SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[bvanevery]

Details drones are for the dying

drones are for the dying

MY 2198.  Sunspots descended a number of turns ago.  I'm taking advantage with my first Obliteration against my former ally.  I never did anything to him.  He just reneged on his Treaty and then got uppity about us both removing units from each others' territories.  So I sent in a bunch of unarmored units from all those Command Centers I was building and wiped out his city.  Took some losses.

I've got these much finer X Synth Impact Rovers coming up next.  The fusion reactor allows me to put a little bit of armor on it without any substantial additional cost, which is gonna be great for sliding up right next to a base.  I only hope the sunspots hold long enough for me to take real advantage of this.

I do have the prereqs for Advanced Military Algorithms, which would allow me to propose Repeal the U.N. Charter.  However I haven't learned it yet, and there's no certainty it'll pass.  Lal the goody two shoes is the Governor and my ally.  He often vetoes that, but sometimes he doesn't.  You just never know.

I still don't know how to build the Virtual World.  Because of the extra drone for every 4 citizens, I'm having to build Hologram Theaters.  The University has been harmed in this regard compared to the stock game.  It remains to be seen how much of a problem it is, but presently, my budget has to be 40-30-30 and I've still got troubles.

Oh, and of course I can't go Fundamentalist, so this chemical weapons extermination, is quite the preconceived agenda.  To the extent that tech is rather easily obtained in WTP, this might actually be the worst case for waging a conquest.

MY 2204.  Sunspots have lifted.  That wasn't long enough.  I got delayed by a flank of wild mindworms.  To add insult to injury, he's jolly well spammed a base right were I previously obliterated it.  I have to go Free Market to deal with my poverty.

MY 2205.  Well I took the base, for all the fat good it's gonna do me.  Can't very well obliterate it now.

MY 2211.  They retook the base with a Chaos Shock Troop and some peons.  Although it's good to see the AI displaying mild competence, it also reinforces what a lousy faction the University is, and what a bad strategy my imagined "X rush" is, absent a Repeal.  Would have been better not to squabble about the border and just sit around until a Repeal is ready.  But how long would that be?  I'd have to break purity and change my research foci.  Won't do that this game, would just start over.

What's up with their armored probe team killing my probe team, like it was nothing?  They both have the same level of training, Disciplined.  They took only 10% wounds.  So then I make a conventional attack with one of my fancy X Impact Synth Rovers and of course it dies.  Later for this, I'm quitting.  There's something awfully capricious about probe team combat, if that was an expected result.

4:37 AM.

Miriam was at war with me, north of Domai, pretty much this whole time.  She circulated in the water near me too.  She never mattered.  I originally thought I was going to go on a chemical extermination of her.

I really had to reel back in my war effort because of my poverty due to the extra drones penalty.  It's not basically fair because it treats the University like it's minting piles of gold bars or something.  Actually, the University's tech research is quite worthless.  So all I get is a faction that's rather disadvantaged for keeping itself happy and above the poverty line.  And I can't go militant with Fundamentalist.  So what's to like?  A free network node is not worth all of these penalties.

Pretty sure I've filed Issue Tracker stuff about all of this.  Yep I did.  It was closed.  Entry for #195 says:

    RESEARCH bonus percentage parameter is added in thiker.ini: se_research_bonus_percentage.
    RESEARCH bonus is doubled.
    Fundamentalist, Brain, ++MORALE, ++PROBE, +INDUSTRY, --RESEARCH. It loses extra RESEARCH penalty which was added previously just because RESEARCH bonus was too weak.

Well, looking at other factions, it seems I have better tech than many.  On the other hand, the Cult got gigantic in 111 turns and has several techs I don't have.  I presume because of their sheer size.  Kinda ridiculous looking at them.  Their government is Fundamentalist Green Survival.  They don't have a single Biology Lab or Network Node, so how the hell are they pulling that off?  Something's wrong here.

Unless the AI now knows how to pop Artifacts for tech?

[bvanevery]

Starting a new game, I set all faction entries to RANDOM by hand.  Hit OK and my faction came up with maybe a 1 second delay, not quite instantly.

Details center of scum

center of scum

I had an unusual start near Mt. Planet.  I had to walk 4 squares to get settled, and I got lucky with a forest pop on the way.  I've completion scummed a Command Center and already have a Recon Rover prototype available, so I'm unusually well situated to rush the hell out of somebody.  I don't know if I have any neighbors.

In MY 2119, I did it again!  I've got 2 Command Centers.  Oh, and I already know Impact weapons.

