The Will to Power - Transcending COVID-19

[bvanevery]

Details consequence of the upgrade bit hack

consequence of the upgrade bit hack

Well I found the first and most basic incompatibility.  I believe this was previously reported by an adventurous playtester, possibly Juffos.  My bogus ability bit hack, which is used to prevent game confusion for unit upgradeability, unfortunately makes a Clean Former ridiculously expensive.  At least, that's what I assume is going on.  <sigh>  I'm not going to get rid of this in my mod, because it's a good feature, arrived at by some determined contortions by another playtester for the most part.  With the stock binary, it's a good hack.  I don't even have the energy or desire to erase it from my alphax.txt on a temporary basis, as a kind of merge validation testing.  I'm not willing to try that hard to avoid Dragon Age: Inqusition, or real work.  This smells too much like real work.  I mean, I just shipped my own mod version 1.41.  Enough real work for now.

I could see if those high bit flags are needed and important for something in The Will to Power, or in Thinker.  But I will at least wait some response from Tim to all the stuff I've written up so far.  Experiment shelved.

Ok, I will at least verify whether getting rid of the bogus bit for the Clean Former would fix the problem.

Details with bogus bit removed

with bogus bit removed

Yes, the bogus bit imposes a huge cost.

This still looks weird though.  A plain Formers costs 3 rows of minerals.  The Clean Formers costs 5 rows of minerals, which is high compared to my own mod.  Come to think of it, so is 3 rows for a plain one.  In my mod the cost is 2 rows (20 minerals) for Formers and 3 rows (30 minerals) for Clean Formers.  Somehow in the mashing together, the cost becomes 30 for Formers and 50 for Clean Formers.  This implies that rounding of costs is different, or the minimum base cost is different.  Like perhaps all the Former costs have been jacked at the binary level?

[dino]

tnevolin hardcoded a completely different unit cost formula and ability flags from alphax.txt have completely different impact on the cost then vanilla.

You have to learn from the mod docs how it works, before you modify his units section to your liking, otherwise it's a mess.

[bvanevery]

Hmm.  I guess my alphax.txt isn't going to be plug and play then.  Not that anyone promised it would be, but it's good to know if encodings mean different things.