Children's Creches provide some complicated morale bonuses that are bugged AFAIK but the +1 morale bonus for any unit when attacking from base square is working as designed. ("parents will defend their home to the death"). Even mind worm units benefit from that and additionally get another +1 morale from the Brood Pit for thematically similar reasons. I'm not sure if mind worms were intended to receive both and will probably submit a bug report post and see if Scient wants to do anything about it.
It's a bug. It's ridiculous on its face. They didn't do all this separation of MORALE facilities for conventional units, and Lifecyle facilities for indigenous life forms, just for the lolz. Nevermind obvious differences in the social engineering effects of MORALE and PLANET.
Mindworms parent larvae. Yes there might be a human mindworm handler involved, but it's not a whole squad of them. You can't make a mindworm have higher Morale from a Command Center, and it's the Biology Lab that heals a mindworm in 1 turn, not a Command Center. I just read that in the .PDF of the game manual, not like I knew that off the top of my head. But it makes perfect sense and is rational. There are
parallel facilities for humans and mindworms. Bioenhancement Center is what it is because it benefits both tracks instead of just one. The Children's Creche is
not supposed to benefit mindworms. There is no simulation or narrative justification for this
at all.
I have no idea where your mind worm's additional +1 morale came from if that base doesn't have a Brood Pit.
The obvious suspect is the Biology Lab. And on that theory, anything with a Lifecycle bonus, such as a Centauri Preserve. Confirming this hypothesis is left as an exercise to some future person. These base bonus bugs / undocumented features deserve their own threads in the Bugs forum.
I am also using Scient so it could be that you're encountering a stock bug that he fixed.
Possible. Will mention that when finally writing everything up.
Overly broad and idiosyncratic definition of "exploit".
I say my definition's better than yours. The bottom line is whether something is seriously overpowered in a game, and not whether the devs put it there deliberately or accidentally.
An exploit is the use of game rules or limitations to produce an unintended result.
I don't agree at all. For instance, combining Thermal Boreholes, Condensers, and Supply Crawlers to Get Rich Quick is very much intended in the original game, and it's
still an exploit. Supply Crawler abuse is one of the biggest exploits of the stock game. Doesn't matter if you were supposed to be able to do it. They came up with an unbalanced game design that makes the pursuit of most other strategies pointless. Thinker Mod is even built around this exploit, it leverages it to the hilt! My mod attempts to blunt the exploit by making all these things more expensive to obtain, and much more research to obtain.
The Copter chassis is an exploit. It
was clearly intended in the original game. The effects of being able to attack with every single move, are catastrophic. The game designers were just stupid about this. The design imperative I think they were probably following was, "Well the game's got too many low level units at a certain point. We need a handy way to clean them all out." What could possibly go wrong?
My answer to that is the Copter chassis is banned from player use. I have only 1 predefined unit, the Unity Lifter, a Copter with a Transport module.
No weapon mounted. I also tried limiting Copter movement for awhile, but it was super boring, having these super slow moving units. So I got rid of the thing entirely, except for the 1 predefined special that doesn't attack.
If you want a conventional military unit to ignore ZOC rules, the game designers clearly intended to give you that option: use a Cloaking Device.
This is
not a "single unit per square" game. You can move stacks of units around. You can combine or break apart stacks at will, any time you want. You can make any combo of legal moves you want on
your turn. This is like Wargaming 101 and I don't see how you figure it's otherwise. You might personally want to design
something else, but the rules of the game are as they are, not what you want them to be. This game does
not simulate logistical "traffic jams", where a column of units can't pass on a road because they don't have room to get by. The game muddles the tactical, operational, and strategic scales, so there is no particular simulation basis for insisting on any particular concept of ZOC, stacking limits, or movement order. It's a "free movement system" and if you don't
like such systems, that's merely your
problem.
You're free to design a game with a different movement system, and try to get people to adopt it, or sell your game, whatever.
When I finally write a new 4X TBS, it's not going to have the "all offense vs. all defense" combat mechanic. Offense and defense factors are going to slug at each other simultaneously. Combats aren't going to be to the death either, they're going to be resolved over a bounded period of time. Standoffs and mutual bloodlettings will be expected. There aren't going to be any Armors that just bounce the incoming Laser fire and cause planes to magically fall out of the sky. There are going to be helpless troops on the ground getting strafed and taking damage, not really able to do anything about their assailants.
The point is that's
my simulation "pet peeve" about the game's combat system. I don't confuse it for being an exploit. It would be like complaining, "The Queen is too powerful in Chess! Look how much it can move around!"
It's bloody Chess. Play the game or not.
The AI certainly doesn't know how to abuse Probe ZOC like you the player does.
This is true. That's merely a problem with the AI implementation, not the rules. The AI is stupid about countlessly many things, like the pathfinding for Formers screwing up, when it doesn't screw up military unit pathfinding. Providing better AI, is a serious commercial development sustainability question.
The idea of James Bond successfully shepherding a tank division through enemy lines is laughable,
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that an
empty square is tremendously secure. If you want it to be super secure, then
fill it. Same as you'd have to do for sea or air combat. If your "line" is like Swiss Cheese then
yes, James Bond can most certainly lead the way and show you how to get from A to B.
But it's an exploit.
It's a flaw in your mental model of what ZOC means, from a game design standpoint. Plenty of articles have appeared in "various places" about ZOC systems. The whole thing arises historically from wargames with limited hex resolution, trying to model the phenomenon of a military unit controlling more than "just their own hex". Well there's actually no good reason to do that anyways, they probably just wanted to save some money on cardboard counters. Probably also on art assets for a given map scale, since a physical playing board was something you had to ship to your customers. They didn't have computers to zoom the map scale up and down to whatever might be desired. If you have enough units and enough hexes, you don't
need a ZOC system. Square's occupied? Guess you're not going there.
The game does feature the obvious alternative, in sea and air combat. Which proves that the designers weren't ideologically committed to some particular notion of ZOC, the way you seem to be.
Why don't you try going back to Civ II or even Civ I and see if you can't do exactly the same things with spies and ZOC? It's not like SMAC was the 1st cut at these game design mechanics. If they didn't redesign them, then they didn't think it was some big humongous problem. You do, and that's
your problem. The rest of us are playing an IGOUGO game with known rules of how everything works.
Defending with an AAA Garrison isn't an exploit either, it's
how the game works.
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