SMACX AI Growth mod

[bvanevery]

CHANGELOG
Changed from version 1.47 to 1.48:

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

- Theocratic: increased GROWTH bonus to +2.  Added -1 RESEARCH penalty.  +1 GROWTH is just too worthless to bother with by itself.  -2 RESEARCH used to hurt AI faction development quite a bit, so the penalty is minimal.  I tried +1 SUPPORT instead of increasing GROWTH, but the AI liked that way too much.  4 factions went Theocratic.  The only ones that didn't, were the University and the Cyborgs, who are not allowed to.
- Socialist: added +1 SUPPORT bonus.  Some factions cannot choose Democratic, so they typically choose Police State.  That gives a JUSTICE penalty, which encourages the choice of Socialist or Green to offset it.  Green has obviously been a better choice though.  This tries to make Socialist actually worth something.  SUPPORT is only influential in the early game though, when minerals output is low.
- Power: removed SUPPORT bonus.  Power becomes available in late midgame, and by then, SUPPORT is irrelevant.  It's only influential in the early game, when minerals output is low.  No alternate bonus is provided because the AI already favored this choice too much.  I'd like it to try the other Values choices.
- Eudaimonic: increased JUSTICE bonus to +2.  From a simulation standpoint, it's surely as just as Socialist.  Game mechanically, it's actually pretty hard to get people happy enough to consistently pop boom.  This may help slightly.
- Thought Control: increased POLICE bonus to +3.  Increased PROBE bonus to +3.  Removed SUPPORT bonus.  Increased RESEARCH penalty to -3.  Previously Thought Control wasn't worth anything in the real world.  Police aren't that useful unless they're 2x strength.  PROBE is increased because I don't want the pairing of Police State and Thought Control to be a given.  Thought Control becomes available in late midgame, and by then, SUPPORT is irrelevant.  It's only influential in the early game, when minerals output is low.  The RESEARCH penalty should actually sting, as 2x police and immunity to mind control are worthwhile abilities.


The attachment limit per post is 5, and I eventually ran out of room at the top of the thread.  Consequently, this becomes the new home of version 1.48.  It was downloaded 182 times before I moved it here.

[Patient Ember]

A friend of mine recently sucked me back into Civ V multiplayer... which reintroduced that terrible/beautiful itch that can only be thoroughly scratched be some quality time with SMACX. I grew up in the 90's, so, ever since I can remember playing video games, SMACX has been at the top of my chart.
Reddit brought me here and I was so thoroughly pleased to find people like yourself still modding this game to this day. Really enjoyed skimming through this thread! I will be installing your mod when I next have time to play.

So I just wanted to wish you good health and thank you for sharing your work 

[bvanevery]

Cool!  No prob.  And thanks for saying something, as I don't think a lot of people actually end up making an account to chime in.  I'll be interested to hear what you see as an improvement.

I've found the thing is somewhat capable of beating me if I start badly enough.  Like, I think you actually have to open well.  I could be wrong about that, because it may be that if my early midgame sucks, I just quit rather than stick it out.  But it's somewhat interesting to arrive at an early midgame that's kinda sucking for me.

In my current game I'm doing a legalized chemical extermination of several factions.  For some reason I'm still being nice to the Hive.  I think it's because I had enough enemies to dispose of already, and they're the farthest away.  I've also been nice to the Pirates who are all over my coastline.  They got uppity the other year, but I took 1 empty sea base they'd just built, and that quieted them down.  That'll last for X number of turns I suppose.

[Patient Ember]

Your welcome!
If I have any cool stories to share about my playthroughs I'll be sure to share them. I'm especially curious to see how the morganites are doing now because I often like to play with the original 7 factions, but I notice that in vanilla, the morganite AI consistently under performs. Usually I would just replace the morganites with the Pirates or the Drones, or maybe Cyborgs. I'll definitely give the SMACX faction lineup a try to see see how the Angels and Cult are doing now too!

[bvanevery]

Morganites are a lot more like a military industrial complex contractor now, in my vision.  At some point in my modding, they and the Pirates were the scariest factions in the game, because they were capable of being such economic runaways.  However something has shifted and they don't seem quite as strong as they used to be.  At least to me.  It's possible that I'm just better at beating them.  However there was a period of time when all the COMMERCE bonuses were majorly messed up, and the Morganite AI was Cornering The Energy Market with only 1000 credits!  Had to nerf that.

[Patient Ember]

So I finally got around to playing a bunch today! The poor morganites got stuck on a scrap of coastline beside the spartans and got pushed out into the sea. I mean it's the spartans; not too surprised there haha. They at least got some sea bases set up in time though! Lal is taking off because he managed to land by himself on the other side of the planet. The rest of us landed within a circle of roughly 30 tiles diameter (on your recommended map size huge.) Playing on a 30-70% land surface planet.
Spartans are now blobbing out a bit on the main landmass and setting their sights on their neighbours the gaians. Haven't seen much of the believers other than their capital, but I think they got stuck on like an indonesia sized island. Seen some of their sea colony pods scooting around though; sunk a few into the sea when I refused to send them tech and they DoW'ed me.
I'm playing as the university    and my closest neighbours are the hive   
Yang is on an australia sized mini-continent right off my coast while I'm on the same mega landmass as the gaians spartans and ex-morganite territory. Got DoW'ed by him and the battle on both sides is revolving around plasma foils escorting transports with laser sentinels. I recently landed some captured mind worms on his island and going to see what damage I can do with those.
I like how everyone is making better use of sea colonies and also they are using probe team foils now which is cool to see. Gotta watch what I leave parked in recently conquered sea colonies now or else they could get captured! Hive also tried to colonize some land and sea bases right next to me which was cool to see. Of course I had to go out and squish them but it was still cool to see.

