Pirates settling on sea minerals is good

[bvanevery]

Details 3 4 3

3 4 3

On land, settling on top of a minerals resource has not usually been good.  If it's Rocky terrain, you can't even do it.  Jury's out on Rolling terrain, it's been ages since I've tried that.  Building a Mine and a road will get you 5 minerals though.  On Flat terrain, a Mine and a road will only get you 4 minerals.  So will a Forest, so I always plant a Forest as you get more energy from that.

I've tended to carry these land habits over to the water.  It may not actually be smart though.  At the beginning of this game, I happened to have a sea minerals within ready reach of me.  I happened to remember that the max minerals you will ever get from the sea is 4.  I realized that in a recent game where I was sending out sea crawlers all over creation to very distant minerals.  I eventually realized their yields were not special compared to plain rocky outcroppings on land with conventional Mines on them.   4 is 4.

Perhaps 4 is the limit because you can't build roads on the water.  Even Svensgaard's Advanced Ecological Engineering special ability, where supposedly he can make advanced terraforming facilities on the water, doesn't allow for roads and rails.  That, I know I've explicitly tried.

Maybe only Svensgaard can get 4 minerals out of this, because of his +1 minerals on the water bonus?  That might explain my historical aversion to putting sea bases on top of minerals.

[Samanthaz]

What are the sources of these flesh most likely to be taken up or taken from?

[bvanevery]

Flesh?  I don't understand the question.  Thank you for reminding me that I'd already completely forgotten about settling on minerals!  Hadn't done many sea-oriented settlements lately.  I'm currently playing the Morganites, not the Pirates.  When the raging Mindworms die down, I'll see if setting on minerals is a good idea for them as well.

[Fibonacci]

I think you may actually have demonstrated a bug, as that should be 5 minerals from the base square for the pirates.

+1 as the starting amount of minerals for a normal base,

another +2 for the square itself having a mineral bonus,

+1 to nutrient/mineral/energy from the pressure dome (it behaves like a recycling tanks, and shows up as additional resources in the base square),

and then what appears to be the "bug":
+1 mineral from an ocean shelf square per the Pirate's faction profile (it doesn't specify "worked" squares, so the base square should get +1 mineral as well). I'm assuming that the "coast adjacent" ocean square is an "ocean shelf" as I've never seen one along a coastline that isn't. If it's not a shelf somehow then I'm mistaken on this +1 mineral.

Of course there's also the possibility that it's the faction profile description's wording that's mistaken for the Pirates, and it's meant to be "Bonus mineral from worked ocean shelf squares" rather than "Bonus mineral from ocean shelf squares" as in the attached screenshot (cropped and red ellipse added for emphasis)...

P.S. Yes, the subject is a reference to the movie Clue. 

[bvanevery]

I am doubting it's a bug.  It is probably "legalese" as to when various bonuses are evaluated.  I seem to recall that a base ignores the terrain benefits of the settled tile.  It just gets settled and gets the resources all bases get to start with.  Except for resource bonuses, which are probably added afterwards.

Similar points of confusion exist about Yang and Efficiency.  He seems to be immune to going lower than 0 Efficiency.  But it's capped to 0 after Efficiency is actually computed.  This has the effect of making it look like he can never gain Efficiency either, in various social engineering choices.  In my mod, I threw the standard behavior out, and instead gave him IMPUNITY to Police State and Planned choices.  It's much easier to calculate bonuses that way, and he can actually have positive Efficiency if he chooses various things.

[Fibonacci]

A semantic bug would still be a bug nonetheless, and could be resolved by changing the profile bonus so it mentions that only worked squares gain the additional mineral. Settling on a bonus resource gives the relevant +2, or settling on a river gives the +1 energy to the base (last I checked). I feel the urge to go check whether or not others, such as the monsoon jungle, give the bonus to the base itself.

[bvanevery]

I don't consider that "resolution".  In the real world, people will be confused because they don't RTFM for every rules mongering detail.  That's why I went with IMPUNITY in Yang's case, it's way simpler for a player to think about.

[Fibonacci]

Tested it out in the scenario editor. Pholus ridge and rivers both give the base square the bonus energy. Likewise for the Mineral bonus in the Garland Crater and the nutrient bonus in the monsoon jungle.

I think more like a technical writer than a programmer. To me it's cost and time effective to amend the friendly manual to provide clarity when it's sought. Any time I don't have to fiddle with actual code I count as a small victory.

tl;dr
I still consider adding the word "worked" to the Pirate's description file so that

"Bonus mineral from ocean shelf squares:"

reads

"Bonus mineral from worked ocean shelf squares:"

as a resolution to "Why doesn't this 'bonus' behave like every other 'bonus' in the game?"

[bvanevery]

I say again, "tight" wordsmithing that turns on tiny details, is not resolution in the mind of a player.  Paid consultants who need to intervene with their tight reading in labyrinthine documents, whether technical or legal, are the problem in society.  Not the solution.  Few people actually invest the time and energy to rip up the code and the rules to make them simpler.  There's so much profit to be had from the rulesmonger mindset.  It's a barrier of baffling and befuddlement to the rest of society, a way of holding power over them.  I say this as a computer programmer myself.

For SMAC, where even if you had .exe patch skills it's not trivial to deploy that to actual players, I'm only interested in whether there's a "good fix" available at the modding level.  If there isn't, I just say live with it as it is.  These kinds of problems, are a good reason to design a game with a lot more things moddable in human readable scripted code.