SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[lolada]

-1 Eco on Knowledge makes it borderline unusable until future societies. Of course, Morgan can still use it.

Why - i think thats not correct? -1 energy in HQ at -1 ECO is nothing.. -2 ECO is not bad either its only -1 energy per base.. thats a small penalty. Unless you play every game with +2 Eco so you would lose that -1 energy per tile.. This basically means you pick up Free Market in every game - and then you don't want pick up Knowledge because you lose that energy.

@tnevolin Movement is bugged in last patch with magtube changes Infantry can move more than 3 tiles.. movement points state 9/9 and it decreases by 2.

[Hagen0]

Of course, you want to be in Free Market if you are running Knowledge. I can tr it out later but I'd guess Free Market + Wealth gains tech as fast or nearly as fast as Free Market + Knowledge and you will get ahead mid term due to the cash you are making.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I think Knowledge is too good.

It is. If you consider it in isolation. In theory. It gives you technological advantage and you beat everybody else. In practice, though, everybody else steal and trade technologies. So it is absolutely irrelevant how fast you researching it. Others will be just slightly behind.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Why - i think thats not correct? -1 energy in HQ at -1 ECO is nothing.. -2 ECO is not bad either its only -1 energy per base.. thats a small penalty. Unless you play every game with +2 Eco so you would lose that -1 energy per tile.. This basically means you pick up Free Market in every game - and then you don't want pick up Knowledge because you lose that energy.

Unfortunately, you don't know that when you design SE models. You cannot possible know when the change will take place. How high ECONOMY you already have at the moment. So one has to go on average - weighting different possibilities. With some assumptions, of course. It is not exact science. I did this and concluded that ECONOMY is about 2-3 times as good as INDUSTRY, for example. Taking that former is exceptionally jumpy, as you correctly said. The most uneven effect of them all. Some steps on rating scale are just tiny, some are enormous. It is difficult to average. And we can have an argue endless. My calculated average may be rough approximation. However, it is a ballpark of it. So, maybe, it is slightly off but I doubt it is significantly beyond this range. I can vouch ECONOMY is better than INDUSTRY at every point in the game. The ration may vary, though.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

@tnevolin Movement is bugged in last patch with magtube changes Infantry can move more than 3 tiles.. movement points state 9/9 and it decreases by 2.

It could be. Highly experimental feature. Send me the save and description.

[Hagen0]

Is there a way to disable techtrading? I have started to make a diagram showing the tech paths in the mod since I had a hard time making informed tech choices. Does anything like that still exist? I don't want to duplicate effort. The tech paths really make no sense anymore from a lore perspective. I understand that gameplay is more important but that is a bit of a bummer.

I still fundamentally disagree about Knowledge. I think it is quite weak in its current form.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Is there a way to disable techtrading? I have started to make a diagram showing the tech paths in the mod since I had a hard time making informed tech choices. Does anything like that still exist? I don't want to duplicate effort. The tech paths really make no sense anymore from a lore perspective. I understand that gameplay is more important but that is a bit of a bummer.

Don't know if you can disable it by game configuration but I can disable it in mod if needed.

Are you asking about mod tech tree? Of course, I have it. How otherwise I would code it back in the game? In fact it is all in alphax.txt - all prerequisites are written there.

You also can consult in game help. It shows you only part of the tree for a single technology but you can track it up and down for couple of levels. This usually sufficient enough for short term decisions.

Yes, it does not make sense from a lore perspective. However, why do you care? Vanilla tech tree does not make sense too. Yet nobody bothered. How do you explain Nanometallurgy being dependent on Probability Mechanics? What the hell is Probability Mechanics anyway?

As I said before, I welcome any help with tech tree. This is a huge work, though.

I still fundamentally disagree about Knowledge. I think it is quite weak in its current form.

I hope you don't disagree with me. Because I think the same.

[Hagen0]

What I was talking about is a chart showing all the techs. Trawling through the data links works to an extent. But I keep forgetting prerequisites for some things and about the existence of others which I might want if I remembered they existed.

Touché about the tech paths. I remember the original tech paths to be somewhat less implausible though. As an example, you reassigned the Engineer specialist to Conquer tech Superstring Theory which is perfectly reasonable from a flavour perspective but strengthens Conquer techs over economy techs. This is a great way to balance but, say, Environmental Economics being dependent on Silksteel Alloys is really, really odd.

[Hagen0]

An example: level 1 Conquer techs Applied Physics and Industrial Base are prerequisites for level 3 techs Industrial Economics and Field Modulation, respectively. That would immedialy make much more sense if you swich them around.

[Nexii]

Yea Knowledge always tends to pair with FM, but it can't with -1 ECON. That being said I think FM > Planned > Green in your set. With knowledge boosted then probably the other economics need boosted.

