Discrepancies in Incentives on Morale, Talent, and Police in Stock SMAX

[Dio]

Hasty redesigns of incentives for Morale in the computer's selection of social engineering occurred in SMAX's development. Disincentives for negative modifiers with Morale on the social engineering screen specifically targeted the Peacekeepers and Morganites while the Gaians received no disincentives for selection of social models with negative modifiers in Morale. Gaians in the stock game received a negative modifier on Morale, so a question emerged on the developers' decisions on computerized Gaians' and Keepers' selection of social models with negative modifiers in Morale. Did the developers unintentionally produce no incentives for Gaian's selection of social models with negative modifiers in Morale? My analysis of other areas in the code suggested the Gaians' receipt of a disincentive for selection of social models with positive modifiers in Morale.

Hasty redesigns of the Peacekeepers', Hive's, Spartans', and Believers' social priorities on Police/Talent appeared in the original code. SMAX's developers generated incentives for the Peacekeepers' selection of positive social modifiers in Police/Talent and created disincentives for the Hive's and Spartans' selection of social models with positive modifiers in Police. Original coding for SMAC and SMAX suggested the Peacekeepers' original focus on Police/Talent instead of Growth while the Hive should have focused on Industry instead of Police. The Spartans originally received a positive modifier in Police while the stock game set a disincentive for the computerized Spartans' selection of social models with positive modifiers in Police. Social effects from Police create discrepancies in the Hive's, Spartans', Believers', and Peacekeepers' flavor in the final game.

[bvanevery]

Chasing around forensics in binary code is impressive.  But how do you know something was original intent vs. later product?  Are there sections of dead code still left in, that are turned off by some hardwired configuration variable?

I have spent a great deal of time reverse engineering faction acceptance of S.E.T. choices at the alphax.txt level.  It was never enough to change my S.E.T. and call my work thematically complete.  I had to ensure that AI factions would actually choose what they were supposed to.  I found the AI was generally quite averse to certain things, and fairly tolerant of other things.  I worked these into my S.E.T. accordingly.

It ended up in some perversions that rub some players the wrong way.  For instance, I have a Green choice that has no downsides.  This is because it's the only way to get the AI Gaians to actually choose it in due time.  If there's any kind of reasonable penalty that fits my table, they won't.  I can't abide Gaians that won't go Green.  I found it was actually a bug in the original game, and didn't have anything to do with my alphax.txt modding.  Gaians had to get all the way to Centarui Psi or something like that, before they'd go Green.  That's completely stupid.  So I bletcherously hacked around it... and this results in a S.E.T. that looks a little asymmetrically weird, to experienced players who are paying attention.

I play balanced the "no downsides to Green" mechanic by making the Green S.E.T. choice available later in the game than other early choices, more of an early midgame option.  This means that factions that start at +1 PLANET have a serious advantage over other factions.  Also, nobody's allowed to breed mindworms in the lab until late game.  You have to go find your mindworms, since they're such awesome weapons that can kill lotsa stuff when used judiciously.  Best weapon in the game.

I have a policy of never touching game binaries or otherwise altering original game code.  That's the niche of modding that I decided to carve out, quite a number of years ago.  I've left the binary hacking to others.  I have plenty of old school ASM skill, it's not that I couldn't do it.  It's that I know how much labor it is, to make such changes and then playtest them.  My hope and ambition has been to make the mod that always works with a standard binary, to minimize the long term maintenance concerns for all time.  Anyone could have written something substantially like my mod at any point in the game's past.  I'm just the one who happened to do it.  It built upon things others had discovered to some extent, and then my reverse engineerings and rearrangements of things, are my own contribution.

Lately the joke's on me though.  Windows 11 exposed a bug in the original SMAC code, some kind of memory allocation thing?  Version 24H2 makes the game crash or run out of virtual memory.  It seems to vary exactly how the game dies.  Most recently for me, the game's end year is trashed with a garbage value, some improbably high trillions of years number.  So that makes the game go kablooey right after the landing screen animation.  This is with a standard GOG binary.

Induktio understands and has explained the exact problem.  He has patched his Thinker mod so that it no longer crashes, and Will To Power mod inherits that fix.  Someone else has provided a patch for the official GOG binary to overcome the problem.  I find it irritating that all the vanilla noobs are currently held hostage to Microsoft's proclivities and would have to hack their stuff to get a working game, but I hope GOG eventually incorporates the fix.  I don't know what the process is for encouraging them to do that.  I'm still just ducking 24H2 like the plague, at 5 week update intervals.

Ok this is wandering away from your point, into the perils of binary hacking, or the merits.  But for me it's been ~20 months since these forums were available to post in at all, so I'm indulging in a bit of long windedness.  Hey who knows, maybe I won't get another opportunity.  Crossing fingers, hoping things stay recovered.