Restricting economical growth

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Yea I've sort of gone in all directions as to what fungus should be. I like the idea of boreholes being more of an upgrade to mines. Echelons should be the upgrade to solar. Boreholes being at 6 E means you don't need to make solar. Solar can sometimes get a bit better than 4-1-4 with a lot of raising and optimal echelons, but it's a fair approximation.

So that leaves forests and fungus. They could be all-arounder options like they are now. Forest at (3/2/2), fungus at (2/3/3) or your similar 2/2/4.

I feel like Forests should be slanted more to minerals, and fungus either to nutrients or energy. When I think of fungus I think of it being food first, then its energies from planet second. I feel like it would be weaker in minerals. Plus it's a little strange that ecodamage makes terrain that would make even more minerals.

I feel like fungus shouldn't be better than forest probably. It's a tough one to rate because by the time it gets good you would have to plant it. A lot will depend when it gets its improvements. Giving it too much too early means you don't have to terraform at all. I ran into that curiosity by making a fungus faction.

It's something I need to mod too. I might go with Forests returning to 1-3-0, reaching 3-3-1 with TF/HF. The 1 E from Hybrid Forest represents Fungus being good at energy. And fungus reaching 3-1-3 or so with techs. Maybe 3-1-4 a bit later. Though those techs need to come before the very end of the game. Right now they're so backloaded that you probably wouldn't re-terraform unless you got Manifold Nexus.

Interesting thought about fungus being more on nutrient side. Maybe I should revert it and do not allow minerals at all! Sounds harsh at first but it is actually better for negative PLANET rating as it doesn't fall that drastically in all three areas but only in two.

So maybe end up with it being 4-0-2 something? This way it actually be able to sustain population after pop boom and all land turn into fungus. Good idea, huh?
😆

Helps to grow new bases a little and not let base size 3 die next turn to 2 with PTS.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Ok first i have to say its important to play the mod - i believe many didn't try it for meaningful duration and lots of talk is guessing / theoretical. I see some suggestions around that have nothing with the mod -_- its a bit dishonest/unhelpful.

I agree that that happened in the previous thread.  But, this thread isn't specific to The Will To Power.  I took that as implicit in Tim's framing of late game economic issues in vanilla.  Now, if he actually mean to discuss only TWTP, then the OP should be edited to that effect.  But I doubt that was his intent.

You are right. It is a generic free ideas thread. I will definitely apply all finding to my mod specifically but others can do the same with theirs like Nexii here.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

The game implemented all of this already.  They just forgot that forests don't grow on Arid land.

Well that is why you invest a lot of efforts in planting it there. I agree that planting anything in arid in more difficult than on moist. Actually I have already done that by increasing forest terraforming time as you mostly want to plant it in arid and rarely in moist sqares. Maybe game should adjust for that. However, since forest spread by itself it loses the point. Unless we make it not spread at all.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Another thing I forgot about fungus is that +2 ECON doesn't give it +1 E per square like other terrain. And obviously the need to keep a decent PLANET rating, which may or may not be hard depending on your SE set.

Seriously? Never knew. In this case we probably should not be too harsh on fungus this makes it even more limited.

[Nexii]

Nutrients is great but 4-0-2 wouldn't be overpowering. I suppose it's all up to you, if you see fungus more as food or energy. But I do think it should be low minerals the more I think on it. It would set Planet's ecology apart from Earth's more, not having them both as good all-around terrain. And other reasons, it means I don't have to give out clean minerals on fungal pops necessarily. Planet does the job for you of lowering your ecodamage, lol.

I might try a bit weaker in nutrients myself for a bit. Maybe 3-0-4 or 3-0-5 but some of that energy coming later in the game, after all the standard terraforming upgrades. The worry I always have is making fungus too good and then that's all you plant. I suppose fungus factions have to be tempered a bit the better fungus is. In the stock game I had to give Cult +1 all around to make fungus workable, because it takes a ton of tech to reach that 2-3-3. Getting anything more than Centauri Meditation (1-0-1) was getting quite far into the game.

