SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[CaptEHCJ]

I have loaded yours "Aki Zeta-5 of the Consciousness, 2155" save (I assume this is the one after which you experience the crash) into 240 version running on my machine. It passed without any problems and continued my turn by showing me which facilities are built in my bases. See attached. Did you get to this point?

If not then it could be not WTP error. Vanilla still has plenty of fatal bugs out there.

Are you launching terranx_mod.exe?

Please send me your exe and configuration files.
alphax.txt
conceptsx.txt
helpx.txt
labels.txt
Script.txt
socwin.pcx
terranx_mod.exe
thinker.dll
thinker.ini
Alpha Centauri.Ini

Even better would be to zip and send me entire AC directory. However, it could be huge. If you can send it me over google drive or some other method – that would be good.

I have also created issue on that. Can you access it? It would be nice if you can attach directory zip there.
https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer/issues/84

I have posted the files requested on the github site and a few comments there. 

[bvanevery]

I have begun a test game of WTP version 250.  Particularly interested in the new Completion gameplay.  Huge map, 30%..50% water, average settings, Transcend, random factions.  I drew the Caretakers.

Details completion scumming a biolab

completion scumming a biolab

Turn 15 I completion scum a biolab.  The Caretakers start the game with the ability to make them, as they're given by Progenitor Psych.  You sure you want to do that?  Not that I object to Biolabs being given very early, I have them in D1 Biogenetics in my mod.  But it takes a little time to get them, and you need to be a little Discovery focused to have the likelihood of getting them immediately.  Giving factions stuff that they can immediately completion scum, is pretty darned good for completion scumming as a tactic.  And as you can see, it's well within the mineral allotment of the new approach.

Details not nearly completed

not nearly completed

Oh, uh, that's not what the popup said.  Was that like a 10 minerals bonus or something?  I'll need to pay better attention next time to the before and after.  If the bonuses are paltry, then the immediate availability of a Biolab isn't gonna matter.  The dialog should be changed to reflect reality though.

I think if you make the bonus too low, then having the dialog pop up "to get the player all excited about something", is just going to come off as really annoying.  I don't have a sense of what low vs. high is yet.  I'll play on.

I seem to have committed myself to a marginally useful early game biolab, lol.  Well who knows, maybe it'll mask my waiting for a size 2 base that can make a Colony Pod or something.  We'll see.

[bvanevery]

Details quite the early support

quite the early support

I've got 4 units and no SUPPORT issue?  This is new.  I remember that being talked about, but I was busy with my own modding at the time.  Well, we'll see.  I wonder how long I can crank out the units?  I'm not opposed to getting a bunch of Formers in a hurry, it's pretty much standard drill with my own mod's Clean Formers at the beginning of the game.

Details 4 units for free

4 units for free

Ok, assuming this doesn't somehow vary per city, looks like 4's the limit.  I'll shift their homes and fill things up.  I would have opened a little differently if I'd known I could have 4 free units.

[bvanevery]

Details absence of scummery

absence of scummery

MY 2184.  This is the extent of my settlement, at which time I made the decision to start going vertical with Rec Commons.  I didn't find colonization particularly difficult, but I am used to long colony pod lead times in WTP.

I popped many pods, but I never got any more Completions than what I documented above.  Only those few minerals on a Biolab at the beginning of the game.  If the criteria has changed for when the event fires off, it seems to be operatively a non-event now.

I don't think anyone's capable of doing better at pod popping than me, as I did start with +1 PLANET, captured some mindworms and spore launchers readily, and carefully retained them to maximize pod bursting.  Basic tactic was to use Scouts to attack indigenous life forms, not the captured mindworms.  If I'd realized I could support 4 units for free, I would have made a lot more Scouts at the beginning.  Even as is, I did ok with that.

I got a fair amount of money from my activities, 790 credits at present.  I mostly don't know what to do with it, so I've sat on it.  Occasionally I've completed a Rec Commons or a unit that was almost complete anyways.  It's not clear to me what the most profitable use of money in WTP is.  Trying to rush units early seems to have big penalties.

I've only got 2 Isles swimming around in the oceans.  I think Zhakarov may have cleaned out all the ocean pods.