[bvanevery]

Details done testing

done testing

Ok, this is the reason I quit, and won't be playing any more for awhile.  I know it is a vanilla behavior.  But it is hugely exacerbated by WTP.  The credit exchange rate on building Secret Projects is 6:1, which is a pretty huge "screw you".  You need piles and piles of credits to afford a SP.  Ridiculous, wasteful numbers of the stuff. 

I had something like 1200 or 1400 credits and had been trying to build the Command Nexus for a very long time.  A ridiculously long time, because it's so godawful expensive.  I was within a few turns of completion, and even had an Artifact being finally dragged back home, to get this done.  And then, this.

A rational person would say I don't want or need the CN, that I'd coughed out the units I needed just fine with 2 completion scummed Command Centers from the beginning of the game.    But I don't know what do to with all this money I've piled up, particularly from exploration.

I was already building every low cost base facility, with all the minerals from farming and forests.  Without legal chemical weapons, there's no motive to go to war with anyone, as "takeover" war doesn't gain you anything.  So my cities just sit around building the next thing that might make them stronger in the future.

I've been trying to get Advanced Military Algorithms since like, forever.  I even adjusted my research focus to Conquer only.  Even once I can make the motion to Repeal the U.N. Charter, there's no guarantee that anyone will go along with it.

So this all becomes a lot of waiting, waiting, waiting.  With all this cash that is of no use.  Except to try to finish a ridiculously expensive SP, that's a total ripoff.  It's like 200% MSRP "oh we're having a chip shortage, didn't you know?" pricing on PCs in real life right now.

Energy market crash has always been a s### sandwich.  Now it tastes even worse than vanilla.  I ain't buyin' it.

Tim, I know you've tightened the economy of lots of things to achieve various gameplay effects.  But the problem is, you've made so many things so tight, it's not fun anymore.  I sit around for a long time with no incentive to do much of anything.  I don't think it's reasonable to make SPs godawful expensive in the 1st place, then even more godawful expensive if you dare to use cash, then allow the vanilla "screw you I'm takin' your cash, how dare you prosper" gameplay.

It's 4:30 PM and to get to MY 2208, took about 6 hours.  That's a waste of my real world life at this point.  With these egregious cost formulas and very long delays until anything meaningful happens in the game at all, this is not respecting my time as an adult.

I wonder how bad my own mod does on that subject.  But at least I'm not setting people up for a huge janking.  At least, I don't think I am.  Sure hope not.

Gonna file "get rid of Energy Market Crash" in the Issue Tracker.  I don't know how doable that is for you.  I'm not likely to play again if I have to face that risk and deal with egregious costs at the same time.

Bear in mind that this sort of problem, is partly an indirect consequence of your new policies about invasions.  That invasions basically have no profit value at all.  You're kinda taking the game away.  So then I look for something else to do, and then that part of the game sucks hard, so...?  I end up saying I'd rather spend 6 hours of my life on something else.

Other circumstances: my nearest invasion target, the Believers, eventually became my ally.  This seemed semi-rational because I would probably go Fundamentalist.  Far to the northwest, the University was also allied and sitting on the Monsoon Jungle.  They mostly provide free or cheap research.  They were a buffer to the Hive, ever more distant.  Hive got in a snit with me, probably instigated by the University.  The Cult was also very far away and in a snit with me, probably the Peacekeepers' fault.  They are also allied with me and also provide free or cheap tech.

So, presuming I could get chemical weapons legalized someday, I was still looking at 2 very long distance invasions.  And I won't ever be able to move fast across the Huge map, until the orbital insertion era, so... how much fun is that gonna be?

Generally speaking we conquer next door neighbors because it's profitable to do so.  It adds to the glory of our empire.  But when you auto-destroy that, you're taking out a big part of the game.  Absent that, the game reduces to "colonize forever" game, where someone else's territory is just a more tedious kind of terrain to clear out and prep.  Because there's no value in what's already there, all that stuff's gonna vanish.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer/issues/63

Collecting opinions here.
What should be crash percentage to not be such a devastating event?

[bvanevery]

I thought about the possibility of a % loss, while out walking the dog.  Thing is, what's the point?

If the % is low, like 20% or less, then the only message is "Hi, gamedev here.  I'm a dick.  I just took money away from you, that you can't do anything about."  What were you supposed to do about it?  Divert all your attention into building a big pile of Energy Banks, so that you don't lose 200 credits?  Considering the cost in credits and time to build those facilities, that's economically irrational, so I don't see the point.  It would seem to be nothing more than attempting to condition the player, to obsess about Energy Banks.  Why do that?  I can't think of any good reason to insert that worry into their head, or try to get them to do that more often.  It's just a futz, some crud.

