what would you NOT put in a SMAC remake?

[bvanevery]

What are your pet peeves about SMAC that you'd like to see go away?

One of mine is overpowered Probe Teams.  They seem to be able to buy cities waaaay too cheaply.  I've rage quit many a game because of those things.  Every single military unit in the city???  The cost of subversion should be the cost of all the stuff in the city + all the units in the city.  Or something along those lines; one could quibble about the aftermarket price of a used city.  Vast stacks of occupying forces should not turncoat trivially.

Pandora is a recent SMAC remake, more or less.  Unfortunately, they decided not to remake any of the substantial story stuff.  Definitely not the decision I'd make.

[Unorthodox]

The one thing I find painful in playing SMAC (or Civ II) is the per city upkeep model.  I'm sorry, I know there are fans, but I really loathe it. 

[bvanevery]

The one thing I find painful in playing SMAC (or Civ II) is the per city upkeep model.  I'm sorry, I really loathe it.

I totally agree.  Galactic Civilizations II had a global queue that sorta worked.  I think I've also used C-Evo build lists a lot.  None of these go quite all the way to globalizing or nationalizing one's development decisions.  That's something I would definitely do in any kind of remake or similar game.

Hm, but maybe you meant minerals support per city.  I mean having to decide individual city improvements.  Waste of time.  Anyways, latter Civ games solved the problem by requiring money to support units, and taking it out of your money.

[sthalik]

Lack of defense in depth. Best thing one can do is avoid making roads, and plant xenofungus on tactical boundaries.

Lack of asymmetric warfare.

[bvanevery]

Lack of defense in depth. Best thing one can do is avoid making roads, and plant xenofungus on tactical boundaries.

Does this imply you'd prefer a tactical combat game, like 12 miles of AT guns to wade through or some such?  SMACs scale is confused, sort of mixing tactical and strategic scale.  The difficulty of combining tactical and strategic scale, is that all those tactical "zoom downs" take forever to play.  I've seen this happen numerous times in RPG "minimap combat" games.  However if you were not personally doing the fighting, if AIs were actually responsible for moving all the units around tactically, it could work.

Lack of asymmetric warfare.

Hmm, define?  When I've gone up against Alien Battle Ogres with Scouts, I definitely felt I was doing asymmetric warfare.  Of course my goal is always to catch up to symmetric warfare and then surpass.  Are you saying you want to be the low tech insurgency forever, or you want to be pestered by low tech insurgents forever?

[Unorthodox]

Lack of asymmetric warfare.

Hmm, define?  When I've gone up against Alien Battle Ogres with Scouts, I definitely felt I was doing asymmetric warfare.  Of course my goal is always to catch up to symmetric warfare and then surpass.  Are you saying you want to be the low tech insurgency forever, or you want to be pestered by low tech insurgents forever?

Similarly, I always felt going heavy into mind worms/morale combat over more traditional troops was rather asymmetric warfare, and modeled reasonably well. 

[sthalik]

Lack of defense in depth. Best thing one can do is avoid making roads, and plant xenofungus on tactical boundaries.

Does this imply you'd prefer a tactical combat game, like 12 miles of AT guns to wade through or some such?  SMACs scale is confused, sort of mixing tactical and strategic scale.  The difficulty of combining tactical and strategic scale, is that all those tactical "zoom downs" take forever to play.  I've seen this happen numerous times in RPG "minimap combat" games.  However if you were not personally doing the fighting, if AIs were actually responsible for moving all the units around tactically, it could work.

My concern is the inability to respond, other than in matching force. By lack of defense in depth and other factors (more of them below), it's not possible to attrit the enemy making territorial forays not profitable. What's possible is to respond with comparable force. No area denial, no "death by a thousand cuts". Heck, even something as simple as land mines. After the war start a charity for children who lost their feet on antipersonnel mines for an economy boost.

Lack of asymmetric warfare.

Hmm, define?  When I've gone up against Alien Battle Ogres with Scouts, I definitely felt I was doing asymmetric warfare.  Of course my goal is always to catch up to symmetric warfare and then surpass.  Are you saying you want to be the low tech insurgency forever, or you want to be pestered by low tech insurgents forever?

Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare. What's relevant to 4X of guerrilla warfare is a targeted infrastructure attack.

Right now, cities are insular single-square tiles with perfect stack defense. Defending the perimeter and defending a larger territory look like the same task in SMAC.

I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.

Have some sort of logistics for offensives, not necessarily very detailed or too grounded in real life. A supply chain connecting all the way into friendly territory. Maybe units need to receive their SMAC maintenance cost directly, otherwise losing fractions of their combat strength up till being non-combatants and disbanding at an even later point. Support combat units in form of more than artillery bombardment special ability.

