Is this something possible?

[PoeticJumpshot]

Notes from Binary Dawn Yitzi most recent patches:

I've played a handful of AI games with the aggressive AI on the highest difficulty, and it led me to an idea I doubt would work but think would be.... healthier? I know multiplayer vs ai is hardly a "chess" match but I don't exactly enjoy having to plow through 600 plus units to eliminate one faction mid game (100 of those being transport foils of some regard lol). I could very easily have missed some of these ideas already being in the patches or done before but no harm in asking.

Is it possible to go the opposite direction with the unit creation/support aspect of the game? I feel like less could be more in that regard, though I suspect the AI wouldn't be able to play around this type of alteration very well. I can already see it just building units that will have to be disbanded over and over again. If this type of thing is possible with just variable alterations in the .txt file I'll try to create one, but I feel like it would require some .exe modifications to really function properly and to be honest I don't even know where to start with the .txt variables =).

My overall goal would be to create an SMAX with far less units on the map throughout the entire game, thus making a lot of the smaller skirmishes much more important as a whole. Waging a war across multiple fronts becomes much harder and it would really be strenuous to deal with fighting multiple enemies at the same time. I don't necessarily want to slow the game down, but I want each individual action to be worth more. Instead of moving 10 impact rovers to "city x" I want to move 2.   

Here's some of my ideas broken up into pieces:

1) Drop the total amount of units in the game. Currently mass production of units (probe teams another one with crazy high #'s) really just draws out the game. Units would need to require substantially more minerals relative to game flow and also increased support costs. So lategame units would need really well developed cities just to produce and support them, preventing "home" unit pass off to underdeveloped cities, and overall it would make each individual unit created much more valuable. I think losing units should feel a lot more impactful at all stages of the game, and strong infrastructure would directly impact your war efforts. Deciding how many units should be "properly supportable" by cities would be a good balancing point I think.

2) Clean/Supportless units would need to be addressed - Clean units would become super valuable and thus the cost of the upgrade should be very high - if not just disabling the upgrade altogether? The upgrade seems to aid the "mass military" run by the AI, and even having it as a super expensive option would still become exploitable for a human player. With this change, it gives great value when finding "clean" units in pods and keeping them alive as you progress through the game, so that chance might have to be looked at.

3) Worms and lifeforms would have to be harder to capture - I haven't played a bug style game in awhile, but I don't remember if they draw support costs or not? Either way building a worm army would have to be altered to take a much more concerted effort even with strong planet ratings. Obviously in this format any "extra units" you can acquire is big, though just having less units around overall would cut down on this potential.

Sidenote - worm farming becomes harder with less units to do so with, so the credits per kill would need to be increased, and worm spawns in all(maybe just some?) forms would also need to be reduced?

4) Probe subversion would need price hikes for above reason as well. Probe teams would also need to be looked at overall. Currently the AI simply builds ridiculous amounts of them so the coding or modification that causes this would have to be addressed. I can't remember what other "supportless" units are currently in game if any, but they'd all need to be looked at.

5) Buildings/social engineering would be an entire other issue. I'm not sure how these would need to be altered to feel healthy yet impactful. Improvement's that help support units or increase morale are even more important with less units to go around, and anything that provides substantial amounts of minerals could cause issues as well. I'm not sure if these will adjust proportionally with the mineral/support cost adjustments or not so it might not even be an issue. 

6) Combat might have to be altered to support the change.... Open land skirmishes would need more "escape or retreats" and defending cities would need more "prep" work to siege and overtake. Essentially an even matchup should favor the defense imo, creating more value on long term sieges and strategical attacks. Zerg and unit sacrifice becomes a much more expensive option opening the need for more creative siege mechanics. I think artillery should be given 1 more space of range, as protecting and taking them should be more of a priority in a world where you probably only have 1 or two of them.

7) Drones would be another issue. Less police units available therefore drones would run rampant. While it would give value to the police mod for units, drones need to be reduced to match the loss of unit policing.   

Some other random thoughts:

Why the armor variants? I haven't played around the various armors to really understand the difference between plasma and projectile? Maybe I just need to understand it better but it seems like an unnecessary aspect of the game. The value of AAA, psi defense, ecm is all very obvious but not so much with the armors. I might have just missed the reasoning for the armor variants somewhere but i think it would be fine if it was just brought back into 1 type of armor that increases by base values, and the mods would be where you alter the units. Just feels like bloat to me.

I haven't really played enough deep into the game with reactors in this patch (most updated dawn/yitzi combo) but I know in the past they felt very unhealthy... just way too strong overall. Has there been an iteration without reactors all together? IDK I need to play some more run throughs but I feel like it's really hard to balance around. It always felt like a big spike in the past, much like air power did. I think reactors would need to be disabled in this format as well. Outside of maybe the move speed the rest (multi attacks, health, unit cost reduction) would be super broken.

As said before if something like this is possible with just .txt variable edits I'll gladly try it out, but I could really use a direction to get me started. Thanks for the patch it's definitely a better version of the game overall.     

