SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Something I never paid attention to. It is not reflected in help but it turns out rocky tile does not produce nutrients from rainfall at all regardless of rainfall. Unimproved rainy rocky square is 0-1-0. Help says farm cannot be built there but it is irrelevant. Even if you place a farm there in editor it won't produce a single nutrient. They only way to get it from rocks is nutrient resources. However, mine, the only viable improvement in rocks, reduces nutrient output by 1. So rocky mine on nutrient resources still produces just 1-4-0. That sucks. Borehole and forest (two other mineral resources) do not have this restriction. Such injustice. I am thinking on doing something on that.

[lolada]

Rushing

Say facilities are x2, units are x4, and projects are x8. And, of course, VoT doubles all the above numbers. What do you think?

What a mess ^^ i've seen they had only 4 mins in a row.. cheaters . I don't know how its calculated but sure they needed it their production was awful. I was also thinking about 8 E per mineral for SP - i'd say do it and we can test it. If it turns about bad i'll complain . The thing is player can hurry important project with crawlers and then rush the rest with energy. AI is in general too dumb for that. But AI gets these ridiculous production discounts so they hurry it 100% with way less energy. This 8E might level the fields somewhat.

On topic of requiring x% amount of minerals before being able to rush SP. It makes some sense since it guarantees one can't snipe them in single turn and the faction with better production can win the race. For example this AtT thing would not happen. And there would be a race - 1 turn rush is not a race; with current system Morgan is the king.
There's Crawler rush thing - but it is for most of the game quite an investment to dump crawlers into SP. I'd ban crawlers from rushing SP just because i find it unfair to AI. But its not too bad, in current implementation player can snipe some important SPs with crawler+energy, but there's enough projects and tech disparity that AI gets lots of them and thats quite nice.

Terraforming
I'd say it should be #1 priority to improve AI terraforming - they need to have enough minerals or they are really really bad. Got to teach them to remove fungus and terraform if they don't have PLANET > 0. Even then AI should know that each base needs at least x amount of minerals. For example 5 - 10 - 20 early, mid, late.. thats the way i think about it at least - in general each base needs to have a minimum amount to complete facilities in reasonable time. Then AI needs to know when things get worse to re-terraform terrain.. once fungus pop everywhere i don't see them removing it. Fixing eco-damage would help them a lot, i've seen them doing 60+ eco-damage thats worm-pop every turn until the base is ruined.

Mines: if mine would not reduce output of food by 1 it could be decent on rolling tiles for some bases. Civ3 had that.. AI still needs to know not to build mine on every tile ^^. Low altitude Rainy rolling tile could be 3-2-0 or 4-2-0 later.. solar would add just 1 or 2 energy (with economy or mirror).. while on hill tiles one could build solar collectors. You can maybe teach AI to prefer solar collectors on higher altitudes, mines on lower rolling tiles.

ICS

I must say i don't really see the issue. I simply don't ICS because its anti-fun and tedious and AI does not do it either. Recently i played on small maps because even on normal maps its easy to get 30 cities 4-tiles-apart and it becomes tedious to play. Basically i tend to match AI in cities and add a few more and just stop. If i add new ones to fill the space i space them more apart, later often 5-6 tiles because it really doesn't matter much once you have 30+ of them.
I don't use governors they are just awful - Induktio said that code is not reversed yet.. until its rewritten i think they are useless. You can force bases 4 tiles apart i won't mind.. i turned off monsoon jungle in maps anyway the thing is unabalanced.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Rushing
On topic of requiring x% amount of minerals before being able to rush SP. It makes some sense since it guarantees one can't snipe them in single turn and the faction with better production can win the race. For example this AtT thing would not happen. And there would be a race - 1 turn rush is not a race.

It's a healing of a dead. If one can hurry projects easily for x8 cash this is clearly the problems of too much cash or too small project cost or both. Project is supposed to be expensive to be not rushed in one turn no matter with crawlers or cash. Restructuring the payment scheme is just hiding it under the carpet.

