SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Another play testing observation.
Gaian's with their +1 N in fungus starting get bigger nutrient output from it than from farms. I don't know if this will be a general concern for other factions. Maybe trade fungus N and E advancement so it gets E before N?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

# Version 86

* Armor value is adjusted based on its position in the tree.
* Borehole Square,  0, 2, 4, 0. Further reduces energy flow and limit its usage to barren lands.

Sorry. I've distributed armor but forgot to adjust its value. Now it should be more matching to the weapon.

[Nevill]

This might seem offtopic, but could you share the formula for raising/lowering terrain costs?

I know you haven't changed it, but I am getting some exorbitant prices. In 7k credits range.


And this tile cost less to lower a few years ago than it does now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I never knew it myself. Just out of experience it gets bigger if it far from own nearest base, high altitude, and in the enemy territory.

[Nevill]

'k, so my first and only MP game with the mod has finally concluded. It's v66, mind.

Notes:
* The beginning was excruciatingly slow, and there was very little to build, and very little to build it with. It's probably fixed in later versions with the new tech tree and former/CP costs, but we'll see.
* We played with the following houserules: Economic victory only, no attacking each other's bases (with the exception of outposts), no attacking AI bases, and no more than 20 bases (again, with the exception of outposts we don't intend to develop). The rule about attacking AIs was rescinded in 2230. Crawlers were banned.
* The game didn't take off until 2200s. We had too few minerals otherwise. I had two bases in Mount Planet, and they could manage about 18 minerals at sizes 5-6. The rest languished at about 10-12 minerals at best.
* Planetary Transit System in 2195 was the first turning point, kicking me up from 20 pop to 48 (16 bases), and then to 60 in a few turns. If we were allowed more bases, I probably could win the game on the back of this project alone. Interestingly enough, new implementation is probably detrimental to the player, as it is much more difficult to grow high-pop bases than low ones (the nutrient requirements grow proportionately, while the workers eat most of the produced food).
* Population boom was another turning point when the game picked up the pace closer to what I am used to. The only reason we could popboom was me building the HGP in 2187, and Tayta being Lal. Else bureacracy drones would not have allowed us reach a Golden Age. I assume it would be harder to do now under the new rules.
* Genejack factories (researched in 2212) were a big factor why the game finally opened up.
* The ecological facilities were not available for most of the game. Tree Farms came too late, and were never used except as an ECON boost facility since forests sucked. Centauri Preserves also came too late. Others weren't even researched. There were times ecodamage started to hit triple digits, and I was playing Gaia.
* Worms were therefore a nuisance. Which I would consider a change for the better, except they were still too easy to kill due to 100% collateral. It took a while before they started to spread out and require real forces on hand to deal with them. They also fare poorly against +50% base bonus. After being flooded by mass waves of worms, spores and locusts, the free mineral cap got raised to a more comfortable level via fungal pops, and they didn't trouble me again.
* Me and Tayta met circa 2180s, and declared war on each other. I got to pact with his neighbours over our mutual dislike towards him, and got them to declare war on him. Even after we pacted, the AIs pressed him pretty hard, although they were very inconsistent about it. Sparta sat on an army for 20 years before sending an invasion force his way. The rest sent mostly a token force... and probes to buy bases with.
* AI used probes to mixed results. Armored probes were annoying, but could mostly be fended off by defensive ones. Also, there was an assortment of probe-related bugs or quirks, like sea probes being stranded on land after mission completion.
* AI doesn't seem to understand defensive probes. They don't protect their bases, which I used to my advantage to beat Zakharov to the Manifold Harmonics race.
* After Manifold Harmonics the game was basically won, as I broke the tech/energy barrier. I was researching latest tier techs in 2 turns, and teched from Chaos gun (6) to Quantum Shard (16) in 12 turns, from 2230 to 2242.
* ...but we still decided to play it out, if only to see how we can break it further. And we did. We repealed U.N. charter, and I planned to do a little gassing, as no amount of defenses could help against the bases just disappearing. But that was mostly for Tayta who was on the same continent with most AIs. Me, I needed to deliver my troops to enemy bases, first, and the territory bonuses + arty strikes made that difficult. So I was planning to use amphibious pods and invade them from outside their bombardment range, and using Sea Formers to get the fleet to the inland bases.
* I stopped 1 turn away from researching DocAir on principle. I wanted to break the game purely with ground-based tech. I assume it would have simplified the war further, but not by a big margin.
* I finally found a way around this mod's combat, which I consider unsatisfactory due to extreme mineral costs and therefore low number of units. Upgrades! Build a lot of cheap basic units, and then mass upgrade them to better models. I produced about 50 6-1-1*3 troops (40 minerals each), loaded them up on transports, and sent them along with ~30 ships to the far reaches, gradually upgrading them to 10~-1-1*3 and then 16~-1-1*3.
* Then a more elegant solution presented itself. A retroviral plague kills about half of base-pop, and reduces defenders to anywhere between 10 to 50 percent health. Facilities protecting against it are high in the tech tree, and AI never built them. Perimeter defences as of v66 can be switched off. Even with perimeters on, a defender reduced to a near-death state falls easily. Since all other means of combat were prohibitively expensive, my army composition got somewhat probe-heavy.
* But that's not all! I didn't even need that many units to wage wars! Apparently, if a base tile falls below sea level, and the base doesn't have a Pressure Dome, it loses max(3, half) population, meaning a base under size 4 simply drowns. So all I had to do was plague/gas the base until it hit size 3 or less, then lower nearby terrain, ignoring any and all defences the base had as it was washed away.
* It took approx 20 years from the early 2240s when I started building units to 2265 when the last AI base on the planet fell. I'll just post 2 pics of the Planet before and after. See the gaping holes in the Sunny Mesa, the Moonsoon Jungle and the Uranium Flats? That's where my formers scythed through the land as it if were butter. I only needed 12 of them to perform the action in a single turn.
* Miriam was the toughest to crack, since not only did she have Perimeter Defences and Neutronium armor, but she also had loads of probes, sometimes several per base. They were all sitting there protecting her, rendering my strategy ineffective, as it relied on offensive probing. I resolved that by connecting her continent to mine. All of her probes stupidly moved out of their bases, leaving them defenceless (to attack me, I assume?), and she was killed in about 5 turns after that.
* Between the former warfare and the global warming, the Planet flooded quickly. It was an apocalyptic sight, a fungal wasteland interspersed with boreholes and man-made seas, with signs of human habitation and terraforming, but few bases besides what initially belonged to us.

