SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Nexii]

I think the problem is that if a smaller faction loses a city, theres not much chance for counterattack. Making defense very strong is sort of the same end result as making offense very strong, both sides lose a lot of troops. With offense being heavy, it allowed more unpredictability (which I think was the reason for more RNG in the defensive systel) as to who attacked who first.

My idea was something like EFFIC but for military effectiveness. The further from your capital, the weaker your troops get. Call it the difficulty of logistics. It's sort of an extension of how they envisioned Children's Creche working

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Why is that a problem? It is not for assailant for sure. When enemy started taking bases one should switch whole economy to defensive production, consolidate second line of defense, pull political strings to form alliance against aggressor. Then fight to the death and hope allies exhaust attacker forces enough to hold the line of defense. That's all.

The diplomacy thing is very well written in SMACX already. Nobody like aggressors. The only thing that with snowballing vanilla war strategy allies cannot stop aggressor in time. With WTP enhanced defense it's possible.

If we don't consider alliances and diplomacy then the game is over when one loses its first base regardless of attack/defense balance.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Thank you everybody for sharing feedback and thoughts. Here is the new release with many of them implemented. A lot of changes, though. I am going to play test it, of course. However, be cautious. Don't start huge PBEM games until this is successfully tested.

More lore stuff. I even renamed some techs for better match with existing lore things. Have a look.

# Version 78

* New technlogy tree version. Hopefully more lore sensible.
* Frictionless Surfaces renamed to Quantum Computers.
* Super Tensile Solids renamed to Applied Plasmadynamics (for plasma shard).
* Organic Superlubricants renamed to Cold Fusion (for fusion lab and fusion laser).
* Aquifer is enabled by Field Modulation (level 2).
* Thermal Borehole is enabled by Superconductor (level 3).
* Condenser is enabled by Ecological Engineering (level 4).
* Echelon Mirror is enabled by Environmental Economics (level 5).
* Hab Complex is enabled by Industrial Economics (level 3).
* Other technology wiring and association see in alpax.txt.

* Removed -1 POLICE shift from all factions. Now this mod does not require tweaking with factions anymore.
* SEs modified to give more negative POLICE ratings.
* SEs modified to give higher GROWTH ratings. This is now safe as population boom is fixed and doesn't break game anymore.
* Borehole Square yield is 0-2-6. Borehole construction time is 12.
* Forest yield is reverted to 1-2-1. Instead moved HF later in tree and restored its original cost/maint.
* Tree Farm cost/maint = 12/2.
* Hybrid Forest cost/maint = 24/4.
* Nutrient effect in mine square = 0.
* Centauri Genetics gives +1 mineral in fungus. By request of players to have some minerals in it.
* Biology Lab cost = 6.
* Fungicide Tanks cost = 1 row of minerals.
* Weapons and armors are shifted little bit later and distributed more evenly across the tree.
* Armor value progression adjusted to keep up with contemporary weapon.
* The Weather Paradigm cost = 40. Lowered due to plenty of advanced terraforming options are now available early.

[Hagen0]

Consider reducing mine terraforming time a bit, possibly also for Solar Collector.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I've played with base tile yield 4-1-1. It indeed helps to grow bases faster at start. However, they grow so fast that I cannot even keep up with their growth. I have to build Recreation Commons and Hologram Theater in quick succession. Then I need Hab Complex pretty soon. Even if I moved it to tier 3 tech it is sometimes not available when needed. Formers cannot keep up with the growth even when they cost just 2 rows. I don't like the idea to build two formers for each base from the game start.

Overall, I feel like cheap colony + cheap former + accelerated growth is too fast development. I'll probably revert or reduce some of these modification in next release.

At the turn 80 Hive has built WP, built condensers and boreholes all over the place and has ~20 bases.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Seems like these changes are good for MP but not for SP. MP is probably faster paced game and ends long before 400 turns. So these changes may fit.

I will revert them to previous values and recommend MP players to set them up in alphax.txt for faster pace experience.

Namely:
Base tile yield: change to 4,1,1 or even give more minerals and energy if desired.
Former cost: change to 2.

[Hagen0]

So you are back at former 4 rows, colony pods 6 rows?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I'll keep Colony at 4. Seems that early ICS is not such a bad thing and AI does it as well. So no harm to AI. Later on pure expansion is not that profitable anymore. B-drones activity in all bases require drone facilities, etc. So this seems to be fine. I don't want to artificially slow game down more than necessary unless it clearly fixes game breaking exploit. And in this case higher colony cost doesn't seem to fix it just slows both horizontal and vertical growth.

