Two Wonderings

[Ajantaka]

1) One of the few things I don't like about SMAX, which is shared by most strategic level games, is that in the latter games the armies often grow to huge proportions and it takes forever to complete a move.  This is made worse because you can't move whole stacks together.  Has anyone ever suggested (of course they have, there is nothing new under the sun) a modification to limit the size of a faction's armed forces based on some combination of population/govt type/economic system/level of unrest ect.?

2)I have often wondered about why and when factions commit atrocities and specific kinds of atrocities.  There seems to be no pattern.  That is, no faction is more prone to it than any other, they seem to occur randomly, as does the kind of atrocity.  Of course, if one or more factions starts using atrocities, especially planet-busters, then this can lead other factions to respond in self defense.  But am I wrong?  Are some factions more prone to this than others?  Do any of the factions have prefered kinds of atrocities?  The whole subject has always seemed mysterious to me.  Would appreciate any enlightenment on it.

Thanks

[Yitzi]

1) One of the few things I don't like about SMAX, which is shared by most strategic level games, is that in the latter games the armies often grow to huge proportions and it takes forever to complete a move.  This is made worse because you can't move whole stacks together.  Has anyone ever suggested (of course they have, there is nothing new under the sun) a modification to limit the size of a faction's armed forces based on some combination of population/govt type/economic system/level of unrest ect.?

I don't think so.  In any case, I think a better way to fix it is simply have late-game units cost substantially more (and be substantially more powerful), so that the increased production goes toward stronger units rather than more units.

2)I have often wondered about why and when factions commit atrocities and specific kinds of atrocities.  There seems to be no pattern.  That is, no faction is more prone to it than any other, they seem to occur randomly, as does the kind of atrocity.  Of course, if one or more factions starts using atrocities, especially planet-busters, then this can lead other factions to respond in self defense.  But am I wrong?  Are some factions more prone to this than others?  Do any of the factions have prefered kinds of atrocities?  The whole subject has always seemed mysterious to me.  Would appreciate any enlightenment on it.

AI is the main area that I don't deal with.

[ete]

There is an AI flag in secnario editor labelled something like wantonly commit atrocities which encourages certain AI to use them more. Personally I've only had Hive initiate PB war, which fits with some of their characterization. As for #1, support costs are meant to handle this kinda, but clean reactors later on remove the limit. My personal feeling is that having scriptable sane automation for units, so you generally micro less and less as the game progresses, would be a great help. Hopefully the opensmac project will help out

[JarlWolf]

With my experience in custom factions, generally you have 5 behaviour toggles:

3 for how aggressive the AI is,

2 for whether its happy to commit atrocities or not.

The following are:

Aggressive-intermediate-pacifist

Yes and no essentially. Been a while since I touched it but that's the gist. Factions which are aggressive, even if they aren't atrocity prone aren't beyond committing atrocity: It just depends on circumstance. When you get aggressive or at least intermediate with atrocity, then you'd also see it more.

I can't recall any specific atrocity happy pacifists, but behaviour wise that'd probably just be a peaceful faction that doesn't mind nerve stapling its own citizens.

[Ajantaka]

Interesting replies all.  Increasing the costs of units as game progresses would be very good.  As to atrocities, I  have had every faction, at one time or another, not just respond to atrocity with atrocity but commit the first atrocity of the game.  But it all seems very random.  Some games no atrocities by anyone and some are a bloodbath with planet busters/poison gas/genocidal destruction of captured cities all over the place.  This includes the 'pacifist' factions.

[Yitzi]

Interesting replies all.  Increasing the costs of units as game progresses would be very good.

It's not too hard; unit calculation mode 1 (in my patch) is designed to allow for high weapon and armor values at higher levels without imbalancing the offense/defense costs, and high costs even with high reactors.  You might want to try with calculation mode 1, and with the offense/defense values given here.  (I've reconsidered some of the other ideas in that post, but the armor/weapon values still seem good.)

[Seleuceia]

IIRC, Kyrub stated that each of the SMAC factions has a slightly different AI engine (beyond just what is in the faction's .txt) while the SMAX factions all use the same engine...

He claimed he actually could see things like the Believers being predisposed to build lots of naval units, I unfortunately don't remember any other examples...I don't know if atrocities is involved in all of that....

[Mr. President]

Apologies if this thread is too old, but it sort of caught my attention because I've often wondered much the same things.

Is it possible that the frequency of atrocities has something to do with the difficulty level? I usually play on Talent or Librarian, and I feel that I almost never see the AI committing atrocities (although I sometimes see factions building nerve gas units if the UN Charter has been repealed).

[Nexii]

1) One of the few things I don't like about SMAX, which is shared by most strategic level games, is that in the latter games the armies often grow to huge proportions and it takes forever to complete a move.  This is made worse because you can't move whole stacks together.  Has anyone ever suggested (of course they have, there is nothing new under the sun) a modification to limit the size of a faction's armed forces based on some combination of population/govt type/economic system/level of unrest ect.?

SUPPORT SE is supposed to limit your army size based on those above factors.  The issue is that late-game units still only cost 1 mineral/turn each so it becomes less significant.  You can try modifying the support divisor in Yitzi's patch to make late-game armies cost more to maintain.  Something like 1 mineral of maintenance per 1 (or even 2/3) mineral rows of unit cost will make it very expensive to maintain big armies.  I find It's more a problem I find for mass formers - making Clean not selectable for terraformers goes a long way to reducing mass unit spam also.  And while getting to +3 SUP is possible with PS/Power, it's not the ideal choice for growth with mass formers.  Alternatively, you could make formers cost more but terraform more quickly.

Increasing late-game unit costs somewhat helps as well.  But keep in mind that native life has static costs, so making late-game units too expensive will mean that native life armies will be the only viable armies.

[Yitzi]

Increasing late-game unit costs somewhat helps as well.  But keep in mind that native life has static costs, so making late-game units too expensive will mean that native life armies will be the only viable armies.

No it won't, as even in the late game there's nothing stopping you from getting empath scout rovers and trance 3-res defenders.

[Nexii]

True, well if anything it makes defense stronger with mixed armies.  Empath 1/1 rovers can't attack native life stacked with a normal (high defense) sentry.  Maybe not such a bad thing throughout the game - encourages artillery and mixed attack forces.  Combat gets a lot more complex at late-game with drop troops, air,  bunkers, etc.  Unarmored empath infantry could be used to break mixed stacks cost effectively, but only if weapon costs don't get too high relative to native life cost.

[Yitzi]

True, well if anything it makes defense stronger with mixed armies.  Empath 1/1 rovers can't attack native life stacked with a normal (high defense) sentry.  Maybe not such a bad thing throughout the game - encourages artillery and mixed attack forces.  Combat gets a lot more complex at late-game with drop troops, air,  bunkers, etc.  Unarmored empath infantry could be used to break mixed stacks cost effectively, but only if weapon costs don't get too high relative to native life cost.

I think that sort of issue is where artillery is best.