SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[MercantileInterest]

Yes

A key to add extra scout patrols might be useful, so the extra colony pods could be guarded. Am currently using version 102. Version 103, apparently, made the worms more plentiful and aggressive in early game, which makes me wary of using it. On the other hand, extra scout patrols might allow the player to harvest pods too quickly.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Sorry about that. I somehow interpreted 'original feature' as 'this is my original idea! Great feature isn't it?' Looking back, obviously not what you said.

No worries. I wasn't offended. Sorry about little confusing wording.
When I imagined your confusion about why I would introduce such an "original" feature. I actually had a good laugh.
🤣

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Kind of you to say. Hadn't thought of nutrient intake 1 in those terms. Simply think that faster base growth but slower colony pod production better mimics what an actual settlement of an alien planet would look like. Fights ICS too. I also set farms to add +2 nutrients rather than the old +1.

Well, I did. Thank you for mentioning +2 farms. This plays to the same end and could be an alternative (or cumulative) to 1 intake. I would probably think like 10 times before I introduce both of these features as default but one of them - surely intriguing option.

Another advantage of bases growing much faster than before is that it reduces the competitive edge to pop-booming, while still leaving the option intact. This new growth dynamic also fixes the planetary transit system.

Indeed.

Your reactor cost reduction formula is also extremely useful. Before, fusion reactor made my overpriced colony pods far cheaper, thereby ushering in an age of mass cities anytime anyone discovered the tech.

In last versions reactors do not discount non combat modules. So pure colony keep its cost forever. The armor on it becomes cheaper, though. Doesn't make much sense for colonies but does for formers, transports, colonies.

For your mod, if you reduce the nutrient intake to 1, you might want to try increasing this line:

10,      ; Nutrient cost multiplier

Excellent idea! See, you should really present them altogether as a package.
👍

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Does that mean that these lines

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; Spawn this many extra formers/colony pods for every computer faction at the game start.
free_formers=0
free_colony_pods=0apply to all factions contrary to what the comment says?

Yes, starting from this one.

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# Version 70

* Both human and AI get extra colony and former as controlled by free_formers, free_colony_pods in thinker.ini.

Sorry about the confusion. I have inherited these parameters from Thinker but didn't change the description when I have extended them to human.
Will do now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Version 103, apparently, made the worms more plentiful and aggressive in early game, which makes me wary of using it.

You are always can dial it down at game creation time. Roughly, new native life is about one level higher than in vanilla. So new rare = old normal, etc.
In vanilla even normal native life is a mosquito bite and rare is unnoticeable. So I just shifted them one level up for bigger challenge but lowest level still feels like normal vanilla, I guess. Didn't test it very extensively.

[bvanevery]

Moist land base cannot afford to work even a single forest without halving growth speed and get their minerals from random rolling tiles only (= 0.5 minerals/pop).

Tree Farms are going to be available by midgame, unless you got rid of them.  Also you can't just grow as fast as you want, you have to keep people happy.  Your claims about relative growth rate are overstated.  You actually need minerals to survive and defend, that's another reason for traditional forest.

[lolada]

I agree to reconsider PROBE weight. Currently it is about as RESEARCH. Do you think it should be higher?

Yes, AI needs to value it higher. And it is non linear. -1 is worse than +1 and -2 is terrible to have... while +2 is quite good and +3 is OP great stopping probe team actions.

I think probe teams need nerf in general - they are one of broken / hard to balance features of the game. I would consider even removing -2 Probe completely and hard limiting it at -1.. Or nerf that cos reduction to -10%, -20% instead of -25%, -50%. Then also SE should have more +probes and less -probes.

Or shift Probe rating to +1 as base, as you did with Police i think. Compared to vanilla all factions would be more resistant to probe attacks. While at it reducing AI willingness to build probe teams (or attack with them) slightly, might not be the worst thing to do.

-Support-

- Btw similar logic could be done for support. Everyone having +1/+2 is interesting try - it would speed up the game and make AI better in general. Also having -1 Support is way worse than having +1 which does nothing until you actually build a unit.. while having +3 i think is kind of op. Minuses are harsh in AC2 in general, but its part of fun. Just giving some ideas.. in the end having everything perfectly "balanced" might be boring and bland and make a worse game.

Very green in late game??? They what - do not build morale facilities at all? Anyway, adding one MORALE back will just turn them green instead of very green. No big difference.
My impression is strangely opposite. I mostly see AI commandos and elites running around. But well, let's see.

