Yitzi's unofficial SMAX patch 3.1e

[Nexii]

Re: Terraforming.  Farm/solar/echelon is competitive if you reduce the former times somewhat of condensor and echelon.  Keep in mind you can put echelons outside the base radius.  I also have had raising/lowering disabled and farm/solar is still good.  Other good options to balance out forests are to make Hybrid Forest later game/tech; make the resources different, or more former turns to plant.  Lately I've been trying Forests out at 1/3/0, and Boreholes at 0/0/12.  Also to consider is the ecodamage of minerals by Forest against energy strategy.

I do agree with the encroaching point though.  It should be a vendetta declare.  Similarly I think sea borders of land bases should extend out as much as land borders (~8 tiles by default).  It's a bit silly to get P-drones for sea units that are still in the base radius.

[Yitzi]

Similarly I think sea borders of land bases should extend out as much as land borders (~8 tiles by default).  It's a bit silly to get P-drones for sea units that are still in the base radius.

This makes sense.  I've put adding in the other three possibilities for borders (sea borders of land bases, and land and sea borders of sea bases) onto my list.

[Question]

That would be because there are two units in that square; a probe team cannot subvert two units at a time, unless they are in a base.  (This is another thing I plan to make mod-changeable.)

Yea, its a bit weird that all you need to do to make your units immune to probe teams is to stack more than 1 unit in a tile.

You could always take out the units with air and then use amphibious military units to capture the base...

I was playing miriam so i couldnt catch up in tech and my only hope was to steal techs with probes, which they couldnt do as the bases were all coastal.

It sort of is, except that instead of giving energy itself it gives energy to nearby solar panels.  If you have a bunch of solar panels, changing one of them to a mirror is worth +8 energy.  Of course, if you get more of them, they're weaker, but a mirror at max elevation surrounded by solar is essentially worth 12 energy.

Why not make ehcelon mirrors give a +3 bonus to the energy output of a square though? A condensor + farm gives +3 nutrients to a square with a nutrient bonus and also increases adjacent rainfall by one step. Its not common to have high elevations that make building solar panels worthwhile. Making it function more like a condensor would make it much more useful in normal play where you have time/resource constraints.

I think forests are okay at this point, its just that farms/solar collectors/mines need to scale more with tech. Making them give more nutrients/energy/minerals when you get higher level techs would be a good step (like what happens with mining platforms). Also making mines not reduce nutrients in the square will also make farm + mines much more attractive. A rolling + moist tile would give you 2 nutrients and 2 minerals, which is better than a unimproved forest.

I also find it weird that drill to aquifer doesnt allow you to direct where the river goes. Even ancient civilizations on earth knew how to dig canals for waterflow, but its 2100+ and you can launch satellites but not dig canals to make additional river tiles? Drill to aquifier isnt very useful when it takes so many turns to do and you have no idea where the resulting river is going to go to.

You mean, instead of showing "Scout Patrol" it would show "Green Scout Patrol"?  I'm pretty sure that could be done fairly easily.  In terms of options to show it, I think maybe I'll just add it under the existing "enhanced information" feature.

Yea something like that, or somewhere else within the box, not sure what would look best at this point though.

Some more issues :

In test.sav, you can see that i have two gatling infantries that i subverted from Lal. However the name is slightly different from the one in the workshop which is Gatling Squad. Also when i go to upgrade them via the workshop, one of them cant be upgraded. Apparently thats because one of them is an obsolete model and obsolete models that are subverted dont appear in your workshop. Whats also annoying is that when you upgrade units on the board, they dont get the benefits of the high morale ability but they do if you upgrade them through the workshop.

Another annoying thing is how you cant retire basic designs like the basic former so it keeps taking up space in your workshop. This wouldnt be so bad if the workshop didnt reset the selected unit to the latest one everytime you upgraded a unit (so if you upgrade an obsolete unit and you have 24 unit designs in total, it resets to #24 and if you want to upgrade any more obsolete deisgns, you have to scroll all the way back again). I tried disabling the basic unit designs, but that just made the game give prototype costs to stuff like formers...

-In test2.sav, it costs 1192 credits to mind control Hallowed Ground, a size 8 base with only a single transport foil and 2 buildings. This seems way too high considering that you may as well just conquer the building manually and save 1k+ credits...its not lcose to the believers HQ either, nor is it in golden age.

I also noticed that incite drones does not correctly show the newly created drones in the base screen, even if it causes a drone riot, you will still see no drones or no extra drones in the base screen. They dont appear to show up when looking at the base's psych screen either.

-Air units blocking tiles is a huge problem and really exploitable in MP. All you need is one air unit like a needle jet and it completely blocks the tile, no movement, bombardment or attacking possible except for SAM units. Any units in that tile can attack out of it with impunity. You can even do this with gravship and they never run out of fuel so you can block that tile forever for all non-SAM units. Im surprised, isnt this used in MP often?

-Clicking "Help" when selecting a native life form in the build screen will send you to the workshop which is useless, since native units dont appear there. It should send you to the datalinks section for that native lifeform.

-In the datalinks, when viewing a tech that grants a new society model (e.g. police state), there is no hyperlink to the police state entry (this applies for all society models, which are all missing hyperlinks for some reason).

-Roads only improve mine outputs if the square is rocky, if the square is flat or rolling, roads do nothing to the mines in the square (at least when combined with a farm). Not sure if bug?

-There seems to be some kind of limit to how many talents/drones you can affect with psych. Even if you have the psych slider at 100% and have 200+ total psych at a base, you will still have left over drones (not pacificsm ones) and not all workers can be turned into talents. Not sure if bug, but datalinks make no mention of a limit...

Suggestion :

-Make +PROBE modifiers in SE affect probe team combat just like how planet affects native life form combat, and also have it reduce your own probe team costs.

[Yitzi]

You could always take out the units with air and then use amphibious military units to capture the base...

I was playing miriam so i couldnt catch up in tech and my only hope was to steal techs with probes, which they couldnt do as the bases were all coastal.

Ah yeah, that would be a problem.

Why not make ehcelon mirrors give a +3 bonus to the energy output of a square though? A condensor + farm gives +3 nutrients to a square with a nutrient bonus and also increases adjacent rainfall by one step. Its not common to have high elevations that make building solar panels worthwhile. Making it function more like a condensor would make it much more useful in normal play where you have time/resource constraints.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the way condensers work in the first place.  But having mirrors give a bonus in their square too (besides counting as a solar panel) might be a future option by request.

I think forests are okay at this point, its just that farms/solar collectors/mines need to scale more with tech. Making them give more nutrients/energy/minerals when you get higher level techs would be a good step (like what happens with mining platforms).

That already exists somewhat with mirrors, condensers, raise land, and enrichers, and for mines I have plans to have maglevs give a boost to mines (totally stolen from earlier Civ games).  Not sure if it needs to be stronger.

Let's put it this way: How many former-turns per extra resource do you think are needed to make the terraforming types balanced?

Also making mines not reduce nutrients in the square will also make farm + mines much more attractive. A rolling + moist tile would give you 2 nutrients and 2 minerals, which is better than a unimproved forest.

Agreed that it would be a good idea (and it's even more important for sea).  Fortunately, that can be done through alphax, with no effort needed on my part.

I also find it weird that drill to aquifer doesnt allow you to direct where the river goes. Even ancient civilizations on earth knew how to dig canals for waterflow, but its 2100+ and you can launch satellites but not dig canals to make additional river tiles? Drill to aquifier isnt very useful when it takes so many turns to do and you have no idea where the resulting river is going to go to.

I think there is probably some rule; maybe each square goes to the lowest-elevation square next to it?

Yea something like that, or somewhere else within the box, not sure what would look best at this point though.

If you can figure out what would work best, I can probably do it.

In test.sav, you can see that i have two gatling infantries that i subverted from Lal. However the name is slightly different from the one in the workshop which is Gatling Squad. Also when i go to upgrade them via the workshop, one of them cant be upgraded. Apparently thats because one of them is an obsolete model and obsolete models that are subverted dont appear in your workshop. Whats also annoying is that when you upgrade units on the board, they dont get the benefits of the high morale ability but they do if you upgrade them through the workshop.

