Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: Yitzi on November 27, 2012, 04:34:29 PM

Title: Are facility hurry costs too low (and why I think they are)
Post by: Yitzi on November 27, 2012, 04:34:29 PM

Facility hurry costs are easy to determine: 2 energy per mineral.  I feel this is too low and favors energy focus too much, as shown by the following calculations (assumptions given):
Firstly, I will assume that it should be substantially (though not extremely) easier to build facilities with a mineral focus as opposed to an energy focus.  Energy focus is better for teching, subverting, and upgrading, so mineral focus should be better for building.
Secondly, because mineral focus comes with ecodamage, you can't produce as much; for simplicity, I'll assume that the difference is the difference between running FM and not running FM (this assumption probably favors energy focus more than is warranted, meaning the actual case is even stronger than I am presenting here), which by the early midgame is roughly a 25-33% bonus in raw FOP produced, call it 30% extra.  So far, that's producing 2.6 energy (can substitute for 1.3 minerals), or 2 minerals, so mineral focus has the advantage.  Looks good.
But then comes the problem: Production-boosting facilities.  In the early midgame, energy going to economy is boosted by the Energy Bank and Tree Farm, for a 100% boost, whereas minerals have no boosters, so you get 5.2 energy or 2 minerals, a clear advantage for energy focus.  Later on, the genejack factory becomes available, but so does the fusion lab, so you get 6.5 energy or 3 minerals, still a slight advantage for energy focus.  It's not until the robotic assembly plant, far later in the game, that mineral focus is actually better at what is supposed to be its strength.
Therefore, it seems to me that it'd be best to boost hurry costs across the board by 50%, making mineral focus better for building, and energy focus better for teching (with labs focus), for grabbing golden ages (with psych focus), and for subverting and getting new bases started with a few carefully chosen hurries (with economy focus).

Title: Re: Are facility hurry costs too low (and why I think they are)
Post by: Kirov on November 28, 2012, 06:49:24 PM

The devil is in the detail, and as far as I'm concerned, first you'd have to explain what you exactly mean by mineral/energy focus or rather, how you want to implement them.

As it is right now, I don't believe you can make a discernible distinction between mineral or energy focus. Sure Yang and Domai favour industrial output over energy, and Morgan under Demo/FM/Wealth can rushbuy things like crazy, but apart from that, factions need both decent production and decent labs, both provided by boreholes. The only distinction I personally use is between energy-oriented and energy-challenged factions, but that doesn't make the latter any industrial powerhouses.

Also, part of the game is precisely finding balance between your treasury, lab output, industry and army. I'm not sure if I want to be forced to choose which leg I stand on, I'd rather exercise both.

Last but not least, I don't have this impression that fac hurry cost is too low. But that may be because I try to switch the slider to labs as much as reasonably possible and I'm usually quite poor. :) Sure buying rectanks is easy, but tree farms and hybrid forests are everything but cheap. Let others say.

Title: Re: Are facility hurry costs too low (and why I think they are)
Post by: Yitzi on November 28, 2012, 09:17:27 PM

Quote from: Kirov on November 28, 2012, 06:49:24 PM

The devil is in the detail, and as far as I'm concerned, first you'd have to explain what you exactly mean by mineral/energy focus or rather, how you want to implement them.

Basically, it's a question of what terraforming you use.  Mineral focus means you use crawled mines and worked forests and boreholes, energy focus means either you use solar collectors and echelon mirrors (possibly with terraforming to raise the land in question), or go for crawled nutrients and get specialists.  Boreholes are limited in either case due to ecodamage, especially with the mod I'm planning (where mineral ecodamage is cut by 10 to compensate for the lack of clean minerals, but improvement ecodamage is only cut by 2, and hybrid forests are moved to the late game.)

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As it is right now, I don't believe you can make a discernible distinction between mineral or energy focus. Sure Yang and Domai favour industrial output over energy, and Morgan under Demo/FM/Wealth can rushbuy things like crazy, but apart from that, factions need both decent production and decent labs, both provided by boreholes.

But actually you don't need good production in most bases, only those that produce units and projects (and even those don't need good production if you allow upgrading of units and crawlers).

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Also, part of the game is precisely finding balance between your treasury, lab output, industry and army. I'm not sure if I want to be forced to choose which leg I stand on, I'd rather exercise both.

The whole point here is to force you to exercise both, because you need energy for research and minerals for production.  The problem is that this way you don't need to stand on both, as 1 energy on the map is worth more than 1 mineral on the map even for industry.

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Last but not least, I don't have this impression that fac hurry cost is too low. But that may be because I try to switch the slider to labs as much as reasonably possible and I'm usually quite poor. :) Sure buying rectanks is easy, but tree farms and hybrid forests are everything but cheap.

Ah, that's the thing.  There's no question that if you switch to labs as much as you can and focus on energy you'll have infrastructure problems.  The problem is that it's possible to go pure energy in your terraforming, put economy at 40% or 50%, rush buy all your facilities, and have better facility production and better research than the guy who goes labs as much as possible and relies on minerals for infrastructure.

