Actually, workers are more useful than crawlers except in the extreme case of Hab Domes, high value specialists, easy pop boom, etc.; otherwise, crawlers have niche uses, but certainly do not outperform workers. So crawler are not overpowered.
In the early to mid game, before any of this comes into play, workers can fully harvest a square, particularly forests because they are so easy to plant, where a crawler can't. Furthermore, I have to have a minimum city size of 5 to even think of a specialist, which is rarely the case for the early game. And even if I got a size 5 city to use a specialist, the specialists are not very good.
So I am far better off having my workers harvest multi resouces squares like forests and an occasion farm/collector or borehole, and have my crawlers harvest my mines. And not much anything else, except filling in the occasional need for extra food here and there.
Once energy limits are lifted, I can crawl an energy farm. But this is not as easy as it sounds. First, for maximum effect, I need for the crawler to first move to my HQ. Then I need to move from my HQ to the energy farm, which is normally at a boundary of my territory. So overall, a crawler might have to cover 25 or more squares before it becomes effective. Even if I have roads everywhere, that is still 8+ turns. For my trouble, I get 4-5 energy, where my crawler get probably get to a mine and get 4 mineral with a lot less bother. Both are useful, but unless you think crawling a mine is "overpowered", then it is silly to think energy farming is "overpowered".
It takes a lot of real game experience to decide what is truly overpowered. These "overpowered" tactics that some worry about are rarely deployed, and in the few games they are deployed, it is in moderation. Probably only one game in 5 do I see someone who has created an energy farm, and even then, it is just 9 squares, not an entire board. I do not encounter people who crawl everything and make their citizens specialists. I only rarely encounter ICS, and easily defeat it. And most of the other things that seem to be a cause of concern show up very rarely.
Why don't I see these things? Is it because the players are stupid or ignorant? No! Because there are too many things basic analysis does not take into account, such as the time and resources and technoligies required to set things up.
In the early game, the only compelling place for crawlers are on resource specials that I cannot reach directly from a city. It is otherwise not worthwhile to spend 30 resources for a crawler that can only get me 1 or 2 FOPS; I have much more productive places to put those 30 resources, namely formers, colony pods, and facilities such as recycling centers, childrens creche, tree farms, network nodes, etc.
In the mid game, I do build crawlers to cover all of my mines, but very little else. Again, there are better things to do with my resources.
In the late game, with sats and high value specialists and food enhancements, once can come up with a scenario where crawling every square is almost as useful was working every square. But at this point in the game, who cares?
Certain upgraded crawlers are good for fast secret project building though...
Crawlers are a safe default investment, usually good to build unless under great pressure or having not developed key facilities or not built enough formers to keep pace with pop growth and existing crawlers. They cost some, but it pays back pretty quickly (iirc 30 mins is a standard crawler, so harvesting a rocky road/mine it pays for itself in under 8 turns, and every turn after that your base gets +4 minerals)
and better still you can get the full cost of them back to rush a secret project which is a huge deal!
and if you've got former power spare to build energy parks, routeing all your energy crawlers to your efficiency 0 HQ feels like cheating the first few times you do it, the research rate can become insane.
There are plenty of situations where something else will be a better long term investment. Unless you have a lot of formers, get more formers first, as EM explained formers are absolutely vital (in large part because exponential crawler expansion requires immense teraforming power). If there's an important facility or SP you want to go for, they are likely better investments. But crawlers are basically never a /bad/ choice at times of peace, and they are often great.
Yeah, but there's the cost of making that road/mine too,...
Yeah, but there's the cost of making that road/mine too,...
If you start to include those costs, you need to take the 'cost' of growing the mine-assigned citizen into account as well if you don't plan to put a crawler on it. ;)
With the drone fixes it seems difficult to ICS many size 3 bases. For that matter, it becomes difficult to control bases larger than 3 before NLM, Tree Farm, Holo.
This might be all getting a bit aside. I feel that crawlers are overpowered in their 100% secret project conversion rate. I think this should be nerfed down a bit to 50% or 75% the crawler cost
Yitzi I'd argue the first faction to get a tech should actually have a big advantage in completing its SP. It's one of the mechanics that makes researching a tech more valuable than trading or stealing it...but there should be more of a cost/downside...rushing should never be free.
But if you're declaring crawlers to a certain secret project, what happens if someone else builds it first? You could have crawlers on route.
I can sort of see how this would work, but when you can switch SP to SP at 100% there's other exploits to get around all this. I can declare one SP I don't want, and then switch to a new SP I really want when I get the tech. Consider sometimes this is legitimate strategy if you get beat to a SP.
I still feel like a penalty to crawler-to-SP conversion and a small penalty for SP-to-SP conversion would better fix this. Something like 60% and 80% minerals kept respectively. I see no difference between crawler pooling an SP and rushing it with energy, and the latter is penalized
A hard cap for SP per base would be pretty reasonable.
Of course putting everything in one base can be really risky too (Planet Busters).
Rather than adding an option to convoy minerals, I had a thought. What if by working on an SP in more than one base, the base(s) that are behind on the SP would automatically feed 80% of their minerals into the base in the lead? Though I imagine it's not quite that simple since base production goes in a set order and can be changed while producing.
I dislike hard caps, as they tend to yield corner solutions. A soft cap (maybe each project in the base slightly increases the cost of more projects in that base) might work, but I'm currently leaning toward limiting the effectiveness of convoying resources instead.