It's hard for me to compare my version of knowledge because Wealth is much more powerful, it had to be boosted even more.

Yea before redoing the whole tech tree I'd have a goal. Either lore based or gameplay. Mostly it made sense to me lore wise, though in a few spots it sort of didn't. The biggest flaw I had right now was that weapons overtake armor in the midgame. 13-3 units are rather common. Then there's kind of a weapons stagnation as armor goes up to 8. The silksteel-photon-probability armors probably need some side economic benefits. Mag tubes are nice but the AI is probably right Drop is better a lot of the time

A tree completely (or almost completely) split into the 4 priorities might be interesting too. I don't know if it would work.

[Hagen0]

I found the tech tree in it's current form jarring flavourwise. There is a progression of armor and weapons techs but otherwise prerequisites that make some intuitive sense are the exception. Most prerequisites appear completely random.

On another note, armor should not be as strong as weapons of the same tech tree depths. You have better modifiers for defense. Having unkillable units can be extremely unfun.

[Nexii]

Yea my sort-of solution was to make armor more or less free on units. Weapons and chassis determine the cost. And I guess reactor now too that I've moved over to scient's patch.

I think the starting point would be to come up with themes, techs that are similar to one another. The Centauri techs are probably the most obvious. Those had a progression that made sense to me. Although there were maybe some flaws.

Some themes might be
Terraforming
Weapons/Armor
Genetics/Pop Growth
Economics
Research

One thing to note is that about half the tree is military techs. So military could be subdivided. Movement, Weapons, Armor, and Abilities perhaps.

[lolada]

Yeah it feels like there's way too many conquer techs.. but i don't know if that affects anything. Maybe factions with conquer focus have it harder to get non-conquer techs.

My first impression was there's too many weapons/armors but i got used to it quickly. One doesn't have to build latest variant, especially not the armor. Equality means its hard to conquer anything - I played Miriam and overrun Deirdre with 10 bases with Particle, Missile and Chaos weapons - all early. I didn't play Yang, Santiago or usurper Aliens i presume they can go to war early. Other factions look to me to be better at builder style. Once you go builder style it seems to me its hard to conquer anything before Fusion laser (10) or Shard Weaponry (13). Worms are no solution also because its hard to amass them. This is ok in general - different playstyle and its fun to play in lategame or endgame.

About SE choices - i must admit i am surprised by your logic, i rated 30% science + 1 EFF highly  and Free Market lower partly because it goes into negative planet. So one can't use fungus - power of all these vary with time tho. I'll go experiment a bit and revisit my choices. Maybe i am taking some wrong things for granted. Gonna also see if i can crunch some numbers in few of my saves and see how it turns out in real game.

ps. i reverted to v.54 but i'll see to reproduce that road movement bug

[Hagen0]

Having the the Conquer techs interleaved with builder techs would be fine for me. But they should make just a tad more sense. A fig leaf like Industrial Automation having Silksteel Alloys as a prerequisite would be OK already. Most of the current ones do not even make as much sense as that.

+2 Eco is substantially superior to having high effiency and research. Now, +3 research is a lot and I can see Knowledge teching slightly faster then Wealth/Free Market (but then maybe not). However, with all the cash from Free Market your development is much stronger. Mid and long term Knowledge can't keep up. The negative Planet rating means that Spore Launchers and Fungus Towers are a pain as you can't attack them. But Fungus squares are not tiles I would use anyway. Maybe I'm wrong about the latter. I haven't played enough to know how strong Fungus can get.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Environmental Economics being dependent on Silksteel Alloys is really, really odd.

Let me repeat in hundredth time. There are so many different technology flavors that is impossible to make all prerequisites sensible. Besides it almost never sensible for one color to be dependent on other color. Yet you have to do it. Otherwise, your color threes will never cross pollinate each other.
🙁

Think about it. It is like 80 technologies and 150 prerequisite dependencies. Were all dependencies absolutely crystal clear for you in vanilla? Were you able to quickly memorize whole tree? I never was and it never bothered me. Were you able to memorize Civ 1/2 tech tree even if it was supposedly reflecting a real technological progress? Was everything sensible to you then? How the hell you can develop Medicine from Trade + Philosophy? 😲
How the hell Space Flight was possible without Plastics in Civ 1? Oh well.


There are few solutions to it.

For one we can just darn rename them all and repaint tech tree from scratch!

Second one could be a finer tuning. Probably trying to preserve vanilla prerequisites because somehow people think they make sense. Ugh. Whatever.

Third one is a mix. Fine tuning + renaming where you see fit to smoother some big discrepancies.


As it doesn't affect game play I don't pay attention to it much. You are welcome to team up with me on it. I hear a lot of critics on this specifically but nobody volunteered yet.
😉