When I loaded the game, it was the same name, and could be upgraded...

As for types of upgrading, there are a few differences between upgrading "on the board" as opposed to through the workshop.

Another annoying thing is how you cant retire basic designs like the basic former so it keeps taking up space in your workshop. This wouldnt be so bad if the workshop didnt reset the selected unit to the latest one everytime you upgraded a unit (so if you upgrade an obsolete unit and you have 24 unit designs in total, it resets to #24 and if you want to upgrade any more obsolete deisgns, you have to scroll all the way back again). I tried disabling the basic unit designs, but that just made the game give prototype costs to stuff like formers...

The basic designs (created in alphax.txt) like the basic former do not take up slots in your workshop, and are always at the beginning.

Resetting to the latest one does seem inconvenient; it's not a top priority to fix (since it isn't that bad most of the time, and doesn't affect gameplay), but later I could probably fix it on request.

-In test2.sav, it costs 1192 credits to mind control Hallowed Ground, a size 8 base with only a single transport foil and 2 buildings. This seems way too high considering that you may as well just conquer the building manually and save 1k+ credits...its not lcose to the believers HQ either, nor is it in golden age.

Firstly, note that they have a native +1 PROBE, which adds 50% to the cost, so it's really like 795.

Secondly, remember that the cost to mind control depends a lot on the population of the base; you're only paying a bit under 100 per point of population before the PROBE increase.

However, I did find something not in the formula I'd found on the internet: The effective population is also increased by 1 for each past mind control and 1 for each past 4 subversions (I'm adding that to the other post), so there's actually 10 effective population, so 79.5 cost per effective population.

Finally, there is some other base property (I'm not sure what) that can increase the cost by 50% or 100%; in this case it's 50%, so it's only 53 cost per effective population.

I also noticed that incite drones does not correctly show the newly created drones in the base screen, even if it causes a drone riot, you will still see no drones or no extra drones in the base screen. They dont appear to show up when looking at the base's psych screen either.

Can I have a savegame that shows this?  I have an idea of what might be going on, but it seems a bit unlikely so I'd rather check the savegame.

-Air units blocking tiles is a huge problem and really exploitable in MP. All you need is one air unit like a needle jet and it completely blocks the tile, no movement, bombardment or attacking possible except for SAM units. Any units in that tile can attack out of it with impunity. You can even do this with gravship and they never run out of fuel so you can block that tile forever for all non-SAM units. Im surprised, isnt this used in MP often?

Fairly often, but you can also "block" a tile with defensive units and then you need strong attackers to catch it.  The only real problem (although I favor being able to hit gravships without SAM anyway) is that SAM is available too late in comparison to air power (they're together) so the owner might not have the tech.  If SAM is moved to synthetic fossil fuels, and air power requires advanced military algorithms, that should fix the problem.

-Clicking "Help" when selecting a native life form in the build screen will send you to the workshop which is useless, since native units dont appear there. It should send you to the datalinks section for that native lifeform.

True, though fairly minor.  Not going to be a major priority.

-In the datalinks, when viewing a tech that grants a new society model (e.g. police state), there is no hyperlink to the police state entry (this applies for all society models, which are all missing hyperlinks for some reason).

True, though fairly minor.  Not going to be a major priority.

-Roads only improve mine outputs if the square is rocky, if the square is flat or rolling, roads do nothing to the mines in the square (at least when combined with a farm). Not sure if bug?

It is not a bug; a mine is worth only 1 in flat or rolling, and the first does not need a road.  (The mine is worth 2 in rocky, plus allowing the rocky itself to produce 2 instead of 1, so that's an increase of 2 that does not need a road and a third that does.)

-There seems to be some kind of limit to how many talents/drones you can affect with psych. Even if you have the psych slider at 100% and have 200+ total psych at a base, you will still have left over drones (not pacificsm ones) and not all workers can be turned into talents. Not sure if bug, but datalinks make no mention of a limit...

Savegame, please?

Suggestion :

-Make +PROBE modifiers in SE affect probe team combat just like how planet affects native life form combat, and also have it reduce your own probe team costs.

They already give a morale boost; with the probe-team-improving techs and various facilities weakened substantially, that morale boost will be quite significant for combat and success chance.  Affecting your own probe team costs is an interesting idea, but not, I think, a high priority.

[Question]

Let's put it this way: How many former-turns per extra resource do you think are needed to make the terraforming types balanced?

I dont think its former turns, but making farms, etc scale with techs like forests do.

I think there is probably some rule; maybe each square goes to the lowest-elevation square next to it?

I just find it weird that you cant just make a river flow to every square when you can launch satellites...canals are not exactly high leel tech. I think the drill to aquifer option is really underulitized the way its setup.

If you can figure out what would work best, I can probably do it.

With some unit names it might become too long if its something like Green Tachyon AAA destroyer. How about including it next to the numbers? The ones that are like 1-1-1-1? Something like 1-1-1-1-Green?

When I loaded the game, it was the same name, and could be upgraded...

As for types of upgrading, there are a few differences between upgrading "on the board" as opposed to through the workshop.

Strange, when i try to upgrade them from the workshop, i was told that there was only one unit that could be upgraded. To upgrade both, i had to upgrade one of them first at a cost of 20 credits, then upgrade both. Whats the point of making two different types of upgrading anyway? Its really annoying not having high morale upgrades take effect unless you upgrade through the workshop.

The basic designs (created in alphax.txt) like the basic former do not take up slots in your workshop, and are always at the beginning.

Yea but they also cant be retired for some reason?

Firstly, note that they have a native +1 PROBE, which adds 50% to the cost, so it's really like 795.

Secondly, remember that the cost to mind control depends a lot on the population of the base; you're only paying a bit under 100 per point of population before the PROBE increase.

However, I did find something not in the formula I'd found on the internet: The effective population is also increased by 1 for each past mind control and 1 for each past 4 subversions (I'm adding that to the other post), so there's actually 10 effective population, so 79.5 cost per effective population.

Finally, there is some other base property (I'm not sure what) that can increase the cost by 50% or 100%; in this case it's 50%, so it's only 53 cost per effective population.

Ive never mind controlled the base or subverted it before though? Also i still dont see why anyone would want to pay that much to mindcontrol a base when they can easily take it with military force for free...

Can I have a savegame that shows this?  I have an idea of what might be going on, but it seems a bit unlikely so I'd rather check the savegame.

Okay use the cruiser probe team to incite drone riots at The Lord's Gift. However you can see no additional drone appears in the base screen either this turn or the next, nor in the pysch screen.

Fairly often, but you can also "block" a tile with defensive units and then you need strong attackers to catch it.  The only real problem (although I favor being able to hit gravships without SAM anyway) is that SAM is available too late in comparison to air power (they're together) so the owner might not have the tech.  If SAM is moved to synthetic fossil fuels, and air power requires advanced military algorithms, that should fix the problem.

I think the main problem is that it doesnt make any sense for air units to be blocking that tile in the first place. They are flying above, they cant block movement, artillery bombardment or anything. And if you try and attack with your own interceptors, the game will use ground units to defend so that your interceptors get a -50% penalty.

It is not a bug; a mine is worth only 1 in flat or rolling, and the first does not need a road.  (The mine is worth 2 in rocky, plus allowing the rocky itself to produce 2 instead of 1, so that's an increase of 2 that does not need a road and a third that does.)

I don't quite understand...which part requires the road? The rocky bonus?

Savegame, please?

Load up the save game and adjust the SE choice to 100% pysch and take a look at Gaia's landing. You can see in the pysch screen that there are still 7 drones left even though the base has 220 pysch. If you change the empath to a worker, it will be a worker and not a talent even though theres more than enoguh pysch there.

They already give a morale boost; with the probe-team-improving techs and various facilities weakened substantially, that morale boost will be quite significant for combat and success chance.  Affecting your own probe team costs is an interesting idea, but not, I think, a high priority.

