SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[lolada]

Would you tolerate them building roads on your territory?

Well when they enter you can't really tell them to piss off  unless you are way stronger, AI doesn't like that. I wouldn't mind a former or two, more would be a pain, nobody wants invasion. In civilization games there was need to road cvilizations for trade network that was interesting.

Maybe to define that better - AI could road towards neighbor's closest city, if they can assign only 1 former thats ok. Now that can be good or bad: good if AI is stronger or friendly; bad for them if they are weaker obviously. You could teach AI to road towards player every time. Its maybe iffy, just an idea, roads should not be 10+ tiles long etc.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Yes that may be useful. However, that is combat routine which AI sucks at the most. There are a lot of elements to it and it'll take huge work to make its combat more coherent. Just building a road won't change things much. It probably should come after when we teach AI to plan an attack.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

This is something from our current MP game with Tayta, so I'll hide the screen under a spoiler.

An AI former is building a road on top of a road.
The 2nd former is building a solar... on a tile that has a mine... possibly built by the same former. Why did it build a mine first and then changed the priority to a solar later? There are unterraformed worked tiles in the vicinity of the base, shouldn't it be more busy with those than remodeling an already terraformed tile?

Not sure what caused it. This could be vanilla behavior, but WtP did try to improve AI terraforming strategies.

Save is attached. Configuration is non-standard for WtP, so I'll attach thinker and alphax.txt too. I'll PM the password if the save is of interest.

I have added a check for formers to cancel their action if improvement is already there. This is to prevent building road on road.
For the second former I could not figure out what is going on. I've debugged it against recent version and it was given an order to build farm on (48,14). Yet, in your version it builds collector on top of a mine that it just completed. Could be AI version differences. Tell me yours. I do not promise I will restore it to test this as I am quite lazy on that but still.

I see you are playing on relatively small map. That is the secret to you fast games, I guess. 😉

[Nevill]

v122.

The map is probably Standard, not small. But Tayta was the one who created the game, and I don't remember how to check the size.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Restored this version but could not reproduce. On my machine former is ordered to go left and build farm, not the collector on same spot.

[Tayta Malikai]

v122.

The map is probably Standard, not small. But Tayta was the one who created the game, and I don't remember how to check the size.

It should be a Standard. It just feels small because we're so close to each other and have no real impetus to reveal the other half.

Large may be better for MP games where we want to build up first, but last time you made it a Large and we still started near each other anyway, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Thank you to EmpathCrawler for discovering this bug.
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=21522.0

# Version 139

* All Brood Pit morale effects are disables same way as for Children Creche.


I guess it wasn't easy noticeable because BP comes quite late and psi units are not usually used as defenders by human. Nevertheless, the design is just awful. It is much more transparent without it.

[lolada]

and psi units are not usually used as defenders by human.

Oh try Spore launchers as def ^^.

[Tayta Malikai]

I'm becoming rather more busy lately, and in a somewhat ironic twist, I need something to idly play when I don't have the presence of mind for more creative pursuits.

So I figured I'd actually play some singleplayer for once. And if I'm doing that, why not go ahead with that game of 'custom factions in WtP' I promised I'd do a while ago?

In the interests of a fair playtest, I invite Tim to select one faction which I will play, and one faction which will be excluded from the game. Link to thread for convenience.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Come on. I don't want you to blame me afterwards for not fun pick. 😁
They are all quite unique and interesting to play. Except maybe Metastate Alliance. They are overly unique in the way they do not participate in counsel. Which is kinda huge part of the game fun. There are so many proposals.
For blind pick I'd take Omega Foundation for matching picture. 👌

[Tayta Malikai]

Heh, fair enough. I just didn't want you to get on my case afterwards when I complain about balance while playing a non-standard faction.

Omega Foundation it is. I don't promise to put the same amount of effort writing this one as Money and WtP (which I still have to finish, after all), but since it's not a multiplayer game I can at least provide screenshots.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

No need to. Just have fun.

I never blame anybody for anything. At least try not to. There are so many definition of fun and balance, for that matter. Besides, factions never were my main modding/balancing focus for the simple fact that anyone can come up with bunch of custom factions like you did.

