You get lots of them for free - weakness being mineral production and "plant fungus" action coming late. Thats good at this point its viable strategy. But then i saw Morgan building Manifold harmonics... and was surprised its that early - and its relatively cheap. Stole the tech and built it and its bonkers... Every tile is 4-2-5 (i'll see to add some screenshots later).. you can spam new bases in fungus areas and its quite awesome - that is once you switch to Green SE and +3 planet. Nice thing is Green has -2 Industry its quite a pain so it balances it somewhat. But anyway whole game my research is top and i have so much money i can buy fascilities all the time.
*Its plenty fun, but its broken a bit too early imo - i think Manifold Harmonics need to come later and needs to be a bit more expensive. Fungus also maybe gives too much energy too quickly. I like to see funguns usable.. so 2-1-2.. or 3-1-2 (with gaians) is good and fun.. but upgrades to 3-1-3, 3-1-4 should come a bit later - or better move later Manifold harmonics. Otherwise planet factions have no use for standard terraforming besides ocassional borehole or mine. I actually have big ecology problems with fungus bases only - and gotta spam centauri preserves.. (or tree farms without forests xD). Temple of planets is too expensive but i started building a few.. i probably should build tree farms they give nice bonuses anyway.
- unlocking resources techs at start - i think its a good move overall - its a bit unbalanced - i started near boreholes for example.. or Yang got into jungle areas. But AI without these techs is so crippled that it ruins the game. So i am good with that. Would be nice they start with formers as i said earlier.
- on probes - they might be too expensive early - it gets better with reactors a bit. AI starts using them more later and they are quite a pain. I actually built def infantry probes i n my bases.. otherwise AI mind-probe bases, steal techs and destroys stuff. Here i actually like that probe gets +50% def in base since it suits me : D. It would be interesting if probes could be modded that tech stealing is harder.. mind-probes also are often too cheap in far-away bases.
Command nexus - looks way too expensive. Took ages in my game - Morgan completed it eventually. I was on it for awhile but i decided to pick up different wonders.
Maritime control - don't mind that.. it comes late so production is better.. and relative value is less. It might be actually good to reduce cost of these fasciities to 60 and project to 600.. Considering also how much you buffed defense in the game. In my game i was most of the time in war - and i built command centers quite late due to how expensive they are. I also wanted Command nexus but found it too expensive. (I don't like crawlers to speed up projects - feels like exploit).
Virtual world - was always too strong project. I'd bump that from 600 to 800.. and really move it later to midgame. Should be on discover tech so Zakharov picks it up if possible. Its free fascilities SP and very strong once - Hologram theaters are not that expensive, but they are 3 maintenance which is important. Or nerf HT maintenance to 2..
Network nodes, Energy bank, Biology lab - I really liked that you reduced cost - looks appropriate. Energy bank - SP that gives energy bank in each base - i think you moved it way too far in tech. The problem is that player has Energy bank in every city - since build style is promoted in mode - so this SP comes late and its very expensive. I am in 2280 i think i might build it - just to scrap energy banks in base and get the money back.. and to deny AI. It would be way more interesting if this project came earlier so we can "calculate" to delay energy banks and wait for completion of project. That said its very strong SP so it should not come too early.
The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm - this is totally broken SP. Good that you made it more expensive. It just ruins AI.. i am not sure if AI will build probes with Alg. Ench. i think it might - but AI just suicides very expensive armored probes on me now. In vanilla they at least suicide cheap 0-1-2 probes and don't build them much. This project would be much more sane if it would just reduce AI chances for probe actions to max 50%. Is that possible? That or it should be removed from the game - or put to level 10 tech very late.
Lab doubling SP - should be 600 instead of 400 minerals probably.
It doesn't help that you actually made psi units more expensive - and brood pit comes late and reactors don't work on psi units. I learned to use cheap units to attack non-combat units and use worms to attack high-tech targets.. just not worth risking worms on non-combat units. If used like that it feels ok, but initial shock is.. well shock.
- I like that you removed those 3r, 3p armors. Good point there. Also it feels like there's too many armor and weapon techs - i felt forced to tech up all the time. Then its hard to build those units - Skunkworks - free prototype facilitie comes way too late. You might consider making prototypes 30% more expensive or just put this facility way earlier.
Here's what i was saying about combat problem with worms and psi combat. The way PSI combat works it turns out that its really bad idea to attack anything non-combat in enemy land due to territory bonus. Worm is relatively expensive and it actually badly loses attacking cheap formers for example. On screenshot in attachment formers are in base.. and its double bonus - and they are unarmored. Foils are also problem.. probes probably - AI at least builds armored probes.
Territory bonus is kind of understandable for military units - they are "trained".. but it turns out that non-combat is real pain for PSI attack. I had quite a few situation where these units did way better than equivalent trained/experienced defensive units. I read about combat goals of the mod - and its ok i can see how you want for example to have 8 str attacker die vs former on forest in his land (having 2 str total)... so its like 4:1 and say 20% of cases attacker dies.
10x the facility cost for an SP is quite high. You're often better off just building the facilities at that point. What's omitted is the opportunity cost. It takes one base longer to make the SP than individual ones. Ok, a human player can do mass crawlers to circumvent this but can the AI? The bigger opportunity cost for many SPs is all the labs spent. SPs should be a reward for investing in labs over other things like facilities or units. Otherwise there's not much advantage to being ahead of the curve, which leads to conquer being more of a dominant strategy over build. Or simply tech stealing because the SP race is so long.
Command nexus - looks way too expensive.
The Human Genome Project, 30, 0, Cyber, Disable, +1 Talent Each Base, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2,
The Command Nexus, 30, 0, Poly, Disable, Command Center Each Base, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0,
The Weather Paradigm, 40, 0, EcoEng, Disable, Terraform Rate +50%, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2,
The Merchant Exchange, 30, 0, IndEcon, Disable, +1 Energy Each Square Here, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
The Empath Guild, 60, 0, HomoSup, Disable, 2x Votes; Infiltrate Every Faction, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
The Citizens' Defense Force, 30, 0, Subat, Disable, Perimeter Defense Each Base, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0,
The Virtual World, 30, 0, Brain, Disable, Network Nodes Help Drones, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1,
The Planetary Transit System, 30, 0, EnvEcon, Disable, New Bases Begin At Size 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1,
The Xenoempathy Dome, 50, 0, Eudaim, Disable, Fungus Movement Bonus, 1, 2, 0, 0, 2,
The Neural Amplifier, 60, 0, WillPow, Disable, Psi Defense +50%, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2,
The Maritime Control Center, 40, 0, DocInit, Disable, Naval Movement +2; Naval Bases, 1, 2, 0, 0, 2,
The Planetary Datalinks, 30, 0, OptComp, Disable, Any Tech Known To 3 Others, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1,
The Supercollider, 30, 0, E=Mc2, Disable, Labs +100% At This Base, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0,
The Ascetic Virtues, 30, 0, Magnets, Disable, Pop. Limit Relaxed; +1 POLICE, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2,
The Longevity Vaccine, 40, 0, BioEng, Disable, Fewer Drones or More Profits, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2,
The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, 50, 0, Algor, Disable, Immunity to Probe Teams, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0,
The Pholus Mutagen, 80, 0, AlphCen, Disable, Ecology Bonus; Lifecycle Bonus, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2,
The Cyborg Factory, 80, 0, MindMac, Disable, Bioenh. Center Every Base, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0,
The Theory of Everything, 40, 0, Unified, Disable, Labs +100% At This Base, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0,
The Dream Twister, 100, 0, SentRes, Disable, Psi Attack +50%, 1, 2, 0, 0, 2,
The Universal Translator, 30, 0, Integ, Disable, Two Free Techs, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0,
The Network Backbone, 60, 0, DigSent, Disable, +1 Lab Per Commerce/Net Node, 0, 0, 2, 0, 1,
The Nano Factory, 40, 0, IndAuto, Disable, Repair Units; Low Upgrade Costs, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0,
The Living Refinery, 60, 0, Metal, Disable, +2 SUPPORT (social), 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
The Cloning Vats, 100, 0, BioMac, Disable, Population Boom At All Bases, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2,
The Self-Aware Colony, 60, 0, SentEco, Disable, Maintenance Halved; Extra Police,0, 0, 0, 2, 2,
Clinical Immortality, 100, 0, NanEdit, Disable, 2x Votes; Extra Talent Every Base, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2,
The Space Elevator, 100, 0, IndRob, Disable, Energy +100%/Orbital Cost Halved,1, 2, 0, 2, 2,
The Singularity Inductor, 150, 0, ConSing, Disable, Quantum Converter Every Base, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
The Bulk Matter Transmitter, 100, 0, Matter, Disable, +2 Minerals Every Base, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
The Telepathic Matrix, 150, 0, Thresh, Disable, No More Drone Riots; +2 PROBE, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2,
The Voice of Planet, 100, 0, Thresh, Disable, Begins Ascent To Transcendence, 0,-2, 2, 2, 2,
The Ascent to Transcendence, 300, 0, Thresh, Disable, End of Singular Sentience Era, 0, 0, 2, 2, 2,
The Manifold Harmonics, 100, 0, SecMani, Disable, Bonus Resources In Fungus, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2,
The Nethack Terminus, 60, 0, HAL9000, Disable, Stronger Probe Teams, 1, 2, 0, 0, 0,
The Cloudbase Academy, 80, 0, Gravity, Disable, Faster/Stronger Air Units, 1, 2, 0, 2, 2,
The Planetary Energy Grid, 50, 0, PlaEcon, Disable, Energy Bank At Every Base, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0,
One thing I wasn't sure about was why Empath, Clean, Hypnotic, and Non-Lethal had such high costs. They might as well be disabled in that case?
If you're releasing a fork, you should update the MOD_VERSION #define accordingly. It's supposed to uniquely identify the version you are using while in game.
The tech cost formula in this mod is broken. It ignores the actual faction SE Research rating completely, m->rule_techcost does not refer to the same variable in social engineering. Actual variable Faction->SE_research is not included.
Did you do anything about the combat odds? I think they are fine as they are. Maybe they give a slightly too large advantage to the side with higher strength.
But for instance two Missile interceptors should be able to trade with one Chaos Interceptor.
Another potential problem is Fusion reactor. It both makes units cheaper and gives them huge power boost.
It doesn't appear to say what your combat formula really is. The example you give is a bit odd. A unit with 2-1 combat strength advantage should of course win with very high probability. However it should take damage in the process.
You still could have told me. From what I got from the other thread you do only two combat rounds and then randomly assign the damage of the victor within the window given by round wins. Is that correct? It seems extremely random.
Btw, I really do think vanilla combat has its upsides. It is very unique favoring sting operations and hit-and-run over normal combat since you essentially can't reasonably build a stack of more than 3-4 units.
Do you still have stack damage? Did you change self destruct damage? Sorry for asking so many questions but your readme is not as detailed as I would like.
It seems Centauri Ecology removes restrictions? I like that. You may have nerfed forests a bit too much. I'm not sure they are worth it at all anymore.
No problem ^^
Anyway by this point i solved most issues i had in the game - so it was mostly nice finisher tech to make the faction op. Worm spam + Locusts to finish the job.
I got other E10 tech (Secrets of Alpha Centauri) with Temple of Planet much earlier - at M.Y. 2358 - just took a look there. 30+ turns is huge difference this late in the game. Centauri Genetics is kinda hidden behind lots of discovery, build and conquer prerequisite techs so that delays it. Swap these two ^^.
Explore 77%, Discover 70%, Build 66%, Conquer 93%. It might be my crap RNG luck as i almost completed every conquer tech - some were likely very expensive. I have the feeling game has more conquer technologies than any others.
Lastly on topic of costs and maintenance. This late Brood Pit is very cheap with only 80 minerals and 2 maintenance.. its the cost of one mindworm. It could easily be 150 minerals, 4 maintenance - but it doesn't really matter too much. Temple of Planet is for example 220 minerals, 3 maintenance. At this point i had +560 energy credits per turn on 50% economy.
- I forgot to comment on Dream Twister and Neural Amplifier - there are obviously great and strong, but not too op. I got one, missed other and worms still die. They are ofcourse better but its no cakewalk - one must spam a lot of units to overrun AI.