If the % is high, it's still a dick move.  It deprives the player of agency.  Or, to the extent you think that obsessing about Energy Banks should be something the player makes decisions about, it's not a good mechanic.  There's always something the player should be doing, some need of the empire here or there.  Why do this "baby birds and babysitting" sort of thing?  I don't want a whiny, crybaby, falling apart empire.

It seems to me like huge economic consequences, would require a fundamentally reworked market trade system.  Where the player has made decisions to invest in BS like Enron or AIG or other such society destroying ventures.  But that level of economic sim, just isn't in the cards for SMAC.  So my vote is, screw it.

My point of view is, some game designers are lazy.  They insert RNG stuff as content filler, because they've run out of ideas.  They figure they can jank the player a bit into treading water, struggling to preserve the status quo.  This is a reasonably well known commercial game design idea, especially in the MMO space.  Well hey geniuses, I'm already doing lots and lots of work in this game.  So bugger off.

How do random bad events work in a game of Monopoly?  Well, there's a certain degree of tactility for the player's agency.  The player does something.  They roll a pair of dice.  They push a token around the board.  They pick up a card from a pile.  These physical acts feel like some degree of player agency.  They aren't; they just feel like it.  But at least the tactile illusion does hold up some, in real life.

And, the illusion is not shattered by particularly horrible penalties.  You can lose $50 for a Doctor's Fee.  You can Go To Jail.  That's about it.

In contrast, the rewards are better than the penalties.  You can get Bank Error In Your Favor Collect $200, which is unambiguously good.  You can Advance To Go and get the $200 you had coming to you anyways, sooner.  It might skip you past a danger.  It might make you unable to land on something you wanted, so it's not a 100% boon.  And it might set you up to land on the light blue properties, as a matter of probability.  Sucks if someone else has put hotels on those. 

SMAC did the opposite.  The rewards are mostly worthless.  The penalties are horrific.  Cynically, one can say that the minuscule rewards, exist only to psychologically condition you to swallow the horrific penalties.  Putting a little Special Sauce on the s### sandwich, as it were.  Pretty lazy and evil game design.

Maybe some genius thought they were "just worldbuilding" with the Energy Market Crash.  That they were primarily trying for a narrative function.  Like starving colonists, there's sort of a narrative there.  It's not a very good one, because I hardly feel invested in an event I can't control, and I'm not gonna just drop what I'm doing to go deal with it.  The tactical question comes up from time to time on forums, and my answer is always, "Let 'em starve."  No, it's not the Chairman Yang in me, that says that.  It's the game designer in me.  It's not an especially compelling narrative or game mechanic, so it's best ignored.

The difference with an Energy Market Crash is, you have to be silly endgame rich, to be able to ignore a jank like that!  "Oh, well, what's another 5000 credits."

If events are meant for narrative worldbuilding purposes, then I would think about the effectiveness and value of various possible events.  So then one doesn't have to be married to "Energy Market Crash".  Perhaps one wishes to say something about "the economy".

The asteroid hit which destroys one of your bases, is another one of these dubious worldbuilding horrible penalties.  I think the reason I haven't called for its removal, is it doesn't happen very often, and I haven't lost a precious base to it.  Like with a pile of Secret Projects in it.  I don't know if that's just my relatively good luck, or if the code filters out cities that are too good to destroy.

Let's ask plainly: what's so important about asteroid hits, for worldbuilding?  Yes asteroids could be presumed to be going on in the game, since it's a space game.  But I can't think of anything about the main narratives and themes of SMAC, that says we really needed to hear about asteroids destroying bases.  I mean yeah someone may have wanted to illustrate how the Garland Crater happened a little better.  But I think the map art was fine in the 1st place.  Why bother with a late game uptick in asteroid hits?

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Energy Market Crash does not take Energy Bank into account. It will just penalize player if they have more than 1000 credits.

I agree that is pretty stupid penalty and there are more like that but that sort of common practice is such sort of games. I do not propose to remove it entirely but reduce its effect to bearable one. Doesn't make it less stupid but at least doesn't disrupt a long played game completely in one shot. So could be silently ignored.

I am aiming to raise event multiplier to 3/4 from vanilla's 1/4.

The big idea of random events in this game is that more fortunate factions experience more bad effects and vice versa. Another equalizing mechanics to prolong the uneven game if such happens. Same story with this one. One can keep their reserves under 1000 to not get penalized ever.

[bvanevery]

Energy Market Crash does not take Energy Bank into account.

That really sucks.  Other events like the Network Overload, Planet Blight, Prometheus virus, and demanding a Children's Creche, lead you to believe that you have to build enough of some facility to prevent a bad event.

