SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[bvanevery]

Details representative projects

representative projects

MY 2254.  I completed the last of the SPs I started earlier, the final one of which ended up being the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm.  Of course, Algorithmic Enhancement is already in play somewhere.  The Planetary Datalinks was particularly expensive to pull off.  I never did use any of my 5 Artifacts.

I've been devastating the Caretakers with X Missile armored speeders.  It goes fine but... I really can't take the unit pushing anymore.  I've got no rails, so everything has to be moved manually.  I've got a road that slowly advances towards the front, but it only goes about halfway.  There are so many bases to get rid of, it's pretty silly.  I just can't justify the real life hours it would take to do this.

Enemy resistance so far is token.  If there's a Scout or Trance Scout defending, then the city just dies.  I might still take a lot of wounds though.  If it's got a Plasma defender, I usually kill it but sometimes I lose a unit.  If it's got Silksteel, I'll lose a unit, but I've got them seriously outproduced and I just attack again and again.  Things die.  Chemicals work reasonably well, even against the inflated defensive capabilities of WTP.

Thing is, if you don't have Aliens to wipe out, it could be a real pain to get chemicals legalized.  I only just learned Advanced Military Algorithms.

My main goal in this playtest was to evaluate the anti-Completion Scumming stuff.  I'd say in terms of the frequency of the event firing, it's working.  It doesn't come up so much.  When it does come up though, 20 minerals is too cheap.

I don't find the new support regime to be a big deal.

And that's that!  Quitting time.  5 AM here.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Details but have you tried wisdom

but have you tried wisdom

Why does Knowledge not have any penalties?  alphax.txt says it does.  PEACE.txt doesn't show any special faction ability like Impunity to this choice.  I need me some EFFIC right now so I'm just gonna go on rockin' this cheat.  I mean, it's MY 2222 and I've never learned Democratic.  As the Peacekeepers.

What? Shouldn't be like that. Send me the save, please.


Never mind. Found the problem. The comma is missing in alphax.txt. Fixed in 251.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I don't find the new support regime to be a big deal.

What do you mean?

[bvanevery]

A comma, lol, I didn't notice that.  But then I was only trying to determine obvious intent.

I don't find the new support regime to be a big deal.

What do you mean?

Well 4 free units is a pretty cush way to start the game.  I'm not complaining if everyone's on the same basic footing.  I can make lotsa Scouts like I'm Miriam in the original game or something.

Later in the game, I still had my civilization fitting into the 4 free unit window mostly.  As I've said about SUPPORT for a long time, it ceases to matter once you're in midgame because minerals production gets high enough.  If I actually had enough units in the field to be a SUPPORT challenge, I surely wouldn't be able to stand to push them around.  As is, I had waaaaay too many armored X speeders to want to bother with.  I think I'd put more effort into establishing "communication by road" before bothering with such an invasion again.

Maybe I didn't even need the Command Nexus.  If I worked on having a few cities that were far more massive, that could spew all the garrison troops.  I don't really see a point in a medium distance invasion.  It's not like the AI is bringing any kind of fight to me, and all I want to do at that distance, is completely obliterate bases.

Dropping money into Recycling Tanks when it's finally growth appropriate to have them, was clearly a successful acceleration strategy.  I got more SPs than anyone else.  It was irritating though to bumble away the Empath Guild.  I belatedly realized that with the AI's inherent spam advantage, I would never be Governor.  The spam directly hurts the Peacekeeper play style, because it's just not realistic that a human is going to keep up with the AI population growth.

Dropping money into Children's Creches might be appropriate, but I didn't actually know that tech for quite a long time.  I'd already made my bigger SP producing cities by then.  The basic idea is you can't spend money on SPs, it's financial suicide.  But you can spend it on making cities bigger, that then sit around making a SP.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

So, you think 4 free units is too much? Turn it back to 2?

[bvanevery]

I'm not ready to pass judgment on that.  I would wait for more feedback from more people.  I'm reluctant to deny a player an opportunity to do well in the early game.

