Modding Questions

[PittTheElder]

Hey folks,

I had a couple questions I wanted to ask about modding:

1) Is it possible to include the "other factions will not start projects before you have the technology" option from Thinker Difficulty and lower to the higher difficulty settings? This just makes it more interesting for me to play Blind Research in a chill game, so I don't need to worry about powergaming. Alternatively, can I soup up the bonuses given to the AI on the lower difficulty levels?

2) If I want to play SMACX balance, I find Spore Launchers just utterly handicap the AI. Is removing them from the game as simple as commenting out their line in alphax.txt?

[Induktio]

1) Is it possible to include the "other factions will not start projects before you have the technology" option from Thinker Difficulty and lower to the higher difficulty settings? This just makes it more interesting for me to play Blind Research in a chill game, so I don't need to worry about powergaming. Alternatively, can I soup up the bonuses given to the AI on the lower difficulty levels?

Hmm, relatively simple requests but I think these factors are hard coded in the binary, so it would require patching. It would be really easy to code the "dont start projects before player has the tech" requirement to the Thinker mod I've been developing. It could even be a configuration option. Next version of the mod will have expanded options to specify how many satellites the AIs are given too. I think that's a really simple way to give them a production boost if needed.

2) If I want to play SMACX balance, I find Spore Launchers just utterly handicap the AI. Is removing them from the game as simple as commenting out their line in alphax.txt?

Basically you can't go removing the basic units because their id numbers are hard coded. You *can*, however, replace the spore launchers with a copy of the mind worms and set the tech requirement to "Disable". Planet will still keep spawning those units but they will show up as regular mind worms. Side effect is that nobody will have the ability to build spore launchers even after discovering the normal tech. Just preventing the planet from spawning spores would probably require binary patching.

[Treerachat]

What can I change?