New alphax variables in Yitzi's patch
From Alpha Centauri Wiki
One of the primary features added in Yitzi's patch is a collection of new features that can be modified through the alphax.txt file. The new options are as follows:
- 1. Beginning in version 2.0, many existing variables have a greatly increased range of acceptable values.
- 2. There is a "Drone rules code" setting (first working in version 2.1), allowing the rules controlling drones and talents to be tweaked:
- A value of 16 means that the University's bonus drones and conquest-based drones can create "superdrones", making the University significantly harder to play on higher difficulty levels (or when using a substantial number of specialists) and increasing the value of Police State when warmongering (or digesting recent conquests) in such cases.
- A value of 8 implements a number of changes meant to limit drone control to the methods designed for it (making all factions harder on higher difficulty levels, though the Peacekeepers less than most): Firstly, if drones are turned into specialists with no talents in the base, other drones will be turned into "superdrones" to compensate. If all non-specialists are "superdrones" and there are supposed to be even more drones than that, it will make "phantom drones" that will not appear but will offset new talents before superdrones do; "phantom drones" can be removed by offsetting them with talents, or via police/facilities/projects if there are no drones (regular drones or superdrones) remaining. If drones are reduced by facilities, and then added again by pacifism, each "phantom drone" will combine with a pacifism drone to make a superdrone. Thirdly, superdrones count double, and "phantom drones" once, when counting drones to determine whether there will be a golden age or drone riots. (It will thus be possible to have drone riots even in an all-specialist base.) Finally (as the flip side to "phantom drones"), it will be possible to have "phantom talents", allowing golden ages even in bases where specialists outnumber non-specialists.
- A value of 4 means that the non-lethal methods special ability and punishment spheres will not work at -1 or lower POLICE rating.
- A value of 2 means that drone-suppressing facilities and projects are less effective at suppressing "superdrones" than regular drones (effectively taking one point of drone control to turn the superdrone into a regular drone before using another point to remove it), and will suppress "phantom drones" first. Police are unaffected by this setting, and will control superdrones just as well as normal drones.
- A value of 1 means that drone-suppressing facilities can suppress pacifism drones.
- To use more than one rule, the values for the desired rules can be added to get the desired value for the setting.
- 3. Beginning in patch 1.1, the ecodamage formula is substantially more customizable. In particular, the following modding options exist as of version 2.1:
- The bonus ecological damage provided by condensers, boreholes, and echelon mirrors can be set (as a multiple of the damage caused by a normal unworked terraforming improvement.)
- The borehole count per base can be set to be squared when calculating ecological damage; this allows heavy borehole use to be heavily penalized (at least until the availability of hybrid forests) without making lesser amounts of boreholes too problematic.
- The bonus ecological damage provided by condensers, boreholes, and echelon mirrors can be set to not be affected by PLANET rating; this can be useful if ecological damage is to be a major balancing factor for these types of terraforming without giving "green" factions an overly high ability to use them.
- The number of "clean minerals" at the beginning of the game, as well as those gained per fungal pop and per facility, can be modified. Note that as of patch version 2.0, the facility-based ones are dependent on facilities owned, not facilities built.
- The number of "virtual minerals" caused per major atrocity or tectonic missile can be modified; in addition, the game can be set to count Planet Buster use instead of major atrocities (so the umpteenth use of nerve gas will not cause extra ecological damage, but using Planet Busters with the U.N. charter repealed will.) Note that if this is set to 0, atrocities and missiles will affect neither ecological damage nor native life aggressiveness.
- Alternatively, fungal pops can be set to reduce the extra ecological damage caused by major atrocities (or Planet Busters with the appropriate mod) and Tectonic Missiles, but not create extra "clean minerals" of their own. Note that if this reduces the ecological damage down to 0, that faction will have a "clean slate" as far as Planet is concerned, and past atrocities/missiles will not increase native life aggressiveness.
- The total minerals produced can be set to be divided by a fixed amount (rounded down) before being added to terraforming-based ecological damage; this allows the relative significance of minerals and terraforming to be tweaked.
- Normally, ecological damage is proportional to (3-PLANET), with a maximum of 6 and minimum of 1. All three of these numbers can be changed.
- Normally, the last step in calculating ecological damage is dividing by 300; this divisor can be changed.
- An extra amount of ecological damage per base can be added (or subtracted) after all other calculations are complete.
- 4. The cost of upgrading a unit can be modified. Not only can the cost per point of difference between the costs of the old and new weapon and armor values now be modified (and they need not be the same), and likewise for the upgrade cost per row of minerals cost by the new unit, but there can also be a portion of the upgrade cost proportional to the square of the cost of the new unit, and there can likewise be a discount for the cost of the old unit (either proportional to the row cost or proportional to its square, or some combination of the two.)
- 5. The energy credits gained as Planetpearls can be increased or decreased from its current value of 10 per lifecycle.
- 6. Condensers can be set to give a fixed amount of nutrients (or none at all) rather than the current +50%.
- 7. The extra speed gained by air units for each level of reactor can be modified, and can be different for needlejets (anything that has more than one turn of fuel and is not destroyed when attacking), copters (anything that has exactly one turn of fuel and is not destroyed when attacking, and therefore can attack more than once per turn), gravships (anything that requires no fuel and is not destroyed when attacking), and missiles (anything that is destroyed when attacking).