There's Crawler rush thing - but it is for most of the game quite an investment to dump crawlers into SP. I'd ban crawlers from rushing SP just because i find it unfair to AI. But its not too bad, in current implementation player can snipe some important SPs with crawler+energy, but there's enough projects and tech disparity that AI gets lots of them and thats quite nice.

Same thought here. I believe project should be built by whole faction but crawlers are bad implementation of it.

I think the problem of buying projects with cash is that it is collected from all bases into a single pool. Whereas, mineral production stays with bases. It doesn't matter when hurrying common production as all bases would build it anyway. Helping some bases with common pool of money is fine as this happens in small increments to bases here and there which is a good way to partially channel combined income to help the neediest. Project is a different story. One want to channel a big part of empire production for a single building into a single base. It should be so huge than theoretically even common cash income pool should not be able to cover it.

Here is what I came up with. When faction starts building a project all bases contribute some percentage of minerals to it. No need to build and relocate tons of crawlers for that. Easy, automatic, and natural for both human and AI. Now it is really whole community who erects it.

With that in mind we can easily price them proportional to whole empire strength and to not be afraid anymore they are not affordable for AI to build it in a single base.
1. We can make it back expensive again. Especially late game ones.
2. We can scale late game project proportional to map size.
3. With two above in mind we should probably rearrange them in time/cost so that cost corresponds appearance time.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Terraforming
I'd say it should be #1 priority to improve AI terraforming - they need to have enough minerals or they are really really bad. Got to teach them to remove fungus and terraform if they don't have PLANET > 0. Even then AI should know that each base needs at least x amount of minerals. For example 5 - 10 - 20 early, mid, late.. thats the way i think about it at least - in general each base needs to have a minimum amount to complete facilities in reasonable time. Then AI needs to know when things get worse to re-terraform terrain.. once fungus pop everywhere i don't see them removing it. Fixing eco-damage would help them a lot, i've seen them doing 60+ eco-damage thats worm-pop every turn until the base is ruined.

Mines: if mine would not reduce output of food by 1 it could be decent on rolling tiles for some bases. Civ3 had that.. AI still needs to know not to build mine on every tile ^^. Low altitude Rainy rolling tile could be 3-2-0 or 4-2-0 later.. solar would add just 1 or 2 energy (with economy or mirror).. while on hill tiles one could build solar collectors. You can maybe teach AI to prefer solar collectors on higher altitudes, mines on lower rolling tiles.

Yeah. It's all makes sense. The only thing that rocky tiles do not harvest any nutrients and on top of that mine reduces the nutrient output confuses me. What is the purpose of it? Some historical reason from Civ1? Well now it makes rocky mines pretty pathetic comparing to forest and boreholes. Don't know what to do with it.

[lolada]

Yeah. It's all makes sense. The only thing that rocky tiles do not harvest any nutrients and on top of that mine reduces the nutrient output confuses me. What is the purpose of it? Some historical reason from Civ1? Well now it makes rocky mines pretty pathetic comparing to forest and boreholes. Don't know what to do with it.

I always imagined the mine to be destructive.. if you take plain grassland and smack a mine on it you destroy lots of that land.. crops can't grow, polution etc - and thats why it goes -1 food. And its a balance thing also.

Civ games do not have production blocks like eco-damage so what they did is simply control amount of minerals available. Now Alpha Centauri can uniquely break this by using crawlers or spaming something like 4 boreholes. Thats hard to balance - so they likely run away from these concepts in later games.

Anyway.. i don't know why you consider mines less valuable that much? They are ok for long time in my book. Eventually you may want to replace them all but i don't see the problem there as long as they are useful for a long time. In AC new inventions replace old ones.. its natural.