An SP cap based on number of pop in a base?
Or else, based on the number of (and perhaps types of) specialists in a base. And if the player for some reason puts the specialists back to worker status, the SP('s) is/are disabled. :D
I don't know, but my gut feeling is a player would rather rebase crawlers then endure a resource loss for crawling a resource from one base to another.
Perhaps, to sweeten the pie, decrease the eco damage normally caused by the crawler shuttling the resource?
It would still be very powerful if a crawler could funnel any amount of resources rather than the existing one (which admittedly is useless). There's a mineral cost to doing the same on a per-square basis by rehoming. In fact I think it'd venture on too powerful to exempt anything. At higher EFFIC you'd always funnel the complete exempt amount to a specialist city. It would really break down the need to make facilities in many cities, thus being very Pro ICS. Exempting the ecodamage would only make this worse.
I would say that mineral funneling should be limited just to SPs.
Not sure EFFIC should play in since it doesn't affect mineral production in any way.
Limiting crawlers to Pop/X sounds like an interesting option. I originally really favored this but then thought that it's not smooth breakpoints and favors ICS with its size 1/2 cities. Maybe something more like 1-3 FOPs per population, would scale better.
Agree on ecodamage being at destination base from gameplay perspective. Although, one can argue this point thematically...is it the mining or consumption of minerals that pollutes?
Exempting amounts would lead to chaining
It's much cheaper to build 2 crawlers (60 mins) and funnel it all to specialist bases, than to make all make the production facilities.
I see it as rather game-breaking. Instead of exempting any amount I would just have the sliding scale based on EFFIC/distance.
I do like the concept of specalist bases...my bigger concern is just keeping it in check. The labs SPs especially come to mind.
One fix to chaining might be to not allow a base to both convoy and receive the same resource?
Here's an idea...
I might use a crawler for city-to-city transfers, if this were the case.
Here's an idea...
You begin the game with a convoy potential of 2.
You discover Adaptive Econometrics, which allows you to convoy 4.
You later discover Sentient Nanomachinery, which allows you to convoy 8.
You finally discover Photonic Disambiguity, which allows you to convoy 16.
I might use a crawler for city-to-city transfers, if this were the case.
Hmm. I wonder how gameplay would be affected by crawler transfers automatically being whatever minerals the originating base produces in excess of support costs?
The target base would produce max 1 thing a turn, and the contributors nothing. Great for loading up SPs in a megabase, but not for much else and a bad idea during not-yet-decided vendettas. I'm just spitballing.
How about this idea...
Convoy potential is based upon infrastructure.
If Sparta Command is connected to Bunker 357 by a road, a convoy can move up to 3x the default amount of stuff.
If these bases are connected by mag-tubes, a convoy can transfer up to 6x the default quantity of materials.
If, however, these bases are connected by forests, the convoy will take a very long time to deliver the goods.
Even harder to program? Probably. But I like the concept. Maybe the length of the road is figured...
Strategic bombardment of roads would become more significant. I have not yet built a mag-tube in SMAX.
...in order for it to make sense it would need to apply to square-to-base convoys as well, and balancing that might get tricky...
...in order for it to make sense it would need to apply to square-to-base convoys as well, and balancing that might get tricky...
I was thinking about that too. It always seemed a little odd to me that an isolated mine with a road stub receives a production bonus. If the road, however, were to connect to a city, then the mineral harvest should increase.
As for food and energy resources...I wonder if a road should boost the convoy potential of those as well.
If so, the importance of creating and maintaining your roads and mag-tubes would be important (without excessive micro-management). The AI loves to build roads, so it would benefit from some sort of bonus.
Interesting idea. Would certainly make going down the Maglev tree more tempting
A simple formula might be just to apply a -/+ penalty/bonus on convoyed resources depending on how it is linked (if at all) with a road path to the homed city. Or a % based penalty/bonus. The penalty reduction or bonus could be increased at Maglev over Road. Currently I'm playing at -1 resource crawled. Might be more interesting if it was -2 with no path, -1 with road, and penalty negated at Maglev, as an example.
Crawlers don't need a huge tonedown, relative to formers they are weaker. But at the same time, they are a strong mineral-dump alternative once you have enough formers to terraform. Also rushing to IA every game isn't very strategic. I think having a min base size to crawl, and +1 crawler per x pop subsequent would be good.
...A simple formula might be just to apply a -/+ penalty/bonus on convoyed resources depending on how it is linked (if at all) with a road path to the homed city...
...A simple formula might be just to apply a -/+ penalty/bonus on convoyed resources depending on how it is linked (if at all) with a road path to the homed city...
That could work...
Hmm, what if a crawler is next to its home base, but not on a road? I don't think a convoy penalty should be imposed in that case.
How about this?
1. A crawler calculates its fastest path back to its home base (by using mag-tubes, roads, rivers, etc.).
2. It will therefore need to expend a certain amount of movement points to get home (i.e. 1 point for a 3-tile-length road).
3. The convoy resource penalty is proportional to these movement points. (Or a bonus is inversely proportional.)
I don't think I've ever built a Supply Rover. It should convoy more stuff than an infantry-based crawler. <Insert Morgan's voice here> Greater investment leads to greater returns (and greater risk). Imagine Supply Rovers hurtling along highways, or flowing within cooperative fungus, or zipping inside mag-tubes. They should deliver abundantly.
It would add to the micro-management burden of the game though.