The things I care about "asserting a need to change", are things that clearly bother me.  Like having to kill waaaay too many bases.  I will try again with a different mindset, but what I learned from last game, is there's no such thing as rushing a mid distance enemy in your mod.  By the time I actually have the minerals to make an offense, the AI will have spammed the map 2/3rds full.

[dino]

It favors early ICS too much and removes tough decissions from early game.

The AI support hurdles should be fixed on the AI production selection code, and/or by introducing AI only bonus.

[bvanevery]

Details spam oasis

spam oasis

MY 2266, 6 AM real world, and it's quitting time again.  Can't take the ICS anymore.  I had 2 "good" cities in the early game, 1 of them my capitol due to a lucky minerals pop.  It took a very long time to get other cities to have much in the way of minerals.  Once they got up to 6 and I built Recycling Tanks on them with all my cash, I started a huge pile of SPs.

Details spam project management

spam project management

As you can see I did pretty well at that.  By rights though I felt like a lot of these slipped away from me for no good reason.  Other than the AI gets like all the resources in the world and I don't.  So many things conspire to make me have like a Third World budget compared to this incredible spam the AIs are putting out.  I garrisoned my entire empire from one Command Center, my capitol.  I would crank out some kind of armored Trance Skirmisher every turn.  Well when you're going Police State and need 3 units per city that takes a long time.  My 2nd good city produced the armored Speeder Formers  I needed to actually develop the rest of the empire.  With so much taken up with just getting the basics established, the AI is bound to start some SP somewhere and get it.

It bothers me that the AI is not even required to try.  I have to spend turns waiting to make the heavily armed units, that will surely destroy the many many weak AI defenders.  I get bored doing that, and the AI doesn't.  This game even had relatively less unit pushing than the last one.  I waited until pretty much everyone was in contact with me.  Then for some reason 3 factions lost their cool and all declared war, after some sunspots.

I did learn the hard way that I can't just put my tough units on fungus and wait to blast the city.  Morgan took one tiny mindworm (!) and actually killed me on the attack.  Since when do Sensor Arrays give an offensive bonus?  Well whatever, better luck next time.  I had +0 PLANET and he had Democratic Free Market Wealth Cybernetic, so should also be +0 PLANET.  He's not sitting on the Manifold Nexus far as I can tell.  Yet he creams me with this little thing.  Why don't my mindworms do that?

I put piles and piles of those tiny mindworms right out in the open next to Morgan's cities.  Knew the AI would attack them and most likely do badly.  Mostly it did indeed do badly, losing more expensive units.  I made those mindworms when I had nothing else to make at one point.  Just before the piles of war broke out, as it happened.  There was nothing decisive about that front because I didn't have any "real" units to follow up with.  And my ally Domai, fought stupidly as one usually expects from an AI.  I'm like, Domai, over here, chew this stuff up?  "Mummuuuuuuhh...  mooo..  ron..."

I also don't like that the Governorship is now impossible for the human player to have.  It doesn't matter if you're Lal or build the Empath Guild.  In fact I don't think it matters if you're both.  I'm not even going to comment on how ridiculous the Gaian population got this game, and I'm the one who was sitting on part of the Monsoon Jungle.  Of course my ally Domai ate most of it.  And of course it's not as important in WTP due to abundant food.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

It favors early ICS too much and removes tough decissions from early game.

The AI support hurdles should be fixed on the AI production selection code, and/or by introducing AI only bonus.

I think it is quite the opposite. Supporting more units allows to have bigger army instead of just stamping colonies.
Anyway, I returned it back to 2 in future version.

[bvanevery]

Details spammed by Isles

spammed by Isles

MY 2166.  I've had about enough of this.  Quitting.

I already sent a ship in that direction trying to draw the interest of any Isles.  Thought I spotted something, but it didn't zoom in on my ship a number of turns back, so whatever.  Settled a new base on the energy bonus northeast of Parrot Landing, immediately got killed.  Save scummed it, went a different direction.  So two Isles come to trash Parrot Landing.