- 8. A penalty can be added to all resources brought in by crawlers. This feature does NOT work properly in version 2.1 and earlier and should not be used except in version 2.2 and later.
- 9. The game can be set to not recalculate base properties after growing or building; this prevents nasty surprises such as drone riots due to population growth or ecodamage due to building a production-enhancing facility.
- 10. The Ascent to Transcendence can be assigned a technology prerequisite through the usual prerequisite entry (which is set to "none" by default; previously, the entry had no effect other than the Datalinks and was set to Threshold of Transcendence.)
- 11. There is an option to have a chosen technology allow crawlers to crawl all 3 resources inside the base radius, and another allow multiresource crawling even outside the base radius.
- 12. There is the option to have a technology double the effectiveness of the ECM and AAA defensive abilities.
- 13. There is the option to choose one of a number of formulae for calculating unit cost:
- 0 is the default, as before the patch, but without adding 2*reactor to the chassis cost of air units and reactor to the chassis cost of sea units. As a variant, 16 is the same but does not add on cost for armored noncombat units.
- 1 reduces the minimum weapon cost to armor cost/3, rounded up and to a maximum of 4, and instead of dividing by 2^(reactor+1) instead multiplies by (6-reactor)/20. In addition, the minimum cost for non-scout patrol units is reduced from 1.5Xreactor rounded up to reactor+1, and the cost reduction for infantry occurs after applying the minimum cost for reactor, and the total cost is capped at 250 rows. 17 is the variant of this, which again does not add cost for armored noncombat units.
- 2 has a cost of weapon cost+armor cost for infantry, twice that for mobile units, and 3 times that for air units. The variant is 18, which adds 33% extra to the cost to everything with a reactor greater than 1. In either case, none of the other modifiers apply.
- 3 is similar to 1, but instead of multiplying by (6-reactor)/20, divides by 4 for reactor 1 and by 3 for reactor greater than 1. The variant, which again does not add cost for armored noncombat units, is 19.
- 4 is similar to 2, but instead of adding the weapon cost and armor cost, simply takes the higher of the two. The variant setting is 20, which again adds a 33% increase to the cost of higher reactors.
- 5 through 7 currently act the same as 0, and their variants (21 through 23) likewise act the same as 16, but may be changed in the future.
- For all formulae, adding 8 will instruct the game to add the reactor to the chassis cost of sea units, and the bonus speed gained based on reactor to the chassis cost of air units, as in the unpatched version of the game.
- 14 There is an option to have bonus resources apply in fungus.
- 15 There is greater control of what units produce pacifism drones under what circumstances. In particular, there will be four entries, for units in your territory or in bases, units in a pact brother's territory, units in neutral territory or that of a faction with no pact and no vendetta, and units in the territory of a faction with vendetta. Each entry will have 16 options, numbered 0 to 15:
- 0.No units produce pacifism drones.
- 1.Only air units with 2 or more attack produce pacifism drones; interceptors are exempt.
- 2.Only air units with 2 or more attack produce pacifism drones; interceptors are not exempt.
- 3.Air units produce pacifism drones, unless they are noncombat (i.e. have no attack) or scout units (i.e. those with 1 attack, 1 defense, and 1 reactor) or interceptors.
- 4.Air units produce pacifism drones, unless they are noncombat (i.e. have no attack) or scout units (i.e. those with 1 attack, 1 defense, and 1 reactor).
- 5.Only combat air units produce pacifism drones;interceptors are exempt.
- 6.Only combat air units produce pacifism drones;interceptors are not exempt.
- 7.Only units with 2 or more attack produce pacifism drones.
- 8.Only unarmored units with 1 or 0 attack do not produce pacifism drones.
- 9.Only noncombat units and scout units do not produce pacifism drones.
- 10.Only unarmored noncombat units and scout units do not produce pacifism drones.
- 11.Only noncombat units do not produce pacifism drones.
- 12.Only unarmored noncombat units do not produce pacifism drones.
- 13.All combat units, as well as probe teams, produce pacifism drones.
- 14.All combat units and armored noncombat units, as well as unarmored probe teams, produce pacifism drones.
- 15.All units produce pacifism drones.
- 16 There are several options to control how conventional missiles scale with reactor:
- 1.No scaling; cost and power are as the values described in #WEAPONS.
- 2.Power is multiplied by reactor; cost is unchanged.
- 3.Power and weapon cost are both multiplied by reactor.
- 4.Power is multiplied by 2^reactor; cost is unchanged.
- 5.Power and weapon cost are both multiplied by 2^reactor.
- 6.Power and weapon cost are both multiplied by 2^reactor, after which weapon cost is further increased by the (unmultiplied) power.
- 7.Power is multiplied by 2^reactor; weapon cost is multiplied by reactor.
The following options are slated for future patches:
- There will be an option to control how the Children's Creche affects morale of units homed to the base in which it is built.
- There will be an option to split the satellite functions of the Aerospace Complex and its military functions, or to have the Cloudbase Academy provide only the latter.
- There will be greater ability to control difficulty levels in multiplayer, and to have the mechanics of higher difficulty levels without the associated AI aggressiveness.