OTOH, rebasing crawlers wouldn't be an issue anymore.
If convoys have negligible travel time and it's just extraction that's the issue then the distance shouldn't matter, and if the travel time is not negligible then there should be an actual turn delay.
If convoys have negligible travel time and it's just extraction that's the issue then the distance shouldn't matter, and if the travel time is not negligible then there should be an actual turn delay.
Yes, I suppose a crawler that is working a tile represents continuous transport. We don't see the trucks going back and forth -- which makes the screen less busy, less like Command & Conquer's crystal harvesters.
The tiles worked by citizens in SMAX surely contain transport equipment. We don't see them shuttling resources. This is good, if you prefer less movement on your screen.
But we do see a direct transfer of minerals when a crawler is cashed in towards a Secret Project or Prototype. So SMAX has a hybrid system for transferring minerals (and 1 unit of production for base-to-base convoys).
In the end, what changes to convoys would make the game more fun and interesting to play?
Well, if you can program crawlers to automatically harvest and return to base when full, that would be great. A fully loaded crawler would be a high priority target, which you must protect with an AAA Squad.
But for now, I'd like to see the base-to-base convoy be more useful. If Sparta Command is thriving and Bunker 357 is suffering, I want to do something about it! <Santiago cares deeply.> Sure, I can send a terraformer to plant a forest or use credits to hurry production, but sending 4 minerals per turn (instead of the current limit of 1) would be worth the investment in a supply crawler.
A simple transfer limit could be this: no more than 50% of a city's production can be convoyed. More sophisticated limits--as are being discussed here-- would be welcome, too.
Why for example is it 100% efficient to crawl energy from a border borehole/solar to your HQ?
That would be nice to have re: retooling penalties. There could be 9 tiers actually (unit, SP, facility) to (unit, SP, facility). Granted 3 of those could probably be eliminated, logically SP -> unit is pretty similar to unit -> SP for example.
I think the below convoy-patrol/move mechanic only makes sense if the convoy 'charges' up excess nutrient/mineral/energy production for X turns before setting out.
I'd rather see a fire and forget system like the current but improved to be useful.
Another way to set a cap would be to limit a base's overall production based on pop. Not sure if that would be more or less intuitive.
Something like a convoy just can shuttle X resources. X modified by reactor linearly. Then diminished by distance (EFFIC). X should be roughly double what can be crawled else it won't be used. So somewhere around X = 5.
A crawler would have to sit in the base and collect up resources. For example a base with +5 nutrients. The crawler loads up 5 nutrients per turn. After 10 turns it takes these 50 nutrients to another base. Those 50 nutrients are then added to the new base. One issue here is that often you'd only want +2 nutrients in the target base such as for population booming. Generally N-convoying won't be that good unless the unload rate can be controlled.
For E-convoying, theres no benefit either unless the target base has multiplier facilities.
M-convoying, obviously is the most useful such as for SPs. In general the excess loadup and transfer is not going to be that powerful as opposed to crawling. Unless theres a multiplier involved, you benefit more by simply crawling the resource to begin with. Now with a crawler per base cap, it would add a level but only if the convoyable amount exceeds that which you could crawl.
Anyways I do favor fire&forget base-to base, and a crawler/base cap over resource-limited cap.
I wondered if a better nerf to crawlers would be to make them (optionally) cost 1 population like a colony pod? Essentially they function like an additional worker. That's what makes them so good - there's no population drop or B-drones like a new city, or N-drones needing PSY/police.
The only cost is minerals & former time. Nothing really beats dumping all minerals into crawlers pre-tree Farms.
That's why I also wondered about a clean mineral cap that goes up/down more with base size. If anything I kind of like this idea the more I think on it...it makes Pop-booming for longer, more important.
Alternatively, perhaps crawling penalties could be broken out by resource and negated by certain techs? Maybe this is a bit much, I'm not sure. But it's hard to argue that early-game mineral crawling to the ecodmg cap, and later on 100% nutrient crawling are the only real options.
Agree that there should be no CM cap. But then how do you curve ecodamage such that it doesn't get completely uncontrollable?
I'd argue of the 3 FOP, minerals are the most important early game. They're the most efficient to re-invest (pods, formers, crawlers, recycle tanks. E is weaker until facility modifiers. N isn't as crucial since a worker only costs 20N whereas a pod costs 40M. Therefore M are the bottleneck. M are also needed for SPs and military units. Without M you die!
The thing is early game formers don't even cost 1 mineral/turn. With PS you can run 2-3 per base for free. These calcs really ignore a lot including that Forest also spreads for free.
The incremental question here is how powerful is IA not the ideal strategy before it.
Even RC should be avoided IMO since police sentries are more efficient. Maybe for Lal or something who can afford to run early FM.
The other huge part of IA is that you can crawler boost a needed SP.
How about an ecodamage formula based on faction-wide M, allocated over each based on its M?
Then mitigated by # of Centauri techs
Therefore at low TECH, high M is punished more severely.
Creates an incentive to grow bases for more E than M.
Yea it would seem Librarian games would be faster (and perhaps more peaceful) as it's easier to run FM with 2 less N-drones.
Good points on ecodamage. This does curb the power of M-heavy late-game strategies. Although, they probably weren't overly powerful anyways once the E multipliers kick in.
Played around a bit without CM, have to agree it makes for a better game. Might try reducing the default PLANET multipliers for ecodamage a bit though. FM becomes a lot less viable at 6x the pollution of Green.
