SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Great. I think I am gravitating to banning crawlers as well. They create a lot of extravagant option those pretty damn difficult to balance. We are already spending a lot of time on solving their problems rather than enjoying the game.

Here is just my opinions but I worked them out based on other people feedback.

Ability to help SP turns one base built mechanics into whole faction build mechanics which is different by order of magnitude production power. This change is not nicely treated in this game where almost everything is tied to a single base economy. And it probably never will.

Ability to crawl resources is another extravagant feature that contradicts there very basic "yield per worker" principle. Everything rotates and is balanced around it. Extra yield from crawlers is an oddball which will never can be integrated nicely in it.

Ability to redistribute resources between bases is under powered and probably not needed at all. I never used it.

Ability to contribute to prototypes is a small version of contribution to the project. Again rarely used.

Overall we can safely ban them without impacting much of Civ/SMACX basic mechanics. I'll go for it in my next versions.

If anyone has compelling reason to keep them - feel free to express your thoughts. However, keep in mind that you have to build a consistent system seamlessly integrating all of crawlers features into basic game concepts without much breaking them.

[Hagen0]

I'd certainly try it out.

The only thing I can bring up in favor of crawlers is that they are iconic and make up a part of what is unique about Smac compared to other civ games. However, they do break a lot of stuff.

[Nevill]

Ability to help SP turns one base built mechanics into whole faction build mechanics which is different by order of magnitude production power.

This is the most breaking feature, I find.

Others can be balanced. Yitzi made crawlers cost extra support. The redistribute feature could be useful if we could pick the amount - certain bases have excess of resourses that can be shared, it's just creating a 30-mineral unit to transfer 1 mineral is stupid when you can easily make it harvest twice that from a nearest forest instead. But those are things that can be fixed by putting a multiplier in front of them. A 1-mineral boost is trivial, but a 5-mineral one is worth considering, perhaps, especially on a project base. A 5-nutrient boost could help smaller bases grow quickly.

But hurrying things 1-to-1 needs to go.

...can it simply be disabled? Just commented out or something?

Crawlers are unique units that I'd rather try to fix than ban; it's just that it's beyond my capabilities to fix them.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Yitzi made crawlers cost extra support.

What's that? They supported by 2 minerals? It doesn't change the crawling benefit. Just makes it less so. I don't like producing extra worker at will that can work any square on earth. This makes all the base placement strategy and hard work to grow population go down the toilet.

...can it simply be disabled? Just commented out or something?

Yea. Just disable this unit. I'll do it in next version.

Crawlers are unique units that I'd rather try to fix than ban; it's just that it's beyond my capabilities to fix them.

Don't bother. They are unique in a way that they are from some other game. They break so long and hard polished balance since Civ1. I honestly don't see anything strategical about them.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

# Version 85

* Disabled crawlers.
* Version cloning_vats_and_population_boom changes are included.
* Project contribution mechanics is removed.

Here. 30 minutes of packaging and all problems those I tried to solve for the past month are gone. What a relief! Now I can actually play it a little.

[EmpathCrawler]

Don't bother. They are unique in a way that they are from some other game. They break so long and hard polished balance since Civ1. I honestly don't see anything strategical about them.

SMAC is unique in a lot of ways, though. Strategically it is devastating to an automated economy if you come in and destroy all the crawlers. Suddenly all of the specialists need to go back to working the fields or bases starve. It's just that crawlers are so powerful, and the AI is so dumb, that you rarely have to suffer that kind of setback but you can inflict it on the AI.


My own house rule is a 2 crawler max per base to keep things reasonable. They should cost some upkeep, too. Maybe energy since they are robots and need power to crawl stuff back and forth to the base. There is a lot broken about them, unfortunately. I don't know the right answer.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Playing the latest version now. Two observations.