These are few factors and I can think of many others. Most can't feasibly work in a 4X but some sure do for their purpose.

[bvanevery]

it's not possible to attrit the enemy making territorial forays not profitable.

I've found that big defensive stacks in walled cities are not at all profitable to fight, when offensive and defensive technology are equal.  In SMAC, one waits until offensive technology is superior.  In FreeCiv the enormous defense advantage is even more pronounced.  Cities founded on hills, you simply can't deal with them until you've got superior weapons technology.  Sending catapults against walled, hilled phalanxes is mostly suicide, or at least overwhelmingly expensive compared to building Wonders.  You have to wait until you've got cannons. 

What's possible is to respond with comparable force. No area denial, no "death by a thousand cuts".

I'm not sure I've seen any computer game that models Fabian strategy.  I'm wondering if the player would find it as frustrating as the Romans (other than Fabian himself) did.  Cannae ensued shortly after they replaced him.

Heck, even something as simple as land mines. After the war start a charity for children who lost their feet on antipersonnel mines for an economy boost.

From a realism and simulation standpoint, I hear you.  But from a game enjoyment standpoint, are you sure you want what you ask for?  You're asking to fight WW I style trench warfare on the Western Front.  It's long, grueling, and slow.  It was frustrating for the participants.  Why isn't it going to frustrate you as a player?  I've definitely had games of SMAC that frustrated me because they were taking forever, although the sources of the problem are different.  1) too many units to clean out, even with Choppers.  2) distances to push the units are too long.  Are you quite sure you really want a much longer, much more boring game?  What's going to keep you interested in the next section of land mines, artillery shells, and barbed wire in No Man's Land?

Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare.

But I think positioning them on favorable terrain, and attempting to distract or delay Ogres from population centers, counts.

I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.

Emperor of the Fading Suns had more individuated facilities per hex, so a "city" is essentially a collection of facility hexes in the same place.  It results in needing a lot more individual garrison units, which if you're maniuplating manually, is more tedium.  What you're asking for, is the ability to attack or defend in more detail.  The question is, how does one manage those details without bogging down the game?  And if some of those details are automated, at what point does player agency disappear, so that it's merely illustrative detail and not decisionmaking detail?

Have some sort of logistics for offensives

One of the big questions for me is whether a planetary space game is going to include some kind of orbital combat mechanics or not.  This changes the logistics and insurgency possibilities quite a bit.  Different historical eras have different logistical problems.  When Hannibal was tromping around Italy, his army was living off the locals and wasn't being supplied from Carthage.  That's not so doable for a WW II sized tank division.  But if you got Star Trek shuttlecraft that can zip to anywhere on the planet in a moment, logistics are more about whether anyone can see you and shoot you down.

A problem for purposes of the present discussion, is orbital combat mechanics are "not SMAC".  SMAC is just Civ II with a sci-fi skin.  I meant for this thread to be more about what in SMAC is tiresome and tedious, as opposed to any game feature one might conceivably implement.  Anyways SMAC's actual orbital mechanics are pretty darned simple, sort of tack-ons to the basic Civ II framework without much thought put into them.  And considering how late game they occur, not so useful or important anyways.
 

[Unorthodox]

Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare. What's relevant to 4X of guerrilla warfare is a targeted infrastructure attack.

Right now, cities are insular single-square tiles with perfect stack defense. Defending the perimeter and defending a larger territory look like the same task in SMAC.

I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.

Have some sort of logistics for offensives, not necessarily very detailed or too grounded in real life. A supply chain connecting all the way into friendly territory. Maybe units need to receive their SMAC maintenance cost directly, otherwise losing fractions of their combat strength up till being non-combatants and disbanding at an even later point. Support combat units in form of more than artillery bombardment special ability.

These are few factors and I can think of many others. Most can't feasibly work in a 4X but some sure do for their purpose.

This is already somewhat modeled by the tile improvements around a city.  The real problem being that pillaging them bears little fruit or damage as they can be instantly rebuilt.  I think one of my favorite ways this was addressed was the 'towns' in Civ 4.  This improvement would take turns to upgrade itself, so pillaging a level 5 (numbers purely illustrative, I don't remember their levels) town could wipe away hundreds of turns of effort.  As such, there was incentive on the defender to leave the city to defend the town, and attackers that couldn't take a city had alternative targets. 

I'd certainly like to see this expanded further. 

[E_T]

Has it been another decade since this question was last asked??