Still, it made cornering the economy only cost 10k after all rivals have been eliminated, and after passing the turn 20 more times the game was done.


A separate sidenote. There is an aspect of collateral you might want to consider.

The mod has collateral damage switched off. What that leads to is that instead of a high-def unit (that can still lose), the best defenders are... scouts! Who would almost certainly lose the engagement, but would also protect other units from harm. In vanilla, collateral serves the purpose of discouraging 1-tile deathstacks. Picking a scout for a defender would sabotage the stack due to collateral damage. Here it is a superior and cheap choice allowing your units to close in on enemy positions.

It also goes for scout artillery. So what if they can shell your forces? Just send in a lot of throwaway 1-1-1 arty units; they would cover you from all sides. It is much better than losing your expensive heavies.

[Hagen0]

Very interesting writeup. I don't understand the scout stack defender point. You can throw away 10 minerals to defend the stack from one attack. But they do cost support. I'm not sure you can build enough of them feasably without killing your production.

[Nevill]

My primary method above doesn't require cover at all, since catching sea transports before they unload is above AI's paygrade. Still, sometimes I did find myself attacking inland without waiting for my formers to clear the way.

It's mostly to protect your units against AI retaliation. AI has 3 to 5 defenders per base. Some of them armored, some of them attackers. It's mostly the latter you need to watch out for, as defenders could be dissuaded with a single synthmetal/plasma unit.

