SMAX - The Will to Power - mod

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

I remember we were squashing each unbalanced feature one at a time spending months seeking for the right solution.
And look at us know. Talking about global game pace and feeling. This is some next-next level. Thank you everybody for contribution!
😀

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

@Bear, to be clear, my list of problems was hypothetical.

Figured. Not that I tried to solve each one of them. Just elaborated.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

i'm tracking with you much better now.  I see that it is the bending of the avg economic curve that's a challenge, not the tech cost curve; and that solutions need to be as non-invasive as possible.

One idea, is to not be so totally universal in how you bend the tech cost curve.  For instance, maybe you scale the economic-tech costs up differently?  Perhaps, you provide a transformer at the beginning, but explicitly increase the cost of the first few economy techs? 

In StarCraft2, eventually the did the same thing.  Early game was too boring for expert players and for audiences, so they gave you like 3x the number of workers at the beginning of the game, but made your resource supply less durable.... leading players to lots of fun action at the start, without causing the game to end any faster and without skipping the early game entirely. 

So, in terms of this mod, something spiritually similar could be implemented.  Heck, it could even be a matter of giving people a terraformer, but then increase the cost of building terraformer, by 15%, decreasing the efficiency of terraforming by 15%.... leading to a more interesting early game, without shortening the game?

Thank you for good conversation. I like to exchange opinion and ideas to enrich each other. Very good analysis.

On your point. This is exactly what I was trying to do. Many other discussions here are about the same thing. Making game more interesting at the beginning and end alike. Obviously, this is pretty hard thing to do for game with accelerated economy growth. Feel free to share ideas.

Terraforming is a "saturable" thing. Meaning eventually one has enough formers to keep up with worked tiles. Doubling it further does not boost economy. In this regard, increasing former cost or terraforming time does not do much because player just increase the fleet of formers to satisfy needs. Can spend some resources on slightly increased formers fleet but nothing else.

One possible way to reduce growth speed is to actually cut down all the bonuses, multipliers, etc. Like cut all mineral multiplier facility bonuses in half, maybe do the same with economy/psych/labs, reduce project bonuses, and so on. Like I cut the satellite intake in half and similar things.
Another avenue is to exponentially increase spending and cost of more advanced units, facilities, etc. However, this is more difficult to balance as unit/facility cost is tied to their benefit so we may fail to achieve nice progression.

[bvanevery]

The problem with Recycling Tanks play style is not changing them around to some new way.  The problem is making the new player aware just how important they are.  I'm not sure how to educate a player as compared to what amounts to sheer trial and error.  Nobody's gonna read through a big README to find the nth gory detail on how exactly WtP is different.  It's in the Datalinks and that's a start, but why is a player ever going to read the Datalinks on that particular subject?  It's like the game is begging for a hovering tooltip, to dump needed info into the player's brain.

Absolutely do please increase the rail movement modifier substantially.  I play Huge maps.  Going only 2x faster is not enough.  Queuing unit push orders for yet another later turn is not enough.  The whole game becomes a bog where you can't get anything done.  Can't knock off this city, can't knock off that city, have to wait around forever for anything to happen.  BORING! 

While you're at it, I think increasing Foil speed to 5, and Cruiser speed to 8, is substantially more civilized on a Huge map.  I've been doing that in my mod since forever.  Don't think I made planes any faster.

Think I did make Gravships faster, maybe put them to speed 18?  Or is it 24?  Or maybe that's what they end up with reactor multipliers.  Gravships are a good benchmark for how fast things should arrive in a region, on a Huge map.  There's a delay in deploying them, and you have to think strategically about moving them if you're not doing orbital insertions.  But they will get to where you want, and you won't be waiting forever for it.  Mag tubes should be working at a similar speed.  I should be able to cross an 18..24 square region in 1 turn, no problem.  For an infantry unit that's a 8x speed multiplier.

And if you're able to get really simulation fancy about it, faster vehicles shouldn't move any faster on a mag tube.  They're gonna be mounted up on a rail bed and then offloaded.  Don't know if that's major change to code though.  Or screws up AI's ability to calculate distances and paths.

BTW one of my least favorite vanilla bugs in the whole universe is Formers chickening out at borders and derailing themselves.  Did Scient's patch or your mod fix that by any chance?  It's only the non-combat units that do it.  They're chicken about "interference".