Take a look chronologically.
1. they build fast and are better source of minerals then forest, its double 4 vs 2
- forest has only 1 food and that is slow.. if you want production badly mine is better
- then other scenario is that you don't want to grow at all.. base would starve.. or go in drone territory - i switch and use mine because i don't want food at that time - when i want to grow i switch back to forest
2. Crawlers come... its way better to crawl mine than forest..
3. Boreholes come - yeah borehole > mine but its way harder to build and has restrictions. So some mines will go away but they are still useful. Nexii surprised me a bit saying that borehole only adds 1.25 of minerals eco-dmg.. but its felt anyway..
4. Mineral production % boosters (like Genejack).. Mine > forest.. it adds 2 minerals instead of 1..
5. Tree farms - its a big investment.. but this 2-2-0 tile is usually better than 0-4-0 so one might want to remove mines. Provided that you can grow which is not easy. Lategame yo u can so eventually you may want to remove all mines. But its quite a job to remove them - one has to level the rocky tile (8 turn default) and plant forest.
5a) special case - green/fungus factions (The Cult and gaians) will likely want to have mines and borehole whole game due to lack of minerals..
6. Eventually by the endgame one might remove all mines from land and use Hybrid forests but thats trading raw production for science/energy and specialists.. which is ok i guess.. its time of star trek replicators

#
On case of farm/mines combination, if mine -1 nutrient effect is removed.. rainy rolling tile can go 4-2-0 with soil enricher.. while hybrid forest is 3-2-1. One could prefer that and work extra tile or specialist.  Actually way earlier rainy farm/mine is 3/2/0 and that is > tree forest 2-2-0 yield. But it causes small amount of eco-damage. One can and likely should use the mix as there's usually a number of flat 0 mineral tiles around the base so there's space for both mines and forests.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I agree mine is quite balanced with other basic improvements: both rocky and rolling.

Forest also seem to be fine now with 1-2-0. Somewhat weaker than other combinations like rolling rainy farm-mine 2-2-0 (that is kinda neat, actually).

This is borehole that is not.

Let's look at advanced terminating from extended features point of view. We'll consider how each option is a) unique and complementary to others, 2) naturally limited by itself so there is no need to restrict it somehow with additional weird rules, and maybe 3) engage strategical thinking.

aquifer

Awesome feature. Unique. Does not replace any other improvement but complement them by adding extra moisture and energy. Self restricted. You can have only so many of them and bonus is minimal. Strategical placement is important.

condenser

Another awesome and super balanced one. Unique for artificial moisturizing. Only river does the same but in very limited and unpredictable manner. Complements farm/enricher. Self restricted as rainfall has a limit. It is also quite strategical as there is no need to place it everywhere especially in totally arid areas. Forest is better there.

mirror

Unique and complementary to solar. Strategical in a way to require right placement around other solars. Slightly off in self restricting area. Surrounding single collector with mirrors adds 8 energy to it or +3 on average per tile for large energy fields of collectors+mirrors. In addition to +4 possible energy from altitude it's a big source of energy overflow past mid-game.

Probably we should restrict the total combined bonus from altitude and mirrors by +3. This way mirror will be sort of artificial high-tech substitute for taking collector at higher altitude and there won't be much need to raise all the terrain all over the place out of golden fever.

borehole

Not unique or complimentary. Same singe tile improvement replacing mine. Not too much strategy in placement either except to put it on most unusable tiles. So it works similar to forest completely disregarding terrain. Bad, OP, and hard to balance feature. I guess designers wanted three advanced options and were out of cool ideas. 😞

As you see, borehole is the only not harmonic thing out there. That is why it is so much discussion around it and pain to balance it. I am really thinking to just remove this abomination from the face of earth.
I am testing it now as 0-2-6. With such yield and longer construction time my AI formers seem to prefer it to mine sometimes but not always.

[lolada]

Aquifiers and condensers seem in good place. AI maybe spams condensers wrongly now - that should be checked - they are not good anymore for food on its own tile.

Mirrors are ok-ish, i build them for fun mostly, i don't see them as op at all. Not like there's space for solar/mirror farms and if someone wants to do it its nice to have the option. When talking about restrictions, i like to go on relaxed side. There's literally no case where one can surround mirror with solar collectors.. there's always flat tile or rocky tile i'd rathe have mine or forest on it. So Mirror usually adds few points of energy and thats nothing spectaculura.. its like maybe a bit stronger mine tile. Often condenser > mirror.. so there's that. If the land is already green enough mirror can come into place.