One is probably not related to mod but just funny. I'm playing Deidre and at some point close to mid game, when everybody are already divided into alliances, friendly Santiago suddenly asked me to deliver a tech in a pretty blunt manner (as she can): "I'll have it and I'll have it now!". Having few worms at a border and Gaian's +1 PLANET I decided to have a fight so replied: "you can take it out of my dead fingers" or something along this line. In response their next proposal suddenly was a pact. Not against somebody just a pact. I, of course, accepted it but was quite surprised. Never saw something like that before.
😲🤣

Another observation is how great native warfare is against nature haters in this mod. I am at war with Morgan who runs FM, obviously, with -3 PLANET. Together with my +1 PLANET I have a devastating +60% advantage in 1:1 combats. Thanks to PLANET defense bonus/penalty in this mod. My response to those complaining about too costly natives in this mod that it is all circumstantial. Sometimes it's not worthy to build them. Sometimes it is. Leave it as one of the possible strategic options when the difference between attacker and defender planet ratings is great.

[dino]

Crawlers:

Crawlers are iconic and fun to use, the issue is that they are so overpowered in vanilla that the most efficient way to play is to build an army of them which lead to annoying micro.
I've proposed a way to nerf them long ago:

1) One resource point penalty from Ytzi's patch, eventually regular support: so it's not worth it to put them on 2 resource point tiles and even 4 point tiles are debatable if you have enough population to work all tiles.
2) No SP rushing, just disband for 50% minerals like every other unit: so there is no point in building more then you need and park them on [poopy] tiles until they can be used to rush SP
3) 5 rows cost: with nerfs above it'll very often be a subpar choice compared to colony pod, or many facilities.

That's it imo, crawler use would be limited to a very situational high yielding tiles and even that not always, much more fun then outright cutting such iconic feature.

Secret Projects prebuilding and cooperative building:

It should all be allowed, but at 50% penalty:
1) No crawler rushing, just regular disband.
2) 50% retool penalty like every other building, no retool penalty was there mostly to not frustrate casual gamer. No risk no fun and it'd be optional anyway.
3) Cooperative building was already there: just stockpile energy in other bases and rush with money, 50% minerals wasted though, but if you really want SP, then you really want it.
Your cooperative building is adjustable anyway, so I'm fine with it too.

Population growth and countering ICS:

Pop-boom was a mechanic that made growing large bases a bit more viable compared to ICS. Without it it's better to just go all forest, boreholes, mines and not bother with larger bases. Since growing the same population in large bases costs like 4 times more nutrient resources. I'd try middle ground, keep changes to popboom, but stop increasing nutrient rows after certain adjustable base size treshold, I'd try a cap at 5 nutrient rows. It's still much slower then pop-boom, but with colony pod cost it makes resource cost of growing pops in large bases comparable with growing them through ICS.

I'd also tie free unit support with population instead of per base:
SUPPORT
0 - one unit per base + one per 5 pops ( means two units at base size 5 )
1 - one unit per base + one per 3 pops
2 - one unit per every other pop
3 - one unit per each pop

Alternatively per 5,4,3,2 pops if you think vanilla up to base size at SUPPORT 3 is too strong.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Crawlers:

1) One resource point penalty from Ytzi's patch, eventually regular support: so it's not worth it to put them on 2 resource point tiles and even 4 point tiles are debatable if you have enough population to work all tiles.
2) No SP rushing, just disband for 50% minerals like every other unit: so there is no point in building more then you need and park them on [poopy] tiles until they can be used to rush SP
3) 5 rows cost: with nerfs above it'll very often be a subpar choice compared to colony pod, or many facilities.

That's it imo, crawler use would be limited to a very situational high yielding tiles and even that not always.

Thank you for suggestions, dino. I applaud people trying to save crawlers by any mean. However, there are so many controversies about them that any nerfing attempts look no better than original abomination. By two reasons.