I did read parts of your readme. Chatting with you is more fun though. :) The problem with your logic is that you compare desert tiles with normal terrain. (In vanilla bad land doesn't matter that much. In your mod it does.) If you have a rolling rainy tile a farm (4 turns) makes it a 3-1 tile with the option of adding energy yield. A forest instead is 12 turns for a inferior tile. My point is that you would not forest desert tiles. You would avoid the area in the first place.
Did you change self-destruct damage? Also I didn't say that the hit-and-run style combat in vanilla did not have counterplay. Of course it had. There were overpowered ways to go about it (helicopters) though.
This one?
#define MOD_VERSION "Thinker Mod v1.0"
What should I put there?
Self-destruct damage is one of the reasons you can't build a stack. Any unit can be self-destructed in the field (even worms I think :)) ). They damage any unit on that tile and adjacent tiles for weapon strength * reactor level/2 rounded down. Units in bases are not effected. So self-destructing two fusion needlejets or a conventional missile and a laser needlejet will wipe out anything on adjacent tiles provided same reactor level is used. This is from memory from years ago so I can't guarantee it is perfectly accurate but should be about right.
This one?
#define MOD_VERSION "Thinker Mod v1.0"
What should I put there?
Obviously, "The Will To Power mod v45" or whatever release number you're on. Unless you're trying to simulate / fool / exercise GPL freedom and have it appear to be Thinker Mod. ;lol
I don't have such difficulties, doing *.txt only modding of the stock binary. A player did ask me about displaying a version number the other day. I had to explain why I couldn't. It's to your advantage if you can.
Version 46.
Here you go with more expensive Brood pit. Didn't move it earlier yet. It is still L10 (78% in tech tree). Where do you want it? 50%, 60%?
Are you saying native warfare is too OP at the end game?No its fine i wouldn't touch it. Its strong if +Planet is stacked and its hard to stack. One must eat -2 industry AND -3 growth from Green and for example pick Cybernetic and eat -3 Police rating. Now police rating can be overcome, but its not easy pick - Cha Dawn for example has good police bonus and its a shame to ruin it with Cybernetic. He does have +2 base Planet so he can actually skip Cybernetic and have strong worms. It also means not picking Knowledge for example. Its fine i think.
Where it is displayed? Some credits or something?
More expensive Brood Pit is logical and it pays for itself quite quickly anyway. I am fine with that. Now the main reason why would i want it earlier is due to The Cult of Planet faction. Its like one of their strength that get used very late. Thats the reasoning - now i am not sure on balancing side. For example if it comes earlier and its on 150/4 costs that balances it. Still Cultist get it for free!! So that cost change practically balances Gaians (or anyone using Mindworms) and changes nothing for The Cult of Planet.
Maybe you can try moving it one level earlier - to level 9 techs - i don't know how you get those % tech values -78% in tech tree. It E10 tech.. there is no E9 tech, E8 is Adv. Ecological Eng - Superformers. E7 are Isle of The Deep. Its definitely strong facility don't move it much if you decide to make the change.
Brood Pit on its own is not game-breaking, but in every base is strong - once i got it i could spam experienced worms quite faster - thats op. Good reason not to move it too early.
It depends on the circumstances a bit. If you just have the missile self-destructing it will narrowly not kill anything adjacent. Also if you want to eliminate defenders of a base the self-destruct won't do anything. However, if you have two missiles you can eliminate any number of stacked units (or merely close) units. That was my point. Due to this, the way air power works and stack damage conventional warfare like in other civ versions is impossible in vanilla Smac. If you did not change the mechanic this still holds for your mod once weapon power reaches a certain point (Missile/Chaos weapons).
It is useful to be able to disband units, but they should not deal any damage in the process. If you have access to the executable you could just change the behavior.
Yeah The Cult could use the boost - they really don't have much going for them except relying on worm warfare and police. Move it earlier, just not too much - after Isles of the Deep, before Locusts. In that case 2 or 3 maintenance is plenty - 4 is a lot for every base. Somehow i thought Free means no maintenance.. silly me !? The cost can stay at 150 min, it gives +2 police + other goodies after all.
Let's remove it? Everybody agrees?
150 seems too much.
Nobody else will build it this way.
360/6 seems to be expensive.
Overnerfing things with inane costing is worse than letting them be overpowered. It takes choice/strategy away in a much less enjoyable way.
Overnerfing things with inane costing is worse than letting them be overpowered. It takes choice/strategy away in a much less enjoyable way.
It has two benefits: native units building and POLICE.
I dislike a bit the concept of making everything super expensive to balance, makes early game super slow and things are still OP later. Better to nerf OP stuff a bit instead, imo.I agree with this - but examples below are mostly not relevat to this mod ^^.
Max bonus without Aero Complex 1/4 base size rounded down and 1/2 rounded up with Aero, balances both satellites and Cludbase Academy.No need for this in will to power mod. Satellites come late and bases are big already - its just more needless drag of spamming satelites. For vanilla it would be logical.
1) Condensers only increase raininess, no 50% food bonus, already implemented in Ytzii's patch and 4,4 Boreholes,
2) 1,1,2 forests - wood is not a useful material in s-f setting, but can be burned for energy ( or you could nerf it even further to 1,1,1 but it'd be too much imo ).
3) Remove a mining platform bonus from EcoEng and give it as aquatic faction bonus from the start instead of the current OP one, it'd balance both sea minerals in general and aquatic factions.
Crawlers:
1) Gather resourcess with 1 point penalty, already in Ytzii's patch.
2) No disbanding for 100% minerals to rush SP, but make one crawler transport 4 resource points between bases ( or 6 ).
Probe teams:
1) Add energy cost to tech stealing ( like half the cost to research +/- probe modifiers ), hijack mind control function and dialogue window for that.
2) Give tech stealing/mindcontrol bases adjustable multipliers.
3) Do not grant a free prototype from stealing a unit, unless stealing faction has the required tech.
Natives:I don't like this one. Isle of the Deep are very expensive - i think they are 120 min, Locusts as well. Sealurks are offensive unit at 80 minerals - and thats expensive as well. Sea/coastal bases are not exactly mineral rich. They die to stupid thing like formers and foils and probes, especially in enemy territory. And they often die vs combat units as well - if they get hurt AI counterattacks and wipes them with sometimes much cheaper ships (due to reactors). I had Drones spamming tons of cheap 3-3-4 ruining expensive Sealurks - you just can't get numbers to win naval war. Its dumb to tisk Isle of the Deep in combat - they have one purpose here and thats transport in dangerous waters.
Make each additional lifecycle granted by facilities ( biology lab and brood pit ) cost one additional mineral row for worms, spore launchers and sealurks and 2 additional rows for locust and isles.
So that changes it:
The Citizens' Defense Force = 500 -> 400
The Maritime Control Center = 800 -> 600
The Cloudbase Academy = 1200 -> 1200
* Command Center cost/maint is 6/2.
* The Command Nexus cost is 40.
* The Citizens' Defense Force cost is 40.
I suspect that a very low popularity of this mod is caused by wild changes to vanilla tech tree and few other aspects and most fans would rather play more familliar SMAC but with more challenge.
Early game is awful with all these huge costs for everything and make people bounce, less brute force approach and more subtlety would make this excellent mod good imo.
As discussed in a thinker thread, nerfing advanced terraforming and crawlers would help AI compared to the human player who can alway abuse it better.Its not exactly that simple with Thinker AI I believe. The AI is so good with borehole, condenser spam that player has to use it -_-. AI also spams lots of forests. Induktio really did a good job there. AI also spams supply crawler a lot and uses them even better than player.
Forest 2 minerals are ridiculous, it's better than mine on a rolling terrain and it's a leftover from civ games, that didn't had boreholes and mining platforms, or that many rocky tiles for a good mine, to generate minerals. I think 1,1,2 would be perfect.
I want less minerals and other resources at play in late game which would slow down late game without issues in early game, like increased costs generate, or without the need to move interesting toys into a very late game tech tree levels.
I dislike a bit the concept of making everything super expensive to balance, makes early game super slow and things are still OP later. Better to nerf OP stuff a bit instead, imo.
Satellites:
Max bonus without Aero Complex 1/4 base size and 1/2 with Aero, rounded down, balances both satellites and Cludbase Academy.
1) Condensers only increase raininess, no 50% food bonus, already implemented in Ytzii's patch and 4,4 Boreholes,
2) 1,1,2 forests - wood is not a useful material in s-f setting, but can be burned for energy ( or you could nerf it even further to 1,1,1 but it'd be too much imo ).
3) Remove a mining platform bonus from EcoEng and give it as aquatic faction bonus from the start instead of the current OP one, it'd balance both sea minerals in general and aquatic factions.
Crawlers:
1) Gather resourcess with 1 point penalty, already in Ytzii's patch.
2) No disbanding for 100% minerals to rush SP, but make one crawler transport 4 resource points between bases ( or 6 ).
3) Do not grant a free prototype from stealing a unit, unless stealing faction has the required tech.
Natives:
Make each additional lifecycle granted by facilities ( biology lab and brood pit ) cost one additional mineral row for worms, spore launchers and sealurks and 2 additional rows for locust and isles.
Add 1 more row for each two "free" lifecycle bonuses granted by SP, SE, or faction bonuses for spore, sealurks and 1 row for every "free" lifecycle for isles and locust.
Brood Pits and Cover Ops Centers
I think cost should be no more than 3-4 turns in that stage for a good base - otherwise it won't be built. Its ok to build Command center 6-7 turn early on.. but on turn 200 there's no way i am using 6-7 turns in many bases building those facilities and still having to wait to build worms afterward. I can spam ton of worms instead from every base in those 12 turns and just finish the job. Police rating is not that valuable this late in the game - especially when you need to build police units as well.
So, that said, good bases in my last game at a time i got brood pits had around 50 minerals - i think i had one at 68 it was eco-damage cap at time.. many other weaker ones were 20 - 30. If you price BP between 100-150 minerals then it will get between 3-6 turns thats roughly ok - very best bases might get in in 2, weaker don't have to build it. You can probably go with 120 minerals if you find that ok, and no more than 3 maintenance. Its excessive to go over. Bvanevery wanted to move the facility out of use - i kind of don't like that argument, I'd like to see it used.
@tnevolin Maybe try putting it in Secrets of Alpha Centauri (L9) for start. It would be an upgrade and won't risk much being op.
I wouldn't put CoC in same bracket with BP. I built two in that game just to have stronger probes to win combat. Two bases can spam ton of probes and they don't cost support - worms do and you can't have them on fungus all the time. There's also no point to have CoC in many bases. One can have more expensive CoC in both minerals and maintenance.
About overpricing in the mods - there's no much point to it - you are both probably hurting AI. For example i find Aerocomplexes overpriced at 120/3 (for the time they appear) and just don't build them - or build them in 2-3 best bases eventually. AI wastes ton of time building them in most bases. Then i try to snatch Cloudbase or if i don't get it i don't really care. Its not that hard to spam more Food satellites or planes instead. I think its actually benefical for AI to have them cheaper as they are good defensive facility for them. Same goes for Naval Yard as they work as Perimeter Defenses.
For example overpriced special projects. The only really good reason to overprice something is that if you allow it early - but don't want to have it built early - like Command Nexus. If you put The Command Nexus at 1000 minerals and its so good - than the player will get it if he really wants it. I can just spam Crawlers and get any expensive special project - yes you made me invest in Crawlers but i get the op thing. But poor AI will waste tons of time on it and lose progress - Bvanevery said AI uses Crawlers to rush - but in any case they are not nearly as effective as player. For example Cloudbase Academy is expensive - that just means its easier to get for a player :D.
Special projects i can't get are actually cheaper ones - that AI builds before me. Thats important. Or one could teach AI to use multiple supply crawlers to rush very expensive projects. In that sense, 50 min base building special projects shouldn't take more than 15-20 turns. I wouldn't price later special projects more than 1000 minerals unless they are very best. The later project appear the faster it should be built. If its broken - then ok - but move it anyway to tech 10+. Very late best bases top 100 minerals.. and you won't be playing much with such power - its game over.
QuoteProbe teams:
1) Add energy cost to tech stealing ( like half the cost to research +/- probe modifiers ), hijack mind control function and dialogue window for that.
2) Give tech stealing/mindcontrol bases adjustable multipliers.
3) Do not grant a free prototype from stealing a unit, unless stealing faction has the required tech.
It would be interesting to nerf tech stealing - its op. At least AI is doing good work with probes, they defend and attack well. I would really nerf mind-probing bases its so obnoxious when you lose entire base + units in and around it. AI could actually spam less attacking probes - they seem crazy with it.