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Absolutely do please increase the rail movement modifier substantially.  I play Huge maps.  Going only 2x faster is not enough.  Queuing unit push orders for yet another later turn is not enough.  The whole game becomes a bog where you can't get anything done.  Can't knock off this city, can't knock off that city, have to wait around forever for anything to happen.  BORING! 

While you're at it, I think increasing Foil speed to 5, and Cruiser speed to 8, is substantially more civilized on a Huge map.  I've been doing that in my mod since forever.  Don't think I made planes any faster.

Think I did make Gravships faster, maybe put them to speed 18?  Or is it 24?  Or maybe that's what they end up with reactor multipliers.  Gravships are a good benchmark for how fast things should arrive in a region, on a Huge map.  There's a delay in deploying them, and you have to think strategically about moving them if you're not doing orbital insertions.  But they will get to where you want, and you won't be waiting forever for it.  Mag tubes should be working at a similar speed.  I should be able to cross an 18..24 square region in 1 turn, no problem.  For an infantry unit that's a 8x speed multiplier.

No problems with me. Just need to compose a comprehensive and thoughtful list of speeds and multipliers. Feel free to start on it if anxious or I'll do it at some point.

And if you're able to get really simulation fancy about it, faster vehicles shouldn't move any faster on a mag tube.  They're gonna be mounted up on a rail bed and then offloaded.  Don't know if that's major change to code though.  Or screws up AI's ability to calculate distances and paths.

That was discussed many times here and still no good solution. You see, game allocates some number of "movement points" to the vehicle which is multiplication of one turn road-moves and chassis speed. For example, in vanilla, infantry has 3 movement points and speeder has 6. They spend them based on terrain. Flat terrain takes 3 (one whole move), road takes 1, tube takes 0. In WTP it is 6-2-1, correspondingly. As you can see, the "speed" of crossing terrain is same for all. It is total movement points that differ. It is difficult to devise an algorithm that somehow make their road/tube traveling distance equal for different chassis. If you can come up with something, I'd be glad to implement.

From the other side, even if not realistic, equalizing travel distance for different chassis makes them less distinct and faster chassis loose their bonus of faster deployment to front lines. They still have their bonus of attack from farther distance, all right. Something to think about.

Again, I can revert it all to instant movement to avoid solving all these problems.

BTW one of my least favorite vanilla bugs in the whole universe is Formers chickening out at borders and derailing themselves.  Did Scient's patch or your mod fix that by any chance?  It's only the non-combat units that do it.  They're chicken about "interference".

Not sure what you mean. Any save example?

[bvanevery]

For now, I'm going with 8x as the recommended mag tube multiplier for all maps.  That makes a Giant map actually giant in some way, rather than mag tubes being scaled up depending on map size.  I don't really believe in that.

And I still think Foils should be 5 and Cruisers should be 8, on all maps.

Oh well on the different chassis mag tube speed idea.  Too complicated to bother with.

I will pay attention at some future time, whether non-combat units derail themselves in the presence of enemy borders.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

For now, I'm going with 8x as the recommended mag tube multiplier for all maps.  That makes a Giant map actually giant in some way, rather than mag tubes being scaled up depending on map size.  I don't really believe in that.

8x faster than on flat terrain or on road? In either case it should be road speed multiplier (3x?).

I will pay attention at some future time, whether non-combat units derail themselves in the presence of enemy borders.

The only thing I think of is a flawed vanilla algorithm. It is not perfect and it does account for territory owner. So it may try avoid stepping on it.

[bvanevery]

Current mag tube multiplier is only 2x, meaning that an infantry unit moves 6 squares on mag tube as compared to 3 squares on a road.  The mag tube multiplier needs to be 8x.  An infantry unit moves 24 squares on a mag tube.

Empires start to experience serious EFFIC penalties farther than 16 squares from the capitol.  So a "proper" fledgling empire might only be 32 squares across.  Mag tube is still not enough to move infantry from one side of such an empire to the other.  But it is enough to move a reserve of infantry from a more central location.  I think this is an adequately well thought out compromise on long distance empire logistics.  If your empire is bigger than a perfect little radial empire, then you just have to deal with your sprawl.  It'll still be work to get troops to some far flung conquered territory.  Might still be better to gas everyone instead of having to build up distant conquered cities.