You only need to defend against a couple attacks, then you take their base. That's 3-5 scouts. Whatever support they cost, they are going to free it after they die, and they die fast. And you have (previously captured) bases around that can't build much else, and you don't care for their support. So scouts make the perfect fodder to shield the invasion.

It sucks a lot more to lose your top-tier attack or defense units, and unlike scouts, those can't be easily rebuilt.

To give a practical example, here is my turn 2250. The invasion of Hive is in progress. Most of their bases have either fallen or sunk, but their capital has a bunch of grounded probe foils due to the bug I mentioned, and they can't move out. Because of that, I had to siege it conventionally.

I could always drown the base, and use a transport to get the marines close, but it's too deep inland, and my formers (to the left) are busy mopping up the rest of Yang's bases. So I get scouts from the surrounding bases, and attack into the perimeter until it eventually falls. Sure I lose units on attack, but at least I lose nothing important to retaliation... and the bases around are not producing anything important anyway.

[Hagen0]

Do you have Mag Tubes?

[Nevill]

No.

I pretty much stopped research after discovering Quantum Mechanics to lower troop costs. I didn't see much point as the game was going to end soon.

I have Xenoempathy dome, so I use fungus as roads. And I spent 90% of the game on a tiny island ~8x15 tiles wide and halfway across the globe from Hive, so I wouldn't get anything out of faster transportation anyway. I had cruiser transports with Maritime Project, that seemed to suffice.

[Hagen0]

My point is that Mag Tubes are a good way to get your troops into attack range without any risk of enemy counter attacks. Of course, this requires a large former park but in vanilla this is not an issue.

[Nevill]

Magtubes in this mod only allow to move 3 times faster than a road.

It means that my infantry would have to attack with a haste penalty. Considering I picked infantry as my primary unit for the +25% bonus vs. bases, and that even with the borderline cheating strategy I still lost about... let's check, 29 out of 53 as of 2265... I don't think one should do that often.

And yes, vanilla 1-turn magtube invasions are known, and the reason I have to come up with houserules to reign them in. Our first game with Tayta where we limited the number of bases had me invade an AI, have it submit, then gift them the bases (about a dozen of them) back returning within the limits, all within a single turn. Tayta didn't have infiltration, so he didn't even notice. Took me 100+ formers to pull off.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Thank you for very comprehensive report, Nevill. I appreciate the efforts.
Not going to answer each and every note but I'll review them for potential future changes.

Your house rules are pretty restrictive. It's like a different game with them.

Regarding the early game speed. I've changed former to 2 and colony to 4. It is as close to vanilla as possible. I also give away 2 formers for all factions at start. Centauri Ecology enables both infantry and foil formers for AI to not bother inventing DocFlex for that. Human can reverse engineer foils from it but this is anyway level 1 tech so whatever.

With that being done I don't think anybody can blame this mod to be slower than vanilla anymore. On a top of that it enables aquifer at level 2 and borehole at level 3. Though, borehole is quite stripped from its vanilla counterpart. Then the rest of eco engineering comes at level 4. I think TF is level 4-5 too somewhere. So there are plenty terraform options to play with.

Now remember this is evolutionary game. Naturally early bases are few and small and their production is low. Then it gradually increases. It wouldn't matter giving plenty of building options since one cannot realize them all together immediately anyway. It'll take time. I don't think it is wise to blame a very iconic 4X game for initial production starting at near zero values. That is kinda cornerstone of such games.

I understand that when you PBEM you spend short time on turn and long time wait. Single player experience doesn't have this problem. User just click next until something get built. Even then I still cannot understand how the amount of action per turn makes PBEM game any more interesting or boring. You carry out as many actions as you need and then you wait for next turn. The wait time doesn't decrease as game progress! On the contrary, it may only increase as opponent needs more time to handle more stuff.