QuoteNatives:I don't like this one. Isle of the Deep are very expensive - i think they are 120 min, Locusts as well. Sealurks are offensive unit at 80 minerals - and thats expensive as well. Sea/coastal bases are not exactly mineral rich. They die to stupid thing like formers and foils and probes, especially in enemy territory. And they often die vs combat units as well - if they get hurt AI counterattacks and wipes them with sometimes much cheaper ships (due to reactors). I had Drones spamming tons of cheap 3-3-4 ruining expensive Sealurks - you just can't get numbers to win naval war. Its dumb to tisk Isle of the Deep in combat - they have one purpose here and thats transport in dangerous waters.
Make each additional lifecycle granted by facilities ( biology lab and brood pit ) cost one additional mineral row for worms, spore launchers and sealurks and 2 additional rows for locust and isles.
Locusts don't really get extra combat advantage and they are expensive. They are good due to their movement/felxibility but thats about it - mindoworms are better and cheaper attacking unit. Locusts also get somewhat countered by AAA and interceptors.. mindworms don't - AI don't really spam trance units that much. By this time you also have magtubes for movement issues. If i spam locusts thats for micro convenience - i am too lazy to transport worms.
I would consider nerfing Command centers to +1 morale. It makes SE choices stronger and goes with logic of making morale valuable in your mod.
As for Naval Yards and Aerospace complexes they act as defensive facilites for AI. Player is not dumb enough to spam them - making them cheaper would help AI i think.
What are your thoughts on expensive projects - doesn't it make it just easier for player to get projects? That logic i mentioned in posts above - it gives more time to player to use supply crawlers.
a) making projects cheap enough that first who gets it has best chance to build it. that would often mean AI gets it - not the player. projects are all over the place so presumably zakharov would not build every project. he's a wimp anyway. and i think AI can be told not to build more than n projects at a time?
b) disable supply crawlers project rushing completely (and make projects reasonably priced for building
c) is it possible to teach AI to plan/use multiple supply crawlers to rush secret project?
d) is it possible to teach AI to rush secret projects with energy credits?
The goal of all of these would be to level the playing field. The thing is that player can pick up any secret projects at will in late midgame. Making projects more expensive is counter productive - it just makes it certain that player will get it.
It's very relevant since the primary tool it uses to deal with issues is to increase mineral cost. And exe modding is also very within tnevolin's capabilities.
Some of my "revolutionary" ideas became a staple of this mod for me, like no collateral damage for example.
I suspect that a very low popularity of this mod is caused by wild changes to vanilla tech tree and few other aspects and most fans would rather play more familliar SMAC but with more challenge.
Early game is awful with all these huge costs for everything and make people bounce, less brute force approach and more subtlety would make this excellent mod good imo.
As discussed in a thinker thread, nerfing advanced terraforming and crawlers would help AI compared to the human player who can alway abuse it better.
I want less minerals and other resources at play in late game which would slow down late game without issues in early game, like increased costs generate, or without the need to move interesting toys into a very late game tech tree levels. The ultimate goal is to make AI competent with the same rules as player, without heavy cheats, ideally to the point that it is competent at one level below transcend.
Mines on rolling are already fine early 1,2,0 mineral resource, but ridiculous 2 mineral forest is so good that it's absolutely pointless to build mines, especially on rolling.
It's a leftover from civ games, that didn't had boreholes and mining platforms, or that many rocky tiles for a good mine, to generate minerals.
It's secondary, but from a versimilitude perspective wood is not a viable production material in a s-f setting, unlike in medieval times, but energy rich plants can be burned for energy.
So I'd imagine forests here as mostly fast growing energetic plants plantations and I think 1,1,2 with 8 turns cost would be perfect.
Removing EcoEng platform bonus is suggested to balance proposed land advanced terraforming nerfs.
No need for expensive crawlers with gathering penalty and 1 mineral forest and it would hurt human player way more than AI.
Super expensive crawlers can be abused by human sniping, or stealing them from AI's making them waste resources this way.
And most importantly, huge costs for basic things are a true blight of early game in this mod.
On units side will to power might be slightly too expensive at times - but they can be rushed - later there is so much money available that you don't know what to do with it.
As for secret projects - i don't like that they are so expensive - it doesn't make sense. I don't think that fulfills reasonable purpose.
Crawlers:Quote1) Gather resourcess with 1 point penalty, already in Ytzii's patch.
2) No disbanding for 100% minerals to rush SP, but make one crawler transport 4 resource points between bases ( or 6 ).
1)
Crawlers are similar to mineral multiplier facilities. You invest in them once and then get return forever. The problem with crawlers is that the return from them is not limited comparing to facilities (which you have limited number). Reducing individual input won't cancel crawler rush as long as they are profitable at all. Same type of solution is to make them more expensive - thus increasing initial investment and reducing profit/investment ratio as I did in my mod.
The more cardinal solution would be just restrict total crawler yield for base same way as for satellites. This would put a stop on their unlimited spawning.
2)
Don't get why you don't want rush SP with them. It'll make you build everything in a single productive base which will be vulnerable to PB later on. Besides on highest difficulty you probably lose the race to AI 99% of the time.
Transporting resources between bases is useless. It is much more effective just to build crawler in highly productive base, then assign it to poor base, and then crawl resources for it.
Agree with Condensers. Their proportional bonus forces me to place them on nutrient resources and I don't think game should force their placement. Although, I'd still give them some bonus to compensate for inability to build solar there. Like +1 nutrient.
You defy its minerals focus. Would be a shock for many players. 😆
I think 1-2-0 in my mod is nerfing enough. Especially with longer terraforming time.
Less late game minerals, less builder micro, does it realy improve your game experience to have 20 - 30 units per base, as opposed to 10 - 15 ?
Also tons of minerals makes building facilities, a no brainer late game when you can build anything in 1-3 turns.
Balancing costs for mid-late game mineral surplus and stalling early game is the major issue for me with WtP.
1,1,2 forests are different from fungus, since they don't require planet rating and can be exploited while running free market.
And with 2 minerals forests, mines are completely pointless, you want an early game 1,2,0 tile ? You have it already, a mine on rolling.
1,2,0 forest is still way superior to mine, with potential future upgrade, and borehole is superior to mine on rocky, why keep mines completely useless ?
Thinker with few lines edited in the source code can be easily adjusted to build less forests and more mines to facilliate changes.
For exmple flat non rainy - forest, otherwise either farm+mine, or farm+collectors.
Thinker also already generates way more nutrients than it can utilise, crawled 4,0,0 condensers won't hurt it and it should just be adjusted to build them only when most nearby tiles are non rainy.
With 1 mineral forest an 1 point penalty and even moderate cost of 3-5 mineral rows, economically viable crwalers usage would be limited to a smaller number of condensers condensers, rainy flat low elevation farms and rocky mines. So it'd naturally limit the amount of crawlers on the map without artificial hard limits.
If the amount of reasonable crawling spots was very limited this way and crawler could transport 6 minerals between bases like it can from special resource rocky mine, then crawling resources between bases to speed up something would be viable and less micro intensive than building, moving and disbanding them. Penalty feature is for the taking from Ytzii's patch, the rest would be difficult.
Agree with Condensers. Their proportional bonus forces me to place them on nutrient resources and I don't think game should force their placement. Although, I'd still give them some bonus to compensate for inability to build solar there. Like +1 nutrient.
Why the forest should have mineral focus and be superior than mining in that to boot ? You have mines on rolling for 1,2,0 in early game, why change forest into something it's already there ?
You don't have the issue with mines being useless in this game ? 2 energy is not too much, it's average of what solar gives at the cost of nutrients, which in early game is no joke.
And I have a new idea: benefits of normal facilities are limited to the base, but with most SPs it's RoI grow with the number of bases. Maybe make the cost of them scale with a map size ?
They still count as soil enritcher so it's 2+2 and that is where vanilla 6 comes from, 4 +50%
I mostly compare my proposals to vanilla, as in what could be changed from vanilla and put into the WtP, insted of what is currently there ( which is cost increases mostly ).
Natives:
Make each additional lifecycle granted by facilities ( biology lab and brood pit ) cost one additional mineral row for worms, spore launchers and sealurks and 2 additional rows for locust and isles.
Add 1 more row for each two "free" lifecycle bonuses granted by SP, SE, or faction bonuses for spore, sealurks and 1 row for every "free" lifecycle for isles and locust.
I suspect that a very low popularity of this mod is caused by wild changes to vanilla tech tree and few other aspects and most fans would rather play more familliar SMAC but with more challenge.
Early game is awful with all these huge costs for everything
The more cardinal solution would be just restrict total crawler yield for base same way as for satellites. This would put a stop on their unlimited spawning.
Forest SHOULD NOT have mineral focus. But it is how it is in vanilla!
Oh i built tons of probes - i actually think i build hundreds in single game :D. CoC is good i like that - its really worth it. One has to build ton of probes or you are dead on transcend. I actually think AI is doing itself a bit of disfavor by building too many armored probes - but thats hard to change. AI is using tons of probes to attack mine - they use expensive armored cruiser probes and suicide into 0-1-1 cheap infantry probes. Defending probe has +50% territory bonus. So in that sense it hurts them badly but the do apply constant pressure.
But i must say armor probes come great against other units - and AI is bated to attack probes so they work great AI vs AI.
Note: armored probes have one great stupid weaknes - if they are under another unit - and they are not main defender. If unit dies probes are dead. I killed multiple times 2-3-4 neutronium armored probes this way - its ton of minerals wasted. Poor AI.
Btw i have a question:
Why does AI can subvert my bases when i have +4 Probe rating? I understood you have Scient patch in your mod - and its supposed to fix this issue - as i understand it. I checked AI did not have ench. probes (yet) - they should not be able to do that. They had Hunter-Seeker but thats irrelevant as far as i know. Its quite a big pain not to be able to use +Probe rating to stop mind-probes. (i have save games i could double check this if its needed)
ps. I'll try to make my case about secret projects - i see the logic in your reasoning - it has pluses and minuses. I will describe what happens in my games in new thread and why i think that super expensive projects beat the purpose. There's no need to change anything quickly we can discuss and see where it ends.
Oh i built tons of probes - i actually think i build hundreds in single game :D. CoC is good i like that - its really worth it. One has to build ton of probes or you are dead on transcend. I actually think AI is doing itself a bit of disfavor by building too many armored probes - but thats hard to change. AI is using tons of probes to attack mine - they use expensive armored cruiser probes and suicide into 0-1-1 cheap infantry probes. Defending probe has +50% territory bonus. So in that sense it hurts them badly but the do apply constant pressure.
But i must say armor probes come great against other units - and AI is bated to attack probes so they work great AI vs AI.
Note: armored probes have one great stupid weaknes - if they are under another unit - and they are not main defender. If unit dies probes are dead. I killed multiple times 2-3-4 neutronium armored probes this way - its ton of minerals wasted. Poor AI.
Btw i have a question:
Why does AI can subvert my bases when i have +4 Probe rating? I understood you have Scient patch in your mod - and its supposed to fix this issue - as i understand it. I checked AI did not have ench. probes (yet) - they should not be able to do that. They had Hunter-Seeker but thats irrelevant as far as i know. Its quite a big pain not to be able to use +Probe rating to stop mind-probes. (i have save games i could double check this if its needed)
ps. I'll try to make my case about secret projects - i see the logic in your reasoning - it has pluses and minuses. I will describe what happens in my games in new thread and why i think that super expensive projects beat the purpose. There's no need to change anything quickly we can discuss and see where it ends.
Could you attach the saved games with a couple notes about which base(s) get subverted by who? Doesn't have to be anything detailed. I'll have a look and see if there was something faulty with my patch or something else at play. Thanks!
Most SEs don't technically update until your next turn. It's a bit confusing because POLICE, ECON show their effects in your cities right away. I guess it's more manageable that way. Still it's much less harsh than Civ2 with its Anarchy period of no government
It's a bit funny because I had the same thing occur when I was testing COC and MC immunity. I set Data Angels to get +2 PROBE using the campaign editor free switch. Apparently even changing it that way doesn't take effect until the following turn. Something I came to learn is that if you look at a faction's SEs in social engineering (next turn) it can differ from the diplomacy screen (current)
# Version 49
* Condenser does not multiply nutrient yield.
* Soil Enricher does not multiply nutrient yield and instead adds 1.