To put it another way: If there were some way to trade mineral output of a square for energy output on a 1:1 basis, it would be possible to switch all the minerals to energy, put the extra energy into economy, rush buy all your facilities, and come out ahead (at least unless you can handle a genejack factory while running FM).  Hence, energy is superior to minerals, which is somewhat imbalancing...

So I think we're agreed on the goal (force players to have some production and some energy, rather than all of one and all of the other), the question is whether that holds as is.

Title: Re: Are facility hurry costs too low (and why I think they are)
Post by: Kirov on December 02, 2012, 08:36:38 PM

Quote from: Yitzi on November 28, 2012, 09:17:27 PM

Basically, it's a question of what terraforming you use.  Mineral focus means you use crawled mines and worked forests and boreholes, energy focus means either you use solar collectors and echelon mirrors (possibly with terraforming to raise the land in question), or go for crawled nutrients and get specialists. 

Well, I don't think my terraforming is in any way unusual, and even with energy-oriented factions I can't say I discern any 'focus' here. Basically, I start typically with 'forest & forget', sometimes I add a farm or a mine/rocky, but that's only because leveling down rocky tiles is a waste of formerhours. Then of course boreholes on coastal tiles and condensers for specialists. One thing - I rarely use collectors and never make echelon mirrors. You can always raise some terrain and put more boreholes there.

I believe there is an optimum way of working your territory and it has nothing to do with any kind of focus. Use your improvements where they're most efficient, simple as that. Focusing on either mins or energy is suboptimum.

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Ah, that's the thing.  There's no question that if you switch to labs as much as you can and focus on energy you'll have infrastructure problems.  The problem is that it's possible to go pure energy in your terraforming, put economy at 40% or 50%, rush buy all your facilities, and have better facility production and better research than the guy who goes labs as much as possible and relies on minerals for infrastructure.

Actually there is a question. By moving the slider by 10% in the midgame, you change your income by several tens ec. For this you can buy only 2 building turns at a good base. You're slower with tech and you won't make up for it just by throwing cash at infrastructure. In an average base, if you pay 100 ec to rushbuy a network node, you won't get nearly as many lab points for these rushed turns.

To be honest, in the games I play, I fail to see the problem you see. Even when playing at Demo/FM/Wealth I can't just rushbuy things like there is no tomorrow. How much do you earn midgame? Rushbuying tree farms or research hospitals is a very expensive business as it is already. 

Title: Re: Are facility hurry costs too low (and why I think they are)
Post by: Yitzi on December 02, 2012, 11:43:45 PM

Quote from: Kirov on December 02, 2012, 08:36:38 PM

Well, I don't think my terraforming is in any way unusual, and even with energy-oriented factions I can't say I discern any 'focus' here. Basically, I start typically with 'forest & forget', sometimes I add a farm or a mine/rocky, but that's only because leveling down rocky tiles is a waste of formerhours. Then of course boreholes on coastal tiles and condensers for specialists. One thing - I rarely use collectors and never make echelon mirrors. You can always raise some terrain and put more boreholes there.

Boreholes do tend to skew things away from everything else except condenser/farm/enricher, I'm really looking at what would happen if boreholes were limited.

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I believe there is an optimum way of working your territory and it has nothing to do with any kind of focus. Use your improvements where they're most efficient, simple as that. Focusing on either mins or energy is suboptimum.

That's what should be, but just running the numbers, it looks like focusing on energy will actually be better than that, at least assuming that your minerals would go mainly toward facilities.

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Actually there is a question. By moving the slider by 10% in the midgame, you change your income by several tens ec. For this you can buy only 2 building turns at a good base. You're slower with tech and you won't make up for it just by throwing cash at infrastructure.

The point isn't that you'd throw cash at infrastructure instead of labs.  The point is that you'd crawl energy on all (or all but one) of your crawled boreholes, replace mines and forests with energy farms, or even worse use specialists, and get more energy to make up for your labs.
Think about what you said: By spending 10% of your energy for one turn, you can buy 2 building turns at a good base, or equivalently 1 building turn at 2 good bases.  That means that under the scenario in question (which I assume to be the balanced one we both want to promote), one turn's energy is worth one turn's production at 20 good bases...i.e. more than your entire midgame empire.  So if balanced minerals vs. energy means that your energy is worth more than your minerals, then each energy is worth more than each mineral even for production...which is not conducive to balanced play.

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To be honest, in the games I play, I fail to see the problem you see. Even when playing at Demo/FM/Wealth I can't just rushbuy things like there is no tomorrow.

You don't have to be able to rushbuy things like crazy to cause problems, just rushbuy them faster by building energy farms and crawling boreholes for energy than you can build them using mines and crawling boreholes for minerals.

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How much do you earn midgame?

I tend not to go for Demo/FM/Wealth in most of my games, and don't go for optimized play anyway, so my own experience isn't that telling.

Let me put it this way:
1. If someone's only concern were building facilities, how many energy FOP (i.e. energy on the map) should be worth as much as one mineral FOP? 
2. What terraforming, if any, should never be worth using in a builder game (i.e. focused mainly on facilities and techs)?
Once you answer those, I can probably either pinpoint where I'd disagree or show why things as they stand are problematic.