Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => Modding => Topic started by: Mart on July 13, 2015, 04:18:11 AM

Title: Energy balance
Post by: Mart on July 13, 2015, 04:18:11 AM

Working on next iteration of UMod, and its large feature is reworking how energy "works" in the game.

What are your thoughts/observations regarding energy in the game?

Some of mine:
- While in the beginning (early game) it is kind of ok, we can get enough to support that few facilities and devote some part to research so we get a tech every several turns (more or less). With tech trading, probing, etc. We can get fast enough tech discovery rate, even if things go wrong and our F2 screen says we gonna have a tech every 20 or 30 turns.
- Towards game end, we have so much energy (crawlers, but not only), that we can get multiple techs in one turn! Often 2 technologies, from own research, no trading or probing. So late game speeds so fast, that much features of late game are not used, we transcend so quickly. But this is rather known for long time.
- It is so unfortunate, that we can typically sell a technology to AI for 25 EC, later for 50 EC, and so on. While we buy like 4 times more expensive. Still, paying for a technology 100 EC or 200 EC when the research cost says several hundred, like 400 or 500. It is cheap a bit. Maybe buy/sell "spread" is 4x? But prices could correspond better  with actual lab points at particular time of the game.

Other?

So apart from energy being good for research, what else is it good for?
Hurrying production? Is it in standard rules too expensive, too cheap or maybe just right as it should be?
Any other?
Winning the game by cornering energy market?
mindprobing units and bases?
upgrading units?
...?

I already have some solution in place, that for the next mod iteration I yet again adjusted.
Asking the questions here, to possibly quicker find some good solution for bringing late game into playable state.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Eadee on July 13, 2015, 10:18:51 PM

Quote from: Mart on July 13, 2015, 04:18:11 AM

Hurrying production? Is it in standard rules too expensive, too cheap or maybe just right as it should be?

I like hurrying how it is. I usually use it to buy instant recycling tanks in all of my new bases if support is >/=0. Also to snatch a secret project here and there if I'm jst a few turns away and an AI is reaching a breakthrough. Besides that I seldom use EC for hurrying.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Mart on July 15, 2015, 12:39:18 PM

And some testing with changed mechanism of energy gave me recently promising results:
- While before Industrial Automation, Lal offered Gaians (human player) Planetary Networks for 375 EC. My tech cost at that time was like 735. This is 50% of the cost, which is better than in other cases.
But the price itself in that early tech tree place is interesting outcome. I tried to make things more expensive, and it looks it works.
- And in the same game while calling for elections around the same time as above, I needed to buy votes from two factions to win. They asked:
-- over 800 EC
-- around 710 EC
I paid both... :)
Maybe that high Planetary Networks price was an effect of having over 2000 EC in the banks.

The settings, I mentioned, are part of Unity Mod, that I work on. I will have soon new version to test. In general, I tweaked costs of facilities maintenance. Gave interest to all factions (1%). And hurry cost is 3 times larger. It makes things more expensive.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Eadee on July 19, 2015, 10:34:30 AM

I just realised you didn't mention the possibility to raise terrain at the expense of EC. I don't know if you want to modify something here too but depending on land mass this is a quite powerful terraforming action.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Mart on July 19, 2015, 10:48:01 AM

Yes. And we seem to have no control over how expensive rising/lowering is.
Effecting 1 tile (one level, 1000 m) is like 4 EC? Or close to it. That is very cheap. If a player wants to bring 100 tiles several thousands meters up, then it amounts to quite a sum, but still it is too cheap.
This is my impression.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Eadee on July 19, 2015, 10:54:37 AM

well, in my experience its very cheap to construct land bridges, but almost unaffordable to raise terrain to get more energy. This 1 Enery/turn you win by raising the land over 1000m won't ever pay off your investment since you alwyas affect a lot of tiles around it you have to pay for, at least I think so.

But if it can't be affected anyways...