Why do Isles go through my untrained defenders like butter?  That doesn't happen with mindworms on land.  Turtling up inside your base is generally the best policy.  It seems to be completely different on water, and I really don't care for that.  I don't think any noobs are going to care for that either, because it's bloody confusing.  Like are indigenous life forms deadly on offense or not?  Doesn't seem consistent.

Notice also that the Isle that attacked is not much scratched.  Only 20% wounds.

The Pirates are minerals poor as dirt now.  In the water, they don't have anything.  Even a base settled right on top of a minerals bonus, is only worth 3 minerals.  I'm not seeing how they're going to compete with the land factions, and stay in the water.  And if they have to go on the land, there's not really much point to them as an Aquatic faction.

Trance units seem to be currently the only valid untrained defense for the Pirates.  I was actually starting to garrison my sea bases with Trance Scouts, but they all had to come from 1 base and I've only got 1 Transport.  It's not that I have a Command Center there.  I surely don't have the minerals to justify any such thing, nor would I likely have had time to complete it.  Nor a Naval Yard; I don't even know how to build one of those yet.  The thing is, everyone's tied up just trying to get the bare essentials going, a Recreation Commons.  We're that poor.  All this food is worthless.  And you can't really make any money on tidal harnesses, because you have to spend your first 2 squares on making minerals that you don't have.

Finally, it's not like I start the game with Trance capability.  I only learned it recently, and I couldn't tell you if I figured it out or just bought it.

I don't know yet if the Pirates are hopelessly crippled for a human player, with the changes WTP makes.  But their opening play style sure seems predetermined.  No choice but to spam Gun Foils, far more than I did.  Can't really just explore, have to more like make war upon all the Isles in the water.  The Pirates are gonna get everyone's Isles, not just their own.  I was trying to establish a big perimeter around my empire, but I feel like I was barely getting everything scouted and garrisoned as is.  I'm not even sure if that's viable.
 

[MercantileInterest]

Using the latest version. In the thinker.ini, if

; Improved tech cost mechanic to increase late game research costs (see Details.md)
; Tech costs scale relative to the level of current research item, instead of the
; old version where costs increased according to the amount of techs a faction had.
revised_tech_cost=1

Then the following error message appears: Error while patching game binary. Game will now exit.

It's a fantastic feature. Surprised it's not on by default.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

It is on by default just overridden in WTP with alternative_tech_cost=1.
Uses slightly different formula too. You can have either one or another. However, due to few research bugs fixed in WTP related to this feature (including multiplayer) I recommend to use the latter (which is on by default). Not because it has better math but merely because I am confident it is more stable.

I will add comment to the Thinker version one about the above.

[bvanevery]

Details excessive hurrying cost

excessive hurrying cost

Why do my hurrying costs suddenly seem to be about doubled?  I was getting away with "near completion" for much smaller numbers of credits, up until some time recently.  It's now MY 2299.  Two theories:

• Something's bugged.
• My cities are getting bigger, doing more work per turn, and "low turns to complete" isn't a good indicator of "few minerals to go" anymore.

Details very spendy water

very spendy water

Wait a minute... what's going on??  I swear this thing wanted like 300 credits a moment ago.  Something's off.  I'll have to really pay attention now.

My government has been Democratic Planned Power Cybernetic for a long time.  I have -1 INDUSTRY.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Post a save.

[bvanevery]

MY 2307.  I haven't figured out if there's really an issue yet.  This is still version 251.

I am becoming concerned that there's not enough time, before the end year of 2500, to actually do much of anything.  I have deliberately avoided making Genejack Factories due to my historic fear of the entire Planet going glub glub glub underwater.  But I'm so minerals poor compared to other factions' colony output, that I'm wondering how the units would ever get made to clean them up.  It doesn't help that singular attacks on a base just result in another Trance Scout being immediately spammed.  It's got an almost video game arcade like sensibility in that regard.  It means that even a big ship with a big gun, is obstructed and delayed.  I saw Lal working on a Copter chassis, but I haven't got those techs yet myself.