Formers I am thinking between 2 and 4. Testing both cases now. Currently inclined to keep it at 2 as well. Expensive formers slow down vertical growth. They also get killed sometimes, etc. Player do not need to produce them in unlimited quantities anyway. So former cost impacts everybody equally.
I'll also change all former abilities to flat cost to avoid any rounding on top of such low cost. For example, Fungicide Tanks add 1 mineral row, Super Former adds 4 rows, etc.

So, it seems the only change I revert is base tile yield. Still testing and welcome your input too.

[Nevill]

Later on pure expansion is not that profitable anymore. B-drones activity in all bases require drone facilities, etc.

It is something that is less relevant for Transcend. B-drones start popping up after 6th base on a Standard-sized map, and after that all your citizens are drones no matter how many bases you have. All the b-drones affect is the Psych slider because it takes 50% more energy to convert a superdrone to a talent, and the base can only make use of pop*2 psych points.

Meaning that the biggest drawback of b-drones is the inability to enact Golden Age, which is necessary for pop booming... except it got nerfed. So there is less incentive to keep the number of bases down.

The MP game is wrapping up. The Manifold Harmonics broke it over the knee like I thought it would. There are no terraforming options comparable to 5-1-5 tiles, and the fungal production techs are clustered together so closely I increased my yield by 3 resourse points in 10 years.

It's 2230, and I research level 7 techs in 2 turns. It takes Zakharov 12 turns even with all the cheating he gets up to.

MH is a late game project that should be built at a point when bases get most of their yield from satellites and are fully terraformed. By then it doesn't matter as much if your tiles are producing 5-1-5 or 6-2-7. It sure matters when the alternatives are 1-2-0 or 3-1-2 (forest and farm+solar, respectively).

Not sure if anything I have to say about the tech tree is relevant, since the new version seems to shuffle things around. I did not like the v66 implementation, because abilities/facilities I could use got moved up the tech tree, and I had almost nothing to play with for 100 years; the game only opened up with Genejack factories and me being able to build things faster, which got me to increase my park of formers and build more improvements so I would actually need facilities with multipliers... and then I started researching techs at a rate faster than I could implement the discoveries. Currently my highest weapon in Chaos gun at 6 power, but I expect to have Quantum weaponry at 16 in a decade.

Oh, and I think Naval Yards I got from the Maritime Control Center fixed my ships in 1 turn. I definitely recall a probe ship at -90% skip a turn and be repaired the next. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen?

[Hagen0]

I didn't like the base tile yield increase to begin with. In particular, if you want to reduce ICS a bit it seems wrong to increase base tile yields.

What incentivises base spam is not the cost of colony pods. They are not that cheap to begin with costing 30 expensive to rushbuy minerals and one population. It's the way support works which means that more bases means lower support costs, growth past size2/3 requiring prohibitive amounts of food and and the issue of drone control. Growing even to size 2 on Transcend requires a police unit and growing to size 3 is heavily discouraged.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I didn't like the base tile yield increase to begin with. In particular, if you want to reduce ICS a bit it seems wrong to increase base tile yields.

The base tile yield was a response to MP game slowness complaint. Definitely, it supports ICS but there are many contradictory conditions there to work with. Anyway, I didn't like it myself and reverted back. So the question is closed.

What incentivises base spam is not the cost of colony pods. They are not that cheap to begin with costing 30 expensive to rushbuy minerals and one population. It's the way support works which means that more bases means lower support costs, growth past size2/3 requiring prohibitive amounts of food and and the issue of drone control. Growing even to size 2 on Transcend requires a police unit and growing to size 3 is heavily discouraged.

I agree that there is a finer mechanics at play here that need to be further researched. For now I believe ICS by itself is not that big of a deal since AI does it at high enough rate too at the beginning.

I also agree with growing restriction there but I don't see how it can be simply fixed without introducing any weird rules. Base has limited worked squares and letting it grow vertically without limits may exhaust this pool of available workable tiles. We are out of ideas about incentivising vertical growth.

One option that we have already discussed is to make all eco/psy/lab multiplying facilities to multiply by 100% instead of 50%. Give Node, Bank, and other facilities relatively early so base can bump its cash and lab output quite significantly. Then increase research cost proportionally to require a lot of developed bases to move it forward at good rate. In this scenario thinly spread empire would fall behind in research.