Note raising Hab is a big buff to Morgan (and moderate nerf to PKs).
I'm not sure raising Hab to 10 would have a huge impact otherwise. The thing is, you have to go for techs near IA to get food production up enough to get near size 7 anyways.
Of the early game facilities, I think I would only reduce HoloT's cost (maintenance). Yes Network Node, Energy Bank, HoloT are bad for low/small energy bases. Not sure this is a bad thing though as high E production should first require a lot of N production.
The thing is, E is always competitive if used right. Getting a tech first and trading it around for more techs or money is the only way to really stay ahead as a builder.
E can also be allocated to bases most in need (i.e. put into Recycle Tanks or Rec Commons) unlike M which you have to take what you get. Once a base has those then the value of M goes down (at least, until higher size/tech). Bases past #6 get less valuable (though still worth it) due to effic distance and B-drones, etc, etc. If anything lowering the N curve might be a good addition. Though that would have big impact. A better mod might be to allow overall techrate as a variable?
By N-drones I meant population size drones. Not sure the regular shortform (C-drones conquest, B-drone bureaucracy, P-drones pacifism)
Actually I feel that with ecodamage modded to be relevant then SE choice determines your strategy. Green will go heavy Forest (and some Boreholes) whereas FM has to go Farm/Solar and Kelp/Tidal.
Can't have much minerals now with FM past the mid game. FM/energy strategies should have the economic edge as Green has its own merits - strong native life, higher mineral production, and a lot less disruption from native life and fungal pops.
Perhaps just in the very early game I meant minerals were much stronger than energy. But the more I play I feel that E is just as important beyond that first expansionary burst.
Would be a nice variable to play around with though (SP rush ratio, unit rush ratio, and facility rush ratio). IMO they should all be 2:1 and some of the SPs/lategame facilities increased in cost.
Morgan I'm not too worried about really even if you do go with Pop:10 at Hab Complex. His -1 SUP really stings all game
Personally I think it's fine if IA is required past size 7. What makes IA so good right now isn't really the Hab portion anyways, it's the supply crawlers.
Actually being isolated is always a really bad thing in SMAC. Explore is as important as the others (Build/Conquer/Discover). If you don't find the other factions and trade/pact them then you will fall way behind a builder who does. That being said isolation can be very good. If your enemies are distant, you then don't have to keep much military.
Note though that raising hurry costs benefits M strategies (forest/mines) over E (solar/echelon).
And to get these you need E...WP might let you pre-build but still you need the techs to harvest fully.
And yea I do consider -1 SUP a pretty big penalty, one of the more steep ones. Early game this means only one unit supported per base. Meaning -1 minerals/base on top of the -10 on base construction (assuming comparing -2 SUP to -3 SUP though I find the SUP more needed than +2 GROWTH early, so I rarely go Demo early).
You certainly need at least one police sentry/defender so your second unit (usually formers) will need that support.
1 E from +1 ECON isn't as good as 1 M, so overall it's a penalty from the start. Morgan is good though because you can always get out 2 fast Recycle tanks at the start. The fast start outweighs the SUP penalty on later bases.
I think if Hab Complex were at 10 (which isn't a terrible idea at 80/2 cost), you'd want to bump it farther up the tree to another tech than IA. Perhaps one level to Silksteel or to another part of the tree less chosen, Optical Computers perhaps.
Yea though later game, farm/solar raising gets to be more productive than Hybrid Forested tiles. The problem is the cost in getting raised to 3k m.
Cutting down the productivity of forests isn't a bad change. Combined with some crawler nerfs/limits this really hampers the crawl tons of forests strategy.
Yup agreed. Would making it so that solar output variable isn't ignored in alphax.txt be a major change?
Cool.
For a single base:
Raised solar is around 90/10/75.
All forest is 63/42/42.
Condensors/4 Boreholes is 99/34/27.
Forest/4 Boreholes is 48/56/56.
But yea the problem is that the setup time for raised solar is very prohibitive. I think raised solar only wins out in really long games (satellites/long boom) or when having a lot of commerce.
I think that raised solar needs a bit more E production. I'd be interested in playing a few games with 1+2*elevation for solar production also, or perhaps making Echelon Mirror double nearby solars instead of +1 (a collector could only get doubled once). Even making small crawlable plateaus should be viable (think of a 3k plateau with 1 mirror and 8 solars). 8-10E would make it competitive with crawling nutrients.
Similarly mines probably need a mid-late game boost. At just 4 minerals they end up useless compared to boreholes. Unless you accept they go obsolete :)
Yea that might be good for maglev+mine. I feel that mines should get to 5-7 minerals later in the game.
It might also be a good idea to boost solar also (+1 energy to solar with road, +2 with maglev). Early on that would be a slight ecodamage increase since road is an improvement.
Nutrients might be strong very late, yea. I think this is more a function of satellite/Transcendi power (note specialists don't increase commerce energy). Otherwise 6/0.5/0 wouldn't be so overpowering for Condensors.
Also I feel like weakening Condensors only makes the Forest strategies better because before that point they aren't as overpowering.
Well I don't think 6/0.5/0 is any worse than 0/6/6 that Boreholes give.
You can down condensors to 5/0.5/0 but then that makes raised solar even weaker against Forest/Borehole or all Forest strategy.
