The one thing I find painful in playing SMAC (or Civ II) is the per city upkeep model. I'm sorry, I really loathe it.
Lack of defense in depth. Best thing one can do is avoid making roads, and plant xenofungus on tactical boundaries.
Lack of asymmetric warfare.
QuoteLack of asymmetric warfare.
Hmm, define? When I've gone up against Alien Battle Ogres with Scouts, I definitely felt I was doing asymmetric warfare. Of course my goal is always to catch up to symmetric warfare and then surpass. Are you saying you want to be the low tech insurgency forever, or you want to be pestered by low tech insurgents forever?
Lack of defense in depth. Best thing one can do is avoid making roads, and plant xenofungus on tactical boundaries.
Does this imply you'd prefer a tactical combat game, like 12 miles of AT guns to wade through or some such? SMACs scale is confused, sort of mixing tactical and strategic scale. The difficulty of combining tactical and strategic scale, is that all those tactical "zoom downs" take forever to play. I've seen this happen numerous times in RPG "minimap combat" games. However if you were not personally doing the fighting, if AIs were actually responsible for moving all the units around tactically, it could work.
QuoteLack of asymmetric warfare.Hmm, define? When I've gone up against Alien Battle Ogres with Scouts, I definitely felt I was doing asymmetric warfare. Of course my goal is always to catch up to symmetric warfare and then surpass. Are you saying you want to be the low tech insurgency forever, or you want to be pestered by low tech insurgents forever?
it's not possible to attrit the enemy making territorial forays not profitable.
What's possible is to respond with comparable force. No area denial, no "death by a thousand cuts".
Heck, even something as simple as land mines. After the war start a charity for children who lost their feet on antipersonnel mines for an economy boost. :)
Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare.
I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.
Have some sort of logistics for offensives
Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare. What's relevant to 4X of guerrilla warfare is a targeted infrastructure attack.
Right now, cities are insular single-square tiles with perfect stack defense. Defending the perimeter and defending a larger territory look like the same task in SMAC.
I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.
Have some sort of logistics for offensives, not necessarily very detailed or too grounded in real life. A supply chain connecting all the way into friendly territory. Maybe units need to receive their SMAC maintenance cost directly, otherwise losing fractions of their combat strength up till being non-combatants and disbanding at an even later point. Support combat units in form of more than artillery bombardment special ability.
These are few factors and I can think of many others. Most can't feasibly work in a 4X but some sure do for their purpose.
Has it been another decade since this question was last asked??
QuoteHeck, even something as simple as land mines. After the war start a charity for children who lost their feet on antipersonnel mines for an economy boost. :)
From a realism and simulation standpoint, I hear you. But from a game enjoyment standpoint, are you sure you want what you ask for? You're asking to fight WW I style trench warfare on the Western Front. It's long, grueling, and slow. It was frustrating for the participants. Why isn't it going to frustrate you as a player? I've definitely had games of SMAC that frustrated me because they were taking forever, although the sources of the problem are different. 1) too many units to clean out, even with Choppers. 2) distances to push the units are too long. Are you quite sure you really want a much longer, much more boring game? What's going to keep you interested in the next section of land mines, artillery shells, and barbed wire in No Man's Land?
QuoteThrowing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare.
But I think positioning them on favorable terrain, and attempting to distract or delay Ogres from population centers, counts.
QuoteI'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.
Emperor of the Fading Suns had more individuated facilities per hex, so a "city" is essentially a collection of facility hexes in the same place. It results in needing a lot more individual garrison units, which if you're maniuplating manually, is more tedium. What you're asking for, is the ability to attack or defend in more detail. The question is, how does one manage those details without bogging down the game? And if some of those details are automated, at what point does player agency disappear, so that it's merely illustrative detail and not decisionmaking detail?
QuoteHave some sort of logistics for offensives
One of the big questions for me is whether a planetary space game is going to include some kind of orbital combat mechanics or not. This changes the logistics and insurgency possibilities quite a bit. Different historical eras have different logistical problems. When Hannibal was tromping around Italy, his army was living off the locals and wasn't being supplied from Carthage. That's not so doable for a WW II sized tank division. But if you got Star Trek shuttlecraft that can zip to anywhere on the planet in a moment, logistics are more about whether anyone can see you and shoot you down.
A problem for purposes of the present discussion, is orbital combat mechanics are "not SMAC". SMAC is just Civ II with a sci-fi skin. I meant for this thread to be more about what in SMAC is tiresome and tedious, as opposed to any game feature one might conceivably implement. Anyways SMAC's actual orbital mechanics are pretty darned simple, sort of tack-ons to the basic Civ II framework without much thought put into them. And considering how late game they occur, not so useful or important anyways.
I see. What do you think of seeing a prototype with some of my ideas, though? Minimalist graphics with few "borrowed" sprites, not meant to be used as an actual game really.
I see. What do you think of seeing a prototype with some of my ideas, though? Minimalist graphics with few "borrowed" sprites, not meant to be used as an actual game really.
Meaning you have a prototype to show? Sure, why not.
Like for instance in my case, approaching 2 decades of experience with this game, and plenty of other games in this genre... I know that unit pushing complexity has to be reined in somehow. Or else nothing has been achieved, it will be the same old crap boring experience. That most gamers don't even like. Or they grow out of being able to make time in their lives for such things. Most people got married, had kids, and took on more responsibilities in their jobs. I didn't! So I sit around posting the world's most incredibly long winded AAR for the sake of form, not even because it's that exciting to play the game or write up the game anymore. But I figure, I should do at least one AAR like that, to see how it ends up. Then it's gonna be been there, done that. The bar will have been raised for what needs to justify the time expenditure on such things.
One thing that's a certainty for me, an absolute requirement in any SMAC-similar game, is better control over terraformers. Currently I work every single tile by hand. The AI is way too stupid to entrust to such things. I would like some kind of programmable or priority list specification for what kinds of terrain to develop. C-Evo had some kind of priority list IIRC. I'd like it to be fully programmable in some kind of scripting language. Which would then ideally be compiled so that the decisions aren't bogging down a scaled simulation. If compilation is too much, maybe I could come up with some kind of "condition mask and transition state" paradigm, where the player is merely selecting or deselecting option bits in a .txt file.
First off it takes balls to admit what you wrote, old chap. Mad respect for that.
Can we talk more about "unit pushing" and possible solutions? Otherwise can you direct me to an existing discussion?
Making it fully programmable or even predicate calculus level won't work for actual end users. I had a program with polynomial coefficients as input. This had to be dumbed down into a linear slider. Users block out when they hear about anything remotely math-related. There's even research on how and why they block out.
FWIW compiling to native is a red herring. Just parse to an AST, validate it and naively interpret. Most of script slowness in games comes from running scripts too often and too many. You can only add a constant factor improvement for that.
https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/alpha-centauri (https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/alpha-centauri)
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/alpha-centauri.27/ (https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/alpha-centauri.27/)
https://www.weplayciv.com/forums/forum/5-alpha-centauri/ (https://www.weplayciv.com/forums/forum/5-alpha-centauri/)
I'm not sure if this counts, but Re:OP, a lot of SMAC does seem dated, most notably the human genome project, but also the part where all vehicles are human-crewed and thus vulnerable to mindworms. Even today's armed forces are increasingly automated, with drones and the like. Of course, mindworm combat was an integral part of game balance and all that, but it's odd in terms of lore.