[Mart]

I haven't played Binary Dawn yet, but from overall knowledge of SMACX, I can discuss these topics to some extent.
Starting with some points only, you placed many items in one post:

Ad. 1) This probably could be accomplished by increasing costs of weapons/armors. Yitzi patch also has some new parameters for adjusting unit costs mechanics. Both ways can accomplish a lot with just alphax.txt modding at this time (present patch version).
- In the game, there are 3 facilities giving total increase of minerals from 100% to 250%. They are in vanila SMACX late facilities though. And for this reason, upkeep would need to be increased by maybe lowering overall support. For the whole game this could be done by applying negative support to all SE choice "family" like Politics or future society, for example. Ah, yes, there is genejack factory too, so 300% ! Changing upkeep to mostly 2 mineral/unit could be the aim.
- Large minerals although mean more angry planet and more mindworms, that could potentially overrun player's bases. Yes, they can be nasty in the late game if a player neglects psi combat. There is also possibility to adjust this. In my tries recently I placed the clean minerals limit at 24, compared to 16 in vanila and still need to see results. Last patch has some interesting new parameters I think?
- SMACX  emphasizes attack, so with less military in order to have comparable defenses, I think armor values and other parameters (AAA and ECM could be changed too, intrinsic base defense, other?)  could be slightly increased. Then smaller number of units would not cause easier loosing faction "sudden death."

Ad. 3) Mindworms have no upkeep when on fungus. That's difficult to change, even if it could be turned to always 1 or more minerals per unit, this is important game element, mindworms cannot have clean reactor. So this balances psi vs. physical fight.

Ad. 7) I would not change anything for drones. In late game there is already too much energy, especially when players can setup solar collectors/mirrors farms. You can actually produce a lot by buying minerals and not accumulating. And this would help a player to place more percentage on psych and less on economy and research. That's good. In vanila I have heard players often place psych at 0%.

[PoeticJumpshot]

Thanks for the speedy reply.

I'll have to comb through the .txt file and try and locate where I can change these different things. I think I can find a way to balance down the planet issue with mineral increases by just making it less reactive as a whole to everything. I wasn't intending on increasing the minerals found in the game itself, really just the unit and support costs. I think increasing perimeter defense and tachyon field upgrades would be sufficient, and maybe activating the tech that improves ecm/psi defense as well. For open field combat if I can alter the defensive value of bunkers that would be a solid temporary defensive solution for land, though air and sea combat would need special attention. I think I'll have to increase the value of armor overall, though with the new combat calculations I think that also affects offense firepower so my initial idea might just have to suffice for now.

From what I read support costs are relative to the unit cost.... so I just need to run some games and make some saves at various points in development to get a feel for what I'll need to set the support metric at. For minerals I'm actually thinking about stripping them down. Cut into the initial base free minerals, and just the amount of minerals available total. In order to make that work and not just turn it into an energy rush build I'll have to look at credit generation as well. It's just becoming more and more extensive as I look at it lol

[Nexii]

You can do all this modding with the custom unit cost formulas that Yitzi put in.  Ecodamage can be tweaked as well.

As far as the unit spam issue, I won't disagree. Even with that I tended to put most units at ~20-50 minerals cost.  The problem isn't just SUPPORT - it's that POLICE becomes much weaker if infantry is too expensive.  The AI loves to spam out infantry.  As well there's the issue that native life costs are always static.  So if you have late game units costing hundreds of minerals, then native life dominates it.  Increase native life cost and then it's useless until end game.  Having native life cost scale with global techs known or top reactor globally available would require patching

I never considered clean all that overpowering, even at zero cost multiplier.  It eats a slot that can have more useful (combat) mods. 

Main issue with defense is that unit cost was weapon + armor * speed (generally) and this wasn't good for unit balance.  It meant that armor was too costly for anything other than infantry. 

I've found when modding it's easy to get into a mindset of 'this tech is OP' or 'that tech is OP'.  It might seem simple but techs being powerful is what incentivizes building infrastructure.  Otherwise all you end up doing is making units and conquering.

What I did to help defense was pretty simple:
base intrinsic defense to 50%
infantry vs base to 0%
defend in sensor range to 50%
native life gets 30% on attack/defense (+3 PLANET)

makes combat more interesting than just suicide/YOLO style

[PoeticJumpshot]

Yeah I've read the various rules and definitions for unit cost calculation but it doesn't help with the cpu's lack of intelligence. Which is why these recent patches were kinda of directed that way, especially the clean reactor units and the formers. The specific issue with clean reactor in my alterations is support costs are intended to reduce unit bloat and reactor would bypass that exact thing. I don't think it's possible to alter the cpu's build priority's though. The difficulty levers aren't really level's of additional intelligence just more agro behavior and freeze out on politics. It would need an entire overhaul to understand the new in game systems, or maybe just having the attack/defense melded into one. Like take out all of the armor options except base value 1, and combat would scale with just your weapons and bonuses. It might work for the comps current build strategy's, and defensive combat values could be adjusted to accent it, though this would need a tech overhaul. I don't think the computers can be salvaged tbh.