* Borehole yield is 0-4-4.
I can update my current v. 47 game i presume and continue with save? I was gonna test a bit forests and morgan and some other stuff. Gonna be interesting to see how this nutrient and borehole thing affects the ai and game pace.
I can update my current v. 47 game i presume and continue with save? I was gonna test a bit forests and morgan and some other stuff. Gonna be interesting to see how this nutrient and borehole thing affects the ai and game pace.
Btw you have now couple of errors in readme file - I noticed Command Center is 60/1 in game, Brood Pit is 120/3 (like that more than 120/4).. you wrote here and in readme its 60/2.. you also have mistakes in readme with new special projects saying its 60 x 10 bases = and right side is 800.. there are 3-4 of these typos now.
Thus eliminated the exploit of switching to higher INDUSTRY at the very end to build it faster.I didn't count mineral boxes its kind of hard - i presume it works. But rushing edge/exploit is still there that i checked. If you switch to +Industry - and rush it then its way cheaper. Switching is -40 energy and rushing saves much more.
Tube movement rate is a multiplier of road movement rate
* Set borehole to 0-6-4.
* Fixed Condenser and Enricher calculation and display.
I didn't count mineral boxes its kind of hard - i presume it works. But rushing edge/exploit is still there that i checked. If you switch to +Industry - and rush it then its way cheaper. Switching is -40 energy and rushing saves much more.
QuoteTube movement rate is a multiplier of road movement rate
What does that mean? ^^ Good to have tubes.
Quote* Set borehole to 0-6-4.
* Fixed Condenser and Enricher calculation and display.
Good borehole change - like that one. I'll check condensers and enricher. I was looking a bit at it last night AI really spams them a lot everywhere. They will certainly influence AI growth significantly.
You can think of it as another benefit of INDUSTRY.This is what i call mental gymnastics ^^. Ah well ok I suppose i can stop myself from switching to industry just to exploit that - it should be self-rule.
I thought to let artillery duel uses armor as well. However, I don't think it is too relevant. Making artillery armored is still important to protect from direct counter-strikes from air and helicopter, for example.
Same for interceptor duel. No need.
* Make ECM to affect sea units as well.I was thinking at first ECM works vs ship.. btw tooltip said somewhere it works against missile attacks? I thought it affects Missile weapons (there's weapon called like that). Anyway... EMC working vs ships is just yet another way to make player better than AI as AI won't be able to use it as well. So we might be better without this one.
I've seen these in your todo list, but didn't think much about it - on first look it looks cool.. But it makes some sense to have these units unarmored - they are supposed to be vulnerable to damage. So I don't know would it be good to make them armored.. maybe better not.
I am also not sure that i like idea of armored formers (AI don't build them), Crawlers (AI builds them) and Probes (AI spams them).
Why?
- these units are non-combat but actually quite strong if armored.... looks stupid
- you get more often than you should spearman kill tank scenario.. Needlejet (or any strong attacking unit for that matter) should have 90% chance to kill Crawler.. not 50% or 30%..
* I think its not issue on transcend WTP - you can't just raid trascend AI in his land (Copters maybe being somewhat exception) you get killed if you stay in their land due to 50% territory malus. Copters also get killed by interceptors btw.. but they are much more deadly than other units when there's no interceptor defense. One can more easily raid weaker AIs.. It would be actually interesting to limit possible armor on NON-combat units to some lower level. Is it even possible?
- probes... its gamey and it takes some getting used to and it mifgt hurt AI a lot in the end
How do you play against mass probe spam? Took me a bit to figure it. AI likes to attack with 0-10-2 probes in midgame. You don't attack with military units - this is stupid units die. You bombard them a bit and attack with your 0-1-1 or 0-1-2 probe and kill it. If its in your lands you get +50%.. one can just let them attack you - you get 50% def. In their land its harder, but one can bombard more. Also Probe dies when military unit on same tile (or in base dies). There's risk unit will attack probe.. one can attack with probes to remove that 0-10-2 defender and then attack with normal units afterward.
What AI does is attacks them in panic - I've seen multiple times AI emptying his base suiciding into 0-10-2 probe on rough terrain. It would be often much better to have these units defend the base instead of attack.. but there's risk of mind-probe. I did not actually try this tactic - but usually when you have probe under strong defender AI suicides into defender trying to kill the probe. Its not that bad because due to +50% they often manage to kill defender in few attacks and probe beneath dies. But one can, i think, just bring unarmored probes and bait AI into attacking. I might experiment with this more.
Basically it hurts AI in the end. It also hurts AI badly to create ton of 0-10-6 cruiser probes that die to 0-1-1 defenders. These probes are protected from unit attacks - that works AI vs AI mostly.. and it helps them on sea.. player would need to build expensive foil probes - but its just easier to spam 0-1-1 defenders and ignore probes on open waters.
So.. armored probes have one advantage - they are not easily countered by units. But they are huge drain on AI and once player figures it out - they are easily countered with unarmored probes. Armored probes likely do more harm than good to AI.
Same goes for example for that Rover Colony Pod - AI just builds more expensive colony pod when cheap is good enough. AI can't reason when is better to build more expensive one. I suggest removing that design - player can create it if he wants.
I started the game with Morgan. After some turns my bases somehow got a Talent each. I have no idea where those are coming from. (Also I am not sure how I would have managed happiness without those Talents on Transcend.) Do you know why they are there? I build Recycling Tanks and researched Progenitor Psych around the time they appeared.
The start with Morgan is quite slow. It is difficult to build Formers, guards and those expensive colony pods, Morgan's -1 support makes it worse. I nearly lost a base to wildlife for cutting corners. Managing the early game was however quite fun which is a good sign.
I started the game with Morgan. After some turns my bases somehow got a Talent each. I have no idea where those are coming from. (Also I am not sure how I would have managed happiness without those Talents on Transcend.) Do you know why they are there? I build Recycling Tanks and researched Progenitor Psych around the time they appeared.
I picked up police state for awhile with morgan. And you have 0-4-0 mines from beginning in the mod to help with support. Then i got Living Refinery : ). I actually lost a colony pod in my game darn worms ^^ It gets easier when you get Fusion reactor - should be able to get to it quickly - its important to meet AI for trading.
Planned, everything else on default. I also installed Pracx over the mod executable.
Yea. As I said I don't have any preference on boreholes. This is more of fans suggested change.
I thought to let artillery duel uses armor as well. However, I don't think it is too relevant. Making artillery armored is still important to protect from direct counter-strikes from air and helicopter, for example.
- these units are non-combat but actually quite strong if armored.... looks stupidIn the stock game, a unit that is armored is a combat unit. It does not suffer the non-combat defense penalty. There's nothing stupid about such units. In WW II for instance there were armored mine flayers that were used on the beaches of Normandy. They had a job to do in combat and they did it. Laying down roads or land bridges to kill your enemy can easily be a front line siege activity. And if you're still allowing your game to build Bunkers, that's something a Former does for you. I don't allow it because the AI is so stupid about building them, but if you do, that's something that Formers do under fire. Formers get attacked by mindworms and that's another reason to armor them, if you're so inclined. Sea Formers get attacked by enemy ships all the time.
Needlejet (or any strong attacking unit for that matter) should have 90% chance to kill Crawler.. not 50% or 30%..
Planned + seems very strong. +1 Industry and +1 Growth are already quite powerful.
Frankly though, I have to wonder about the wisdom of nerfing the energy bit, when it's called a thermal borehole. It's not called a lava flow.
Changed free market is also very good. Similar powerlevel to Planned+. I don't quite see the point of Green though. Seems only useful for a worm war.
I was able to stay in Police State with without Efficiency being much of an issue. Is there a effective second drone control (or Psyche facility) next to Recreation Commons? Do Children's Creches still increase effiency? From what I read they don't give Morale bonuses anymore, right?
I was comparing Green with Planned+ and Free Market which are in the same category. Planned+ and Free Market both have their place depending on the situation. Green, however, is +2 Planet +2 Effiency -3 Growth -2 Industry. So some very pedestrian advantages and utterly horrific downsides. I can see two situations when Green might be useful. If you attack someone with worms or when knocking out the last few techs before trancendence. In any other situation, switching to Green is approximately equal to retiring. :)
I really really don't like Power.. 2 Supp, 2 Mor, 1 Probe, -2 Industry everything is ruined by industry.. 1 Supp, 2 Mor, 1 probe, -1 Industry; .. or +2 Supp, +2 Mor, -1 Ind..: or something like that would be much more interesting.. What's the point in picking it when it makes producing everything so hard.. i'd rather have more units.
EFFIC is more of a nice to have IMO. Unless you're playing on very large maps then it gets more valuable
It's only 3 less drones in your empire per 2 EFFIC on a normal map. On a huge map, about 5 less drones.
It has fairly quick diminishing returns, as it's a 1/x function. Creche gives +2 getting you over the worst part of the curve.
However being at negative EFFIC is crippling for the same reason, how the function curves.
EFFIC means less in the late game because specialists contribute directly to econ/labs/psych
Overall the first +2 EFFIC is good to have but it's nothing compared to +2 ECON or +2 GROWTH
It's true I haven't been in a late game situation yet. However, then you also have stuff like Cybernetic and Eudamonia. Moreover, there is Democracy for effiency. There is also the option of going specialist-heavy.
As lolada pointed out, the planet going to hell in a handbasket is another situation where Green is good.
I really really don't like Power.. 2 Supp, 2 Mor, 1 Probe, -2 Industry everything is ruined by industry.. 1 Supp, 2 Mor, 1 probe, -1 Industry; .. or +2 Supp, +2 Mor, -1 Ind..: or something like that would be much more interesting.. What's the point in picking it when it makes producing everything so hard.. i'd rather have more units.
SUPPORT is 2-3 times better than INDUSTRY at the very beginning. Each level of SUPPORT saves you 1 mineral. Whereas each level of INDUSTRY saves you 10% of ... 2-4 minerals early bases produce, which is ... 0.2-0.4 minerals. Figure it out yourself. SUPPORT declines quickly as average production grows but it stays on par with INDUSTRY until bases reach 10 minerals production in about early mid game. If you managed to grab faction with bonus SUPPORT or if you crank it up by some other means (SE, project) you will have an extreme boost in first 100 turns. That is big impact. However, I can go with 1 Supp, 2 Mor, 1 probe, -1 Industry; Should be no biggie.
and after some time armor doesn't make it more expensive
- base builds it in same number of turns anyway.
Its useful when arty gets attacked - it happens sometimes.. unarmored arty is very vulnerable to needlejets for example.
+2 SUPP +2 MOR +1 PRO -1 INDThis could be good.. I would definitely like to keep +2 Morale and i hate -2 Industry.. Probe can be gotten from other sources as well so I didn't mind losing it if Power proves strong. Power has another issue its coupled vs Wealth (great in peace-time) and Knowledge (3! RESEARCH 1 EFFICIENCY -1 ECO -2 PROBE.. great always.. Probes are weakness but that can be dealt with.. and ECO is often no big deal.
-1 Eco on Knowledge makes it borderline unusable until future societies. Of course, Morgan can still use it.
I think Knowledge is too good.
Why - i think thats not correct? -1 energy in HQ at -1 ECO is nothing.. -2 ECO is not bad either its only -1 energy per base.. thats a small penalty. Unless you play every game with +2 Eco so you would lose that -1 energy per tile.. This basically means you pick up Free Market in every game - and then you don't want pick up Knowledge because you lose that energy.
@tnevolin Movement is bugged in last patch with magtube changes Infantry can move more than 3 tiles.. movement points state 9/9 and it decreases by 2.
Is there a way to disable techtrading? I have started to make a diagram showing the tech paths in the mod since I had a hard time making informed tech choices. Does anything like that still exist? I don't want to duplicate effort. The tech paths really make no sense anymore from a lore perspective. I understand that gameplay is more important but that is a bit of a bummer.
I still fundamentally disagree about Knowledge. I think it is quite weak in its current form.
Environmental Economics being dependent on Silksteel Alloys is really, really odd.
An example: level 1 Conquer techs Applied Physics and Industrial Base are prerequisites for level 3 techs Industrial Economics and Field Modulation, respectively. That would immedialy make much more sense if you swich them around.
That being said I think FM > Planned > Green in your set.
It's hard for me to compare my version of knowledge because Wealth is much more powerful, it had to be boosted even more.