On topic of boreholes.. they are in weird place. One thing to note - they are awesome solution for flatland bases with no rocky tiles.. coastal ones especially. Easy quick 6 minerals.. energy doesn't even matter, its just nice. In that sense they compete away for example mineral sea platforms. So if you remove boreholes you will give way more space to forests certainly - otherwises bases can't get minerals. Not sure if its possible to make sea tiles useful for minerals. So here - boreholes are op certainly. Farm/mines combos might be used here if you remove that -1 nutrient.

Another thing is that this will certainly weaken mineral production of lots of bases - it might be good idea.. might be reeeealy bad for AI.. possibly. The thing with AC is that many bases are strong so losing 1-2 of capital ones is not terrible. If most bases turn to crap then taking someone cap and production base might be game over. AI also handles production badly - they go into big support problem so they really need raw minerals.

- Borehole with 0-2-6  yield hm seems quite awful to me honestly ^^. Not sure i would build them.
- Removing boreholes completely would help with eco-damage.
- Another idea is - since they are cool - just moving them to something like tech 10. So lategame one can use them a bit its fun.

- btw what about giving base tile an extra mineral to help AI?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Looks like opinions are more or less around 1) nerfing borehole and focus it on more of minerals/energy but not both, 2) nerfing energy flow past mid game.

Short term plan.

Solar collector energy yield limit is 4, including altitude and mirror effects, excluding bonus resources and SE effects. This wont affect tidal harness as its max energy output is 4 already. This will render combining land raising and building mirror fields useless. They still will be useful separately. Preferably mirrors will be cheaper option.

Borehole is 0-2-6. This is kinda artificial attempt to balance them instead of completely removing it. This way they are formally not superior to rocky mines and not inferior to farm-solar combo.

[Nexii]

Well you can remove the -1 N for mines in alphax.txt. I have for awhile as sea mining platforms were very bad compared to tidal harnesses. Let's see, 1 M and -1 N, or 3 E...not a hard decision. I even gave mining platforms +1M. But I also reduced kelp by 1N. I might go back on this one yet, sea has to be considered for mines I guess is all I'm saying. I've also tried 3-0-2 and 3-2-0 for sea tiles. Right now I have sea at 2-3-0 and 2-0-3 (plus any facilities).

Echelons were never that OP because they took more former turns than condensor+borehole and produced less. Add up the turns for farm+enricher+raise+solar/mirror, it's like 4+8+12+(12+4)/2. 32 turns plus the EC cost to raise. Solar raise is somewhere around 4-0-6 and borehole is 0-6-6. Though often borehole fills in extra land with forest, so that has to be averaged in.

Solar seems a little stronger than it is because a lot of the surplus N ends up wasted. Kind of like with sea bases. It's mostly borehole and condensor that need nerfing down. Condensor probably doesn't need any N boost at all on the condensor tile. Borehole should probably be 0-4-4 or 0-5-5, somewhere around there. I think boreholes do need to produce M, otherwise M ends up being very scarce. Alternatives could be to boost the M of forests, mines, or fungus.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

On topic of boreholes.. they are in weird place. One thing to note - they are awesome solution for flatland bases with no rocky tiles.. coastal ones especially. Easy quick 6 minerals.. energy doesn't even matter, its just nice. In that sense they compete away for example mineral sea platforms. So if you remove boreholes you will give way more space to forests certainly - otherwises bases can't get minerals. Not sure if its possible to make sea tiles useful for minerals. So here - boreholes are op certainly. Farm/mines combos might be used here if you remove that -1 nutrient.

Yeah. That is the problem with forest and boreholes. They are both new additions and they are both mineral focused. Together with mine this is three mineral oriented improvements. Forest is also adding nutrients so it is somewhat complementary and unique comparing to mine or borehole. While two of them is easy to balance three of them is too much to handle. There are no other group of competing improvements like that.

Nutrient penalty for mine is fine. This is payment for minerals. I understand this. What I don't understand is that rocky tile does not produce nutrients at all. Why? This is a complete waste of rainfall.

- Borehole with 0-2-6  yield hm seems quite awful to me honestly ^^. Not sure i would build them.