Hmm okay i was just thinking that right now a +2 probe faction fighting a -2 probe faction has the same probe team odds (maxing out at 3 .0 combat strength for elite probes) which doesnt really make sense. Its also a bit unfair that probe only decreases enemy costs and not your costs.

More issues :

-The sound volume at the main menu is not controlled by the game's volume settings for some reason, for example if you decrease the sound volume ingame the main menu's volume isn't affected at all. Its a bit annoying because on my computer, the main menu is really loud and i decreased the volume ingame to compensate, and the only alternative seems to be to change my computer's main volume settings everytime i launch the game...

-If you look at the save game, the needlejet put on hold in Nettap complex isnt regenerating fuel for some reason...but it will if you manually use space bar to skip it's turn instead of setting it to hold. I also noticed this tends to happen everytime you set needlejets to hold in a base.

-About the unit list not showing units whom have moved...i found the problem. Only the colored icons next to the unit image gets grayed out, and its quite hard to see at a quick glance which is grayed out. I would post a screenshot but print screen just generates a messed up image (how do you take screenshots ingame?). Is it possible to make the name of the unit gray instead, as that would make it easier to see which unit has already moved? And also including the number of move points left would be really helpful.

Suggestions :

-Do you think its possible to remove Kyrub's AI changes from the next patch, as its currently not supported by him or anyone else at the moment and there seems to be some major AI breaking bugs in there...

-Can you include a list of all changes you did to the base game (other than allowing modable options) so that someone can update the datalinks? For example, clean mineral limits increased by tree farms, etc will be removed if the building is destroyed? Thats a pretty big change that doesnt appear to be documented anywhere.

-Possible issue with the way probe teams are returned to the nearest base. I used a probe team on Alpha Prime, and the probe team returned to Gaia's landing (see b.sav). The problem is that in order to get back to alpha prime, i have to sail all the way around the continent, making it much further than returning it to one of my bases at the southern point of the continent. I think probe teams should take into account direct access rather than just flat distance.

[Question]

Slight correction on artillery duels, they are to the death except when its ground vs naval for some reason, at which point both units will shoot twice then disengage.

Also i can confirm that reactor sizes are NOT disregarded when engaging in psi combat with native lifeforms. It probably should.

More issues :

-Gravship formers cannot use the "construct road/tube to" commands, you just get a message saying that "land units cannot perform this in sea squares and vice-versa for sea units". But manually building them with the "r" hotkey works.

-Apparently if you attack a air superiority needlejet in a base square with non-SAM air unit, the needlejet will defend with its armor value and not its weapon. The needlejet wont get the 100% SAM bonus vs air units either.

-Infiltrating datalinks is apparently a 100% success chance just like genetic atrocities, at the very least you do not get a warning popup showing you success rates.

-Not sure if intended : Believers +25% attack bonus doesnt apply against native lifeforms.

-Human factions no longer get interludes for discovering the borehole cluster/manifold nexus. They used to in the original game, but not in alien crossfire.

Questions :

-Is there a way to view a combat log for all combat that has occured in a particular turn? Conventional missles display the combat window for only a split second so you cant figure out what unit it hit.

-Does the free police unit from self aware colony have non-lethal methods, or does it override an existing military unit with non-lethal methods?

-Is there a way to lift yield restrictions at the start of the game, without any techs required? I Know you can change the techs required in alphax.txt, but what about no techs at all?

-What does enhanced information in alphax.txt do?

-What are the requirements to spot a sub/cloaked unit?

Suggestions :

-When raising/lowering land, can it show the elevation after the change in the popup that tells you how much it will cost? And possibly give a warning if it changes elevation band for a landmark square (so you can tell if it will remove the landmark bonus). Landmark bonuses are pretty important, especially in the early game, +1 minerals or nutrients in every square at the start can easily make a base a powerhouse.

-Economy seems pretty underpowered unless you can get it to the point where you get 1 energy per square. Maybe make economy 1 give +2 energy per base? +1 energy per base basically does nothing, and theres no reason to aim for a golden age unless you need extra growth to pop boom (playing cybernethics/pirates for example) or you already have +1 economy from elsewhere. -1 energy at the HQ base is also pretty irrelevant.

Support is also pretty underpowered once you get clean reactors. Most people will go demo/planned in the early game for obvious reasons and then just spam clean reactor units. I think it would be good if support becomes more relevant past the early game where every mineral counts. Even 4 free units per base is not very impressive given the sheer hassle involved in spreading out support (having to move the units manually to each base to change their home base) and is only really useful to get free garrisons with 2 special abilities (without clean reactors). Yang can hit max support which is really useful, but anything below that isnt very useful unfortunately.

-You cant plant forests at a monolith manually, but it can spread there. Since hybrid forests are better than monoliths, maybe allow planting forests at a monolith and have the forest take priority over a monolith if it's yield is higher? Another option would be to give a boost to monoliths when you research centauri psi, since manifold harmonics is a secret project and monoliths are only good tile yields in the early game.

-When you take over a base with a headquarters, you will get the option of freeing captured faction leaders. Another issue is that if the enemy doesnt rebuild the HQ (like with buggy AI) you will never get a chance to rescue captured faction leaders again, which is rather odd.

-Make SE choices scale more? For example right now police past +3 does nothing, but efficiency will keep scaling past +5 (as far as i can tell, it does with a children's creche at least).

[Yitzi]

Let's put it this way: How many former-turns per extra resource do you think are needed to make the terraforming types balanced?

I dont think its former turns, but making farms, etc scale with techs like forests do.

When you consider enrichers, specialists (empowered by nutrients, of which farm+condenser+enricher has more than forests), and raising land/condensers/mirrors, I think they do scale.

An early-game (post-gene splicing, pre-tree farms) farm/solar is worth 2/1/1 give or take (might be 3 food, might be 2 energy, but also might be 1 food or 0 minerals).  A later-game (post-enrichers) farm/solar/enricher with condensers, mirrors, and land raising is worth more like 4/1/7 (depending slightly on situation).  That's definitely scaling a lot.

I just find it weird that you cant just make a river flow to every square when you can launch satellites...canals are not exactly high leel tech. I think the drill to aquifer option is really underulitized the way its setup.

If you describe how you'd like it to work, I could probably put it on the list at some point.

With some unit names it might become too long if its something like Green Tachyon AAA destroyer. How about including it next to the numbers? The ones that are like 1-1-1-1? Something like 1-1-1-1-Green?

Could definitely be done.  It's on the list.

Strange, when i try to upgrade them from the workshop, i was told that there was only one unit that could be upgraded.

Ah; I didn't try upgrading from the workshop.

And that's not because of being obsolete, it's because one of them was not the unit in the workshop.  Each faction gets its own list of 64 non-pre-designed units, and that other one must have been Morgan's gatling infantry, not your own.

Whats the point of making two different types of upgrading anyway? Its really annoying not having high morale upgrades take effect unless you upgrade through the workshop.

I'm guessing that the differences are unintentional and constitute bugs, but they're not such high priority to fix at the moment.  (If you want, you can start a thread to see if people want the two to be made to work the same; if there's widespread support for such a change, I'll put it on the list.)

Yea but they also cant be retired for some reason?

The reason is that retiring a design is deleting it, and since all factions use the same predesigned units, retiring it for one faction would retire it for all factions.

Ive never mind controlled the base or subverted it before though?

It counts all subversions by your faction, not just of that one base.

Also i still dont see why anyone would want to pay that much to mindcontrol a base when they can easily take it with military force for free...

That base, they wouldn't in your situation.  But a more well-defended base, or if they're really rich but have a weak military, might be a different story, especially if it doesn't have +50% from PROBE and +50% from I-don't-know-what.

Okay use the cruiser probe team to incite drone riots at The Lord's Gift. However you can see no additional drone appears in the base screen either this turn or the next, nor in the pysch screen.

That's because that base is maxed out on disloyal citizens, probably from having been conquered recently.  The only reason it wasn't already rioting was that last turn must have been without the drone rules change, so the number of pre-specialist drones was capped at the number of specialists (2).  Your incitement did not make any more drones, but did force it to re-check and realize there were enough drones to riot.