The biggest flaw I had right now was that weapons overtake armor in the midgame. 13-3 units are rather common. Then there's kind of a weapons stagnation as armor goes up to 8. The silksteel-photon-probability armors probably need some side economic benefits. Mag tubes are nice but the AI is probably right Drop is better a lot of the time
I found the tech tree in it's current form jarring flavourwise. There is a progression of armor and weapons techs but otherwise prerequisites that make some intuitive sense are the exception. Most prerequisites appear completely random.
On another note, armor should not be as strong as weapons of the same tech tree depths. You have better modifiers for defense. Having unkillable units can be extremely unfun.
I think the starting point would be to come up with themes, techs that are similar to one another. The Centauri techs are probably the most obvious. Those had a progression that made sense to me. Although there were maybe some flaws.
Some themes might be
Terraforming
Weapons/Armor
Genetics/Pop Growth
Economics
Research
One thing to note is that about half the tree is military techs. So military could be subdivided. Movement, Weapons, Armor, and Abilities perhaps.
Yeah it feels like there's way too many conquer techs.. but i don't know if that affects anything. Maybe factions with conquer focus have it harder to get non-conquer techs.
My first impression was there's too many weapons/armors but i got used to it quickly. One doesn't have to build latest variant, especially not the armor. Equality means its hard to conquer anything - I played Miriam and overrun Deirdre with 10 bases with Particle, Missile and Chaos weapons - all early. I didn't play Yang, Santiago or usurper Aliens i presume they can go to war early. Other factions look to me to be better at builder style. Once you go builder style it seems to me its hard to conquer anything before Fusion laser (10) or Shard Weaponry (13). Worms are no solution also because its hard to amass them. This is ok in general - different playstyle and its fun to play in lategame or endgame.
About SE choices - i must admit i am surprised by your logic, i rated 30% science + 1 EFF highly and Free Market lower partly because it goes into negative planet. So one can't use fungus - power of all these vary with time tho. I'll go experiment a bit and revisit my choices. Maybe i am taking some wrong things for granted. Gonna also see if i can crunch some numbers in few of my saves and see how it turns out in real game.
ps. i reverted to v.54 but i'll see to reproduce that road movement bug
Having the the Conquer techs interleaved with builder techs would be fine for me. But they should make just a tad more sense. A fig leaf like Industrial Automation having Silksteel Alloys as a prerequisite would be OK already. Most of the current ones do not even make as much sense as that.
+2 Eco is substantially superior to having high effiency and research.
Having the the Conquer techs interleaved with builder techs would be fine for me. But they should make just a tad more sense. A fig leaf like Industrial Automation having Silksteel Alloys as a prerequisite would be OK already. Most of the current ones do not even make as much sense as that.
They had to. You cannot make both prerequisites from the same group. You need to cross pollinate. When we are talking about themes these are just single chain of similar techs. Each one of them takes some random prerequisite as well.
+2 Eco is substantially superior to having high effiency and research.
Friend, I understand you feel this way. Can you prove it? Not to yourself but to others? I am not saying your understanding is incorrect but without proof the dialog is impossible.
Just propose the change instead and we'll vote.
I already made a suggestion. I will think on it some more.
Do you value the system where each technology has one prerequisite from the previous tier and one prerequisite from the tier before that?
What do you say about the weapon armor balance? Weapons should be a bit ahead of armor, not as much as in vanilla maybe.
What do you mean by same group? Is this a requirement in the game or a rule you set for the mod? How important is the position of a tech in the tech tree (type of prerequisites, type of following techs) vs level of that tech for you?
I was just discussing SE effects with lolada. I didn't propose or intend to propose a change.
I already made a suggestion. I will think on it some more.
Do you refer to this?
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21359.msg125498#msg125498
Sorry, I didn't get what model you want to change and how.
What do you say about the weapon armor balance? Weapons should be a bit ahead of armor, not as much as in vanilla maybe.
Why?
No, I meant the Applied Physics + Industrial Base switch.
No, I meant the Applied Physics + Industrial Base switch.What do you say about the weapon armor balance? Weapons should be a bit ahead of armor, not as much as in vanilla maybe.
Why?
Disregard this for the moment. I don't really have enough experience to say for sure. (Purely from calculation there seems to be no reasonable way to get a entreched defender out of a fungus field near your base or out of a base with perimeter defense. As I understand it, the combat power of units weakens when they get damaged. But I'd guess a defender behind a perimeter defense can easily kill several attackers in a row which means that combat becomes a fairly static affair.)
Here movement bug in v.55. - you can move that infantry 9 tiles in gaia start thanks to river.
Let me repeat in hundredth time. There are so many different technology flavors that is impossible to make all prerequisites sensible.
Besides it almost never sensible for one color to be dependent on other color.
Yet you have to do it.
Were you able to quickly memorize whole tree?
I never was and it never bothered me.
Were you able to memorize Civ 1/2 tech tree even if it was supposedly reflecting a real technological progress?
Was everything sensible to you then?
How the hell you can develop Medicine from Trade + Philosophy? 😲
How the hell Space Flight was possible without Plastics in Civ 1? Oh well.
For one we can just darn rename them all and repaint tech tree from scratch!
As it doesn't affect game play I don't pay attention to it much. You are welcome to team up with me on it. I hear a lot of critics on this specifically but nobody volunteered yet.
😉
Let me repeat in hundredth time. There are so many different technology flavors that is impossible to make all prerequisites sensible.
I think I managed it in my latest mod version 1.43 tech shuffle.
How the defender is entrenched if there are no bunkers anymore? Is it just staying on fungus? If so then it is about 2.25 times stronger than attacker with equal weapon strength. So? It'll take one artillery and one attacker. No casualties.
In base with PD it is about 3 times stronger than equal equipped attackers. This is little bit more challenging. One artillery to wear it down to 1.5 and then two attackers, one dies. So 1:1 losses. Not bad for defended base attack.
Regarding artillery. Did you change that too? Artillery damage on an equal tech level on a unit in Fungus should be 0.Yes its changed - artillery has a chance to deal damage even when weaker - its in readme file. I suggest highly to keep artillery at max weapon it really helps. 2-3 units are enough usually - 2-3 turns of bombardment and then attack.
Let me repeat in hundredth time. There are so many different technology flavors that is impossible to make all prerequisites sensible.
I think I managed it in my latest mod version 1.43 tech shuffle.
Is it published?
Doctor, +2 Psych
Empath, +1 Economy, +2 Psych
Transcend, +1 Economy, +2 Psych, +1 Labs
Technician, +3 Economy
Engineer, +3 Economy, +1 Labs
Librarian, +3 Labs
Thinker, +1 Psych, +3 Labs
Regarding artillery. Did you change that too? Artillery damage on an equal tech level on a unit in Fungus should be 0.
QuoteHow the defender is entrenched if there are no bunkers anymore? Is it just staying on fungus? If so then it is about 2.25 times stronger than attacker with equal weapon strength. So? It'll take one artillery and one attacker. No casualties.
In base with PD it is about 3 times stronger than equal equipped attackers. This is little bit more challenging. One artillery to wear it down to 1.5 and then two attackers, one dies. So 1:1 losses. Not bad for defended base attack.
Tim is right here - i just broke Drones Neutron (10) defenses - behind Perimeter Defense - with mostly 13-1-1 / I have also some 16-1-1 attackers (protected by some armored units). I bombarded them 2-3 turns and just smacked infantry in - out of 4 attackers only 2 died.. sometimes 3-4 die, but its still about equal and you get the base. Without bombardments its tougher. First few bases can be tough to take, but it eventually snowballs. I'll post save in attachment if anyone is interested to take a look - terraforming is interesting too. Its M.Y. 2367 so you can have fun with lategame wars - i recently became Planetary Governor and passed double trade agreement - its money galore now.
Let me repeat in hundredth time. There are so many different technology flavors that is impossible to make all prerequisites sensible.
I think I managed it in my latest mod version 1.43 tech shuffle.
Is it published?
No, but I think it is feature complete and I am beta testing it. If you want early access, I can make it so. I will publish before the end of the month anyways, unless I run into an unexpected disaster. Like separating Planet Busters from spaceflight somehow being deeply bugged. I don't think there's a reason to expect that, but it's the sort of thing that does require a playtest before final release. I suppose I could run an AI vs. AI game to speed up my confidence in that.
Empath, +1 Economy, +2 Psych =
Transcend, +1 Economy, +2 Psych, +1 Labs
Technician, +2 Economy
Engineer, +2 Economy, +1 Labs
Librarian, +2 Labs
Thinker, +1 Psych, +2 Labs
Doesn't it make Engineer and Thinker too weak? Their revenue is nothing comparing to working a tile. Nobody would like to use them.
Part of the reason is that High Energy Chemistry -> Synthetic Fossil Fuels -> Air Power is intuitively understandable.
I just want to look at your fixed tech tree if you have it completed already.
QuoteDoesn't it make Engineer and Thinker too weak? Their revenue is nothing comparing to working a tile. Nobody would like to use them.
Hm whats the goal? I don't consider using specialists in general unless the base is working really weak tiles like 1-1-0 or 2-0-0 then i choose one thats good. If we want them to be used instead of tiles then we should determine some yield and balance around that.
I am fine with your numbers as well if you think mine were too weak. I presumed you wanted to nerf Transcens (they are op). Just then place Transcends at Tech11 thats enough to have them used to some effect - but keep them as superhuman ;cha;.
Specialists are a fine choice for factions that have problems with Energy/Research from tiles (like Yang). They need to be decently strong to remain an option.
Attached is the WTP tech tree.
Observations:
- I like a lot of the early tech progression from a gameplay perspective.
- Tech progression is consistently illogical from a flavour perspective, the late game in particular is a hot mess. ;)
- The alien technologies serve no purpose, make techprogression illogical (ie. Field Modulation grants Aqua Farms for some reason, it also makes no sense as an early tech) and worsen the problem that advances are spread out a bit too thin. (That's an issue with Smax not the mod.)
- A lot of overpowered advances seem to have been nerfed out of existence by placing them two seconds before Transcendence.
Yeah, that was my point. I'm not criticizing the mod here. Aqua Farms should be granted by some Former or Centauri tech. The were put with Progenitor Psych because Progenitor Psych needed something not because it made any sense. Progenitor Psych is a completely superfluous doubling of Social Psych and the game would be better without it. Almost all of the alien technologies are like that.
I wonder if some of the overpowered mechanics can be salvaged.
Attached is the WTP tech tree.
(ie. Field Modulation grants Aqua Farms for some reason, it also makes no sense as an early tech)
I have now posted a .zip of my mod 1.43 beta (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=20959.msg125539#msg125539) for those interested in my tech tree, or other aspects of my mod.
First of all, do you have your lore explained somewhere or you just feel it is right? If latter, then I would refrain from arguing about it as, obviously, everybody has their own feeling what is right.
I cannot yet absorb how anything industrial may stem from ecology.
That is by definition a force opposing any industrialization.
Flexibility, in its turn, is a military doctrine.
There is kinda far leap from military operations to industrialization.
There is no definitive say whether some connection is good or bad.
So either some non-conquer techs need to give military benefits OR we accept conquer having the most techs.
So with that approach Centauri Ecology felt "explore" to me knowing nothing else about what it does. However you're right, formers aren't "explore" in their function. They're definitely build foremost. So perhaps Centauri Ecology shouldn't be the tech to get formers.
Maybe then it should be the most simple sounding "build" tech. Which would be Industrial Base.
So with that approach Centauri Ecology felt "explore" to me knowing nothing else about what it does. However you're right, formers aren't "explore" in their function. They're definitely build foremost. So perhaps Centauri Ecology shouldn't be the tech to get formers. Maybe then it should be the most simple sounding "build" tech. Which would be Industrial Base. So something as simple as the very first techs can be debated
Also, I liked to pair every free facility SP with its facility.
why is more tech required to build a superproject for all bases?
When using the stock tech tree, I found I had more the opposite feeling. That there were more techs than useful things to give them. Especially in the back half of the game. I guess I can see how pushing SPs later might reverse that.
Also, I liked to pair every free facility SP with its facility. The ones that didn't felt odd to me. It was the feeling of your new tech being negated by the possibility of a future SP that you couldn't even start yet. Which didn't even make sense, if you can build it individually in each base, why is more tech required to build a superproject for all bases? The only place this strictly can't be done is Virtual World. But as long as VW's tech allows holo theatres, and NN comes before, I have less issue with it
Such SPs give just pure economical advantage.