Sacrificing cheap units to protect a stack
I'm pretty puzzled what do you find bad about it? That is a strategy all right. I am exceptionally glad that this mod forced you to invent another strategy. That a pretty huge leap forward comparing to vanilla where you just strategyless pounding bases with needlejects.
As Hagen0 pointed out this is not free exploit. You need to support them, build them and constantly deliver to front line as they die in every counterattack. AI is still pretty dumb about combat. If it would concentrate enough attackers or keep more defenders this strategy may not work.

Regarding some other exploits you mentioned like PTS or MH. They are mostly fixed or repositioned in the tree. Thank you for earlier insights.

Unit cost
That question was already raised hundred of times. There are 13 weapon levels from 1 to 30. They corresponding cost goes from 1 to 20 in WTP. With reactor discount it is from 1 to 10. Can you propose a cheaper cost progression?
Fusion reactor is level 4. Quantum is 7. So 6 level unit is probably 5 rows, 9 level is somewhere 6-7 rows. That is pretty much cheap for mid game.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Further base development support plan

Mineral multipliers

Distributed more evenly and start very early. Recycling Tank repurposed to mineral multiplier. Cost/main increased slightly for all.

Recycling Tank (repurposed, 6/2)
Genejack factory (10/4), ~ level 4
Robotic assembly plant (20/6), ~level 7
Quantum converter (30/8), ~level 10
Nanoreplicator (40/10), ~level 13
total: 250%

Energy multipliers

Hologram theatre (psych 50%)
Energy bank (economy 50%)
Network node (labs 50%)
Tree farm (psych 50%, economy 50%)
Hybrid forest (psych 50%, economy 50%)
Fusion lab (economy 50%, labs 50%)
Quantum lab (economy 50%, labs 50%)
Research hospital (psych 25%, labs 50%)
Nanohospital (psych 25%, labs 50%)
total: psych 200%, economy/labs 250%

Effect

RT become a real helping facility instead of vanilla's toy.
Creates incentive to grow bigger stronger bases (multiplier!).
More early minerals -> more formers build and support -> quicker aquifers and boreholes -> more terraforming in general -> more energy as well -> earlier benefits to erect Energy bank and Network node.
More minerals -> more units = relatively cheaper units.

Corrections needed

Facility costs need to be increased here and there. Otherwise may end up with nothing to build.
Research cost need to be increased to maintain a steady pace.
Support may need to be rethought in a way of extending to all units proportionally. Otherwise it will quickly lose value.

[Tayta Malikai]

Nevill ended up saying most of the things I would've said, so I'll just throw in a few cents from my perspective. I feel it's worth noting that Nevill is really, really good at exploiting this game. My games with him are a learning experience for sure.

The house rules were certainly restrictive. The main ones (Economic Victory only, no attacking AIs) were only introduced for this game, as an effort to see if we could play in ways other than just racing for the biggest weapons we could and winning the game in a single battle. In particular, I think the no-attacking-AIs rule was introduced because, in past games, it was too easy to gain an advantage by conquering the AI (Nevill won our first game outright by wiping them all out, and would've done the same in the second if I hadn't attacked first). That might not be as big of an issue now, with wars being expensive and territory bonuses blunting offensives.


I know we've been going on a lot about the pace of the game, so I'll try avoid belabouring the point even more. But I really did feel that there was a severe dearth of things to do in the first 100 turns of the game. It was to the point that my first reaction to Nevill's suggestion of starting another game was dismay. I really did not want to go through that stage of the game again, and normally I consider the early game to be the fast and fun part of the game.

It's true that one experiences a certain shock, going from the end of a well-developed game back to the beginning again, but I don't think that was the case here. We'd just come from another multiplayer game using Nevill's mod (which can basically be considered vanilla+ for balance purposes), which never got past 2150, and I found the pace there to be notably faster and more eventful. And this was with one player sometimes taking a week to submit his turns!

While the stated goal of the mod is to make players think outside the vanilla box, and arguably succeeded in that, I'm not sure the end result was terribly interesting in terms of the needed tactical complexity and options available. My tactics consisted of two parts: genetic warfare to cripple a base's defenders, and an endless cavalcade of rovers to nerve gas the base into oblivion. I occasionally sunk a few bases with terraformers, but nowhere near the extent Nevill did.