I can't tell much about the AI's colonizations, but I think I out-colonized Deirdre.  I currently don't care about wiping them out, as they don't really seem to be a threat.  However she's Seething, possibly from my rude willingness to poke my Scouts around her land, even though we have a Treaty.  Hey, I want more pods.  There may not be any, but I like having intel.  I've left whenever she's thrown a snit about my presence, but if she's not going to, well I'm just gonna keep tromping around.  I'm rude that way.  I've got stuff to do, and she can just bugger off and do her own stuff.  I really don't care.  We're both Planet-friendly factions and she's often such a butt.

Zhakarov probably wants to declare war on me soon.  Maybe I'll use him as long distance chemical weapons exercise, but I don't feel I'm logistically in good contact with him yet.

[bvanevery]

Details not scumming

not scumming

MY 2199.  I outmaneuvered the Gaians at a corner of their empire, and managed to pop some pods they hadn't reached.  I got another Completion.  It's not scumming, because I did not set up anything specially to get it.

Details so how many minerals

so how many minerals

I'll need to load up an autosave to see what the city was at before.  Pretty much all my cities are building Children's Creches lately.  I've also gone Green Democratic.

Details the creches of yesteryear

the creches of yesteryear

31 - (8 + 3) = 20 minerals bonus.  Seems a bit cheap.   I mean isn't that a Recon Rover, yippie?

[bvanevery]

Details fat on kelp

fat on kelp

MY 2202.  Seething Deirdre sold me a map of the Pirates.  They're a bit spammy nuts.  One of the original feedback questions that led to the anti-Completion Scumming measures, was about rate and expense of colonization.  Well it looks like the Pirates aren't paying much!  All that free food.

The Gaians in contrast are a little more spammy than I earlier estimated, but they don't seem so bad compared to myself, at least yet.  If I wanted to take 'em, I could.  As is, I still don't care.

The University doesn't look at all tough on land.  Almost stillborn, by this mod's standards.  They have stuck their toes in the oceans a fair amount.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

The Caretakers start the game with the ability to make them, as they're given by Progenitor Psych.  You sure you want to do that?  Not that I object to Biolabs being given very early, I have them in D1 Biogenetics in my mod.  But it takes a little time to get them, and you need to be a little Discovery focused to have the likelihood of getting them immediately.  Giving factions stuff that they can immediately completion scum, is pretty darned good for completion scumming as a tactic.  And as you can see, it's well within the mineral allotment of the new approach.

I don't understand. Are you playing the version where instant completion is replaced with fixed mineral bonus? If so then what is the problem in having this mineral bonus for anything? It is still the same bonus regardless of what you are building.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Oh, uh, that's not what the popup said.  Was that like a 10 minerals bonus or something?  I'll need to pay better attention next time to the before and after.  If the bonuses are paltry, then the immediate availability of a Biolab isn't gonna matter.  The dialog should be changed to reflect reality though.

Sorry, I must have changed the script after I committed the release. Should be updated in next version. It adds flat 20 minerals.
It is in thinker.ini: instant_completion_fixed_minerals

Here. Take these and just drop in game directory. They should have fixed wording.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I've got 4 units and no SUPPORT issue?  This is new.  I remember that being talked about, but I was busy with my own modding at the time.  Well, we'll see.  I wonder how long I can crank out the units?  I'm not opposed to getting a bunch of Formers in a hurry, it's pretty much standard drill with my own mod's Clean Formers at the beginning of the game.

Ok, assuming this doesn't somehow vary per city, looks like 4's the limit.  I'll shift their homes and fill things up.  I would have opened a little differently if I'd known I could have 4 free units.

Support has been changed too. See here.
https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer#alternative-support

Number of constant free units is set in thinker.ini. Initially I thought to give 2 to match vanilla closely. However, people (including your) often noticed AI exhausts itself with support pretty quickly. So I raised it to 4. We can play with it to find a good spot.

Ok, assuming this doesn't somehow vary per city, looks like 4's the limit.  I'll shift their homes and fill things up.  I would have opened a little differently if I'd known I could have 4 free units.

It does not. The pattern is same for all bases.

[bvanevery]

https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer#alternative-support

I think you've got a missing term in your equation.  In both Firefox and Edge browsers it appears as:

Code: [Select]

base support = ( * (4 - SUPPORT)) / 4
Sumthin's tryin' ta get multiplied.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Fixed.