Yea it probably doesn't come up too much for most people's SE sets. It's hard to get +2 ECON while not ruining your PLANET.

The other question is what are the candidate techs to give Fungus upgrades? That's something I'm trying to decide now.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Nutrients is great but 4-0-2 wouldn't be overpowering. I suppose it's all up to you, if you see fungus more as food or energy. But I do think it should be low minerals the more I think on it. It would set Planet's ecology apart from Earth's more, not having them both as good all-around terrain. And other reasons, it means I don't have to give out clean minerals on fungal pops necessarily. Planet does the job for you of lowering your ecodamage, lol.

I might try a bit weaker in nutrients myself for a bit. Maybe 3-0-4 or 3-0-5 but some of that energy coming later in the game, after all the standard terraforming upgrades. The worry I always have is making fungus too good and then that's all you plant. I suppose fungus factions have to be tempered a bit the better fungus is. In the stock game I had to give Cult +1 all around to make fungus workable, because it takes a ton of tech to reach that 2-3-3. Getting anything more than Centauri Meditation (1-0-1) was getting quite far into the game.

Yea it probably doesn't come up too much for most people's SE sets. It's hard to get +2 ECON while not ruining your PLANET.

The other question is what are the candidate techs to give Fungus upgrades? That's something I'm trying to decide now.

4-0-2 is not OP at all. Remember it is level 9+ yield when you already can have 4 nutrient on rainy square or in sea. During the game it'll grow from 1 to 4 gradually loosely matching best terraformed square probably.
Another good thing about it being more nutrient than energy is that it will greatly help in sustaining and growing new bases in first half of the game. Later on, when nutrient demand is not that big, its value will be pretty moderate and players naturally will tend to replace it with terraforfing.

And since its energy yield is not affected by ECONOMY maybe we can give it even 4-0-3/4 something (by the end game, of course)? This way it will still lose to 4-1-4 land square that is usually turned into 4-1-6 by late game high ECONOMY rating.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

New fungus plan. No minerals whatsoever. I am not afraid of changes. This also means it should be supplemented by mineral terraforming anyway. Fungus will sustain base without infrastructure development with some food to feed people and energy to maintain infrastructure. Very well in line of native life opposing infrastructure growth.
😁
https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer#fungus-production-guidelines

[bvanevery]

I agree that planting anything in arid in more difficult than on moist.

I really mean that forests in Arid land is crazy and the game's geographic model is wrong.  You can't put trees in the Sahara and you can't put them on Bureau of Land Management land in the USA either.  This is why there's BLM land and then there's a separate Forestry Service with National Forest land.  In my travels, I learned to enjoy the shade of trees.

A corollary is that trees should die if their needed moisture is removed.  Deforestation should be a thing.

The game has this odd idea of making farmland near forests turn arid.  I am doubting that's a real world thing.  More like an incorrectness of the game's model.

The game's moisture model is so capricious, that you have a strong incentive to leave terrain alone and not try to raise it to 'improve' anything.  You can dry up all your farmland in a heartbeat, and there's no basic way to have all of it make sense.

And meanwhile high altitude energy parks, are really not worth the trouble to build, for the amount of terrain raising effort they take.  So the game has nice ideas about terraforming that aren't actually valuable in practice.  Sandboxers do it, people trying to win the game don't.

However, since forest spread by itself it loses the point. Unless we make it not spread at all.

The uber coder badass would fix that too, while they're uber coding badass fixing what's possible on Arid terrain.  I didn't say it was low hanging fruit.   

I wonder where OpenSMACX is at nowadays?  I do plan to compile it up pretty soon here, to investigate all the tech tree weights that Scient helpfully reverse engineered.  It would increase my understanding of vanilla tech tree design.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

the game's geographic model is wrong.

The game geographic model is wrong. Probably because this is geographic model of some other planet and not Earth.
This also could be just because it is a game.