Another option is to introduce base size defense modifies as in Civ 3 (as I remember). Sort of "citizen defense forces". 😊
I.e. the bigger the base the more difficult to fight units in it. Then adjust weapon/armor and defense modifier so that current +100% (base + territory) is achieved at about size 6-10. Then smaller bases will be an easy prey. One has to explicitly grow them to increase their defensive value. This also solves a "first base capture crashes the victim" problem many people told about. In this case it will be increasingly difficult to move into center of empire. So the invasion may naturally stop somewhere in the middle.

[Nexii]

Yea buffing the base square only makes ICS worse. I did try something similar once where the base square got a lot more energy. With the thought that far bases wouldn't make good use of the energy due to inefficiency. It didn't really work because such a high amount of energy came from the base square that outlying ones didn't matter much. A lot of size 1 bases were just better.

I was trying to find the mechanic. But I think in Civ2 the base square got resource bonuses when the city reached certain sizes. That seems liked a good way to reward larger cities. I wonder if there are any other creative ways to reward larger cities. I think they were kind of on the right track with specialists only in bigger cities. But specialists have a lot of flaws too.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

The MP game is wrapping up. The Manifold Harmonics broke it over the knee like I thought it would. There are no terraforming options comparable to 5-1-5 tiles, and the fungal production techs are clustered together so closely I increased my yield by 3 resourse points in 10 years.

It's 2230, and I research level 7 techs in 2 turns. It takes Zakharov 12 turns even with all the cheating he gets up to.

MH is a late game project that should be built at a point when bases get most of their yield from satellites and are fully terraformed. By then it doesn't matter as much if your tiles are producing 5-1-5 or 6-2-7. It sure matters when the alternatives are 1-2-0 or 3-1-2 (forest and farm+solar, respectively).

Thank you for testing that. I see that my arguments were flawed. I'll move it later to the tree. Somewhere at 60-90% would be fine?
I don't think it worth reverting it to Secrets of the Manifold as this second last tech before ToT. So there won't be enough time to enjoy it.

Not sure if anything I have to say about the tech tree is relevant, since the new version seems to shuffle things around. I did not like the v66 implementation, because abilities/facilities I could use got moved up the tech tree, and I had almost nothing to play with for 100 years; the game only opened up with Genejack factories and me being able to build things faster, which got me to increase my park of formers and build more improvements so I would actually need facilities with multipliers... and then I started researching techs at a rate faster than I could implement the discoveries. Currently my highest weapon in Chaos gun at 6 power, but I expect to have Quantum weaponry at 16 in a decade.

I am constantly working on it. Even though the tree itself got rearranged sometimes, I have my own table of feature appearance times and try to stick to it. In latest versions you got advanced techs appearing one by one quite early. So, I guess, you'll have something to do whole game.
* Aquifer is enabled by Field Modulation (level 2).
* Thermal Borehole is enabled by Superconductor (level 3).
* Condenser is enabled by Ecological Engineering (level 4).
* Echelon Mirror is enabled by Environmental Economics (level 5).

I also distributed mineral multiplying facilities more evenly in the tree. Genejack Factory appears somewhere 30-40%. Base needs much less mineral surplus for these facilities to be profitable than any energy multiplying facilities. Besides, boreholes are nerfed. So some multiplication of minerals should not be over the board.

Oh, and I think Naval Yards I got from the Maritime Control Center fixed my ships in 1 turn. I definitely recall a probe ship at -90% skip a turn and be repaired the next. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen?

Interesting. Don't know. I think not by default but Maritime Control Center may do it. I'll check it out.

[Hagen0]

Let me note that I liked the tech tree much better in my recent game which includes the earlier and spread out terraforming options you mentioned.

Incentivising vertical growth doesn't require anything extreme. You'd need to reduce nutrients required for growth and buff drone control options a bit maybe. Increasing the economy buildings multipliers would have serious unintended consequences. I can almost guarantee that. (One that comes to mind is building super-economic bases with crawled energy.) If you want to buff facilities in general why not abolish maintenance costs? This would also make drone control better.

[Nevill]

Is there a way to play with the cost formula?

There are the following strings in thinker.ini:
reactor_cost_factor_0=100
reactor_cost_factor_1=80
reactor_cost_factor_2=65
reactor_cost_factor_3=50

And this is from the readme:
unit cost = [PI cost + (SI cost - 1) / 2] * reactor factor * abilities factor + abilities flat
reactor factor = reactor cost / Fission reactor cost

I assume it takes reactor factor = 100% for fission, and then applies discounts according to the values above.

However, changing reactor_cost_factor_0 to anything other than 100 does not actually change the cost of fission units, but changes the cost of units with other reactors.

What do these numbers stand for then?

Personally, I'd like to test the game with the values of 70/60/50/40 from what the current costs are, but I am not sure how to go about it.