Most people here play 4 player games, so now I'm a bit in two minds, as 1) 4 player game will be more interesting diplomatically 2) they are much longer in real time. In my other game 'We'll Meet Soon', we do one turn per week (!), whereas our 'Water World' was on average one turn per day.
Anyway, I want to join. My expectations:
- a planet covered with land in at least 50% :P
- no tech stagnation, please
Some house rules concerning choppers would be in order, but I don't insist.
I want to encourage everyone to switch to the kyrub's patch. It includes everything scient's but is said to greatly enhance AI. I want to try it out and possibly make it standard for my games. It also solves stockpiling bug, so there's no need to adopt any house rule. It's downloadable here: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=108 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=108)
I want to join if is ok for you guys :-)
I'd be happy to join. If there's an opening.
Well i will do that once forum has officially stated that being must-have-patch. Atm i'm having game with my friend, and patching it would prob mess my game.. Soo i should have 2 alphas on my pc aaaaand hassle and effort and meh :D
Before we finished Water World I PMed Dolgorukov and know he wanted in. So it's quite likely we have a team for 2 games right now. :D
funbot, I doubt the staff will ever force us to use any specific patch or else. But I really want to use kyrub, stupid AI is one of the biggest issues in SMAC and kyrub tried to solve it at least partially. There is no hassle in making another copy - AFAIK, you just make a new folder and copy your SMAX into it and apply the patch, it should work. 1 GB of space and 10 minuts of work. I can agree to tech stagnation if you want... :D
I'd be happy to join. If there's an opening.
All factions random? Thats hardcore :D, though i doubt not too many would like to play that way :).
I'd be fine with "all random"...but I don't like playing with
-no Unity scattering
-Easy atrocities, at least in terms of base-obliteration
-Copters that can get more than 8 movement per turn (not counting CBA and Fuel Nanocells)
-Ecodamage-free boreholes before the late game
-Cheap crawlers
-The ability to build a project within a turn or two of getting the prerequisite tech (by storing up crawlers or having the whole empire work on the project via crawlers)
-Various features that favor ICS
-An ecodamage system that makes your PLANET rating fairly worthless for a builder game
-Hurrying that's as cheap (after considering the fact that there are far more energy-boosters than mineral-boosters until the late game) as building things normally
-Unit upgrading that's even cheaper than that
You seem bit absolute with your terms, do you mean that if any of those things are approved by majority, you wont join the game?
And couple of changes you request seems to require tweaking on core mechanics
When I'm done with all the needed and wanted tweaks, I plan to make "SMAX 1.5" semi-official.
UUuuuu, well that sounds intriguing. I wish u good luck on your project ^_^, and yeh, i couldnt be more glad if needlejets would recieve a serious series of nerf-hammering.
Yitzi, I think thet , at least untill you have the patch ready, you might be being a little too restrictive.
Well as far as i understood, Yitzi and dolgurokov were both not eager to join this game due their own reasons (yitzi not happy with current patch and dolgurokov dislikes Usual +3 player games).
Dolgurokovs team game is a totally diffrent issue to me, and since i didnt honestly fully or (remotelly) understand the whole concempt of the game, i decided to pass on that personally.
For me, teams/alliances/pacts should be made ingame instead of premade teams. It just seems more natural to me (would love to give good detailed speech why but i feel my english aint good enough for that ;lol)
The only restriction before I have the patch ready is that I'm not playing. Without the patch, it just rewards the sort of gameplay I dislike too heavily.
I too have a feeling that military victory is too easy compared with the others. It takes some interest out of the game for sure.
At least with ingame teams it's harder to make such alliances, and if they can be broken then there usually won't be enough trust to let things get too out-of-hand.
What's the map size? I'm afraid for poor Morgan he won't stand against another invasion of brutal Believers and I see there is the Hive onboard. Maybe I should reconsider... :)Well imo standard maps gives just enough space for grow but also good amount of tension with borders. And not to mention the managing stuff with larger map might get bit tiresome... Buuuuut im not feeling That strong about it, so if you incist on that, i can bend on my preferrences on that one :).
I too have a feeling that military victory is too easy compared with the others. It takes some interest out of the game for sure.
(at least without nerve gas); the only things that would need to changed are making it hard (I'm thinking a +2 POLICE prerequisite) to use nerve gas against bases or to obliterate them (as if you can't use nerve gas it's difficult to take bases, and if you can't obliterate bases then to accomplish anything you need to not only take bases but keep them.)
-edit- And i do feel its necessary, or atleast good gamewise to have such factions in the game, if not more reasons than just shuffle up the deck little bit. Just having punch of builders managing their production queue and formers terraforming prioritys seems rather stale and boring game to me.
Ok, let's play a medium map, I'll think about my faction choice and drop you a line today or tomorrow.