Well at least 3/4 probably won't trigger a rage quit.

The big idea of random events in this game is that more fortunate factions experience more bad effects and vice versa.

I don't believe in doing much rubber banding.  It removes player agency.

[bvanevery]

I see you have a new version #225 in src, which implements the 3/4 nerfed Energy Market Crash and also more military priority for the AI.  But, no release package for it.  I am probably too lazy to figure out how to make a release package myself.

I briefly started up #222 again before remembering I hadn't actually installed a #225 release last night.  I manually set all the factions to RANDOM.  The delay before my faction came up, was only very slight, like a few tenths of seconds extra.  I would say that the previous problem of relatively long delay, is gone.  I bet it was a Thinker 2.4 problem and 2.5 fixed it.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Here created package for 225. I am still testing AI changes. It is a very tedious work. May adjust something else if I find problems.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

For everybody's reference there is a switch ai_useWTPAlgorithms that allows to disable WTP AI algorithms completely and fall back to Thinker ones.

[bvanevery]

1 AM.  Played a Morganic game until MY 2232.

In the beginning, spore launchers were a super duper pain that kept destroying my roads from invisible locations.  Killed a 1st one, didn't realize there was a 2nd one for quite awhile.  Mindworms were also much more swarmy than other games.  They trashed several of my Scouts, but my bases happened to be close enough together that I was able to reinforce.  I prevented base loss and facilities damage.

Morgan's -1 SUPPORT felt severely restrictive.  I'm not certain if it's a dealbreaker for his prosperity in WTP, but it sure makes the early game a big chore.  I'm not yet convinced that he has any compensating advantage.  He doesn't make that much more money with +1 ECONOMY than anyone else.  There aren't any early SE choices where you pick up just a +1 additional ECONOMY, for the desired total of +2, as in my mod.  In that regard in my mod, he has a lot of flexibility as to how he will make his money, and that's a real advantage.

In WTP he has to do what everyone else does: go Free Market.  And the penalties on that are awful.  I was surrounded by fungus, often touching my bases, and I lost defenders even with PLANET = 0.  No way I was going to take a penalty, with all that mindworm activity.  It turned out I was in the middle of a supercontinent.  So, somehow someone else's mindworms eventually just wandered over to me, to cause me trouble.

Lal was my huge next door neighbor and the dominant power of the game, as the graphs told it.  So, I'm pretty much Finlandized to go Democratic.  Except, I'm already at -1 SUPPORT and really hampered by it.  It took me forever to build The Living Refinery.  Then I finally went Democratic, to seal my alliance with Lal for the long term.  Getting to that point was a real drag.

And, oh yeah, WTP has a PLANET penalty in Democratic for some reason.  Doesn't make any narrative sense, but game mechanically, there it is.  So that's another reason why I didn't think I could realistically choose it, for a long time.  Took me forever to learn how to make Trance Scouts, then to train enough of them to garrison all my bases.

Oh, and I had the gigantic Cult of Planet threatening me next door.  They actually proved incompetent and never came my way with any troops, and I killed several of their bases with Recon Rovers.  Finally Lal and I got peace out of them.  Anyways it was another reason why a PLANET penalty really didn't seem viable.  I had one Fungicidal Former going around trying to snip snip snip stuff to prevent a Cult mindworm invasion, that never actually came.

The Usurpers nominally threatened me from the south, but never did anything.  Incompetent.

Aside from this being an unwieldy and scrunched up game, where I was just made to feel like a super runt the whole time, the "quit trigger" was finally getting a clue about how Hab Complexes work in WTP.  Morgan isn't actually hard limited to base size 4.  Instead, there's this GROWTH penalty mechanic.  His faction description needs to change to reflect that, and I filed an Issue about it.

I think the Morganites suck, but I haven't determined whether they dealbreaker suck or not.  Some other random time.  It's hard to estimate when, the military action of the game was, pretty much nil.  I saw Lal starting to move some Chaos troops around, but darned if I knew where he was taking them.  He definitely didn't travel through me to get to the Usurpers, even though he was at war with them too.

I learned that the AI's swarming behavior is a two edged sword.  If you ally with someone like Lal, he's gonna send Colonists through you.  To get to any empty territory around you.  Which is bad if you wanted to colonize that stuff yourself.  But it could be good if you want him as a political buffer state.  We didn't get far enough to see if the buffer state would hold up.  He had "shelled" me from much of the Cultists and the Usurpers.  The Believers should have been arriving eventually too, and his bases would have been in the way of that.