Not saying that 5/0.5/0 Condensors are bad - if you keep sats and specialists as-is that's ok. But raised solar isn't superior in the mid-game. Only late-game does it become superior because of the extra nutrients.
I'd take 56M/56E of Forest/Borehole over 12M/75E with raised solar.
The other problem with raised solar is that the former time is orders of magnitude higher.
Also if echelons doubled, this would put 3k solars up to 8E. At 8E, it would be a more difficult decision whether to crawl nutrients or energy.
It would also make raised solar plateaus something worth making. Right now it's a lot less former time to drill an off-base borehole and crawl that.
It's not just due to Hybrid Forest or Enrichers that raised farm/solar isn't viable until very late game. It's because you're population limited until Hab Domes, so all those nutrients that theoretically make farm/solar look better than forest/borehole go to waste.
40M is powerful even midgame since you can invest that in formers/crawlers to get more energy.
Now you could put Hybrid later, which would make it so the Forest strategy gets ~15 less N/E. The N is less concerning as you can get satellites or even crawl a condensor.
Pretty much solar just doesn't compare with Boreholes for energy production. It needs to make a lot more.
The other issue with Hybrid later game is that it makes ecodamage very difficult to control. Raised solar pollutes a lot also without Hybrid Forest available
Far as crawling to get engineers/specialists. I believe these are only worth it when limited by space and in SSCs, but I may be wrong. 5E versus 3E/3M, it would seem that specialists aren't quite as strong as workers unless in a SSC. The thing is that you don't save any former time with specialists as the condensor has to go elsewhere, plus you're paying 30M per crawler (~10 per specialist). Working a Condensor is slightly better than crawling it also (1/2M,1E if at +2 ECON).
Why shouldn't crawlable solar plateaus be worthwhile? Not sure I understand the reason, you could say the same for mines or any other improvement. Everything should be viable in given situations, this leads to more strategies. It's hard to argue that solar plateaus weren't intended
Yea I meant limited crawling of solar plateaus. As in a few crawlers per base, it should be an option versus minerals or nutrients.
If pop booming is removed what I've found is the nutrients curve gets very steep...it's +10/N per worker.
Planned-GA booming would also be an option for +8 GROW (though requires very high PSY allocation).
I think CV would need a nerf also. Making it effectively +9 on top of the immunities to Power/TC (Likely choices with not needing the +GROWTH) is too much
Overall it might be positive changes. N gets diminished when all you need is that +2 to boom. I think in practice though farm/solar takes way too much former time & raise costs to ever create it. At 32 former turns/sq that's 640 former turns/base. So to fully terraform a base within 50 turns requires 13 formers, or ~8 super formers. 8 super formers are around 320 minerals by default. Whereas a forest/borehole strat only needs ~2 super formers per base. All those minerals into formers is what makes raised solar not so practical.
For the differential (~240 minerals), one could have two major multiplier facilities like Fusion Lab and Genejack in the base instead.
Then there's the 64 E/sq for top elevation raising - meaning 1280E to raise a full base which is several times the cost of the formers. I guess I'm trying to say the game is long over before raised farm/solar can be realized, the more I think on it.
but I think with satellites and +6/+8 GROW booms you'd be fine. If you can get a pop increase every other turn with all Forests and a bit of Condensor crawling that's good enough.
..., and sky hydroponics labs to substantially later in the game....
..., and sky hydroponics labs to substantially later in the game....
Any progress on being able to construct Nexus Stations and Solar Power sats before Sky Farms?
Crawlers:
Make them cost one mineral in support ( logistics in real life are costly as well ):
- It will make the early game crawler spam on forest a lot less powerfull.
- It'll still be viable to build a few to put them on forest for one mineral and move them on mines after ecological engineering, remote special resources wiil be still great.
- It will give an incentive to build roads to their destination in advance and not to send them too far away, especially in early game.
- Later the clear reactor comes, but at this point crawlers are at a competition with workers.
Make scrapping them work just like any other unit. Instead give them lets say 3 + (reactor) resource units crawl capacity when shifting resources between bases:
( They can transport up to 7 resources from remote tiles, then why only two already gathered ones between bases ?)
- Make popboom possible at +10 growth ( planned, demo, creeche, eadaimonia, golden age ).
- Clonning Vats give +2 growth, give Hive +2 growth - if early popboom is not possible, than this one more growth isn't such a huge difference, and late game popbooming wil allow this faction to live up to its name.
I am convinced that with these two fixes and tech stagnation, research curve will be just fine and for sure you should try to nerf crawlers and popboom first before messing with rersearch...
and put the CV as a late rather than midgame SP.
I found that with nerfing crawlers and CMs, it was necessary to reduce early game building costs. While the late game is definitely too fast, the early game is also definitely way too slow :)
The point of the nerfs is to make mid/late game techs and other developments last longer, if you reduce costs, than you'll negate crawl nerf.
How does conwoy penalty works ? I can't find description of this feature, does it simply reduce amount of crawled resources by a value ?
Add an option to change an amount of resources shipped by a convoy between bases and apply the same convoy penalty to it. Make crawlers scrapping like a regular unit and we are set.
Project crawlers scrapping for 100% resources is bad, it allows you to effectively build the project before you have the tech and then make it appear the moment you get it.
I would also make it impossible to start the same project in more than one base - it's another exploit that allows you to start to build a project before you have the tech.
Is changing alphax.txt values safe for my saves ?