Kinda.. military factions like to stack morale, non military eudaimonia and other -morale SE choices.. they likely prefer other kind of facilities as well. My lategame in AAR was me having elite units killing AIs very green units for a long time. AI was actually stronger when it did not have access to Euidaimonia and -3 morale ironic.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Moist land base cannot afford to work even a single forest without halving growth speed and get their minerals from random rolling tiles only (= 0.5 minerals/pop).

Tree Farms are going to be available by midgame, unless you got rid of them.  Also you can't just grow as fast as you want, you have to keep people happy.  Your claims about relative growth rate are overstated.  You actually need minerals to survive and defend, that's another reason for traditional forest.

You are right. I didn't make my statement clear. These two effects: accelerated growth and more minerals from reassigning workers to forests/mines are mutually exclusive, of course. And because of other needs players tend to channel extra food to the latter. That is why I am mostly comparing extra mineral from working non farm tiles. But even then the difference is huge.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I agree to reconsider PROBE weight. Currently it is about as RESEARCH. Do you think it should be higher?

Yes, AI needs to value it higher. And it is non linear. -1 is worse than +1 and -2 is terrible to have... while +2 is quite good and +3 is OP great stopping probe team actions.

I think probe teams need nerf in general - they are one of broken / hard to balance features of the game. I would consider even removing -2 Probe completely and hard limiting it at -1.. Or nerf that cos reduction to -10%, -20% instead of -25%, -50%. Then also SE should have more +probes and less -probes.

Or shift Probe rating to +1 as base, as you did with Police i think. Compared to vanilla all factions would be more resistant to probe attacks. While at it reducing AI willingness to build probe teams (or attack with them) slightly, might not be the worst thing to do.

-Support-

- Btw similar logic could be done for support. Everyone having +1/+2 is interesting try - it would speed up the game and make AI better in general. Also having -1 Support is way worse than having +1 which does nothing until you actually build a unit.. while having +3 i think is kind of op. Minuses are harsh in AC2 in general, but its part of fun. Just giving some ideas.. in the end having everything perfectly "balanced" might be boring and bland and make a worse game.

Thank you for expanded answer. I agree that most effects are nonlinear and that is the salt of the game. Everything flat makes it boring as you said. Remember universal paradigm: we don't fix OP things, we are fixing UP things. In this context fixing OP thing makes sense only if this lets other UP things come out of its shadow. The "balance" is a vague word. More specifically, we should pay attention to things those are not countered by some other strategy. Whereas negative PROBE is quite stoppable by counter probes those can be slow (infantry) -> 50% cheaper and 50% stronger due the territory bonus = twice as less investment needed to counter enemy probes.

Those weights, I was asking about are just flat values to help me and other mod designers to come up with SE effects combinations. I am not trying to actually fix SEs. 🤣

[lolada]

One idea i keep forgeting. SE weights obviously change during game.. so you have early, mid, late. Important factor also is peace/war and (advanced) not just blindly diplomatic status, but actual severity of threat to player/AI (nearby oponnent or very distant AI, strong opponent vs feeble one). Morale/Probe are not so important in peace.. but during the war they really matter. AI tends to be most of the game in war ^^ so it makes sense to value them accordingly.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

One idea i keep forgeting. SE weights obviously change during game.. so you have early, mid, late. Important factor also is peace/war and (advanced) not just blindly diplomatic status, but actual severity of threat to player/AI (nearby oponnent or very distant AI, strong opponent vs feeble one). Morale/Probe are not so important in peace.. but during the war they really matter. AI tends to be most of the game in war ^^ so it makes sense to value them accordingly.

You sight penetrates into depth of the idea, man! Yes, they are not flat values but formulas based on other variables. Peace/war (or grades of that) is being one of them. There are plenty others like average base energy intake vs. mineral intake, base size, base count, etc. Many of them. Luckily, most of them gradually develop over the course of the game so we can box their values into more or less narrow range based on game stage. These early/mid/late stages are actually a bundle of such parameters. I could list them all but it is beyond the scope of the article that just explains the method.

The peace/war parameter, though is a different one. It is not tied to game stage and can change drastically there and back between turns. So, formally, I need to split each stage column in two. And this is actually what I did at early technique experimentation stage. Fortunately, I have discovered that I don't need such distinction for my purposes. Just the average would do. So I have introduced another game stage parameter for the average war/peace percentage proportion. Since it is just a percentage, one can dial it up and down emulating the threat in between war/piece edges. So currently this war percentage is incorporated into game stage. I understand it is not at all precise but I am not seeking precision with this technique. Only very rough approximation.