As a result, there was very little need to use infantry (for the +25% vs bases), land transports (to allow troops to attack without hasty penalties), sea or air transports (to enable striking deep into enemy territory in a single turn), artillery (it had very lackluster results when I tried to use it to soften defenders; gene warfare was far superior), missiles (to eliminate troublesome defenders, at a price), or probes to disable Perimeter Defenses (which they can't do anyway in recent versions of the mod). All tactics that I found very useful in the past, even necessary to avoid a prolonged slog feeding units into a grinder, but not here.

Now, it could just be the case that atrocities are overpowered. And there is a barrier to using them, in the form of sanctions, behooving you to repeal the Charter first. But if you are committed to wiping out the AIs anyway, why not use them?

This would certainly have been harder to pull off if the AI used defensive probes properly. And nerve gas could be nerfed by making it more expensive: Nevill has it priced at Attack/Defense in his mod (cost factor -1), which is effectively +50% for offensive units. That seems more commensurate with its power.

That said, I will definitely have a look at what the latest versions do with the tech tree and give it a fair shake, and revisit the topic then.

I will round off by saying that while PBEM absolutely involves a lot of waiting, that just makes having meaningful stuff to do on your turn even more important. I don't mind playing 2 turns a day when those are some of the most intense turns of the game.


RE: Planetary Transit System, I had this radical idea to change it so that it granted free Psi Gates at bases, because Psi Gates are really cool but nobody ever gets to use them, ever. But then I realized it would just be a net buff for human players over AI, which would be undesirable.

So here's another idea: change PTS to grant +1 GROWTH faction-wide, like a Cloning Vats-lite.

There's precedent for projects with duplicate effects in the game (Human Genome Project vs Clinical Immortality, Supercollider vs Theory of Everything), so it wouldn't be out of place. My understanding of the new pop-boom mechanics is that the threshold to pop-boom got raised to +9 GROWTH, and the ways to achieve this are Democracy (+2), Planned (+2), Children's Creche (+2), Golden Age (+2), Cloning Vats (+2), and... one more? Can't remember exactly, but I know it was supposed to be "you need 5 out of 6 ++GROWTH effects to pop-boom now". Anyway, if PTS is changed to give +1, this offers another avenue to reach +9, while not being terribly overpowered in itself, and still giving factions a way to boost their population growth earlier in the game. It also gives a way to help factions like Yang and Morgan, who can't boom as easily due to being unable to use Democracy and Planned respectively.

EDIT: Found the post where you talked about this. Eudaimonic also gives +2 now, and the threshold to boom is actually +10. That actually makes this idea more viable, as a single +1 effect won't be enough to push anyone over the limit. Except Yang, but since he loses the +2 from Democracy it evens out.


On a different note: I recall you expressed interest in it, did you get to try multiplayer out yet? Since we've now finished the game and don't yet have any particular plans, maybe something could be organized.

[Tayta Malikai]

With all that said, it occurs to me that I should probably talk about what I liked about the mod, too.

• The changes to territory exerted by coastal and sea bases are great. AIs no longer clutter up the coastlines with dozens of crappy sea bases.
• I didn't think to take advantage of the INDUSTRY exploit, and now that it's fixed, I don't have to worry about it anymore.
• Streamlining hurry cost formulas is a quality-of-life change I didn't know I needed. Now I can tell at a glance how much energy I'll need.
• Unit upgrade costs now work more like I expected them to work, too.
• Equalizing the cost of land and sea formers and CPs is great. I just wished it was equalized in the other direction. xP
• Upgraded reactors no longer affecting unit HP - YES.
• It is now more affordable and sensible to put at least a modicum of armour on offensive units now. I don't usually go higher than Synthmetal, though.
• Increased combat randomness makes offense less dominant. I think setting it at 2.0 feels just right.
• I miss being able to hunt worms for money, but I think it's for the best. It rewarded being a big polluter too much.