realistic growth

[bvanevery]

It is not appropriate to try to accomplish 3rd party AIs with the SMACX binary.  Yitzi pretty much proved there's only so much you can patch, despite years of heroic effort.  The amount of programming effort you'd need to make a framework for an AI to understand SMACX, is equivalent to writing a new game.  Ergo, you should set your sights on writing such a game.

Doing such, you can also make adjustments to pare down the game to something more AI fungible.  To the extent that SMACX is gratuitously complicated, it's more difficult to write an AI for, because the possibility space becomes much larger.  I think an obvious area to pare down is individual city improvements.  There's basically no need for it, it's a complete waste of time even for a human.  The idea works up to about 9 cities, then just seriously sucks.

Details police probe

police probe

Here is another attempt at the social engineering.  I am toying with the idea that Police State is actually what improves your probe teams, as the Communism mechanic did vs. Democracy in Civ II.  Fundamentalism no longer relates to Probe Teams.  I do not accept that fundies are harder to brainwash, because they are brainwashed, proving it can be done.  The "mind control" stuff is also just this game's flavor text for "triggering a coup".  I see no evidence that actual Theocratic societies are magically immune to such things, if the price is right.  I do think the pricing for that is grossy wrong in this game, but that's another issue.

I never bought that the Believers should be good at Probe Team stuff.  It struck me as merely a game mechanic, foiling the ability to steal tech, for the inability to make tech.  But the truth is anybody with a Probe Team can steal tech, it's not a particularly special ability.  Your Probe Teams might die more often, you may run out of pristine cities to steal from, your teams may die more often, but so what?  You can still do it.  Having Elite probe teams is most relevant for framing factions, getting the job done undetected.  In SMACX, the only faction that should be demonstrably good at that out of the box, is the Data Angels.  Everyone else can suck it AFAIAC.  Much like Support, I'm turning Probe into "a game of inches" rather than everyone getting these wacky large bonuses for it.  The range of Probe ability is only -3 to +3 anyways.  If Roze goes Police State, then she's got the best possible teams.

I'm a little unclear on how many other things can add to Probe bonuses, like the Covert Ops Center.  I never build them.  Seems easy enough to get Elite teams via Command Centers, Bioenhancement Centers, and various social choices, so how does it help me further?

I'm also working on Police State and Planned not having a -2 Efficiency penalty, but a -1 Efficiency -1 Economy penalty.  However, I'm finding that plain vanilla SMACX, the Hive's immunity stuff isn't working.  Yes I did try IMMUNITY, ECONOMY but it didn't work.  IMPUNITY, Police State seems to have the desired effect, but the negative icons don't go away on the SE screen.  Hopefully that is just cosmetic.  I'm still experimenting.  I haven't tested whether Yitzi fixed any of this.

Oh yeah, growth.  I figured out what I was doing wrong with the default social choices.  I had replaced the keyword "None", which is wrong, as that's the tech prereq.  I needed to put stuff after "None".  Then things worked fine.

I say that the default economy of the human race, is to have more babies.  More terrified young-uns you can command, are more hands for your farm, more commodities you can marry away, more people who might take care of you in your old age, and more units to sell into the sex slave trade.  Babies, babies, babies!  As many as you can keep alive.  So this is modeled as +1 Growth if you have a Simple economy.

Planned lets you keep doing this in a more advanced societal framework, but it isn't an automatic "pop boom" social choice anymore.  You're going to need multiple things to get to a pop boom.  Fundies make babies, that's their indoctrination.  The Believers also make more babies in my mod, so they can get to +4 Growth if they go Fundamentalist and either Planned or Simple.  Get some Children's Creches and they're gonna be Yuuuuge!

I didn't want every default SE category to award Growth though.  Having everyone start with +3 Growth is rather unbalancing, makes getting bonuses or penalties in Growth pretty much meaningless.  I figured out that Frontier shouldn't enable you to grow.  When you don't provide advanced political infrastructure for your society, there's no collective safety net and the wolves get you.  Ergo, everyone starts the game at +0 Growth.  If you have more advanced politics, you remove a growth penalty.  Which is like growing more, until you get advanced economics as well, which makes it a wash again.  Except of course that Free Market and Green both give growth penalties, so you have to sacrifice growth to have those things.  That's intentional, it should sting.

Values I decided have nothing to do with Growth.  A society focused on Survival should be tougher than one that isn't, unless of course we're talking Power.  When all your citizens are sleeping with a rifle at the ready, they're gonna fight better.  Everyone starts off a survivalist on Planet, except for faction penalties, which would just be hippie skippie Deirdre.
 

[Buster's Uncle]

Judging from what the .exe boiz have told me over the years -I have scient on Skype- something about how the .exe works and constrains space/memory might make it an order of magnitude easier to just write your own game...

[Fibonacci]

I never bought that the Believers should be good at Probe Team stuff.

I suspect it was peer pressure from the conversion mechanic in Age of Empires (I used to love playing the Babylonians). It also with the idea of nation versus country. Fundamentalist tries to model the spread of the two. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash explores a kind of "mind worm" spreading through a population and the inoculation against it, the "nam-shub of Enki". Fundamentalist appears to serve as such an inoculation.

I'm a little unclear on how many other things can add to Probe bonuses, like the Covert Ops Center.  I never build them.  Seems easy enough to get Elite teams via Command Centers, Bioenhancement Centers, and various social choices, so how does it help me further?