I think the main problem is that it doesnt make any sense for air units to be blocking that tile in the first place. They are flying above, they cant block movement, artillery bombardment or anything. And if you try and attack with your own interceptors, the game will use ground units to defend so that your interceptors get a -50% penalty.

So you think a ground unit should be able to move under a hostile air unit (and therefore attack the other units in the square as well)?  Makes sense; I'll put that option on my list.  (Bombardment would already be enabled under a combat-rules change I'm already planning, and SAM ground units can attack air but have no -50% penalty.)

I don't quite understand...which part requires the road? The rocky bonus?

The second point of mine bonus.  The rocky bonus requires a mine, but doesn't count as a mine bonus so it isn't blocked by not having a road.

Savegame, please?

Load up the save game and adjust the SE choice to 100% pysch and take a look at Gaia's landing. You can see in the pysch screen that there are still 7 drones left even though the base has 220 pysch. If you change the empath to a worker, it will be a worker and not a talent even though theres more than enoguh pysch there.[/quote]

This is because the total talents, after applying psych but before cancelling the resulting talents with drones, is capped at the base population.  This limitation is also removed by mode 8 of the drone rules, and indeed setting 100% psych with mode 8 active will give you all talents.

Hmm okay i was just thinking that right now a +2 probe faction fighting a -2 probe faction has the same probe team odds (maxing out at 3 .0 combat strength for elite probes) which doesnt really make sense.

That's because there are too many probe boosts; with fewer probe boosts (and perhaps a morale penalty for -PROBE) things will be quite different.

Its also a bit unfair that probe only decreases enemy costs and not your costs.

That's because PROBE primarily represents security, with expertise somewhat secondary.

-The sound volume at the main menu is not controlled by the game's volume settings for some reason, for example if you decrease the sound volume ingame the main menu's volume isn't affected at all. Its a bit annoying because on my computer, the main menu is really loud and i decreased the volume ingame to compensate, and the only alternative seems to be to change my computer's main volume settings everytime i launch the game...

Unfortunately, this is likely to be very difficult to deal with.  Setting your computer's main volume settings may be the only viable solution.

-If you look at the save game, the needlejet put on hold in Nettap complex isnt regenerating fuel for some reason...but it will if you manually use space bar to skip it's turn instead of setting it to hold. I also noticed this tends to happen everytime you set needlejets to hold in a base.

While pressing space once (after which it shouldn't deplete fuel) isn't that big a deal, I'll put it on my list.

-About the unit list not showing units whom have moved...i found the problem. Only the colored icons next to the unit image gets grayed out, and its quite hard to see at a quick glance which is grayed out. I would post a screenshot but print screen just generates a messed up image (how do you take screenshots ingame?).

The only way I've found that works is to open up paint (or other image program) before starting the game, and then alt-tab to paste it in.  It will look weird, but seems to work most of the time.

Although I've noticed that putting my laptop to sleep with the game running seems to reset the visual stuff; it makes SMAX look funny, but does avoid the color issues and so is likely to solve the problem too.

Is it possible to make the name of the unit gray instead, as that would make it easier to see which unit has already moved?

Probably, but it'd be quite difficult to figure out how.  i/o stuff is always difficult in assembly.

And also including the number of move points left would be really helpful.

That would probably be doable at some point on request, but it's not going to be one of the higher priorities.

-Do you think its possible to remove Kyrub's AI changes from the next patch, as its currently not supported by him or anyone else at the moment and there seems to be some major AI breaking bugs in there...

Not without hugely delaying the patch.  However, have you tested to see that those bugs are in Kyrub's alone (probably are, but not certain) and are not in Scient's?

-Can you include a list of all changes you did to the base game (other than allowing modable options) so that someone can update the datalinks? For example, clean mineral limits increased by tree farms, etc will be removed if the building is destroyed? Thats a pretty big change that doesnt appear to be documented anywhere.

That is in there, #5 here.

The best list of changes I have is that wiki page; I haven't kept a separate list for myself.

-Possible issue with the way probe teams are returned to the nearest base. I used a probe team on Alpha Prime, and the probe team returned to Gaia's landing (see b.sav). The problem is that in order to get back to alpha prime, i have to sail all the way around the continent, making it much further than returning it to one of my bases at the southern point of the continent. I think probe teams should take into account direct access rather than just flat distance.

It isn't even using flat distance; if it were, it would end up at The Flowers Preach.

So I'm not quite sure how it decides the base to return them to, but it's not simply "the nearest base".

Slight correction on artillery duels, they are to the death except when its ground vs naval for some reason, at which point both units will shoot twice then disengage.

That makes more sense.  The exception is probably so that artillery isn't overpowered against naval units.

Also i can confirm that reactor sizes are NOT disregarded when engaging in psi combat with native lifeforms. It probably should.

You sure?  I seem to remember that higher reactor doesn't help in psi combat.  If you want, you can try running some psi combats with different reactors and letting us know your results in terms of win/loss.

-Gravship formers cannot use the "construct road/tube to" commands, you just get a message saying that "land units cannot perform this in sea squares and vice-versa for sea units". But manually building them with the "r" hotkey works.

I'm putting it with the other gravship former bug.

-Apparently if you attack a air superiority needlejet in a base square with non-SAM air unit, the needlejet will defend with its armor value and not its weapon. The needlejet wont get the 100% SAM bonus vs air units either.

Probably because it's being attacked on the ground, not scrambling to intercept.  Think of it as the equivalent to the in-port penalty for air units.

-Infiltrating datalinks is apparently a 100% success chance just like genetic atrocities, at the very least you do not get a warning popup showing you success rates.

Genetic atrocities are not 100% success rates; I think it only shows success rate if there is some extra factor (such as the option to frame another faction) that makes the success rate dependent on your next decision.

-Not sure if intended : Believers +25% attack bonus doesnt apply against native lifeforms.

Known, an option to change it will probably be provided at some point.

-Human factions no longer get interludes for discovering the borehole cluster/manifold nexus. They used to in the original game, but not in alien crossfire.

Interesting; I'm nowhere near working on interludes yet, though.

-Is there a way to view a combat log for all combat that has occured in a particular turn? Conventional missles display the combat window for only a split second so you cant figure out what unit it hit.

I've never had trouble seeing...but no, I don't think there is any combat log.  Adding one would be doable, but fairly major and not such high priority.

-Does the free police unit from self aware colony have non-lethal methods, or does it override an existing military unit with non-lethal methods?

Before my patch, it overrides existing units with non-lethal methods (making it a downside in some cases.)  With my patch, it does not have non-lethal methods, but will not override an existing unit that does.

-Is there a way to lift yield restrictions at the start of the game, without any techs required? I Know you can change the techs required in alphax.txt, but what about no techs at all?

Just change the tech required to None, and that should work.

-What does enhanced information in alphax.txt do?

Several things.  See entry #20 here.

-What are the requirements to spot a sub/cloaked unit?

I think the only way is to try to move into its square (or be AI), but I'm not sure.  Feel free to experiment and let us know.

-When raising/lowering land, can it show the elevation after the change in the popup that tells you how much it will cost? And possibly give a warning if it changes elevation band for a landmark square (so you can tell if it will remove the landmark bonus). Landmark bonuses are pretty important, especially in the early game, +1 minerals or nutrients in every square at the start can easily make a base a powerhouse.

Raising/lowering land always changes elevation band of the square affected; nearby squares are affected if they'll be more than 1 band away from the square next to them.  Actually adding it to the popup would be somewhat tricky; probably doable, but too much work for too little benefit to be high priority.

-Economy seems pretty underpowered unless you can get it to the point where you get 1 energy per square. Maybe make economy 1 give +2 energy per base? +1 energy per base basically does nothing, and theres no reason to aim for a golden age unless you need extra growth to pop boom (playing cybernethics/pirates for example) or you already have +1 economy from elsewhere. -1 energy at the HQ base is also pretty irrelevant.

Yes, low levels are fairly insignificant unless you're ICSing.  However, changing the effects of social engineering is not one of my higher priorities.