I considered making the armor techs and defensive unit ability techs DISCOVER. CONQUER would get the weapons techs, chassis aside from Foil, and the offensive abilities. EXPLORE and BUILD have a lot more units/facilities/etc.
I think you are bit defensive about this, Tim. ;) Of course, there will always be tech progression that makes little sense or is hand-wavy at best. The original tech tree is, however, much more reasonable than the current one of the mod. The majority of the prerequisites is plausible in vanilla.
This is nice talk in theory, but in practice we want AI to be good and for that AI needs access to good facilities and weapons. If its so directed that one AI goes for explore and almost never gets any weapons.. it could be piss poor AI that dies.
Also these conquer aggressive AIs are already quite terrible at infrastructure building.. or teching economy..
So the tree should be somehow setup to help AI get good performance.. player can manage.
Or you could give Conquer factions access to earlier stronger weapons in their tech path and add some weaker and later options for builder.
This is nice talk in theory, but in practice we want AI to be good and for that AI needs access to good facilities and weapons.
It is kinda difficult to conquer with contemporary weapon and [poopy] armor.For the human player it's trivial. Build rails. The AI doesn't know how to do rails based conquest, so it's at a disadvantage. Rails is a tried and true method as far back as Civ 1.
Practical gaming shows there is no isolated development. Everybody trades about half of techs.
I would yet to see a tree designed with paths in mind. It would be interesting to study it.
People talk about research paths as if they want to give one player all weapons and another all facilities.
Designing a tech tree is really hard with your requirement that each tech is prerequisite for one tech in the next tier and one in the tier after that. Each tier of techs has a one-to-one relation to 4 other tiers. That is amazingly restrictive.
defense is discover,
This is of course my mod, since forever, since the very beginning. In 2 years you really haven't checked it out in any great detail? The differentiation between paths has only gotten stronger in the past year.
I looked at it but didn't study. Can you tell me some of your paths besides weapon and armor?For instance nowadays there's a pretty strongly differentiated "indigenous life forms only combat" section of the tree. If you're not studying Explore, you're not getting up it. It's long. It goes all the way from E3 Centauri Genetics to E8 The Will To Power. Then continues with D9 Secrets of Alpha Centauri and D10 Secrets of the Manifolds.
Weapon and armor techs are clustered too much in the early game. The consequence is that you have something advanced like Probability Mechanics too early in the tech tree.
Orbital Spaceflight is not such a high level concept for example. If satellites should remain out of consideration they could be assigned to some late game tech instead.
You mentioned that these things were discussed.Can you link a thread? I am curious why Bio-Engineering and Non-Lethal methods are so late among other things.
Since there are armor techs missing in the midgame it would be possible to make Photon/Wave mechanic armor 6 strength, push Probability Mechanics back and make the corresponding armor 8 or 9 strength. Neutronium Plate could be 12. That also comes too early narravitely atm.
Early weapons look like they could be spaced more - or maybe 1-2 removed but its not necessary in any case.. spacing a bit would work.. armor the same. Then one could add maybe armor 12 to fill the gap a bit.
4d facility - energy Biology lab Progenitor Psych
2 ability Hypnotic trance Secrets of the Human Brain
4a facility - military Perimeter defense Doctrine: Loyalty
4b facility - drones Hologram theatre Polymorphic Software
4c facility - misc Children's creche Ethical Calculus
1 unit types Mind Worms Centauri Empathy
1 unit types Spore Launcher Bioadaptive Resonance
4j facility - size limit Hab complex Industrial Automation
6 secret project The Virtual World Planetary Networks
1 unit types AAA Tracking Advanced Military Algorithms
3 terraforming Thermocline transducer Adaptive Economics
6 secret project The Planetary Datalinks Cyberethics
4f facility - minerals Genejack factory Retroviral Engineering
6 secret project The Citizens' Defense Force Intellectual Integrity
7 weapon Fusion laser 6 Organic Superlubricant
4e facility - ecodamage Hybrid forest Planetary Economics
1 unit types Hovertank chassis Nanominiaturization
2 ability Carrier deck Nanometallurgy
4h facility - prototypes Skunkworks Advanced Subatomic Theory
1 unit types Copter chassis Mind/Machine Interface
4a facility - military Flechette defense system N-Space Compression
4b facility - drones Paradise garden Sentient Econometrics
You could make some armors prereqs for weapons and vice versa. That might solve the "armor too far ahead" or "weapon too far ahead" problems
I don't see "armor too far ahead" or "weapon too far ahead" as problems.
I don't see "armor too far ahead" or "weapon too far ahead" as problems.
Weapon too far ahead leads to a cakewalk, a colonial style slaughter.
Armor too far ahead doesn't lead to much of anything. Territory remains more static.
Weapon too far ahead leads to a cakewalk, a colonial style slaughter.
Armor too far ahead doesn't lead to much of anything. Territory remains more static.
They both will have strong weapon and weak armor.
I went through all the techs and re-read their quotes. I think a big reason the tree is confusing is that for many techs, their quote/speaker doesn't really match the priority (conquer, build, discover, explore) it had been assigned. Prime example is Superconductor. Has Morgan as a speaker about the economic criticality of superconductors. But it's somehow a conquer tech? I ended up re-categorizing a lot of techs into different priorities. Only problem was a few too many ended up in the discover pile. So a couple have to be moved over.
Technology is a box to place features. It means nothing by itself. Superconductor enables weapon. Thus it is a conquer technology so conquest oriented faction can get to this weapon. It doesn't matter what Morgan said about it. This is just a scenery.
I agree it does sound more scientific or maybe science-industry application related. So we can repurpose it for some other feature and keep research instead. That's all.
(Retroviral Engineering -> Genejack factory, supposedly they engineer viruses to jack genes)
There's no 'reason' that Superconductor has to grant Gatling Laser unless I'm missing something in the lore?
It will probably make a lot of sense to me but perhaps not others.A lot of your Discover techs are not going to make sense. It's not about armor, it's about faster research. There's no more reason for Discover to be about armor, than for Explore or Build to be about armor. Why should I be forced to study Discover to have a viable defense in the game?
I have made a tech tree up to level 6 with your restrictions. Some techs had to be shifted by one level. I also spread out weapons and armor a bit more on purpose.
My tree also ended up being 7 per level (up to level 11) and n-1 / n-2 prereqs. It has to narrow a bit at the end with more n-1 prereqs and less techs at level 12 and onward
Did a similar thing too so that I wouldn't hit the same branch for the second prereq.
A lot of additional work in matching up the techs logically to all the benefits. I think it's in a pretty good place although the order might only make sense to me lol. It's going to feel like playing a new game I think. It was very hard to place some technologies especially closer to the end. I used the lore and tech shorts to some extent as well.
My categories ended up being:
Explore: anything PSI, pop growth, pop control
Build: terraforming, energy, minerals
Discover: armor, defensive abilities, labs/research
Conquer: weapons, offensive abilities, chassis
Unfortunately no, I did all the planning in Excel. There is the in-game graph you can click through but it doesn't really give a 'big picture'. I changed what many techs grant also, not just the ordering.
I wish there was a way to programatically graph the tree. Drawing it out would be a lot of manual effort.
Best bet to view it probably is in-game, just have to back your alphax.txt up first
I agree this is a lot of work. Especially, when you keep changing versions. I don't think there is a need. What one can get from this "big picture"? I use it to track a development to a single target technology. And, to be frank, it is not really such a big help in it. I always can check immediate prerequisites in game and 99% of the time this is what I only need. When I plan the tree I only need to know which level each tech is to make sure I place them right. Plus I make sure they are do not cluster too much. I.e. there is no easy way for some high level tech. However, the latter is impossible to catch visually, anyway. So I have a program for that.
Not talking about AAA tracking. You need that too and it would be excellent on Optical Computers. I meant the SAM ability needed to attack flying targets. If you do not have that you just die vs needlejets even with AAA tracking mainly because you can't attack land units under a needlejet so they can just walk up to your bases with infantry or probes and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.
If I could relax the n-1/n-2 to sometimes allow n-2/n-2 or n-1/n-1 (all techs still retain 2 prerequisites) that would already help a lot.
I see what you mean. It would need to be n-1/n-1 and n-3/n-1 one level above as a variant to keep the structure.
@tnevoling
Movement is still bugged in v.58
first save:
Unit seems to be able to move diagonally on river tiles for < 1 movement point. In std game it can go so along the river, no shortcuts.
second save:
Somehow that Colony Pod in Halls of discipline can move 4+ tiles. Its weird like its rounding ?! on some tiles it spend 2/9 on other 3/9 points.
Ok. Where there's just a # that's for n-2. For n-1 I wrote it out.
Had to redo it but your way was better for visualization.
One key aspect of balancing out Needlejets is to put Air Superiority well before Doctrine: Air Power so that factions without Air Power can fight Needlejets.
It's set in #TECHNOLOGY section of alphax.txt
Biogenetics, Biogen, 0, 0, 0, 1, None, None, 000100000
The highest numbered priority of the 4 will be what kind of tech it is considered. I believe if you set equal priorities it takes the last. The order is conquer, discover, build, explore. The numbers can be greater than 0 or 1 to fine tune beelines or make the AI prefer key techs more.
If I could relax the n-1/n-2 to sometimes allow n-2/n-2 or n-1/n-1 (all techs still retain 2 prerequisites) that would already help a lot.
Yea. I know how it works. I am curious how you specifically divided them in groups? Did you set yourself a rule to use certain gap between different values to make sure it is well aligned with the color like if you set Discover value to be 4 other values cannot go near it to not spoil the grouping? Or it is completely arbitrary? Meaning in conquer you can have equally any of 4333 or 4000 or 1000, etc.?
Looks pretty colorful. I assume this straight line of red techs in the middle is the weapon path?
One key aspect of balancing out Needlejets is to put Air Superiority well before Doctrine: Air Power so that factions without Air Power can fight Needlejets.
Here the proposal.
Air chassis cost same as speeder.
Also note that war in Smax is rarely profitable anyway.
Could try allowing artillery ability on air units ;PI actually tried to create one but couldn't :( Overpowered?
Also note that war in Smax is rarely profitable anyway.
If you are referring to vanilla SMAX then I beg to differ. I found it the most profitable endeavor specifically because attacking is very economically effective. Even in WtP it is still profitable against weak or unprepared opponent. Even if you managed to conquer only 1/3 of neighbor territory by throwing everything you had on them and then forged a piece with them you already have twice more bases and will overpower them sooner or later. The problem is that it spoils your relations with others. So you likely won't meet any other unprepared faction.
I actually tried to create one but couldn't :( Overpowered?
Some observations - this is Pirates at -2 efficiency ruining lots of their lead ^^. Did you maybe consider modding a bit efficiency formula so its not that evil on negative side?
Here is much closer city to HQ.. quite inefficient, but we know that i guess. Here Pirates are ruining themselves with - Support. I looked at other bases as well - their production is really crap. AI with good support is much better, like Miriam - guys in SE choices are discussing this. Going light with support minuses would improve AI a lot (Thought Control is -3, Democracy -2).
I also posted this screenshot due to AI using 1-0-0 tiles or 0-1-0, 1-1-0, this would be nice to improve if possible. Its maybe for Induktio? AI could use specialist - Engineers are quite nice and available now for example and they are using these crap tiles.
Basically its just that -2 efficiency is strong - you could come up with some formula/function that scales linearly in negative values, current one is very punishing. Aliens do the same they like to pick Planned and they tend to lag a lot in tech by late midgame. You SE choices are fine, imo, you have at two places -1 efficiency its nothing.
Same with Support - its great stat to have - the thing is that dumb AI does not know when to stop producing useless units. Go through Pirate bases their production is sad - three bases next to my continent have 9/10/11 pop and total of 4 usable minerals eghm.. its hard to balance them - pirates are leading the game from beginning. Looks like they could use some +support..
Specialists are great if you have drone or efficency issues. Otherwise working tiles is better. It would be preferable to fix AI working bad tiles by improving its terraforming.
Same thing with support. The core issue with the Pirate base in the picture is not support cost but that the resource input is low.
I had a better EFFIC formula in mind in the Thinker thread.
Here saves.. posted two if you want to have some fun trying to win war vs Miriam ^^ she's brutal, but its quite fun. In later save i have pact with pirates so you can peak into their bases.