The base gets +2 probe from a covert ops center, which along with the bonus from children's creches makes a base more expensive to steal, and less chance of success. If you're playing a faction withenough negative morale, running wealth and/or eudaimonia, plus modifiers can get halved. Each facility ends up +1 and I find myself having a bioenhancement center/children's creche plus one or two others at times as Morgan in a base, and then having that base produce a unit every turn to send off to support elsewhere. It's not a necessity, but it's certainly still useful to some factions.

For realistic tuning of Police State, I'd favor making it something more like +2 Support +2 Police -2 Probe +1 Econ. Bribery and hyperinflation are normal things in police states. I'd also like to add a 1 energy maintenance per supported military unit to complete the bribery theme and the "easy come easy go" nature of money in police states (here's your government issued wheelbarrow full of bank notes, they'll be worthless by the time you get through the line to spend them or deposit them). Not sure how to implement it as usual. My imagination exceeds my grasp.

And hope spring eternal as far as AI clients, making something that shoves keystrokes and move movements/clicks has been done to other games. 

[bvanevery]

For realistic tuning of Police State, I'd favor making it something more like +2 Support +2 Police -2 Probe +1 Econ. Bribery and hyperinflation are normal things in police states.

That's not the right way to decide the issue IMO.  First you need to notice the range of possible Police State effects is only -5 to +3.  On the positive end of the scale, giving +2 Police is a huge goosing.  In general I don't believe in all these +2 "huge goosings" in any of the SE choices.  I try to find something that should give +2 as the "best" thing, and something that only gives +1 as a "contributing" thing.  When the upper range of the ability is only +3 anyways, you get there by making the choices.

Instead of making Police State so kickass for getting a better Police rating, I made it that you have to choose Power as well.  And you get the Probe benefit, which you didn't previously get.  Yang, I've fixed so that his faction is inherently +1 Police.  I couldn't abide him having less police ability than the Spartans.  I might take the +1 Police away from the Spartans and do something else with them.

I'd also like to add a 1 energy maintenance per supported military unit to complete the bribery theme

Is there any mechanism in SMAC to do that?  Bear in mind, the Hive is already modeled as economically poor.  I've been trying to generalize that to Police States and Planned economies.

and the "easy come easy go" nature of money in police states (here's your government issued wheelbarrow full of bank notes, they'll be worthless by the time you get through the line to spend them or deposit them).

That's false.  Modern day China is a Police State.  What you are thinking of, sounds more like a Kleptocracy.  c.f. Nigeria.

And hope spring eternal as far as AI clients, making something that shoves keystrokes and move movements/clicks has been done to other games. 

Just because it has been done, does not make it sane from a programmer hours standpoint to do so.  There's a point at which, to have that amount of code and sustain yourself at the effort, you need a means of support.  People get paid to pour that many hours into stuff.  And those that aren't getting paid to do it, like myself, need to figure out how to sell games to get the support.  I can't get money by dumping man-years of work into a SMAC license I don't own and have no right to make money from.  Even pursuing as much modding as I am at present, some devs would call a waste of resources.  My justification is it might bring me closer to a design for my own 4X TBS "SMAC-like" game.  If I reach a point where I decide it's not actually helpful for that agenda, then it'll be time for me to move on.

At present, I'm also finding it somewhat informative as to "what works in modding and what doesn't".  I have a lot of "what doesn't" experience with Wesnoth.  Screw XML styles of specification, they're horrid for a human to type!  SMAC has a pretty clean sense of modification for the most part, very minor changes in text files actually get immediate effects in the game.  I would have a faster way to reload the changes than starting a new game, like a F# key for it.  Needed that in Wesnoth as well, didn't have it.  Main thing that's a little clumsy in SMAC so far is lack of centrality at times.  Like having a bunch of settings in alphax.txt, but faction stuff will be in somefaction.txt.  I know why they did it, but it's still a pain for tracking and modification.  Some kind of packaging and diff system for the content would be helpful too.  At present it would be overengineering, but for an ideal game I'd want this.

[Fibonacci]

That's false.  Modern day China is a Police State.  What you are thinking of, sounds more like a Kleptocracy.  c.f. Nigeria.

I'm quite familiar with modern day China. I picked up Mandarin when I was a U.S. Army linguist...
Tedious bureaucracy with the option to pay your way past it is definitely a thing still. And it's only corruption when you don't give the right cut to the other party members.

[bvanevery]

I don't think the game has the scope of economic model to handle hyperinflation.  Sometimes when contemplating these things, like Growth, I have to concede "sometimes it could go up, sometimes it could go down".  I try to keep the biggest picture of realism in mind that I could, recognizing that this is still quite a limited game.

So for instance, Probing.  A Police State or a Fundamentalist thing?  Or a Democratic thing?  USA has spies, USSR had spies, Russia has spies, China has spies (but I don't know what they do).  UK's got spies, Israel's got spies.  Maybe Iran has spies but I don't think they have good spies compared to ours?  Spying would seem to be more a function of budget and technology than national identity.

What to do?  Well I'm inclined to say that spying is "not inherently Fundamentalist".  It is inherently a Police State thing to do, whether they're good at it or not.  I toyed with making Fundamentalism a kind of police state as well, seeing as how all the theocracies actually are police states as well.  So then I get left with game mechanical questions.  What does it mean to choose between the two?