Support is also pretty underpowered once you get clean reactors.

I'm not so sure; if you're going constant warfare, +50% to cost is a fairly big deal.

Even 4 free units per base is not very impressive given the sheer hassle involved in spreading out support (having to move the units manually to each base to change their home base)

If every base is producing a lot of units, they'll get those 4 free units without having to spread out.  SUPPORT-heavy social engineering is designed for a highly militant society.

-You cant plant forests at a monolith manually, but it can spread there. Since hybrid forests are better than monoliths, maybe allow planting forests at a monolith and have the forest take priority over a monolith if it's yield is higher? Another option would be to give a boost to monoliths when you research centauri psi, since manifold harmonics is a secret project and monoliths are only good tile yields in the early game.

I am planning an option to have monoliths give, of each resource, either 2 or what fungus would give, whichever is better.  So you actually would get a boost in the late game, although only the Gaians would get it as early as Centauri Psi.

-When you take over a base with a headquarters, you will get the option of freeing captured faction leaders. Another issue is that if the enemy doesnt rebuild the HQ (like with buggy AI) you will never get a chance to rescue captured faction leaders again, which is rather odd.

Odd, but I'm not sure where it should be done if not the HQ.

-Make SE choices scale more? For example right now police past +3 does nothing, but efficiency will keep scaling past +5 (as far as i can tell, it does with a children's creche at least).

It's one possible future project.

[Question]

When you consider enrichers, specialists (empowered by nutrients, of which farm+condenser+enricher has more than forests), and raising land/condensers/mirrors, I think they do scale.

An early-game (post-gene splicing, pre-tree farms) farm/solar is worth 2/1/1 give or take (might be 3 food, might be 2 energy, but also might be 1 food or 0 minerals).  A later-game (post-enrichers) farm/solar/enricher with condensers, mirrors, and land raising is worth more like 4/1/7 (depending slightly on situation).  That's definitely scaling a lot.

I meant that they dont scale automatically. You dont need to go out of your way to get the +1 mining plateform bonus or tree farms/hybrid forests, as you need those techs/facilities anyway.

An early game rolling/rainy square typically gives 3/2/0, assuming you disable mines lowering nutrients and most squares are below 1000 meters. Thats of course much better than a early game forest, but hybrids give the same nutrients as a rainy + farm, the same minerals as a rolling + mine and the same energy as a 1000 meter square with solar collector....except that you only need to build a forest and not worry about building anything else. For most of the game you wont have enough formers due to support limits so you have to be efficient with terraforming. Even a farm + soil enricher + mine is going to net you 4/2/0 at best, which is much worse than a hybrid forest. Theres also the problem that a tidal harness + facility nets you 4 energy per square if im not wrong, with minimal investment. To equal that you need to spend how many turns raising land and building a complex network of echelon mirrors and solar collectors? Turns that could have been spent on more tidal harnesses and foil supplies.

I find that raising land is problematic for two reasons : it costs credits and it can screw up things like river placement, coastal tiles and landmark squares. If my HQ is in the garland crater, i am not going to raise land and lose the precious +1 mineral bonus per square.

Also the problem with condensors and echelon mirrors is that you cant freely stack them. For example i could have a farm with a condensor, but i cant put a solar collector in the same square. That also limits the amount of echelon mirrors i can have affect one square. Meanwhile i can have two forests each producing 3/2/2.

Using supply crawlers only makes sense when you only want one resource from that tile or when the tile is outside the base radius. For example it makes no sense to put a crawler on a 3/2/2 forest. Even if you have enough nutrients to support a base pop of mostly specialists, you wont have enough energy/minerals because you arent working enough forests/boreholes. With a size 14 bae and forest spamming, i can easily generate enough nutrients from hybrid forests alone to have rocky mines/coastal tiles worked by crawlers, which gives me a nice balance of minerals and everything else. Theres no reason for me to switch the forests over to condensors and farms since that would mean losing a ton of minerals/energy. Look at my bases in a.sav, i have no shortage of nutrients and im not even working most of my kelp farms at my HQ.

Part of the imbalance is that mines always give at least +1 minerals, which is worth 2 energy (and isnt lost to inefficiency). Solar collectors only give +1 energy unless its a high elevation square, but a hybrid forest gives the equivalent of 4 energy (2 minerals/2 energy). Thats as much energy as a 3k+ meter square with a solar collector except the odds of you having a base with 3k+ meters squares is really low. Also a coastal tile gives you access to tidal harnesses that give 4 energy with the facility bonus, except that you dont need to use 3k+ meter elevation squares or echelon mirrors. I could try playing with the map editor to see which is better, forest spamming or using advanced terraforming, but the ease of forest spamming is a definate advantage.

Probably should move the discussion of forests, etc to another forum...

If you describe how you'd like it to work, I could probably put it on the list at some point.

Without knowing how the current river system works its hard to say....from what i can tell it seems to flow downhill but how the game determines the exact tiles created with a river seems pretty random, especially as it changes with interaction with other rivers. I think for a start decreasing the number of turns to drill to aquifer and removing the inability to drill in adjacent river squares would be a good start.

Ah; I didn't try upgrading from the workshop.

And that's not because of being obsolete, it's because one of them was not the unit in the workshop.  Each faction gets its own list of 64 non-pre-designed units, and that other one must have been Morgan's gatling infantry, not your own.

Actually both of those were subverted units. When you subvert a unit, it gets added to your workshop, but the reason why only one did was because one of them was obsolete. I think thats also why one of them says its receiving support from a base but the other has no base listed as support.

The reason is that retiring a design is deleting it, and since all factions use the same predesigned units, retiring it for one faction would retire it for all factions.

Thats strange, doesnt the AI use the same pre-designed units as well? So for example if you subvert a unit and then retire the design, shouldnt it in theory retire all remaining units of that design in all factions?

That base, they wouldn't in your situation.  But a more well-defended base, or if they're really rich but have a weak military, might be a different story, especially if it doesn't have +50% from PROBE and +50% from I-don't-know-what.

Then maybe the formulae should make it more expensive based on how hard the base is to take via conventional means instead, making it really cheap to take a lightly defended base. Also while i was testing out a different installation with just the official patch + your patch, i noticed mind control costs were dirt cheap...i could corner the energy market with only 2k+ credits and there were dozens of enemy bases on the map, total enemy pop was 200+. Im not sure if scient's patch touched probe team costs though, but mind control costs in your patch are much higher.

The second point of mine bonus.  The rocky bonus requires a mine, but doesn't count as a mine bonus so it isn't blocked by not having a road.

Hmm...when do mines give +2 minerals instead of just one? Is it on rolling/rocky?

This is because the total talents, after applying psych but before cancelling the resulting talents with drones, is capped at the base population.  This limitation is also removed by mode 8 of the drone rules, and indeed setting 100% psych with mode 8 active will give you all talents.

Ah i see, but from what i could tell, specialists still take up potential talent slots?

Not without hugely delaying the patch.  However, have you tested to see that those bugs are in Kyrub's alone (probably are, but not certain) and are not in Scient's?

Yea i did a fresh install of AX and just installed the official patch + your patch. From what i could tell, the AI seems to behave the same as in my installation with scient's patch + your patch. Its hard to test as the game keeps crashing without scient's patch and theres a weird bug where the mouse cursor suddenly stops working ingame and i have to use the keyboard shortcuts to exit the game.

That makes more sense.  The exception is probably so that artillery isn't overpowered against naval units.

Well if you remove the land based bonus that land artillery gets, then it gets more even.

You sure?  I seem to remember that higher reactor doesn't help in psi combat.  If you want, you can try running some psi combats with different reactors and letting us know your results in terms of win/loss.

I had my singularity units fight enemy faction controlled mind worms and they started the psi combat with 40 hp. Not sure if this applies to normal units vs alien controlled lifeforms as well...will need to check.

I'm putting it with the other gravship former bug.

I forgot to mention : They do have access to the automatic roads/tubes command but clicking it does nothing nor is there any error message.

Genetic atrocities are not 100% success rates; I think it only shows success rate if there is some extra factor (such as the option to frame another faction) that makes the success rate dependent on your next decision.