Basically its just that -2 efficiency is strong - you could come up with some formula/function that scales linearly in negative values, current one is very punishing. Aliens do the same they like to pick Planned and they tend to lag a lot in tech by late midgame. You SE choices are fine, imo, you have at two places -1 efficiency its nothing.
Can you share a link? I am lazy to read it all over again.
Btw @tnevolin Pirates are really awful with production - you should give them back that +1 mineral on sea at some point earlier. It takes ages for them to get that tech for +1 mineral platforms, they still don't have it. They have strong start, but midgame and later they are terrible. I'll submit the save if you want to take a look.
Yea that's another aside. Econ and labs from specialists shouldn't avoid EFFIC penalties. Psych I suppose has to avoid it or bases could riot forever.
Perhaps going to 0% energy is a little much. Creches could get you back to some given %. And those far bases would still produce minerals. IMO it's the only way to curb ICS.
This is really ugly system - reminds me of civ 3 corruption, nobody wants useless bases.
I suppose it's a subjective thing. I don't really feel that effic/b-drones really slow down ICS all that much. Between minerals and specialists being exempt. Plus most bases don't suffer that much inefficiency since it's by distance. As long as you don't run low EFFICYes I agree it does not really slow down ICS that much / it nerfs it ofcourse, after a while even pop 1 cities start with a drone. It kind of forces player to keep EFF in positives. Thinker AI for example spams bases similar to player - but is not as smart to keep away from -2, -3 EFF. In that sense changing negative EFF effects to be not too punishing is a good idea.
I reallly dislike the added randomness in the combat system. The armor/weapon equality in early game had the effect I anticipated. I had Roze's heavily armored units sitting next to my forest/sensor for 10+ turns. Neither side could attack so we were just staring at each other.
So The Ascent to Trascendance cost 3000 minerals and Pirates are building it in base with 11 mineral per turn.. And rush it 106 turns to completion.. for approx. 4000 gold.
I had it way more completed and it costed 14000 to rush.
Looks like it would be a good idea to somehow limit AI rushing ^^. Would it be possible to limit SP rushing only when project is 50% complete with minerals..? So one cant rush like this. AI transcend has big discounts - that could be changed as well if first suggestion doesnt work?
Hmm, 3% energy per effic isn't too bad. It might need a little more than that. Not much though any more than 5% would be overkill
It would fix the EFFIC scale. Right now my SE set doesn't allow for lower than 0 for that reason.
75% efficiency at any distance from the HQ at +4 EFFIC is a lot. I do think Thinker AI and various speedruns demonstrate how strong ICS is. That horizontal development (base count) is more to blame for the energy/research explosion than vertical (facilities, SPs).
Rather than hammer far bases with terrible energy or mineral production, I do wonder if dynamic colony pod costs would work. That is the cost of a pod goes up by some amount of minerals for every base & colony pod you have...to match how citizen costs go up in nutrients
Combat outcomes felt completely arbitrary. (I understand they aren't really.) By giving the winner of each combat round a bonus you inreased the volatility of combat. You can easily see the same moderately close fight won by each side taking hardly any damage. It also has the effect that you have a hard time wearing down units. I lost 2 Empath rovers vs the same 1 HP fungus tower since my planet rating was low.
The armor issue is a matter of taste. I don't like the way you can't remove units sitting in your territory. On the other hand, it does give a boost to Morale as experienced units are worth more than in vanilla and it forced me to build more units.
We probably just need to remove whatever AI restriction left to let human win and this should do the trick.Not appreciated you need to take comments more seriously. Ok maybe its me - i need to better explain it - i presumed you would know what i mean.
Based on numbers above it seems that they rushed it way past 50% completion. Did they?
I don't understand why you want to limit this again after you just proposed it. This is the last project. You should be able to overtake AI by far by this point as you did in previous games.
In the current form of the game of course you buy the Ascent to Trancendence in one turn. I appreciate why you don't like it but that is true for all Secret Projects. The way you can use your whole faction to pre-build them is somewhat silly.
Regarding the combat. I don't mind unpredictable combat winners that much. It's the way the winner often takes low or no damage that I really dislike. As I said you can for the same battle have the attacker win and take no damage or the defender win and take no damage. It's very hard to plan for and early game with few units it can screw you over. Overall, the current combat implementation is worse than the vanilla one.
Not appreciated you need to take comments more seriously. Ok maybe its me - i need to better explain it - i presumed you would know what i mean.
This is about the argument bvanevery used - players have expectations. This is violating it ***heavily***, you can only go so far. Now there's some tolerance, we get used to something, so it takes a while to accept change, and we get used to that and its ok.
Now... Do you want to force player to always insta rush The Ascent to Trascendence or risk losing the game? I presume no.
Do you want players to delay and bank 15-20k ducats before completing Voice of Planet.. so they can insta rush The Ascent on turn 1 to deal with insta loss?
Is it ok to expect from player to have to rush last project? Personally i really don't like it.. its like saying to win you need last tech +20k gold or you lose.
Some backwards AI with pathetic production instantly completes the game winning project for 4k gold. That is not good design... there are many things wrong here, here's some:
- AI gets access to project it shouldn't have (vanilla allows everyone to build this project once Voice of Planet is done)
- AI heavily cheats with rushing.. like i sad he rushed 90+% production with 4k gold... while the player needs many times more
The Ascent to Trascendence breaks these rules:
- no tech requirement: anyone can build it.... eghm its ok for vanilla for its terribad AI
- yeah AI needs to have energy but it cheats its ass of.. and at late endgame there's ton of energy
- no consequences.. insta win button
So The Ascent to Trascendence needs to be somehow dealt with differently to be reasonable thing. Some suggestions:
- require tech to build it.. then its fair game if player wants to risk AI rushing it.. (fine by me.. its easy solution)
- disable rushing it completely (its 30 ish turns or less fine by me)
- limit rushing it (fine also..)
- or limit rushing every project if you want.. (my original suggestion, fine by me..)
- nerf transcendence AI rushing cheat _significantly_ (i wouldn't do this.. AI needs help for getting lategame projects)
- you can leave it be - but thats lazy thing (i really wouldn't like this)
Why not fix it properly when so much other things were already improved?
Colony pod cost would be something like
30 + X * MAPFACTOR * (# of bases + # of colony pods)
Re: Ascent. It was always kind of broken but few games went so long due to imbalances that it was never a huge concern.
I think it's more fitting with the lore to have no tech requirement. As essentially all factions 'ascend' you just become a less dominant part of the ascended entity if you don't win the race. So probably no rush for Ascent makes the most sense. VoP IMO should have granted some bonus to Ascent production - Space Elevator/satellites kind of idea.
In the current form of the game of course you buy the Ascent to Trancendence in one turn. I appreciate why you don't like it but that is true for all Secret Projects. The way you can use your whole faction to pre-build them is somewhat silly.
Regarding the combat. I don't mind unpredictable combat winners that much. It's the way the winner often takes low or no damage that I really dislike. As I said you can for the same battle have the attacker win and take no damage or the defender win and take no damage. It's very hard to plan for and early game with few units it can screw you over. Overall, the current combat implementation is worse than the vanilla one.
I'm sorry but you really don't understand the problem I have with the combat. It's not that you can win or lose unexpectedly. It's the way the damage dealt to the victor is so volatile. The bonus for winner of the last combat round makes combat outcomes more extreme, making results that should be extreme outliers (like the weaker unit winning without taking damage) commonplace. If you are attacking with weaker units this is particularly problematic. If you attack say with 2 vs 3 odds you can easily lose 3 units in a row without making a dent or the first one can win without problem. It's too much.
What do you mean? AI built AtT before Voice of Planet is done? Then this definitely a bug and need to be looked into. Please send me a save.No I mean i built it.. AI doesn't even the tech. But it then happened that AI rushed complete AtT at 90+% for
I was genuinely excited by your test results. No sarcasm was intendedHaha well i considered that.. shortly lol. My bad.. i thought you just glanced over it like its nothing. its kind of important imo.
This looks like another bug. I didn't understand first the completion percentage. However, you said 11 production * 101 turns to completion = about 1100 minerals. So it should cost about 4k credits. Please send me a save to look into it.Now I am confused ??? Ah I'll see later to check saves again and i'll upload them. The project is 3000 minerals.. I don't remember what Pirates Industry was... they might have used several crawlers and then rushed with energy.. maybe they rushed it multilpe times -_- weird. I don't understand now how they could even get to 1000 mins to completion their production was so crap. I though Transcend AI can rush cheaper?! Oh crap.. gonna take another look at saves.. something doesn't add up here.
What do you mean? AI built AtT before Voice of Planet is done?- No.. I meant now in your mod it is not ok anymore to give AI access to AtT, like in Vanilla. But maybe scratch that.. need to check saves again.. i thought AI can rush-buy SP for cheap. If AI pays 4 gold per mineral its a fair game..
1. Generally speaking, do you expect to certainly win on highest difficulty all the time? If not all the time then what percentage?
2. If not at highest level, then what is the difficulty level you expect to win all the time?
3. Do you expect win the race for The Ascent to Transcendence all the time? If not all the time then percentage or times?
4. Do you expect AI to get to the level when it competes for AtT? Do you prefer it to compete but still get it to yourself?
Let's say two units with relative strength 2 and 1 are fighting. How badly do you want weaker unit to be damaged if it wins? 80-90% all the time? What if they both have 1 HP left?
No I mean i built it.. AI doesn't even the tech. But it then happened that AI rushed complete AtT at 90+% forcheap(i am not sure anymore) and won the game. What this mean is that if player wants to win - you delay Voice.. prepare crawlers.. money and have to rush it on turn 1.. or you really risk losing the game.
Didn't get your MAPFACTOR. I though you proposed to make them more expensive with time. Which is a great idea in my opinion.
borehole = nutrient/energy. Also unique yield combination. In its 0-2-4 form it is not completely superior neither to forest nor mine nor farm-solar. It is still comparable to mine if we convert energy to minerals 2:1. They both will be equivalent to 4 minerals. So borehole will be better if you want to shift focus from minerals to energy.
mapfactor is just scaling by the size of the map. By # of bases+colony pods makes more sense than time. Time means they get expensive whether you have a large empire or not. And it would force players to do all their expanding early on.
re: on combat - well i didn't change any factors - i guess i can try with 2.0 and see if it "feels" less volatile.. i got used to 3.0
I saw boreholes as more as a replacement for mines.
Here sample progression for turns 0-100-200-300-400.
Colony: 6-8-10-13-17
Former: 4-5-7-9-11
Transport: same as former
Speeder Probe: same as colony
Supply: 12-16-20-26-34
With that in mind some non combat unit cost could be lowered down a little to make them bearable at the beginning. Like supply can start from 8 or 10 instead and then grow up.
And river impact - they ruin river flow.
Yeah they are competitor of mines, but you can for example take a look at my saves there and see i have lots of mines and basically 1 borehole per base. There's not even 1 borehole in new bases. Whats the problem with borehole > mine as long as there are restrictions and eco damage?
QuoteHere sample progression for turns 0-100-200-300-400.
Colony: 6-8-10-13-17
Former: 4-5-7-9-11
Transport: same as former
Speeder Probe: same as colony
Supply: 12-16-20-26-34
With that in mind some non combat unit cost could be lowered down a little to make them bearable at the beginning. Like supply can start from 8 or 10 instead and then grow up.
I'll put up stop sign here ;stupid :D What do we want to gain with these changes??
Now I will remove myself from this discussion hoping you'll forge some agreement with Nexii.
Thanks for adjusting the combat formula. I will finish my current game and then give the version a whirl.
Are you able to fundamentally change mechanics like support and eco-damage to make them less ICS-friendly? Sounds tricky.
Here - thats 1 turn before they rush Att. 106 turns to go.. 11 minerals per turn. Pirates are at +1 industry (fund + planned + power + thought police). If you click next turn they will fully rush it.
Well forcing a bigger space between bases does solve a lot of the ICS. And it makes EFFIC more relevant
I think a 100% distance formula could be fine to retain for EFFIC. Here's idea #2 for a simplified efficiency:
EFFIC = 1 - (4 - EFFIC) * HQ DISTANCE / 200, min of 25% max of 100%
-4 EFFIC would lose 4% efficiency per 1 distance (8/200) from the HQ
0 EFFIC would lose 2% efficiency per 1 distance from the HQ
+4 EFFIC would have 100% efficiency at any distance
The 200 factor could be adjusted by map size, but it's probably roughly what it should be for a normal sized map.