And yea, there is that - Demo/Planned/Creche was very easy to boom with. I have Democracy at -5 POL, and Planned at -3 ECON. So if you run both it's very difficult to drone control that.
Some of the issue with the SE switching is that it's a bit fast by default (1 turn, and negligible cost for large empire). I think more turns would be preferable to very high energy costs.
There's similar exploits I mentioned with IND pumping/dropping. You can make crawlers then convert them at low IND, for more minerals. Then pump IND back up to get a cheaper SP. Extreme case you can multiple the crawler minerals by 2.6x. I think for that one crawlers would need to have a value associated with the minerals used to create them.
Obvious solution - make growth level resulting in popboom adjustable in alphax.txt, so anyone can chose what one think it should be.
If your land is fully developed, yes. The extra pop is always a big benefit. But as I've noted before, there's other exploits to get around booming. You can make colony pods instead in size 2 feeder bases at 20M, which is a lot less FOP than higher natural city growth (10N*size could be 100-200N in a big base).
Perhaps if city growth didn't require such high sums of N, at higher size, non-booming would work better.
But as I see it, cities have to grow vertically somewhat faster than linear in size (as horizontal expansion is non-linear, aside from B-drones dampering things a bit). An exponent of 0.5-0.8 onto N to grow would be better than 1.0.
I wondered also about whether GA should require *all talents* in the base, rather than talents > workers.
CV is also very, very, powerful due to removing Power and Thought Control negatives. It can be like +11 SE in good SE categories.
Yea I do play with drastically lowered ecodamage with 0 CMs. The default divisor of 300 is extremely high. Reason is that even 1-5 net ECODMG results in fairly frequent pops. I found around 8000-15000 was needed. Not much ecodamage early but it does ramp up late. Early on the -PLANET on fighting native life is a big downside just on its own.
Scaling current M for IND changes would be useful. To clarify I assume you mean bases would always keep the same % completion. i.e. a facility half done say 30/60 with IND+4, would go to 60/120 if switching to IND -2. Same should probably be done for N and GROWTH SE changes, though somewhat less crucial.
I've thought about SPs and unit rushing. As bad as crawler rushing is, pooling up energy to boost an SP is also exploitable. I wondered if SP races would be more interesting if they instead employed the unit-type rush costs (where rushing 0%>100% is very expensive, but the cost goes down to ~4:1 or 2:1 as you get closer to 100% completion).
In between SE changes you would either be stuck in the previous SE or default/frontier choice. Civ2 had the mechanic of 4 turns for government change, but I think it was rather rudimentary (only changed gov't on leap year). AC is definitely more complex, since theres multiple tiers. I'd have to think more on this. Scaling energy costs alone would probably help some but it tends to favor economic>war changes and make war>builder changes difficult.
The thing to keep in mind is that there's only 400 turns maximum in a standard game.
A few small nerfs to growth and tech here and there, and SPs also, and it doesn't take a lot more to make the game harder to complete within a normal timespan.
I think pod dumping would definitely have to be out with pop booming out is all I'm saying. You could also crawl N into a tiny base so it essentially booms every turn. Why make all that surplus N and go heavy +GROWTH in your big cities when you can crawl N/M into a small base? A few feeder bases would still be worth it, is all I'm saying. At most you would need 1 per 'real' base, and they can be scrapped once the boom is over. Their E production wouldn't matter.
This gave another side idea for crawler capping. What if rather than crawlers per X pop, resource crawling could be capped as a percentage of the base's *worked* resources? Maybe around 50-100%? I suppose another option would be something like X resources of each category per N pop (1-2X or so).
Either way I still don't feel that booming is that overpowering.
Further I think it's one of the few ways a faction that's behind can legitimately play catchup.
3000 was quite high - only Green SE was really that viable then. Past a certain number of pops, native life will really wreck your bases.
ECODMG = DF * Perihelion (1) * Techs * Life (2) * Difficulty (5) * Planet) / 3000
Assume 0 PLANET (3) -> DF * 30 * TECHS / 3000
DF = M -> 20M * 30 * 20 / 3000 = 4 ecodamage at 20M, 0 PLANET, 20 TECHs. 4 ecodamage is actually quite a bit in terms of pop frequency.
80M * 30 * 80 / 3000 = 64 ECO DMG late game (~20 with some eco facilities, 6-7 with both and green).
Yea SPs going from 16:1 to 4:1 also works.
Another option would be that only the negative of the SE you are switching to applies for a few turns, before you get the positives? The defaults can also be modified to be negative but I realize most players don't play that way (I opt to)
Yea I feel 400 turns is quite a long game. I guess if the amount of units to micro didn't get so high later on, it might be faster.
Personally against AI, most games don't last long as it doesn't play well into the early-mid game.
Yea I think that fix for pods would also work. The cost per pod would scale with GROWTH I assume? i.e. 20N at 0 GROWTH, 10N at +5 GROWTH, etc.
Still not sure how PTS would play in, though.
Also this seems kind of similar to the delivering N with crawlers idea, so I really wonder if pod dumping even has to stay in.
It's something to think about. A similar pod exploit to 'destroy' bases is to starve them down to 1 and make a colony pod, then just disband the pod in a friendly base. Not sure what I think on that.
I wouldnt say pop booming is OP but rather, growing a base without pop booming is too slow.