I think it should show the success rate at least, just so that players will know whether to risk it or not.

Just change the tech required to None, and that should work.

Thanks, that did the trick.

I'm not so sure; if you're going constant warfare, +50% to cost is a fairly big deal.

True, but without clean reactor spamming, your bases run out of minerals very quickly. Unless im playing yang/believers, i find it very difficult to build more than a handful of units per base before clean reactors. Especially as demo-planned is so good.

I am planning an option to have monoliths give, of each resource, either 2 or what fungus would give, whichever is better.  So you actually would get a boost in the late game, although only the Gaians would get it as early as Centauri Psi.

Can you also make it give the forest yield (3/2/2) if it would be better than the monolith yield? I cant recall if the game lets you plant forests at a monolith manually which might be another issue...

Odd, but I'm not sure where it should be done if not the HQ.

Hmm well i think ideally the captured faction leaders would get transferred over to you if you take over a base with a HQ and you get to decide what to do with them from then on. But for that to work properly i think the game would also need to let you have the option of freeing captured faction leaders any time you wanted, which might be difficult to get working...

Issues :

-Check out b.sav, after i hit end turn, i get a urgent message from yang, but clicking ok doesnt give me any conversation window.

-Check out a.sav and look at home:hearth that is building the longevity vaccine. I have almost 100 extra minerals, but not all of that is getting carried over to the next building, the biology lab. I set the game to carry over unlimited minerals, but only 42 minerals are getting carried over, out of nearly 100 extra minerals.

-Bonus resources are invisible in sea squares of ocean depth or deeper. This is an issue because you cant see the bonus resources when settling bases which is important for positioning, especially at the start of the game. Very annoying to find out that you settle your base 1 tile out of range of a bonus resource square.

-When selecting a tile on the map with shift+click, tile yields bonuses from tree farms, hybrid forests, economy bonuses or the merchant exchange are not displayed.

-Immunity/Robust : Growth does nothing for SE. Immunity : efficiency for yang obviously works, but when i tried to make a custom faction with immunity/robust : growth, it did nothing whatsoever when i chose the Green SE model.

-In the "about" menu ingame, it says your patch version is still 2.5.

-Units disbanded via the retire option in the workshop do not appear to give their bases any additional minerals from disbanding.

Suggestions :

-Auto recycle buildings before they are replaced by the free buildings granted by secret projects? I mean, you could do it manually before you finish building the secret project, but its a hassle to keep track of.

-If you get a hurry penalty from not having enough minerals, have the game warn you in the hurry screen that there is a penalty.

-For progenitor prototypes, can there be some kind of indicator that it is a prototype with the 2 square sight radius?

Questions :

-What is the terraforming penalty for farms, etc pre-tree farm? Does each farm, etc add 1 virtual mineral or something?

-Does the AI receive any boosts?

[Question]

Noticed a huge bug with how intercepting needlejets do air combat.

I had SAM needlejets in a base and noticed they were getting destroyed by non-SAM usurper needlejets.

Looking at the combat results, it seems that when the usurper needlejets move close enough to trigger intercepting defenders, the game will move the interceptors next to the enemy needlejet. The enemy needlejet will then attack the intercepting needlejet, even if the enemy needlejet does NOT have SAM. Because of this, the usurper needlejet was getting its 25% attack bonus (and presumably believers would as well). The intercepting needlejet does NOT get the caretakers 25% defence bonus (even though it is being attacked) and will also NOT get its +100% SAM bonus vs non-SAM air units. The combat is also calculated as weapon vs weapon instead of weapon vs armor (As is normal for SAM needlejet vs non-SAM needlejet).  This basically means you dont need to worry about using SAM jets to clear away enemy interceptors.

So a SAM needlejet intercepting enemy needlejets can easily get destroyed beacuse it doesnt get its 100% SAM bonus that it should be getting. However if you attack enemy needlejets manually (on your turn, before they fly back to base) the attack will be resolved against their armor values and you will receive the 100% SAM bonus as per normal.

A simplefix would probably be to make the interceptors attack the hostile air units first, so that would give them the SAM bonus vs armor. Making the caretaker defence bonus work would probably be harder though...

[Question]

I can confirm that a singularity unit will start with 40 hp for all psi combat against native life forms, whether alien or faction controlled.

Issues :

-Caretaker artillery do not get the 25% defence bonus when attacked

-No air units can mount anti-grav struts despite what the description says (that it gives reactor*2 moves to air units)

-Planet modifiers for psi combat do not apply to the defender

-Progenitor energy grid doesnt count free buildings from secret projects like the command nexus

-You can build a hologram theater before you build the virtual world, and if you do, the hologram thearters will remain in the base and still cost energy to maintain, even though it does nothing at this point.

-Air units exert a ZOC on ground units, even though different domains shouldnt (naval doesnt exert a ZOC on ground units for example)

-If playing as caretakers and a surrendered human faction starts building the ascent to transcendence, you will automatically go straight back to vendetta. They probably shouldnt be able to do that.

-Even with "carry over unlimited minerals" and "build more than one item at a time" turned on, you cannot build more than one satellite at a time unless you manually queue them, but you can build multiples of anyhting else (e.g. units) without queing them manually.

Suggestion :

-Include a setting to make all non-combat units (terraformers, transports, etc) use up no support just like crawlers/probe teams. I suspect this will make support much more useful when you dont need to worry about an army of terraformers taking up minerals.

[Lord Avalon]

-No air units can mount anti-grav struts despite what the description says (that it gives reactor*2 moves to air units)

This is a simple alphax.txt change. Go to Antigrav Struts under Special Unit Abilities and change the third zero from the right to a 1.

-Include a setting to make all non-combat units (terraformers, transports, etc) use up no support just like crawlers/probe teams. I suspect this will make support much more useful when you dont need to worry about an army of terraformers taking up minerals.

Maybe you should prioritize clean reactors. I build dozens of clean formers.

[Question]

Yea but that stuff should eventually get fixed in the next patch instead of asking everyone to fix it themselves.

Oh and i forgot :

- Half morale modifiers from -2 morale do not appear to work (you still get full morale modifiers).

[Nexii]

Singularity units will start at 40 HP but they take damage at 4x the rate vs native life.  That is the native life ignores the reactor.

Excess nutrients from farm/solar become more important if you increase pop limits to 10/20 from 7/14.  Also I mod SE settings so that the easy boom from Demo+Planned is more difficult to maintain.  Demo+FM with GA is another option, but I also took out early booming with that.  Main issue remains that Hybrid Forest just comes a bit too early for tech.  7 FOP isn't overpowering from forests when you compare to things like default borehole (12 FOP) or late game solar/farm/echelon (~7-9 FOP) with raising disabled.  I wouldn't say 1M=2E.  For building things, yes, even SPs go to 1M=4E.  However E gets stronger modifiers early, huge modifiers depending on commerce, and doesn't suffer from ecodamage late.  It's hard to equate but I'd rate it more like 1M~1E.  Sometimes M>E and sometimes E>M.

I also play with raising & lowering disabled.  It makes circumventing the map terrain too easy.  I feel a differing map layout is one of the few things that makes each game unique.

Virtual World doesn't give free Holo Theatres.  Only makes Network Nodes act as them.  Though it is a thing in general, 'actual' built facilities for any SP will still cost maintenance. Command Nexus, Maritime Control Center, Cloudbase Academy all work this way.  Not sure if that's really intended or not..

[Yitzi]

I meant that they dont scale automatically. You dont need to go out of your way to get the +1 mining plateform bonus or tree farms/hybrid forests, as you need those techs/facilities anyway.

Well, you don't actually need the tree farms/hybrid forests, but the extra former time is a concern; IIRC, it still balances out, but I am planning to reconsider the strengths of various terraforming options and adjust accordingly.

An early game rolling/rainy square typically gives 3/2/0, assuming you disable mines lowering nutrients and most squares are below 1000 meters. Thats of course much better than a early game forest, but hybrids give the same nutrients as a rainy + farm, the same minerals as a rolling + mine and the same energy as a 1000 meter square with solar collector....except that you only need to build a forest and not worry about building anything else.