#1
This was a standalone invention artificially introduced into the game. No previous logic or game development or problems demanded it. And now we are introducing more artificial constraints again not having any relation to game lore but only to crawlers themselves in attempt to beautify it. This is like inventing a car that can go 600 mph which is totally inapplicable to any road or even race track existing on Earth. And then forcibly limit its speed to 160 mph max. Err, why bother?

#2
It would be worth spending time on it if there would be something worth saving about crawlers. There is none. All of their features are either completely unusable or overboard. Read your own suggestion above. Bolded and colored by me. You are nerfing both OP features to make them inferior as other two. You do not fix any of their feature but forcing player NOT to use them at all effectively removing them from the game. So why taking such complex route if you want just disable them.

Don't let that "iconic" thing cloud your judgement. In my mind the worm is a rightful SMACX icon. It is even on the load splash screen if you haven't notice. 😉

Breathe in, breathe out, close your eyes, imagine yourself Brian Reynolds listening to someone proposing such innovation to the game. What would you answer them now when you know everything about crawlers?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Secret Projects prebuilding and cooperative building:

It should all be allowed, but at 50% penalty:
1) No crawler rushing, just regular disband.
2) 50% retool penalty like every other building, no retool penalty was there mostly to not frustrate casual gamer. No risk no fun and it'd be optional anyway.
3) Cooperative building was already there: just stockpile energy in other bases and rush with money, 50% minerals wasted though, but if you really want SP, then you really want it.
Your cooperative building is adjustable anyway, so I'm fine with it too.

Yep. That all existed there. I introduced my mineral contribution not because I wanted another mean of cooperation but to outweigh human crawlers abuse that AI cannot respond to properly. Now when crawlers are gone there is no need for such complicated feature. I removed it already together with crawlers.

Rushing with money seems very fair. One can involve whole faction economy power in it but waste half of the money due to 4:1 conversion ration instead of normal 2:1. I'd even raise to 8:1 for project for that exactly reason to make it even fairer for smaller factions.

[dino]

I disagree, their intended use is to allow gathering resources by nutrient starved bases during early-midgame, so you can work few mines with them even if you can't grow and sustain enough pops.
A faction that starts, or was cornered into mostly dry area will be in a huge disadvantage without them, so they are necessary for game balance.

And the problems with them are:
1) Unnecessary secondary ability to rush SPs - get rid of it.
2) The're OP to the point it's preferable to put swarm of them and try to work every single tile unworked by the base.

Get rid of just these two and there is no point in building and micromanaging swarms of crawlers, but you can still put a few on mines to overcome being nutrients starved and unable to work mines with pops.
And both changes are very simple, nothing convulted about them: Disable SP rushing and add resource penalty from Ytzi's patch, or regular support cost.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Population growth and countering ICS:

Pop-boom was a mechanic that made growing large bases a bit more viable compared to ICS. Without it it's better to just go all forest, boreholes, mines and not bother with larger bases. Since growing the same population in large bases costs like 4 times more nutrient resources. I'd try middle ground, keep changes to popboom, but stop increasing nutrient rows after certain adjustable base size treshold, I'd try a cap at 5 nutrient rows. It's still much slower then pop-boom, but with colony pod cost it makes resource cost of growing pops in large bases comparable with growing them through ICS.

I think you are substituting the matter of discussion here. The controversy is not between big and small base sizes. It is pretty fine to have a whole spectrum of them across the empire. The clash is between player strategies. One is to develop bases (terraforming, facilities) as soon as possible to make them grow faster in all ways (population, yield, etc.). Another is to abandon any development completely until the large territory is covered with undeveloped bases. The latter is called ICS. The important distinction is in development that goes alongside with base growth. I.e. when you get next worker - terraform for it instead of making a colony out of it and remove the burden. Then capitalize on combined yield by building multiplying facilities, etc.

If you look at it from this perspective you understand that specifically early pop boom is an instrument of ISC strategy. More precisely: spam colonies - pop boom until bases cannot grow anymore on undeveloped land - spam again - ... (repeat).
Pop boom is anti-development paradigm. It makes bases grow insanely fast without any investment into infrastructure. That is why ICS and pop boom (together with PTS) is so OP strategy that does not require any of the base evolution mechanics. That is why people complain about the above because it makes otherwise feature reach game boring.