[bvanevery]

Wind is wind.  Water is water.  Rock is rock.  Planet's got 'em.  Nothing in the game fiction says it's particularly violent wind, like say we see on the surface of Jupiter.  I think Mars is not a picnic either, with its thinner atmosphere, if I remember some documentary stuff correctly.  The game manual rather explicitly talks about planetary rotation and east vs. west sides of continents, as far as how its moisture model works.  I don't remember exactly where it is talked about, it could be in one of the supplementary *.txt files.  The game's atmospheric model is explicitly Earthlike.  Different gas composition, but same physical dynamics.

[Nexii]

Someone else pointed out once that solar being more effective at high altitude is probably as silly as the forest thing. It should be more effective when a tile is arid. Cloud cover would diminish solar effectiveness. Higher altitudes aren't like hotter to heat up the panels, if anything they tend to be cooler. I suppose I can maybe half give them this one, at high altitudes some cloud types might be below the panels. And working both into the formula might have been complicated.

They did explain that Planet has high nitrates in the soil, but I'm not sure if that alone would make up for a lack of water. You'd have to irrigate Forests planted in Arid at a minimum I'd say. They should have made the former time go up in that type of terrain, sort of like how solar takes longer on rolling/rocky terrain (even in water, strange isn't it).

[bvanevery]

I suppose I can maybe half give them this one, at high altitudes some cloud types might be below the panels.

Don't give in.     Mt. Everest generates cloud systems.  This is a basic function of moist air trying to rise, then meeting a physical barrier.  It's why rain shadows exist for mountains.  The game is wrong.  There is no logic to "increasing energy with altitude" at all.  And it's hard to harness in practice, game mechanically.

Raising land is useful for bridging land masses.  It's also useful if Planet is sinking in a mindworm global warming + flooding apocalypse.  It's mildly useful for terraforming your coastline in a way that naval units can't threaten.  If you didn't work the ocean shelf squares already, and you have deep ocean in coastal base range that you can't do anything with.

Otherwise, it isn't useful.  I wonder if there's any rational mechanic that would make it useful.  Why would you ever bother to raise up mountains, other than that "you can" ?  And what if you actually had to pay real expenses on that, instead of just having a bunch of free clean units that do it for nothing, no eco-damage to anything?  Like raising a new Mt. Everest wouldn't have some bad ecological effects?

[Nexii]

A better one that bothers me is the global flooding. I'll be in the minority here, but water raising up hundreds or thousands of meters from pollution isn't realistic. If every last bit of ice on Earth melted it would raise our coasts by 80m. That would put many coastal cities underwater, but it would be nothing like Waterworld. So either Chiron has way more ice (in which case why is there no ice tiles)? or it's just not realistic either.

[Hagen0]

On higher altitudes sunlight is more intense, especially UV light.

On topic I have the feeling you are overnerfing stuff. Does forest really have to take 12 turns when it already lost its energy? If you want people to build mines make those faster to build. But keep in mind that you simply may not have the option to build them for lack of tiles.

[bvanevery]

but water raising up hundreds or thousands of meters from pollution isn't realistic.

Ah but didn't you know it's the Ice Cream Cone Planet?  The double ice cream cones planet.  Didn't you know the reason you can't go over the poles is because there's this giant cone of ice extending deep into space along the axis?  That's where all the frozen water is, and it's all gonna come crashing down when you disrupt the delicate ecological balance.  Delicate I tell you, this fungal neural net is delicate...

Do not talk about the solar wind and the polar auroras.  Do not talk about perihelion!  Do not pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  There's nothing to see here.  These aren't the droids you're looking for.  Move along.  "Move along, move along!"

I'm all for humanity killing itself in a game, but it would be more satisfying to have them do it for a good reason.  Chris Crawford had the right idea in Balance of Power.  Does anyone else find it mildly disappointing that the AI only releases 1 Planet Buster at a time?