Time to start over with a real faction, if there any.  Certainly Morgan isn't.  1:30 AM now.

It seems like a few Recon Rovers would be the supreme weapons of devastation, as long as I had the means to make them.  Which I didn't so obviously have with Morgan.  You can't rely on 1 Recon Rover to win against a Scout in a base though.  Saw those 75% odds, watched my Rover die.  Fortunately had a 2nd one.  It would take swarms of them to do the job of wiping out the frontier spam.

The tech gets ridiculously far in advance of anything I'd ever be able to build.

[bvanevery]

4 AM.  Did better as the Peacekeepers.  Still takes a long time to get stuff built though.  Meanwhile I have all this cash lying around, that I resist spending on facilities, because usually I use it for SPs.  But the exchange rate on that is terrible, so I guess I have to uncomfortably switch gears when playing WTP.  At least Artifacts still work.  I got the Human Genome Project done and thereby avoided building a bunch of Rec Commons for a bit.  Was getting close to finishing the Merchant Exchange when I quit.

I had a big minerals deposit and Rainy Rolling land within my first few turns.  Even this huge boost really didn't make me feel awesome.  There's just too much crap that's gotta get done and too many bases are unproductive.  I got Trance Scouts garrisoned more quickly this time.  It was just about after I got that done, that I quit.

An Elite Recon Rover can devastate Scout defenders.  Less than that though, they die more often than you'd think.  I never had lots of Recon Rovers because there's always something else that needs to get done.  Meanwhile the AI just spams away, making me feel like a bit of a fool even trying to keep up.  My ally Domai got elected Governor, not me.

I also don't trust the odds calculator when facing a Colonist.  Several times I was facing 93% victory and yet my Recon Rover died like it had taken on something too strong.  Really don't expect a big fight out of something I'm supposed to have decisive odds over.  Makes me wonder if there's a non-combat part of the calculation that's wrong.

Feels like I should ignore tech, and that bases without minerals don't matter.  I tend to make a lot of solar farmland on rolling terrain, and the bases don't seem to grow into it much.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I have played few times myself and I think something should be done about AI obsessed with expansion and disregarding defense. It is still not in right spot. I need to work on it more. Meanwhile, I will probably disable my production algorithms and let Thinker do the job.

[bvanevery]

No argument with me on that!

I played a short game before finally going to bed, 1 hour long, as the University.  No contact with anyone, just colonizing a new area with a few cities.  Lotta Rainy land.  Yet, couldn't help but feel it was all going wrong, that somehow, such land distracts more than aids.

It may be an indirect effect of colonization being so expensive.  The usual drill is to spread out and grab stuff.  It seems like the right thing to do, because the AI is doing it so much.  Yet, it may not actually be all that productive.

I will try to figure out how to make bigger bases with piles and piles of minerals.  This time around, I specifically got into trouble putting Recycling Tanks on every early city.  I already knew it was probably a bad idea, but I was frustrated at the non-growth non-productivity.  Maybe a minerals city producing a lot of Rover Formers, then better choices about where to settle next to get yet more minerals.

I haven't really figured out if conventional Mines are worth building in the early game.  In the stock game, they're not.

It also occurs to me that tech is dirt cheap on the open market.  That makes Fundamentalist slam dunk the one good tech of your early 6 choices.  If you can choose it.  2 factions cannot.  There's also the possibility of it precipitating a war with a neighbor that you don't want, as was the case 2 games ago.  However I'm starting to think I should just take my chances, relying on the AI to not be any good at fighting for now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Base grows. Give them a time. In WTP they grow even slightly faster than in vanilla and they grow in energy and mineral output even more faster. So player should have much more things to do comparing to vanilla. Maybe your mod does something similar to give player things to play with at the beginning.
We may be already slightly spoiled by that and forgot how long and dull vanilla was with its yield restrictions where there were nothing to do except colony spamming for quite a while.

I don't think colonization is that expensive. The only change comparing to vanilla is that colony cost slightly more (3 -> 4). However, the modification in growth system makes it equally impactful to build colony at any base size. So that may create an impression of other priorities competing with colonization and, therefore, presenting colonization as not only choice = not a "no brainer" anymore = perceivable more difficult to choose.

It is easy to build mineral output due to recycling tanks and other mineral multiplier moved slightly closer. Of course, base needs some basic mineral input first. Conventional mines are very lucrative in WTP when restrictions are lifted. They overrun forest on mineral output. However, forest is also give one energy which may level them a little. See attached worksheet for forest and mine per worker mineral yield.

Early tech was somewhat cheap. I increased early tech costs a little. Should be smoother development now.