[bvanevery]

And because of other needs players tend to channel extra food to the latter.

Another problem for the human player is babysitting the UI.  Why do I do a combo of 2-1-2 farmland and 1-2-1 forests?  Because when I click on the city resource display to automatically reposition workers on squares, that's what works.  I can't be bothered to manually fiddle with worker allocations on squares, except when there's a crisis that needs to be solved.  It's too much manual labor.  The game is going to invalidate whatever I arranged somehow anyways.  I can't "lock" my decisions, or specify any policy of what to allocate when the city grows again and I'm not babysitting it.  Way too much micro.

So a human player's growth, is not usually governed by some pure resource trajectory possibility, like "all food" or "all forest".  It's governed by whatever worker allocation algorithm is running.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

# Version 123

* Experimental nutrient balance version.
  * 1,       ; Nutrient intake requirement for citizens
  * 15,      ; Nutrient cost multiplier
  * Base Square,      1, 1, 1, 0,

All alphax.txt changes only.


A little play test feedback. Initially bases seem to grow slowly but somewhat faster later. That is an expected and planned consequence. ICS still occurs but it is equally beneficial to spam at any base size no need to do it in smallest size bases only. Here is mathematical confirmation of this point.

Number of turns to grow new population from current size

Ocean tile yield without and with aqua farm is equal to rainy and jungle yield, correspondingly.

Vanilla (nutrient multiplier: 10)

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                                 1  2  3  4  5  6
Moist land (surplus = 2+0*pop)  10 15 20 25 30 35  -> grows infinitely with further base size increase
Rainy land (surplus = 2+1*pop)   7  8  8  8  9  9  -> approaches 10 with further base size increase
Jungle     (surplus = 2+2*pop)   5  5  5  5  5  5  -> approaches 5 with further base size increase

This version (nutrient multiplier: 15)

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                                 1  2  3  4  5  6
Moist land (surplus = 1+1*pop)  15 15 15 15 15 15  -> approaches 15 with further base size increase
Rainy land (surplus = 1+2*pop)  10  9  9  8  8  8  -> approaches 7.5 with further base size increase
Jungle     (surplus = 1+3*pop)   8  7  6  6  6  6  -> approaches 5 with further base size increase

As you can see, jungle and rainy bases growth rate progression doesn't change much. The growth rate was stable before and is after. Moist bases growth progression was declining before and is stable now, though. It stabilizes at about half of rainy base rate, which is exactly fair. However, the important thing is that it does not fall into stagnation at all! Which is a very good change. Now most of your bases will exhibit steady growth.

I think it is a great finding by MercantileInterest. With that ICS becomes non issue as it is completely fine to spam colonies at any point in the game and at any base size with about same impact to population growth. No need to specifically use extremely small undeveloped bases for that purpose only.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Somebody reported that Locust is a most effective combat unit at later game. It moves freely due to gravship chassis, quite combat effective with extra PLANET, and relatively cheap with Brood Pits. Apparently it shadows other ways of waging war. Probably need to do something about it.

One approach is to shorten gravship range to penalize all-surface-unlimited-fuel chassis. Something like 4. This would not hurt conventional units as they already have 2x-reactor range advantage over locust. So singularity gravship would move at 4+2*4=12, which is is a pretty decent rate for non-refueling unit.

Another approach is to raise cost of locust to offset Brood Pits cost reduction effect. I was thinking about gradual price increase for all natives with time. Something like base + 1 * turns/50. I.e. add one mineral row every 50 turns. This way their cost may grow like that, for example. At the year 300 with Brood Pits locust still cost about 50-75% of best contemporary armored infantry or speeder, yet possessing much better mobility. So this cost progression is not that steep but still smooths the effect of natives being too costly initially and too cheap later.

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turn                   0  50 100 150 200 250 300
worm/launcher/sealurk  2   3   4   5   6   7   8
isle of deep           4   5   6   7   8   9  10
locust                 8   9  10  11  12  13  14


[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Another idea is to reduce movement rate along the road/tube to 2/4, correspondingly. Currently with 9 tube movement rate hovertank is able to cover astounding 9*3=27 tiles per turn, going round the world in two turns. Such ground movement rate is not only ridiculously fast comparing to air speed but is also largely unnecessary. 12 tiles per turn is plenty enough. Reducing movement rate will also emphasize speeder and hovertank mobility value.