Pop boom should be aligned with other game concepts with investment/benefit balance. Meaning if it so good it should cost enough to offset it, don't start it early, etc. Better yet it should be tied to base nutrient surplus to gradually elolve from it instead of just ignoring it completely.

From that few obvious things stems out:
Nothing should trigger pop boom directly like CV. That is fixed in this mod.
Pop boom should not be achievable early in the game to not fuel more already OP ISC strategy. That is fixed in this mod.
Pop boom preferably should be triggered at the point when population growth is already quite fast to make investment into GROWTH worthwhile even without triggering it. This is more of less already done in this mod but some tuning may be in order. Play testing will show.

Let me illustrate the last argument. Investing into GROWTH by the mean of SE choices cost some negative consequences. In vanilla +5 GROWTH doubles base growth rate. Nice but comparable to advanced terraforming to get twice as more N surplus. Yet player pays for such growth with other penalties. Then a single addition of +1 GROWTH makes bases grow about 10-20 times faster! That is a huge jump. So progressive investment in GROWTH makes it about no change (slightly worse or slightly better) on a range between 0 and 5. Then a single +1 step and - boom! Literally. 🤣
In this mod this is at least happening at +9 GROWTH when growth benefit is already immensely huge: 10 times increase in growth. If popboom then doubles this speed it is not that huge of a jump comparing to vanilla case.



Regarding your proposition about growth box size. Yes. There are talkings about this around. This is still pretty uncharted territory, though. Both in term of players experience and game mechanics modding. We still can approach this but need stronger foundation maybe with some calculation on how it changes the game pace, etc.

[dino]

Oh, I like the change to popboom, I've already proposed it some time ago, no need to convince me.

But to grow from 1 to 7 costs 27 nutrient rows, while from 7 to 13 it's 63 rows, 2,3 times more nutrients.
So going for 2 size 7 bases, instead of one large, you can either get there much faster, or spec way more tiles for minerals production and still get there equally fast.

Turn advantage in getting tiles worked makes smaller denser bases a clearly winning strategy without popboom. Capping rows at some point would soften it a bit.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You are forgetting nutrient surplus growth with base size. The initial idea in board game made sense: growth requirement is proportional to population same as nutrient surplus is (roughly) proportional to population. Which, theoretically, makes base growth pretty steady.

That worked more or less fine for Civ1 with its max +1 nutrient surplus per tile. Unfortunately, Civ2 and further SMACX abused it insanely up to +3 surplus per tile (farm + enricher + satellite). Capping rows at some number will blow base sizes out of proportion. You'll end up with 30-40 size bases easily. Remember, that everything is balanced already in hardcoded way. Game expects you needing Hab Complex and Hab Dome at some points, etc.

I noticed that large bases start overtaking smaller ones at some point when they start building multiplying improvements and other enhancement stuff. Smaller bases just don't have an incentive to build them yet while larger bases keep stamping them one after another doubling and tripling their total production. So the only questionable period when large bases are not that attractive is early game.

As I said before, I don't see much harm in early colony spamming. That is absolutely normal thing to do. Moreover, the game is designed to support this because there is almost nothing to build in bases at the time. Later on everybody naturally switch to bigger bases when there is something to build there.
We should only be concerned if such spamming lasts whole game and leads to victory.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I believe the simple and natural way to offset ICS would be to distribute multiplying facilities proportionally across the tree and scale their cost/maint so that it makes sense building them at appropriate base power. This is for both mineral and energy multipliers. I.e. the very first such facility should be beneficial at base size about 4, then 8, 12, 16, 20. Something like that. This way player quite early has an option to double base production. Then it would be somewhat more beneficial to grow extra worker in this base rather than in new one.