They are still good for energy. Better than average tidal harness or solar collector. Best high altitude collector-mirror field can get up to 7 energy but this is rare and costly to raise everything. So they will be an excellent energy source.

- Removing boreholes completely would help with eco-damage.

Not by much with their reduced output. Nobody will spam them. Besides terraforming ecodamage is completely curable.

- Another idea is - since they are cool - just moving them to something like tech 10. So lategame one can use them a bit its fun.

Eh. Not a solution IMHO. Just swiping it under the carpet. It doesn't matter when you undergo complete terraforming replacement it is still bad design.

[Nexii]

I mean there's 3 sources for each resource
For N: condensor/farm, kelp, forests
For E: borehole, tidal, echelon/solar
For M: mines, borehole, forest

Plus fungus but that's kind of a wildcard

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Well you can remove the -1 N for mines in alphax.txt. I have for awhile as sea mining platforms were very bad compared to tidal harnesses. Let's see, 1 M and -1 N, or 3 E...not a hard decision. I even gave mining platforms +1M. But I also reduced kelp by 1N. I might go back on this one yet, sea has to be considered for mines I guess is all I'm saying. I've also tried 3-0-2 and 3-2-0 for sea tiles. Right now I have sea at 2-3-0 and 2-0-3 (plus any facilities).

I wouldn't bring sea bases into mineral discussion. They are mineral poor and energy reach for reason.

I think boreholes do need to produce M, otherwise M ends up being very scarce. Alternatives could be to boost the M of forests, mines, or fungus.

I don't think they are scarce on land even without advanced terraforming. It depends on how many you need. About every third tile is rocky so building a rocky mine per every two farms gives 20 minerals for 12 population base. 40 with two factories. And even that may already produce high ecodamage. This is what stops people from borehole spamming, not the scarcity by itself.

If you think bases need more minerals we can just move multiplying facilities somewhat earlier. They were originally placed late because of boreholes and mineral abundance to curb ecodamage! Now with nerfed boreholes moving them earlier won't harm.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Looks like opinions are more or less around 1) nerfing borehole and focus it on more of minerals/energy but not both, 2) nerfing energy flow past mid game.

Short term plan.

Solar collector energy yield limit is 4, including altitude and mirror effects, excluding bonus resources and SE effects. This wont affect tidal harness as its max energy output is 4 already. This will render combining land raising and building mirror fields useless. They still will be useful separately. Preferably mirrors will be cheaper option.

Borehole is 0-2-6. This is kinda artificial attempt to balance them instead of completely removing it. This way they are formally not superior to rocky mines and not inferior to farm-solar combo.

Update.
1. Borehole stay nerfed like that.
2. No touching collectors/mirrors.
3. Moving mineral multiplying facilities a little bit earlier to give players a chance to beef up mineral intake in case they found it insufficient. They are still expensive so no use to build them everywhere. Also there is still ecodamage that strikes back early production centers.

[lolada]

Fine by me boreholes are op they cause a lot of imbalance and unit spam. Gonna be intetesting to playtest.

[Hagen0]

Looks like opinions are more or less around 1) nerfing borehole and focus it on more of minerals/energy but not both, 2) nerfing energy flow past mid game.

Short term plan.

Solar collector energy yield limit is 4, including altitude and mirror effects, excluding bonus resources and SE effects. This wont affect tidal harness as its max energy output is 4 already. This will render combining land raising and building mirror fields useless. They still will be useful separately. Preferably mirrors will be cheaper option.

Borehole is 0-2-6. This is kinda artificial attempt to balance them instead of completely removing it. This way they are formally not superior to rocky mines and not inferior to farm-solar combo.

Update.
1. Borehole stay nerfed like that.
2. No touching collectors/mirrors.
3. Moving mineral multiplying facilities a little bit earlier to give players a chance to beef up mineral intake in case they found it insufficient. They are still expensive so no use to build them everywhere. Also there is still ecodamage that strikes back early production centers.

Sounds good to me. I'd not even make them so expensive. The opportunity cost of building a facility over formers/colony pods is always considerable. I would hardly build any in the early game if they were not so cheap to rush-build.