half the tech tree doesn't matter

[bvanevery]

Hmm, I see you changed the Short Names for some of the techs, and occasionally the long name for flavor reasons (like not wanting the Progenitors).  But I'm not seeing that you changed gameplay much?

I guess the degree of change is relative.  The changes I've made for my mod are vast, although I've only reshuffled all the abilities.  Like yourself, I've required every tech to transcend.  I doubt that will actually make the game take any longer, in my case.  I still believe that 1/2 of the tech tree is superfluous gewgaws.  Lots of stuff, yeah you can build them, but you won't get any value out of them before the game ends.

The most dramatic change I've made, is I've re-weighted all the AI hints to reflect what the granted abilities actually do for the player.  A Recycling Tank is not a kind of discovery for instance, it's a kind of Build improvement.  There are large numbers of Conquer techs because that's what the game actually has in it.  This is my biggest playtesting concern, whether the AI will do something reasonable with the new weights I've given it.

[gwillybj]

You're totally correct. Very little gameplay change. Just removing what I didn't want and playing with other things. All for fun.

In order to make the game last longer:

• 180x360 random maps (lightly edited to remove stupid stuff)
• Tech Stagnation turned On
• In alphax.txt, under #RULES, the technology discovery rate is 50

These three things make it unlikely any faction will be in a winning position too soon after getting Fusion Power, as happens so often in unmodified games. My games go well past that, getting into Quantum and Singularity engines and all the weapons and armor up there. The maps I keep don't prevent early contact. It all comes together in a package that makes me happy.

[bvanevery]

Ok but how many hours does it typically take for you to play one of your games?  "Lasting longer" is fine, and I appreciate trying to make the late game tech actually worth paying attention to instead of a WHIZZ! there it goes sort of thing... but I do wonder at the quality of "long" hours of play overall.  I've done massive AARs, as I'm sure you're aware by now.  My biggest one was 80 hours of production time.  I don't consider that to have been a satisfying game, nor one that most people would have wanted to play.  Rather, for me it was a frontier, both in playing and in writing.

[gwillybj]

   My games aren't just lengthy novels. War and Peace, in large print, even. They're more like multi-volume epics . A Game of Thrones, replacing the light fantasy of that with the heavy stuff from War and Peace. I apologize for the poor choice for comparison ; instead, binge-read The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. A true Epic story, right there . That's how it plays for me.

To answer your question: It isn't unusual for a game to take three or four weeks , playing eight or more hours a day , depending on my obligations here at home. I have a lot of time, being unemployed due to my combined disabilities.

My approach to the game is obviously vastly different from yours; I hope that's okay. I thoroughly enjoy these games. I never get bored. I do a bit of record-keeping on the side, influenced by my years of pencil-and-paper RPGs – always keeping my mind busy somewhere; I might even be online, reading the many top-quality posts here at AC2 ! If this were a print newspaper, it would easily win awards .

[bvanevery]

Fine if you are happy with what you do.  I just have very different requirements for "epic long" duration games, and I don't think anything about SMAC's content is sufficient for a one month game.  I think most gamers would agree with me, although I don't know about most 4X TBS gamers as it's a self-selecting audience.  I used to try to figure out how to make a game like SMAC shorter.  Recently I've considered the possibility of going the other way, of making it longer, serializing the content and play sessions.  But most people simply aren't going to pay attention to the same-old same-old for an entire month.  Much more has to happen than just being given a bigger gun every few days.

To me the biggest difficulty of serializing a game, is what's going to make the player pick up the game again, after they've saved and gone to bed?  Especially if 2..3 days go by until they start playing again.  It's tough to keep someone's attention unless there's something absolutely gripping about the game, and SMAC in that regard is not gripping.