Perhaps for SPs they can't be rushed with anything till 25% complete with minerals. I do think that was sort of their intent with the 4x rush cost till 4 rows are complete thing. Only problem was it still allowed rushing the early part, and it didn't really scale up for the more expensive SPs.
Say facilities are x2, units are x4, and projects are x8. And, of course, VoT doubles all the above numbers. What do you think?
Rushing
On topic of requiring x% amount of minerals before being able to rush SP. It makes some sense since it guarantees one can't snipe them in single turn and the faction with better production can win the race. For example this AtT thing would not happen. And there would be a race - 1 turn rush is not a race.
There's Crawler rush thing - but it is for most of the game quite an investment to dump crawlers into SP. I'd ban crawlers from rushing SP just because i find it unfair to AI. But its not too bad, in current implementation player can snipe some important SPs with crawler+energy, but there's enough projects and tech disparity that AI gets lots of them and thats quite nice.
Terraforming
I'd say it should be #1 priority to improve AI terraforming - they need to have enough minerals or they are really really bad. Got to teach them to remove fungus and terraform if they don't have PLANET > 0. Even then AI should know that each base needs at least x amount of minerals. For example 5 - 10 - 20 early, mid, late.. thats the way i think about it at least - in general each base needs to have a minimum amount to complete facilities in reasonable time. Then AI needs to know when things get worse to re-terraform terrain.. once fungus pop everywhere i don't see them removing it. Fixing eco-damage would help them a lot, i've seen them doing 60+ eco-damage thats worm-pop every turn until the base is ruined.
Mines: if mine would not reduce output of food by 1 it could be decent on rolling tiles for some bases. Civ3 had that.. AI still needs to know not to build mine on every tile ^^. Low altitude Rainy rolling tile could be 3-2-0 or 4-2-0 later.. solar would add just 1 or 2 energy (with economy or mirror).. while on hill tiles one could build solar collectors. You can maybe teach AI to prefer solar collectors on higher altitudes, mines on lower rolling tiles.
Yeah. It's all makes sense. The only thing that rocky tiles do not harvest any nutrients and on top of that mine reduces the nutrient output confuses me. What is the purpose of it? Some historical reason from Civ1? Well now it makes rocky mines pretty pathetic comparing to forest and boreholes. Don't know what to do with it.
On topic of boreholes.. they are in weird place. One thing to note - they are awesome solution for flatland bases with no rocky tiles.. coastal ones especially. Easy quick 6 minerals.. energy doesn't even matter, its just nice. In that sense they compete away for example mineral sea platforms. So if you remove boreholes you will give way more space to forests certainly - otherwises bases can't get minerals. Not sure if its possible to make sea tiles useful for minerals. So here - boreholes are op certainly. Farm/mines combos might be used here if you remove that -1 nutrient.
- Borehole with 0-2-6 yield hm seems quite awful to me honestly ^^. Not sure i would build them.
- Removing boreholes completely would help with eco-damage.
- Another idea is - since they are cool - just moving them to something like tech 10. So lategame one can use them a bit its fun.
Well you can remove the -1 N for mines in alphax.txt. I have for awhile as sea mining platforms were very bad compared to tidal harnesses. Let's see, 1 M and -1 N, or 3 E...not a hard decision. I even gave mining platforms +1M. But I also reduced kelp by 1N. I might go back on this one yet, sea has to be considered for mines I guess is all I'm saying. I've also tried 3-0-2 and 3-2-0 for sea tiles. Right now I have sea at 2-3-0 and 2-0-3 (plus any facilities).
I think boreholes do need to produce M, otherwise M ends up being very scarce. Alternatives could be to boost the M of forests, mines, or fungus.
Looks like opinions are more or less around 1) nerfing borehole and focus it on more of minerals/energy but not both, 2) nerfing energy flow past mid game.
Short term plan.
Solar collector energy yield limit is 4, including altitude and mirror effects, excluding bonus resources and SE effects. This wont affect tidal harness as its max energy output is 4 already. This will render combining land raising and building mirror fields useless. They still will be useful separately. Preferably mirrors will be cheaper option.
Borehole is 0-2-6. This is kinda artificial attempt to balance them instead of completely removing it. This way they are formally not superior to rocky mines and not inferior to farm-solar combo.
Looks like opinions are more or less around 1) nerfing borehole and focus it on more of minerals/energy but not both, 2) nerfing energy flow past mid game.
Short term plan.
Solar collector energy yield limit is 4, including altitude and mirror effects, excluding bonus resources and SE effects. This wont affect tidal harness as its max energy output is 4 already. This will render combining land raising and building mirror fields useless. They still will be useful separately. Preferably mirrors will be cheaper option.
Borehole is 0-2-6. This is kinda artificial attempt to balance them instead of completely removing it. This way they are formally not superior to rocky mines and not inferior to farm-solar combo.
Update.
1. Borehole stay nerfed like that.
2. No touching collectors/mirrors.
3. Moving mineral multiplying facilities a little bit earlier to give players a chance to beef up mineral intake in case they found it insufficient. They are still expensive so no use to build them everywhere. Also there is still ecodamage that strikes back early production centers.
Sounds good to me. I'd not even make them so expensive. The opportunity cost of building a facility over formers/colony pods is always considerable. I would hardly build any in the early game if they were not so cheap to rush-build.
I'm playing an older version. However, when I researched Quantum Power the game asked me to upgrade my units. The upgrade costs were negative and I made a ton of money, almost 1000 credits. Is this intended? :)
Hit end turn on the save file to replay it.
# Version 65
* Merged with Thinker 2.0.
A lot of changes. Proceed with caution.
Terraroming AI
I have started to work on terraforming AI to give computer some boost. Induktio has already done a lot on unit movement in Thinker. I hope to extend this a little in terraforming part only for now.
I use the computer worked tile placement algorithm to determine which changes will be accepted by base. For that I actually change map modeling future improved state and then recompute base to let it use these new improvements. Whether modification will be accepted or not depends greatly on base needs and governors settings. In this regards this algorithm lets AI decide which improvements they need based on their current model and base settings. Of course, it may accept more than one possible improvement options. In this case I weight them by each resource. Currently I set nutrients = 1.0, minerals = 1.0 and energy = 0.5. For nutrients and minerals I count additional surplus. For energy I summarize total economy, labs, and psych. This approach allows to automatically account for any multiplying factors as well as corruption. So essentially I project the net worth of given improvement.
Observed that they build farms a lot and but not always second improvement on it. Maybe it is just not enough formers and they got distracted on other priorities or bases grow fast due to lot of farms?
*one thing you can do is value energy slightly more - then they build solars more often on good tiles (+2/+3 energy) before moving to another food tile - not sure if it is a good idea overall - but it makes them move less work more
I am also thinking to take base needs for example and emphasize on preventing disasters. For example, start valuing nutrients more when it is close to starvation, minerals - when it is close to support limit, energy - when it is close to maintenance limit. I don't know if AI does this too but anyway algorithm can help it.
Can you mod what tiles governor choose to work?
Probably. However, The logic is more or less good already and it is so complex that I am afraid I won't be able to do anything better in observable lifetime. Do you have a specific complaint against vanilla governor?
Then you can teach AI governor some of these tricks/tweaks. To work minimum x minerals if possible, or to avoid/reduce growing if using doctors/empath and focus more energy/production instead. And terraforming AI can improve tiles according to base needs. These two things are quite connected.
Borehole construction time is now does not match its reduced output (0-2-6). I am thinking to either cut the construction time or increase energy output a little like to 0-2-8 or 0-2-10. It should be still relatively strong improvement for that time investment but should not compete with rocky mine in minerals.
That was my first reaction as well. I though Boreholes would be ruined, but there's still usually a crappy tile for them so they are quite useful. That said due to how multipliers work I wouldn't go over 6 energy, its quite unbalanced. Once you have 8 or 10 yield with energy bank/ network nodes for example the faction that gets a tech runs away quickly.
On the other side terraforming time is really long, its as long as secret project build! I'd reduce that number maybe even to 16. Other improvements are built much faster except Aquifier i think. That one could be shortened as well.
Fix version 69.1.Kudos for coming up with a fix so quickly!
Thank you for opening the multiplayer for me. I never knew it existed. It stares at me from the main menu but my eyes slip over it for 20 years. It would be fun to play. 😊
I agree that Thinker-WTP are designed for better human vs. AI experience. However, I'd say vanilla is also slow game from the mid game on. So either way it'll be a 400 turns bouncing back and forth.Eh, not really. From what I've seen, most multiplayer games end well before 2300. Once you unlock cruisers and air units, you can really seize the initiative and start rolling over people. The challenge lies in getting to that point without being rolled over yourself.
We should probably design a specialized fast game mod for multiplayer. Everything is cheap. Terraforming is short. Units move far. Total probable 50-100 turns whole game.
Although it will be a challenge to balance it. With far moving units one can bite a big piece of neighbor before they can retaliate.
Wait a minute. I know such fast paced game - chess!
🤣
Eh, not really. From what I've seen, most multiplayer games end well before 2300. Once you unlock cruisers and air units, you can really seize the initiative and start rolling over people. The challenge lies in getting to that point without being rolled over yourself.
Nevill wrote a nice mod that was more geared towards multiplayer, which I found reasonably balanced. Part of the reason we started playing WtP was actually to see if we could combine the two somehow. Maybe he'd have something to say about such a project.
EDIT: There is also the question of distribution of techs. In most games, you're very unlikely to see anything past level 9. Granted, this is an issue in singleplayer too; dunno yet whether WtP addresses this. The other question here is how much a faster base and territory development will contribute to faster techs.
I'm playing Civ4 as my other 4x game and it has fairly efficient mechanics for avoiding snowballing. One is a (very) roughly quadratic increase in city maintenance, the other is an enormous defenders advantage in warfare.
As for vanilla Smac multiplayer, the only serious MP game with reasonable settings I played ended by resignation of all other factions in turn 121 due to overwhlming military and economic dominance of the leading facction (he was Morgan with Cloning Vats, Helicopters, Monopole Magnets, probably also Satellites (would have to look that one up)). The serious MP game with unreasonable settings ended by resignation in turn 67. I would be very surprised if MP games between competent players last past 150-170 turns. WTP probably increases turn count by delaying the broken stuff way deep in the tech tree.
The decrease in early development speed your mod introduces is fundamentally a bad idea.
My take on the nutrient requirements for growth is that your numbers are still way to high. I would revert growth to level 2 to 2 rows of nutrients and keep it at 2 rows until size 3 or 4 and then increase it to 3 rows for the next 3 (or 4) levels of growth , then 4 rows and so on.
without addressing the real causes of snowballing which is not early expansion speed but rather a bunch of broken mechanics (pop-booming, Satellites, +2 Eco kinda) and secret projects (Weather Paradigm, Planetary Transit System, Cloning Vats).
To change the balance of horizontal growth vs vertical growth it is sufficient to increase the efficiency of facilities, especially drone control facilities.
What I personally would like from your mod is balancing out some of the overpowered options.
Interesting trade offs between a variety of options in terms of base development and social engineering would be even better.
Yes, I would like to see Colony Pods reverted to 3 rows and early base growth to 2 rows as well. I think formers at 2 rows is also better.
I will probably finish a game not before the weekend.
That's interesting. Did you leave growth at 4 rows then?
It doesn't add up. I have +2 psych which should lead to 2 citizens, one default on Transcend, one from the +2 psych. I get what is going on there but the +2 psych from Lal's ability is wasted in this situation.
Did you change tech costs to be fixed, or dependent on tech level in some way?
Get it to at least 1-1-0 yield relatively early in the game to allow minimal support for barren land and sea bases.Well, this is false. No tech gives fungus +1 minerals, they give it +food or +energy instead.
Focus on energy yield in the mid game to compliment forest instead of competing with it.
Use green/alien technologies for fungus production to streamline research priorities for green/PLANET factions.
Technology | Fungus production effect | Comment
---------- | ------------------------ | -------
Centauri Ecology | +1 nutrient |
Progenitor Psych | +1 mineral | reassigned
Field Modulation | +1 energy | reassigned
Bioadaptive Resonance | +1 energy | reassigned
Centauri Psi | +1 nutrient |
Centauri Meditation | +1 energy |
Secrets of Alpha Centauri | +1 energy |
Centauri Genetics | +1 mineral |