I also applaud your attempts to make them distinctively unique. Mere juggling SE innate bonuses quickly exhausts possible combinations and gets boring. I am already playing with Binary Dawn faction included on top of original 14. Maybe will add up yours as well after this play test.

One advice: Decide on who to keep and make them a 7-pack. This is a standard number for other faction modders. People often like to test your complete set at once and they will have hard time thinking whom to exclude like you just had. Besides, it'll require 8 play tests or more to try out all possible combinations.

[Nevill]

Any restriction for minimal hurrying threshold is unclear. Why it is 10 in vanilla? Why not 20, 50? What difference does it make? I never understood the significance of this number but I had to remember it to exploit it properly.

I missed the initial discussion of the feature in the thread, but I can answer that right away.

The hurrying threshold is the same as the default retool threshold. Removing it opens the way to a minor exploit I found myself using in our recent game with Tayta.

Hurrying facilities costs 2 credits per mineral. Hurrying units and projects costs 4 credits per mineral. Retooling is free for the first 10 minerals.

Assuming 10 minerals in a row, it means that hurrying a scout from zero to full costs 40 credits, but hurrying first 10 minerals of RecCommons and then switching production to a scout costs 20 credits, with the same result.

Assume we are building a transport (30 minerals). Hurrying it as a unit costs 120 credits. Hurrying a Children's Creche (50 minerals) costs 100 credits, and retooling afterwards loses half of the minerals over the first 10, i.e. we have the same 10+(50-10)/2 = 30 minerals for cheaper.

First 10 minerals should cost 4 credits regardless of what is being built... which requires facilities to have a 10 mineral hurry threshold.

In the example above, with the hurrying threshold enabled, we get: 1*40+4*20 = 120 credits for Creche.

I believe it might have been there to prevent retooling abuse... at least in part. Plus to ensure that if you want to build anything in one turn that can't be built on its own, you will have to pay through the nose.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Correct. I understand the mechanics and interdependence between retooling and hurrying. I was just curious about the number itself.

I understand free retooling threshold should be there. Otherwise, human pays penalty immediately after previous production ends and they want to assign something else to produce. I'll probably change the hurry formula as you proposed to avoid this micro exploit.


Nope. I cannot. It is hard-coded so it is either double or nothing. Can revert penalty threshold back. No big deal. Still units cost fill be flat (doubled as usual if below penalty threshold).
Won't be able to hurry Recreation Commons outright in new bases but I can live with it.

There always will be exploit around hurrying. Even in vanilla where project hurry price is doubled for the first 4 rows (=8) one can hurry facility from 1 row to 8 row for 2 and then retool it with 50% penalty effectively reducing the price for first 4 project rows to 4.


Speaking of which, the only way to avoid any exploits is to remove all retooling penalties and remove all hurrying penalties at all and make hurrying price x4 for everything uniformly. This does hurt vanilla experience where building-retooling-hurrying was a mini-game in itself. However, what the heck? It doesn't seem to impact the core of the game significantly.

[Tayta Malikai]

The ability to start building a facility, hurry the first 10 minerals for 20 credits, and then switch to building a unit at no penalty is definitely exploitative. You essentially gain an advantage of 20 credits on every unit built. That's significant given how much 20 credits is worth early in the game.

I think the best solution for this is to just put the 10-minerals hurry threshold for facilities back. It at least obliges you to have some minerals production in a base before you start rushing expensive stuff there.

I also applaud your attempts to make them distinctively unique. Mere juggling SE innate bonuses quickly exhausts possible combinations and gets boring. I am already playing with Binary Dawn faction included on top of original 14. Maybe will add up yours as well after this play test.

One advice: Decide on who to keep and make them a 7-pack. This is a standard number for other faction modders. People often like to test your complete set at once and they will have hard time thinking whom to exclude like you just had. Besides, it'll require 8 play tests or more to try out all possible combinations.

Heh, thanks. The way I went about it was to start by slapping every vaguely-relevant modifier on each faction, essentially LARPing them, and then going back and whittling them down to their core characteristics. Nevill gave me some balance suggestions in that regard.

I could always include some advice on which factions to exclude. The reason for having 8 factions is that a lot of them could be described as being the odd one out - Omega can't be played effectively by the AI, Meta gums up the Council mechanics, PTC doesn't really know what it's doing, and so on. So I figured the player should get the choice of what sort of game they want to play.