[bvanevery]

Has it been another decade since this question was last asked??

I don't know; do you?  I suppose I could see if the archive goes back that far.

The Recreation Commons archive appears to go back to 2012.  Searching through it manually about SMAC is "target poor" so I'll leave it to others to recommend any relevant material.  I posted here because at present, it gets the most traffic.  Not because it's the correct subject sorting for the topic.

The Theory of Everything archive appears to go back to 2010.  I'm reading through it backwards to see if I learn anything.

[Later...]  This is not yielding much.  So far, a discussion of how there are too many kinds of weapons and armor in the game.  I agree; my experience is I breeze right over a lot of them as "intermediate forms" that don't get much field use.

Now I'm finding an interesting and long discussion of The State of SMAC 2.  From 5 years ago, not 10.

Interesting to me personally, is commentary on the FreeCiv AC effort fizzling out.  I knew that codebase was a wreck back then.  I tried a number of times over the years to become interested in that project, including making a Visual Studio build for them once, which was rejected.  Historically that code was repulsive and icky.  Glad to find out it wasn't just me.  Sometimes I've wondered whether I'm just bad at reading other people's code, or the code really is as bad as I think it is.

[sthalik]

Heck, even something as simple as land mines. After the war start a charity for children who lost their feet on antipersonnel mines for an economy boost.

From a realism and simulation standpoint, I hear you.  But from a game enjoyment standpoint, are you sure you want what you ask for?  You're asking to fight WW I style trench warfare on the Western Front.  It's long, grueling, and slow.  It was frustrating for the participants.  Why isn't it going to frustrate you as a player?  I've definitely had games of SMAC that frustrated me because they were taking forever, although the sources of the problem are different.  1) too many units to clean out, even with Choppers.  2) distances to push the units are too long.  Are you quite sure you really want a much longer, much more boring game?  What's going to keep you interested in the next section of land mines, artillery shells, and barbed wire in No Man's Land?

(0) Re Fabian defense:

See modern stabbings as an asymmetric tactic, originating from Palestine, targetting Israel. The latter don't go house to house confiscating knives, just box in. This is warfare example, I'm not here to discuss politics.

(1) Re Defensive structures:

It's not like each and every mine type has to instakill units in the radius. And not like entrenched defense is free or way cheaper. It's just a choice when faced with more numerous and technologically advanced army. The defender has to realistically expect significant territorial and infrastructure losses. "In depth" means that the enemy spearhead penetrates to begin with.

Trench warfare is obsolete because of mechanized infrantry and combat aircraft. And it should be.

(2) Re: Tuning and fun

Distances to push the units are decidable by the game maker. Logistics needn't be too strict, e.g. units having an "inventory" of logistic points that only need replenishing from time to time for full combat strength. Rotate the forward line of troops' units, restock and heal old units for a prolonger offensive. Of course capturing enemy production centers simplifies logistics a lot, hehe.

Overall average controlled area size can be tweaked. Defense should be easier than offense. Also there are more than unconditional surrenders.

Being able to steamroll through an enemy-controlled continent is too easy in SMAC Get plenty of clean reactor jets then few 1/1 rover "stealers". Or high-morale Probe Teams or countless other unbalanced stuff.

(3) Re: Support units

Consider anti-air battalions, from SA-2 to double-digit SAMs. SA-2 can turn around a fighter at best unless it's not detected. There are countermeasures, but defenders during the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia used even the older types brilliantly. Note the doctrine differences between NATO air superiority and Soviet (or post-Soviet) focus on anti-air batallions.

Falcon 4 had good ideas about air defense emplacements. They could fire, but were rarely resupplied, same as other battallions. Hardly a permanent defense.

Modern combined-arms warfare has plenty of fun stuff. Probably I'm gonna look up more of stuff that can possibly work in a 4X.

(4) Re: Game depth

What's interesting? Increasing both game depth and breadth. Only few of my ideas are any good for a 4X title, and everything needs tuning. Both are a given.

See Fallout's combat that was fun because of death animations. Nothing else at all. The canon, Fallout 1 -> 2 -> New Vegas. The latter had totally no-fun combat though.

Throwing tons of weak units at strong units isn't asymmetric warfare.

But I think positioning them on favorable terrain, and attempting to distract or delay Ogres from population centers, counts.

Nominally, sorry. How about hiding a support multiple-rocket artillery in a district, then sacrificing it for a devastating barrage? Like these modern Russian ones, they look real scary. And expensive.