With default values and 0 growth, it takes 20 nutrients to grow from size 1 to 2. Thats 10 turns assuming you get lucky and have a rainy square in your landing zone. From size 6 to 7 and 0 GROWTH, it takes 64 nutrients. At 20% growth, its 57 nutrients and at 40%, 43 nutrients. I dont know how this is calculated because 80% of 64 nutrients is obviously not 57 nutrients...
That is a LOT of turns to grow a base normally if you cant pop boom.
Is that on a standard map size and difficulty? I think theres a similar modifier for IND on small maps.
Well, with ecodamages that high, I'd favor less significant increases in tech costs mid-late. Later Locust swarms (10-20) can completely level a base.
I will say I did have one exciting game once where it was a race to see if my Ascent city could survive waves of native life.
CV circumventing that is quite overpowering. Lore-wise it CV might fit in the mid-game but for balance reasons with booming out/harder, it needs to come late OR be toned down a lot. Otherwise it's game for the maker.
Fading the SEs would probably be the most 'ideal' but perhaps also the most complex to implement.
I think as long as the SE page can be accurate at each turn that can work. I assume you'd be 'locked' from further switches until completely converted to the new choice. i.e. I'm switching from "Green" to "Free Market", I can't pick "Planned" until fully "Free Market"?
Of course, sometimes the intermediary penalties are not that significant.
Stacks are a good idea. This would be good for combat and not just terraforming. However one issue is that units with same chassis don't always have same movement (damaged, Elite).
I'd say that some SPs are undercosted for their benefit and most were about right. EG, CBA, CV I think everyone agrees are undercosted. A few like Bulk Matter, Telepathic Matrix, were vastly overcosted.
Fewer are undercosted if you take down facility costs & maintenance (which I agree is a positive change).
It also depends heavily on what sort of SP switching penalties you run. A lot of the time you will lose an SP race.
Is there a way to make SPs go from 16:1 rush cost to 4:1 without impacting facilities and units? These seem like flat variables in alphax.txt that impact everything? I was thinking something more like unit scaling.
Even if theres a bonus to growth on small maps though, it doesnt make sense that 20% growth is more like 10%...
Yea for SE switching I was more concerned with hovering between a choice and Frontier-types, or SEs and those with no downside (CV with Power/TC, Yang with PS/Planned).
I think as long as the positives fading in are relatively backloaded it'll be fine though.
Bulk Matter is the +2 minerals SP.
One thing about late-game facilities is that they have a lot less time before the game is over to pay off.
Although cities are much bigger late, facilities all only give a % modifier on the base E/M produced. I'd have to run some numbers. Something like ~15-20 turns to pay-off would be about right, I feel.
but moreso than pay-off I think you also have to weight them against units. Units keep you from losing cities.
It might be more that 2:1 rushing gets rather strong, late, when considering that E doesn't cause any ecodamage, than that M costs need to stay very high.
I'll see about native life pops. I wondered if perhaps the strength of pops should scale up with ecodamage #, rather than pop sequence #.
I can't prove this but I feel that ecodamage # is not linearly related to pop chance, that it might not go up as fast. So many bases with low ecodamage actually are a lot more dangerous than a few bigger bases with high ecodamage.
The game I'm remembering might have been more of a race to VoP to get Ascent than VoP>Ascent. Might have been something like huge boils going around and new ones stopped coming at VoP, but I had to rush Ascent in the next 2 turns and protect the Ascent city.
Yea some randomness to pops would be good if doable.
For late-game play, I'm weighing facilities more against units and not SPs/sats. Units don't just defend your cities, they can pressure enemies and capture their cities or SPs. A pacifist/defend style might work vs the AI, but for higher level play you might get rolled over trying to go 100% economy.
I think increasing the labs curve would suffice for slowing down the endgame. Making facilities cost even more M late...I don't know. I feel they are pretty high already costed, if you're running like 80-100M a base you'll have huge ecodamage.
I think generally later game facilities probably should cost more, but they would need more benefit than they do right now. Most late-game facilities only give similar benefit to early-game facilities.
Of course this also requires E/M specialized terraforming choices.
OK, I haven't read up on absolutely everything in this thread so probably repeating things said already but here is my take on what crawlers should/shouldn't be and in an ideal world how their effect should be handled.
1. First of all the whole recycling for 100% production thing is and always has been bonkers, recycling in general in civ/smac is bonkers of course but crawlers doubly so. Just put crawlers at the same level as anything else that is recycled.
2. Convoys should really be separate to Crawlers and should be able to convey 1/(x*y) excess unit from one base to another every turn with x being the distance bases and y being a modifier based on technology. This would have the same effect as saying that one convoy can transport 1 unit between bases per x turns based on distance, which feels realistic. The tech could be related to Speeder/Hoverjet discoveries as that seems to fit.
3. Ideally I'd like Crawler number to be limited by a new specialist type (Technician/Engineer), a bog standard base being able to run 1 crawler at full efficiency but after that a specialist would be required to each additional one in the same manner with each crawler over the limit being half as effective as the last (averaged over the fleet).
4. Crawlers should also be capped in terms of efficiency by tech, I would start with a maximum of 3 units that could be collected by any crawler, raised to 5 then unlimited. Not sure what techs would make sense for this though, possibly related to 3+ minerals then boreholes (the tech only, not if you get the WP).
Having two separate unit types would be somewhat harder, though, and I'm not sure there'd be an advantage over having them actually physically carry the resources.