[bvanevery]

Details final extent

final extent

MY 2242.  This is last night's wee hours of the morning game, and I've decided I will start over.  I leveled up all of my cities through Hologram Theaters.  I built a few Command Centers for garrisoning, but, lacking any real desire to wipe out the Gaians, I finally just started building several Secret Projects.

I feel like I probably should have done that eons ago.  The game makes me very uncomfortable that I can't do SPs when I'd like to get them done.  I have to engage in very, very long term planning to have any of them, due to the crippling exchange rate of credits for SP minerals.  This is particular to WTP and I'm not sure I'm exactly in favor of it.  I find myself staring at my directed research choices and thinking, well I don't need that, nor that, because I can't actually build that....  Which honestly, is a bit boring.  Feels like there's nothing to do but level up all my cities.

The potential parity of AI expansion, gave way in early midgame to the usual across the map spam I more typically expect from WTP.  I still don't know if that's playable or not.  I definitely have no desire to emulate Infinite City Sprawl myself.  The AI never gets tired or bored of this, but I as a human most certainly do.

I think my empire was ok but could have been a bit bigger than my earlier reported ceasing of colonization.  Not by much though.  One thing I wonder about, was making a financial area in that personal ocean south of me.  It was all shallows and pretty well shielded from the predations of the Pirates, who were way elsewhere on the map.

It would have been militarily rational to stomp the Gaians in their crib.  I usually have trouble with that sensibility in SMAC.  In recent years, I just don't wanna.  It's also game mechanically rational to leave your closest enemy for last, concentrating on someone farther afield and interfering in their growth.  However that's also a logistical drag, so in terms of real world player energy investment, it's a bit between a rock and a hard place.  I do wonder if a different "close by" enemy would have stimulated me to get on with the stomping.

Deirdre definitely didn't bring any fight to me.  Despite all that Seething, and my provocations of tromping Scouts all over her soil, given our Treaty.  She did steal a tech from me.  In a rare moment of largesse, I simply ignored it.  I really only had a 1 city front with her, so she wasn't going to be able to do it again.  In the manner of The World According To Garp, that city was pre-disastered.  Lacking obvious incentive in the tech tree, I kept researching the lowest tier techs anyways.  So I figured, how much could she possibly get ahead?  I'm not the University, I'm not coughing out great stuff for her.  I deliberately pursued this "low tech" research policy in the future, despite having built every research gizmo I could.

SE table choices as usual don't seem like a very good deal.  I did eventually decide that Democratic was acceptable once I got Green.  Green fits my faction's capabilities.  I made pretty good use of it until the midgame.  Then I got the feeling that I'd sucked up most of the pods that were available, and I was very much hitting a point of diminishing returns.  I contemplated bagging my mindworms and going Free Market.

I did manage to get a lot of Artifacts home, but then I did nothing with them.  They are probably best used on SPs as they don't suffer the horrible exchange rate of straight cash.  But SPs are also so expensive, that they hardly seem worth having.  Maybe it's better to let the AIs build them all, wasting their resources, and then engineer the long distance logistics to take them over?

And of course, I had lots of money from my early exploration, that I didn't use on much of anything.  I still don't have a sense of what's actually worth paying for at the beginning.  WTP seems to favor a "more horizontal" approach to empire building.

In a new game, I'll use a lot more Scouts, to take advantage of the 4 free units.

My provisional opinion is that 20 minerals is too cheap a bonus, to be wasting the player's time with a popup screen.  That's arguably only worth 40 credits.  A 25 or 50 credit bonus is nothing to get excited about, and straight cash is generally more useful than a small city specific minerals bonus.  Completion mechanics were worth something because they were a large bonus.  In the early game, it takes 75 or 100 credits for me to feel like I made some bank.  It seems like the frequency of Completions has been cut down as well, not just their value, so "once in great while you get 20 minerals" seems especially cheap.  It's really inappropriate in the midgame, where the typical cash pop is 150 to 200 credits.  Here I am getting 40 credits worth of minerals, in some random city where it may not have even particularly availed me of something important.