I'd dispense with the single-tile population center abstraction entirely. Make them vulnerable in distinct parts, more spread out, have division of labor for a single "city" over specialized tile-districts, etc. Not one-tile "fortress". This way the scale confusion may actually work for game's benefit. A city center could be a government district. Everything else spread out from it in some directions. It's not like clerk's ward is particularly fortified or anything. It may be necessary to make cities' effective tile area larger.

Emperor of the Fading Suns had more individuated facilities per hex, so a "city" is essentially a collection of facility hexes in the same place.  It results in needing a lot more individual garrison units, which if you're maniuplating manually, is more tedium.  What you're asking for, is the ability to attack or defend in more detail.  The question is, how does one manage those details without bogging down the game?  And if some of those details are automated, at what point does player agency disappear, so that it's merely illustrative detail and not decisionmaking detail?

Increase sight radius for defending units so they don't need to cover all districts, expect during an immediate emergency. Accept some losses, there should be enough districts for redundancy.

Have some sort of logistics for offensives

One of the big questions for me is whether a planetary space game is going to include some kind of orbital combat mechanics or not.  This changes the logistics and insurgency possibilities quite a bit.  Different historical eras have different logistical problems.  When Hannibal was tromping around Italy, his army was living off the locals and wasn't being supplied from Carthage.  That's not so doable for a WW II sized tank division.  But if you got Star Trek shuttlecraft that can zip to anywhere on the planet in a moment, logistics are more about whether anyone can see you and shoot you down.

That "Star Wars program" stuff wasn't ever put into life, we don't know how it'd work. Probably just more mutually assured destruction. Were there games with it? If not we don't know how it'd turn out. Probably just widening the superiority gap.

A problem for purposes of the present discussion, is orbital combat mechanics are "not SMAC".  SMAC is just Civ II with a sci-fi skin.  I meant for this thread to be more about what in SMAC is tiresome and tedious, as opposed to any game feature one might conceivably implement.  Anyways SMAC's actual orbital mechanics are pretty darned simple, sort of tack-ons to the basic Civ II framework without much thought put into them.  And considering how late game they occur, not so useful or important anyways.

I see. What do you think of seeing a prototype with some of my ideas, though? Minimalist graphics with few "borrowed" sprites, not meant to be used as an actual game really.

[bvanevery]

I see. What do you think of seeing a prototype with some of my ideas, though? Minimalist graphics with few "borrowed" sprites, not meant to be used as an actual game really.

Meaning you have a prototype to show?  Sure, why not.

[sthalik]

I see. What do you think of seeing a prototype with some of my ideas, though? Minimalist graphics with few "borrowed" sprites, not meant to be used as an actual game really.

Meaning you have a prototype to show?  Sure, why not.

Not at the very moment, no. But this is interesting, which is the best motivator.

[bvanevery]

One thing I'm starting to feel, having read a large number of archives on the subject of "the next SMAC", is it's like asking different directors to make movies about the same screenplay.  Every director will do something different.  At some point, one must simply manage the complexity by having confidence in one's own vision as a director.

Like for instance in my case, approaching 2 decades of experience with this game, and plenty of other games in this genre... I know that unit pushing complexity has to be reined in somehow.  Or else nothing has been achieved, it will be the same old crap boring experience.  That most gamers don't even like.  Or they grow out of being able to make time in their lives for such things.  Most people got married, had kids, and took on more responsibilities in their jobs.  I didn't!  So I sit around posting the world's most incredibly long winded AAR for the sake of form, not even because it's that exciting to play the game or write up the game anymore.  But I figure, I should do at least one AAR like that, to see how it ends up.  Then it's gonna be been there, done that.  The bar will have been raised for what needs to justify the time expenditure on such things.

I think I could do a big AAR with the Pirates, roleplaying the sinking of everything, "because I hate land".

I think pretty soon I'm running out of Builder frontiers that I haven't explored in SMAC.  I've done "max boreholes" worlds before, they're nothing special.  Nowadays I just plant trees and build tree farms / hybrid forests eventually.  They yield almost as much, certainly more than I need to beat up an AI, and it's a lot less work.

One thing that's a certainty for me, an absolute requirement in any SMAC-similar game, is better control over terraformers.  Currently I work every single tile by hand.  The AI is way too stupid to entrust to such things.  I would like some kind of programmable or priority list specification for what kinds of terrain to develop.  C-Evo had some kind of priority list IIRC.  I'd like it to be fully programmable in some kind of scripting language.  Which would then ideally be compiled so that the decisions aren't bogging down a scaled simulation.  If compilation is too much, maybe I could come up with some kind of "condition mask and transition state" paradigm, where the player is merely selecting or deselecting option bits in a .txt file.