That would require enabling new specialist types,
I don't mean have them trundling back and forth on the map, just mimic it by transporting 1/5*y (my brackets are off earlier) per turn to a city 5 tiles away once the initial connection is made. I was thinking a seperate unit because a Convoy would be cheaper but would be consumed on setting up the route.
[/quote]That would require enabling new specialist types,
Ideally yes, but tying it to the current types could be possible.
Why is using crawlers to help build Secret Projects considered an exploit? Why is it not a legitimate use? After all you have to expend time and resources to build crawlers?
...At present I am testing the idea to slow research overall by around 6 times, so it is like 15-17 % of standard research rate. However, the early game should have discovery rate similar as in standard rules, so I made each faction to get appropriately more energy to direct it to research. This would work in early turns, and in endgame having minimal impact. I would expect accordingly 6 times slower research in endgame as compared to standard rules. Or even more, as I intend to slow down base spawning.
I think increasing the labs curve would suffice for slowing down the endgame.
Making facilities cost even more M late...I don't know. I feel they are pretty high already costed, if you're running like 80-100M a base you'll have huge ecodamage. I do agree with the 10 turns/fac : 1 turn/fac problem as M ramps up problem though, but it does apply to units also. So it's relative. Probably more an issue from late-game micromanagement perspective than anything else. Civ2 also had this problem. I think generally later game facilities probably should cost more, but they would need more benefit than they do right now.My impression is too, that late game may have more expensive stuff.
Most late-game facilities only give similar benefit to early-game facilities. Higher costs aren't such a bad thing, I'm envisioning M and E specialised bases to make the economy side more interesting. Of course this also requires E/M specialized terraforming choices.However, in late-game player has more bases and more population, so the same effect of +50% of something is accordingly larger. Increasing such effects would contribute again to "snowball" effect.
By making early bases have 6E rather than 1E? This tended to encourage ICS I found unfortunately. The problem was more with the curve. Midgame will be relatively slower, late game will feel about right in your case. It'll range from like 5T/10T/5T from early/mid/late which isn't too terrible
But on the topic of crawlers, if I didn't suggest this before. What if the amount crawled into SPs was inverse to the progression amount?
For example let's say we are using a 40 cost crawler to boost a SP
0% SP = 40 minerals
If the SP was 50% complete, the crawler would only get 20 minerals (50% left*40)
75% complete, (25% left*40) = 10 minerals
ETC
A better formula might also account for supercosted crawlers (though I play with flat cost, so less of an issue)
For example a 200 mineral supercosted crawler probably shouldn't boost a 200 mineral SP instantly.
Something like a max gain of 25% per crawler (50M), or maybe 50% (100M) might do. Or SPs could have a mineral% cap per turn, though personally I don't mind 1 turn SPs if you've stockpiled
It may be just me but I really think loosing the desired SP is penalty enough. Lets say you're Zakharov and didn't get the hunter-seeker-algorithm. Instead you have to go for another project that may be completely useless for your plans (one of those psi-bonus SPs?). I really think there is no need to get another penalty. However if you have a problem with SP-switching would it be possible to simply "cash out" minerals invested in a SP that was already built (at the same rate as stockpile energy works)? I'd find it most interesting if those minerals wouldn't turn into EC but instead turned into research-points (at stockpile energy ratio without any base/facility -modifiers for science output).
The "Production to research" thing sounds interesting. Is energy ftom "stockpile energy directly converted into pure EC or does it use the economy/psych/labs ratio from SE?
Then I'd really like an addition of "production to research" thingy... I gotta ask now: Is it possible (and does it make sense) to patch the GOG-version with your patches Yitzi?The "Production to research" thing sounds interesting. Is energy ftom "stockpile energy directly converted into pure EC or does it use the economy/psych/labs ratio from SE?Directly into pure EC.
Then I'd really like an addition of "production to research" thingy...The "Production to research" thing sounds interesting. Is energy ftom "stockpile energy directly converted into pure EC or does it use the economy/psych/labs ratio from SE?Directly into pure EC.
I gotta ask now: Is it possible (and does it make sense) to patch the GOG-version with your patches Yitzi?
...You could probably make a deal with GOG -they were talking to scient about two years ago- but there's no money and an IP rights issue with all the previous patches you've incorporated.
When I open up requests for the next patch version, feel free to nominate it. (Although I can't make the build icon for it, so someone else would have to do that.)Sounds good. In what type of file would you need the icon? I could probably help with it.
Depends what you mean. If you're asking whether you can buy the GoG version and then install my patch, I'm fairly certain it's possible (although you'll have to figure out for yourself whether the GoG EULA allows it; I suspect it does, but am not certain). If you mean making a version of my patch based off the GoG version: It could probably theoretically be done, but would require buying the GoG version, then breaking the EULA by disassembling it (unfortunately, GoG uses a modern-style EULA, which prohibits disassembly), then a lot of work for little if any benefit, so it's not happening.If I can use your patch on my game I bought at gog then I'm already happy. :)
When I open up requests for the next patch version, feel free to nominate it. (Although I can't make the build icon for it, so someone else would have to do that.)Sounds good. In what type of file would you need the icon? I could probably help with it.
If I can use your patch on my game I bought at gog then I'm already happy. :)
When I open up requests for the next patch version, feel free to nominate it. (Although I can't make the build icon for it, so someone else would have to do that.)Sounds good. In what type of file would you need the icon? I could probably help with it.
.pcx; the files in the facs folder would be the basic guideline.