The things is, I agree with you and I'm not a true builder myself. I met some players with the approach "let's build all facilities in all bases" and find it boring as well. But some industry and tech level is in order because I find little elegance in 2-1-2 or 4-1-2 rushes (if only for the fact that you don't use mixed units here, you just mass produce one design).
Expect for houserule for nervegas and obliterate only allowed at police+2.
I was actually thinking of the more general rule set:
All atrocities that do not affect a base, i.e. nerve gas against non-base-defenders and planet busters that won't include a base in their radius, require POLICE +0. All atrocities that do affect a base (except nerve stapling) require POLICE +2. Repealing the U.N. charter does not change this, but atrocities against aliens are not restricted (except that Planet Busters still need POLICE +0.)
Um, i'm kind of loss here, your activity here implies that you are eager to join the game but earlier i understood you Dont want join the game.... Sooo which it is? :)
I'm not interested in joining this game, but still interested in discussing it.Such heresy
And suggested houserules: All atrocities that do not affect a base, i.e. nerve gas against non-base-defenders and planet busters that won't include a base in their radius, require POLICE +0. All atrocities that do affect a base (except nerve stapling) require POLICE +2. Repealing the U.N. charter does not change this, but atrocities against aliens are not restricted (except that Planet Busters still need POLICE +0.)
No stockpiling
All atrocities that do not affect a base, i.e. nerve gas against non-base-defenders and planet busters that won't include a base in their radius, require POLICE +0. All atrocities that do affect a base (except nerve stapling) require POLICE +2. Repealing the U.N. charter does not change this, but atrocities against aliens are not restricted (except that Planet Busters still need POLICE +0.)
Let me start with saying that I don't see any need to modify atrocities.
But even if I did it, the above rule seems nice on paper but I'm afraid in practice it doesn't take into account the game balance. If we wanted to translate it into actual gameplay situations, it would mean two things:
- you can't run FM to inflict a no-base atrocity
- you must run PS to inflict a base atrocity.
Not only I don't see any logic here if we look at things like that
- this benefits the Hive in both ways
- this benefits other momentum players for reasons I fail to see
- this penalizes Data Angels from the start, already not the premium faction
(also Deirdre which is a good faction, but she is weaker than the Hive in my view, so it's still unbalanced)
this penalizes all FM users, for reasons I yet again fail to see (why FM Morgan shouldn't induce Genejack Warfare with his probes is beyond me).
Basically to simplify things a bit, this rule can be boiled down to: "in most standard situations, Hive, Santiago and Miriam can nerve gas, others not so".
Also, this concept says openly that you need +2 POLICE to use a Planet Buster against a base, but with 0 POLICE you can "only" nuke units, even if it's a former just next to a base.
I'd keep base obliteration as a nice tactics thing
ohkay, how about we just ban nervegas. Rest attrocies are restriction free.
So then what's to keep someone from using air power to take a high-value base (losing substantially more units than they destroy, but they're able to focus their units a lot better) and obliterating it so the other guy can't take it back? With base obliteration difficult, you can make it easier to defend against air so that taking a base with air power is very inefficient and the other guy can take it back with land units more easily, but with easy obliteration you can do so much damage that no air power fix will be sufficient without making air power completely worthless.
Also, air power can't 'take high-value bases' just like that, needles and choppers simply can't capture bases.
They can, however, get rid of the defenders after which you can use a small ground force to take and destroy the base.
True, but this is the part where it's not OP. You need to bring those ground units to smash things around and such raids are not that easy.
Also, an attacker wants to keep at least some bases as launch pads for his ongoing offensive.
What might get razed is bases with Projects and I definitely want to keep that. It's a good thing to be able to destroy HSA.
All in all, obliteration hasn't been an issue in any games I've played or heard of.
If the settings are final I'll try to create the scenario this weekend.Settings are good to go. Only changes that might come are only tinsy tweakings on houserules, but those shouldnt be affecting on scenario creation, atleast as far as i would know.
Scenario ready. The scenario is oriented for long run factions (builders), since these are the factions you chose.
Some details:
1 - The scenario is probably more then 50% land, but devided in 7 main iseland, one for each faction
2 - There are many smaller empty islands, most of them containing the ruins (just to make you run for them ;) )
3 - All main iselands have monsun jungle at the "pole" side of your landing and uranium flats at the "equator" side
4 - factions:
Funbot - Peacekeepers
Kirov - Morgans
ronin - Uni
Bodissey - Drones
AI - Gaia, Cult, Consiusness (all tracend)
5 - you all get 3 pods+3 scouts+ 3 formers (AI get 4)
6 - All the AIs are set to peacefull, but They are pre pacted and programmed to team up agains humans
7 - you are not suposed to have eahc other commlinks untill you meet
If it is all Ok with every one, please send me your passwords and Ill send the game.