Earlier I recommended 50 minerals and I will stand by that recommendation, as being worth 100 credits for facilities.  You do seem to be controlling the frequency of Completions somehow, whether explicitly or implicity.  They're way less frequent, so I don't see why the player has to be put on 2 kinds of hard diet.

[bvanevery]

Details governor learns much

governor learns much

MY 2151.  Rockin' it as bureaucratic Lal.     My landing site was a bunch of dry scratch near the Great Dunes.  This cost me about 5 turns of delay, but subsequently I found good land and made up for it.  I took advantage of the early free units and made lotsa Scouts and Gun Foils.  I popped the crap out of the pods, getting me a fair amount of money, and a bit of safety from any surprise mindworms.  When I had excessive money, I used it to rush Colonists.  That's actually how I went from 2 to 4 bases, as I found that pile of USS Unity money up north.

Soon I'd established my scouting perimeter.  I mainly started making Formers after that.  I only got 1 'Completion' when trying to set those up, which was merely a 20 minerals commitment to an ECM Recon Rover prototype.  That wasn't the greatest idea in hindsight, as the prototype is expensive and would still take a lot of turns to complete.  I was nominally at war with the Cyborgs at the time though, although they weren't land adjacent to me.  We eventually signed a Treaty, and later even a Pact.  The Aliens on the other hand are being butts.  No real conflict yet, but they're doing their usual Alien ugly thing.

The seaward orientation yielded the reward of coming into contact with all of the other factions.  This year in a flurry of comm sales, I became Governor.  I also got maps for most stuff.  For some reason I parted with D3 Intellectual Integrity to get one of the maps, I guess because I have a hard time valuing any of these early techs as important.  Usually I wouldn't do that, and maybe I didn't even have to, as one of my new allies might have been able to get it for me.  Oh well, whatever.  Brain got a bit soft.

Having this early a window into most of the AI spread, I find interesting.  It seems we're at parity in our ability to spread, more or less.  That implies the really spammy stuff comes later, when I as a human am tired of colony pushing and they're not.  We'll see if they have any military capacity when I decide to change gears.  The Caretakers are close enough to completely obliterate, and maybe I will finally do that sort of thing sooner rather than later.  The Usurpers are also just down the road from them, so it begs for chemicals.

[bvanevery]

Details recycling payout

recycling payout

MY 2216.  I completed my 1st Secret Project, the Merchant Exchange.  I'm also 2 turns away from completing the 1st SP I started, the Command Nexus.  Policy has been to build Recycling Tanks in cities once they've got 6 minerals.  It took a long time to get multiple such cities going, but eventually I was building many SPs in parallel.

I also built 1 such city with a Command Center, as it happened my capitol U.N. Headquarters.  It singlehandedly defended the realm from all manner of mindworm spam, probably triggered by the Caretakers coming to clean up the fungal bond pods I missed.  In the future I'll be more through with Scout spam at the beginning.  I have found the disengagement of Scout Rovers to be effective against mindworms, getting past the usual attrition problem.  Spore launchers I've never had an answer for though, and have just occasionally had to sacrifice something.

The Caretakers also interloped and exacerbated my situation with a few units.  However they've had no stick-tuitiveness about it, so things got back to quiet.  I'm using the remainder of my Scout Rovers to wipe out fungal towers near me.  Some of my bases are at size 6 and when they go to size 7, I'll get an unhappy person, so I make a colonist. 

Once the Command Nexus completes I think I'll start sending ECM Recon Rover spam at the Caretakers.  Unfortunately I don't know the secret of chemical weapons yet.  I've kept the default Explore Discover research foci, to see what it's like for the Peacekeeper AI to experience the game.  Well, they aren't going to learn Democratic, it seems.  I've never made a SE choice, and I plead poverty with my allies Aki and Zhakarov.  They dole out some techs to me.

Yang, Deidre, and the Caretakers hate me.  The Usurpers recently signed a Treaty with me, after a long bout of sunspots.

[bvanevery]

Details but have you tried wisdom

but have you tried wisdom

Why does Knowledge not have any penalties?  alphax.txt says it does.  PEACE.txt doesn't show any special faction ability like Impunity to this choice.  I need me some EFFIC right now so I'm just gonna go on rockin' this cheat.  I mean, it's MY 2222 and I've never learned Democratic.  As the Peacekeepers.