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Mart on July 19, 2015, 12:16:19 PM

There is this strategy, where you rise land to 3500 m above sea level, then set up an energy park there in the way:
line of solar collectors
line of echelon mirrors
line of solar collectors
line of echelon mirrors
... and so on
This way each solar collector is getting +1 energy from 6 echelons, effectively +6 raw energy. Echelons get their regular, but this is still +4.
And for free market add even +1 more.
Placing crawlers on such tiles homed to bases with multiplications like energy bank, tree farm, etc. get that multiplied many times.
So in endgame energy incomes skyrocket.
And such energy parks do not need to be on level 4 (3500 meters). They can be on 500 meters too, but still they can earn you enough to quickly get to level 3500.
On CGN there was an AAR from a player doing something like this. His incomes were in thousands (? iirc) EC/turn.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Buster's Uncle on July 19, 2015, 02:35:53 PM

EEEEEEE
ECECECE
EEEEEEE
ECECECE
EEEEEEE

-The collectors get as much as 12EC/turn at 35,00ft if crawled for a base in Golden Age and having the Merchant Exchange - 13 if a river square.  This gets more worthwhile as the size of the farm scales up and according to the length of the game, the biggest drawback being that it's not worth the trouble.  You can borehole up to heck and gone for a good return at a fraction of the former micromanagement time.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: vonbach on July 19, 2015, 06:46:30 PM

Good grief thats insane. I never bothered with geo engineering like that.
I just build as many cities as possible and solar collectors on every rocky square
with forests on all the rest. My cities are small until I hit the right tech but productive.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Buster's Uncle on July 19, 2015, 07:04:13 PM

[shrugs]  For me, it takes a while for the forming to get old...

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Geo on July 19, 2015, 08:13:23 PM

regarding raising/lowering terrain prices: afaik it scales with distance from the closest base.
And I think planetary council votes are scaled according to the amount of energy you have available. There's I think something else that scales according to availability as well, but I can't think of what exactly it is now.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Buster's Uncle on July 19, 2015, 08:56:23 PM

Votes seem entirely population-based to me - at least in the early game when it's easy to keep track.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Geo on July 19, 2015, 08:57:50 PM

We're talking about buying the votes from another leader during the Planetary Council voting procedure.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Buster's Uncle on July 19, 2015, 09:00:32 PM

Ah.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Nexii on August 04, 2015, 08:18:19 AM

Energy has a lot of use.  It doesn't pollute like minerals and is amplified by commerce.  Also there's more facilities to boost energy, for example energy bank + tree farm gives you 2x energy, at 2:1 rush ratio that means your energy = minerals for production.  So yes it's powerful for rushing facilities.  Arguably too powerful relative to minerals once you fix ecodamages. Some of this is moddable though since you can set the rush rows to be large you can make facilities 4:1 and SPs 16:1 for rush ratio.  Same with unit upgrade costs although I actually lowered those.

Energy is also a little more long term facing since labs take more time to benefit from (new techs, facilities, SPs have to be realized) whereas minerals can be directly put into military for pressure.  Or terraformers which tend to have a fast turnaround.

Tech buy/sell should probably be more relative to the buyer's tech cost.  Though really this is just an offer price and not the 'actual' worth of a tech.  Maybe the AI should offer a bit better deals later game.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: vonbach on August 04, 2015, 06:06:41 PM

Honestly one of the reasons i terraform the way I do is I like the way forested terrain looks.
Feeding my main cities crawlers and sending them on every spare forested square is also fun.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Eadee on August 04, 2015, 06:19:59 PM

What I like about forests is that they spread on their own and even remove fungus when doing so. Saves a lot of terraformer-time.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: Buster's Uncle on August 04, 2015, 07:43:21 PM

^This.  First thing I form at each base is plant a forest, to give it time to spread.

Title: Re: Energy balance
Post by: vonbach on August 04, 2015, 09:49:16 PM

Same here. Forest plant a sensor in it. Build a farm,solar,road  or two then spam forests.