But of course by that point or soon after, you're not looking at rainy+farm, but rather rainy+farm+enricher.  And you're looking at maglevs too, so with the boost I'm planning, that's 3 minerals.

For most of the game you wont have enough formers due to support limits

What support limits?  With 10 squares at an average of 2 minerals each, and a genejack factory, you've got 30 minerals to the base, easily enough to spend a few on supporting formers.  Assuming that you don't just get clean formers (available at bioengineering which is early-ish midgame.)

Well, unless you play with an overpowered attack (makes for shorter games so that bioengineering and retroviral are fairly late) or where maglevs don't boost mines (so there's less minerals available), or with ecodamage rules that cause clean minerals to be an actual "cap" (also less minerals available) or easy pop booms (so that you need a huge number of formers to keep up with growth)...but all of those are things that either can be modded away, or on the list to become moddable away.

so you have to be efficient with terraforming. Even a farm + soil enricher + mine is going to net you 4/2/0 at best, which is much worse than a hybrid forest.

I'm currently planning to make it give 4/3/0 with maglev, which is actually better when you consider the power of midgame specialists (assuming that hab dome limits are increased somewhat).

Theres also the problem that a tidal harness + facility nets you 4 energy per square if im not wrong, with minimal investment. To equal that you need to spend how many turns raising land and building a complex network of echelon mirrors and solar collectors? Turns that could have been spent on more tidal harnesses and foil supplies.

For 4 energy per square?  8 turns per square (for 50% mirrors 50% collectors, no need to raise) is enough.

I find that raising land is problematic for two reasons : it costs credits and it can screw up things like river placement, coastal tiles and landmark squares. If my HQ is in the garland crater, i am not going to raise land and lose the precious +1 mineral bonus per square.

Makes sense...perhaps it should be balanced assuming no raising, and then raising made to not imbalance it.

Also the problem with condensors and echelon mirrors is that you cant freely stack them. For example i could have a farm with a condensor, but i cant put a solar collector in the same square. That also limits the amount of echelon mirrors i can have affect one square. Meanwhile i can have two forests each producing 3/2/2.

"Condenser does not replace mine/solar/mirror/etc" is explicitly on my list of future mods to enable.

Using supply crawlers only makes sense when you only want one resource from that tile or when the tile is outside the base radius. For example it makes no sense to put a crawler on a 3/2/2 forest. Even if you have enough nutrients to support a base pop of mostly specialists, you wont have enough energy/minerals because you arent working enough forests/boreholes. With a size 14 bae and forest spamming, i can easily generate enough nutrients from hybrid forests alone to have rocky mines/coastal tiles worked by crawlers, which gives me a nice balance of minerals and everything else. Theres no reason for me to switch the forests over to condensors and farms since that would mean losing a ton of minerals/energy. Look at my bases in a.sav, i have no shortage of nutrients and im not even working most of my kelp farms at my HQ.

You have no shortage of nutrients, but are you able to support a large number of engineers and thinkers?

Part of the imbalance is that mines always give at least +1 minerals, which is worth 2 energy (and isnt lost to inefficiency).

1 mineral is not worth 2 energy, as energy can be used for things other than rush buying (and even rush buying is helped by having economy-boosting facilities, which are easier to get than mineral-boosting facilities.)

but a hybrid forest gives the equivalent of 4 energy (2 minerals/2 energy). Thats as much energy as a 3k+ meter square with a solar collector except the odds of you having a base with 3k+ meters squares is really low. Also a coastal tile gives you access to tidal harnesses that give 4 energy with the facility bonus, except that you dont need to use 3k+ meter elevation squares or echelon mirrors. I could try playing with the map editor to see which is better, forest spamming or using advanced terraforming, but the ease of forest spamming is a definate advantage.

You're not considering nutrients and their ability to support specialists, though.

Probably should move the discussion of forests, etc to another forum...

Perhaps, though here's fine too if you want.

Without knowing how the current river system works its hard to say....from what i can tell it seems to flow downhill but how the game determines the exact tiles created with a river seems pretty random, especially as it changes with interaction with other rivers. I think for a start decreasing the number of turns to drill to aquifer and removing the inability to drill in adjacent river squares would be a good start.

The first can be done with alphax.txt; the second wouldn't help much, I think, as I think it would automatically just lead into the existing river.

Actually both of those were subverted units. When you subvert a unit, it gets added to your workshop, but the reason why only one did was because one of them was obsolete. I think thats also why one of them says its receiving support from a base but the other has no base listed as support.

The fact that one says it's receiving support and the other doesn't is that your SUPPORT rating makes one get free support but not the other.

As for why only one gets added, I'm guessing that when the first one is subverted, it's added to your workshop and also changes to that type, but the second, because it doesn't add to your workshop, doesn't change type.  (It can't always change type, as if you have all 64 slots occupied it won't add to your workshop.)  Which is a bug, though not really a major one in most cases, and the cases where it is significant would remain significant even if you've got all 64 slots filled (in which case it can't enter your workshop because there are no slots.)

Thats strange, doesnt the AI use the same pre-designed units as well? So for example if you subvert a unit and then retire the design, shouldnt it in theory retire all remaining units of that design in all factions?

No, because when you subvert a non-pre-designed unit it creates a new design for you, and retiring it affects only yours (and any that were yours and subverted without changing the design; in your game, if Lal retired his design, it would retire the unit that wasn't upgraded under your design.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure what should happen that this wouldn't be a problem at least if you lack a slot for a new design.)

Then maybe the formulae should make it more expensive based on how hard the base is to take via conventional means instead, making it really cheap to take a lightly defended base.

I don't think so; it's better for the game if different methods are more effective in different situations.

Also while i was testing out a different installation with just the official patch + your patch, i noticed mind control costs were dirt cheap...i could corner the energy market with only 2k+ credits and there were dozens of enemy bases on the map, total enemy pop was 200+. Im not sure if scient's patch touched probe team costs though, but mind control costs in your patch are much higher.

What were your social engineering settings and tech?  A strong commerce rating in comparison to your opponents makes cornering a lot cheaper.

Hmm...when do mines give +2 minerals instead of just one? Is it on rolling/rocky?

Just rocky.

Ah i see, but from what i could tell, specialists still take up potential talent slots?

I'm not sure what you mean.

Yea i did a fresh install of AX and just installed the official patch + your patch. From what i could tell, the AI seems to behave the same as in my installation with scient's patch + your patch. Its hard to test as the game keeps crashing without scient's patch and theres a weird bug where the mouse cursor suddenly stops working ingame and i have to use the keyboard shortcuts to exit the game.

That's strange; scient's patch followed by mine should be the same as just mine.

But what about scient's patch without mine?

And what about scient's and Kyrub's but without mine?

Well if you remove the land based bonus that land artillery gets, then it gets more even.

True, but that's not default and it's not fair to balance only with such a mod.

I forgot to mention : They do have access to the automatic roads/tubes command but clicking it does nothing nor is there any error message.

Sounds like a bug.

I think it should show the success rate at least, just so that players will know whether to risk it or not.

Might not be a bad idea, but not high priority.

True, but without clean reactor spamming, your bases run out of minerals very quickly.

That sort of depends on how many minerals you're producing in the first place, doesn't it?  Plus, of course, on how fast your units die.

Can you also make it give the forest yield (3/2/2) if it would be better than the monolith yield? I cant recall if the game lets you plant forests at a monolith manually which might be another issue...

Forest instead of monolith doesn't really make in-game sense, though, the way that fungus instead of monolith does.

Hmm well i think ideally the captured faction leaders would get transferred over to you if you take over a base with a HQ and you get to decide what to do with them from then on. But for that to work properly i think the game would also need to let you have the option of freeing captured faction leaders any time you wanted, which might be difficult to get working...

It would indeed, simply in terms of UI.

-Check out b.sav, after i hit end turn, i get a urgent message from yang, but clicking ok doesnt give me any conversation window.

Didn't get any message myself.

-Check out a.sav and look at home:hearth that is building the longevity vaccine. I have almost 100 extra minerals, but not all of that is getting carried over to the next building, the biology lab. I set the game to carry over unlimited minerals, but only 42 minerals are getting carried over, out of nearly 100 extra minerals.

No matter how many minerals you're able to carry over, you can never carry over minerals that were not produced this turn (in this case, 42.)  This rule was probably made in order to prevent abuse involving different rush costs.

-Bonus resources are invisible in sea squares of ocean depth or deeper. This is an issue because you cant see the bonus resources when settling bases which is important for positioning, especially at the start of the game. Very annoying to find out that you settle your base 1 tile out of range of a bonus resource square.

I think this is because they are inactive in such squares.  Fungus works the same way.

-When selecting a tile on the map with shift+click, tile yields bonuses from tree farms, hybrid forests, economy bonuses or the merchant exchange are not displayed.[/quote]

This is because those are not part of the value of the tile, but depend on the base using the tile.  (Except for economy bonuses, for which the statement is not true.)

-Immunity/Robust : Growth does nothing for SE. Immunity : efficiency for yang obviously works, but when i tried to make a custom faction with immunity/robust : growth, it did nothing whatsoever when i chose the Green SE model.

Can you provide the faction file?

-In the "about" menu ingame, it says your patch version is still 2.5.

Yes, I forgot to update that.

-Units disbanded via the retire option in the workshop do not appear to give their bases any additional minerals from disbanding.

Would be more trouble to fix than it's worth, as usually you'll retire something that has no units, or if it did have units would have few enough to disband the ones in bases manually.

-Auto recycle buildings before they are replaced by the free buildings granted by secret projects? I mean, you could do it manually before you finish building the secret project, but its a hassle to keep track of.

You can recycle them after the project too if you want.  Something that comes from both project and actual presence will IIRC have a star next to it, and can be recycled (removing the star).

Auto recycling would be a bad idea; if you conquer or build the Command Nexus but aren't sure you'll be able to keep it, you might not want to recycle all your existing command centers and then not have them if you lose the Command Nexus.

-If you get a hurry penalty from not having enough minerals, have the game warn you in the hurry screen that there is a penalty.

It's an idea, but not high priority.

-For progenitor prototypes, can there be some kind of indicator that it is a prototype with the 2 square sight radius?

I'd have to figure out how it records that it is a prototype, which isn't the highest priority.  It would be a possible future request, though.

-What is the terraforming penalty for farms, etc pre-tree farm? Does each farm, etc add 1 virtual mineral or something?

Each farm adds 1/8 virtual minerals if not worked, and 1/4 if it is worked.

-Does the AI receive any boosts?

Depends on difficulty level.

Noticed a huge bug with how intercepting needlejets do air combat.

I had SAM needlejets in a base and noticed they were getting destroyed by non-SAM usurper needlejets.

Looking at the combat results, it seems that when the usurper needlejets move close enough to trigger intercepting defenders, the game will move the interceptors next to the enemy needlejet. The enemy needlejet will then attack the intercepting needlejet, even if the enemy needlejet does NOT have SAM. Because of this, the usurper needlejet was getting its 25% attack bonus (and presumably believers would as well). The intercepting needlejet does NOT get the caretakers 25% defence bonus (even though it is being attacked) and will also NOT get its +100% SAM bonus vs non-SAM air units. The combat is also calculated as weapon vs weapon instead of weapon vs armor (As is normal for SAM needlejet vs non-SAM needlejet).  This basically means you dont need to worry about using SAM jets to clear away enemy interceptors.

So a SAM needlejet intercepting enemy needlejets can easily get destroyed beacuse it doesnt get its 100% SAM bonus that it should be getting. However if you attack enemy needlejets manually (on your turn, before they fly back to base) the attack will be resolved against their armor values and you will receive the 100% SAM bonus as per normal.

The reason this happens is because interception takes the form of moving to the attacked unit's square and being attacked instead, meaning that both units use their attack values and it counts as a dogfight.

A simplefix would probably be to make the interceptors attack the hostile air units first, so that would give them the SAM bonus vs armor. Making the caretaker defence bonus work would probably be harder though...

Actually, my plans for a combat rework will allow an option where non-SAM units cannot damage in-the-air needlejets under any circumstances (though they can sometimes survive being attacked by needlejets), which will solve this nicely.

Issues :

-Caretaker artillery do not get the 25% defence bonus when attacked

Is this true even when attacked by non-artillery units?

-Planet modifiers for psi combat do not apply to the defender

Known and apparently intended; a possible target for future changes, but not a real issue.

-Progenitor energy grid doesnt count free buildings from secret projects like the command nexus

That's because they're not really there.

-You can build a hologram theater before you build the virtual world, and if you do, the hologram thearters will remain in the base and still cost energy to maintain, even though it does nothing at this point.

They can be sold if you want, or kept in case you lose the virtual world.

-Air units exert a ZOC on ground units, even though different domains shouldnt (naval doesnt exert a ZOC on ground units for example)

Probably because they can attack them.  A staple of the Civ series IIRC, and a possible future change but not high priority.

-If playing as caretakers and a surrendered human faction starts building the ascent to transcendence, you will automatically go straight back to vendetta. They probably shouldnt be able to do that.

Yes, surrendering to the caretakers should probably prevent building the Voice or Ascent.  Not a major priority at the moment, though.  (Note that if several other people also agree with you on the importance of something, it'll probably rise in priority.)

-Even with "carry over unlimited minerals" and "build more than one item at a time" turned on, you cannot build more than one satellite at a time unless you manually queue them, but you can build multiples of anyhting else (e.g. units) without queing them manually.

I thought I fixed this.  Savegame please?  (Although note that to build 2 satellites you'd need a huge amount of production to finish one and then build the entirety of the second.)

-Include a setting to make all non-combat units (terraformers, transports, etc) use up no support just like crawlers/probe teams. I suspect this will make support much more useful when you dont need to worry about an army of terraformers taking up minerals.

No, it'll make it less useful because you don't need it as often.

However, enabling customizing of what units require support is a possible future project, though not high priority.

Yea but that stuff should eventually get fixed in the next patch instead of asking everyone to fix it themselves.

No, as the default is that air units can't get it, so that's the "fixed" version and anything else is a mod.

- Half morale modifiers from -2 morale do not appear to work (you still get full morale modifiers).

To clarify: Modifiers halved doesn't refer to the combat bonus from morale, but rather to the boost from the command center and similar buildings; they give +1 instead of the usual +2.

Excess nutrients from farm/solar become more important if you increase pop limits to 10/20 from 7/14.  Also I mod SE settings so that the easy boom from Demo+Planned is more difficult to maintain.  Demo+FM with GA is another option, but I also took out early booming with that.  Main issue remains that Hybrid Forest just comes a bit too early for tech.

True; this was the idea behind my proposal of having Planetary Economics require Environmental Economics and Pre-Sentient Algorithms; this puts it at a similar level as Advanced Ecological Engineering.

[Nexii]

Yep.  I put Hybrid Forests at Biomachinery instead which is also B7.  I think it might be more tempting to go that route for Genejacks.  More of a tech split: AdvEco2 for E focus, or BioMach for M focus.  But I may consider redoing the tech order instead.  I guess you can mod both ways. 

By default I'd say forests win out.  The former time and cost of TF/HF facility are less than overall cost of farm+solar raising.  If TF/HF only gave the resource bonuses and not Eco/Psy it would be pretty close imo.  It doesn't take much modding to skew terraforming in favor of farms and solar at the exclusion of forests.  In trying to make forests weaker more often I've found I made them useless than not.

I think there's something to be said for altitude mattering when it comes to terraforming.  Otherwise every base ends up the same.  Ideally I think low altitude should go forest or mine/farm and borehole, and high altitude farm/solar/echelon.  Borehole is still the strongest of all, by a big margin.  I take borehole down to 0/0/9 lately.  I think 0/5/5 would also be okay.  Mainly I don't like borehole being so strong and expensive on FTs as it makes Weather Paradigm too crucial