Year is 2220 and I just researched superconductor. One of my favourite parts of your mod so far is the tech tree. It just flows better and makes more sense now. Example: Morgan's quote for superconductor 'I would go so far as to say that superconducting fiber alone makes our present economy possible.' Well now it's actually a build tech! --which unlocks energy banks instead of what it was before which was kinda silly --> a conquer tech that unlocked the gatling weapon which, in the old tech tree, often got skipped over to the chaos weapon anyways! It's the touches like these that I really enjoy.

And of course the balancing you did for social engineering looks great so far although I haven't gotten far enough to see the values and future society choices yet.

Overall enjoying it very much!

[bvanevery]

Cool, thanks for the report!  I definitely like repurposing the quotes when it fits.  Things like Superconductor make me wonder if the tech actually started life as a Build tech, but then they needed another weapon and pressed it into service with the Gatling Laser.  Maybe I'm restoring it to some previous stage of its development?

Single-Sided Surfaces is my rename of Frictionless Surfaces.  I used to have it for Clean Reactors, the idea being that you needed a Klein Bottle topology to recycle fissile byproducts.  That's ancient history though.  It's been used as "ECM and Pulse stuff" for a long time now.  I think it needs a rename, but Frictionless doesn't make any sense.  So I have to think about the quote and come up with something else.

In  my current game, I'm the Data Angels.  Spartans settled quickly on the Monsoon Jungle reasonably far to the south of me.  They've been spamming me with hostiles ever since.   I've found that even with the bias I've put in towards early game defense, Recon Rover spam from a nearby Conquer faction can still be quite dangerous.  I turtled up and went vertical in my scrunched corner of the continent.  I have been barely fending off the spam, building infrastructure, and emptying almost the entire world of supply pods.  Police State Green Knowledge.  I'm about to finally turn the tide with a Fusion Power offensive.  Mission Year 2249, so this hasn't been complete cake.

I'm playing my prototype version 1.49, which has a number of minor changes that came together yesterday.  A couple of months of playtesting has given me an itch here and there.  Like, I've played plenty of games where I've gotten planes, long before I've gotten cruisers and Carrier Decks.  I want Carrier Decks on smaller ships.

Gatling Laser will be separated from Doctrine: Air Power.  Fusion Power and Quantum Power will be more Build than Conquer, to make the build vs. conquer progressions a bit more varied.  They're also gated by Discover.  High Morale becomes expensive and comes later; basically I want it out of the game.  So that frees C5 Advanced Military Algorithms to be the bearer of the Gatling Laser.

Most importantly, University RESEARCH bonus will go to +3, and they lose the POLICE robustness.  I've played enough University now, to think that +2 really just doesn't mean all that much, compared to what the AIs do.  They seem to get ahead of me on tech no matter how many advanced labs I build.  That ain't right!

Data Angels will no longer advocate Thought Control.  Having a "darker" interpretation of Roze has been fun, but there's no practical value in them pursuing it at all.  Rational play is choose Police State at the beginning of the game and call it a day, to get +3 PROBE.  AI will no longer have any agenda, it's total free will for the Angels now.  I did the Believers that way for awhile, so I know what the consequences will be.  They won't get angry at your social choices, but if they do get angry with you for some other reason, there are no social choices to suck up to them with.  So it's a two edged sword.

Conqueror Marr will become the poster child for Thought Control.  Yes the dialogue won't be in alienspeak, but if you overlook that, it's in character.  Version 1.48 has 3 Socialist factions and I'm tired of it.  Proper alien dialogue ain't worth it.

[Patient Ember]

Sounds good! I'll def give the smacx group a try once I'm finished my current game.
I think I concur with your thoughts on university. I was a little surprised but not at all upset when I didn't have to deal with the extra drone or two during the early game. As for research I'm currently leading but for difficulty I'm just doing librarian this game and haven't been building a lot of miltary units so been focusing on colonizing a lot and getting those network nodes out. There was a time in the past when I used to only play 'abundant' setting for fungus and worms because I like the feeling of having to really struggle to colonize bases. I stopped doing that though because I noticed the ai factions really struggle with lots of fungus and worms so I switched back to average.
Thanks for the reply and looking forward to any future updates. Will let you know how the University / Hive / Spartan power struggle goes!

[bvanevery]

Yeah with a stock binary, abundant fungus seriously hurts the AI.  You are basically cheating for your own benefit, setting it to abundant fungus, although you might not think of it that way or notice for a while.  But if you've run as many automated AI vs. AI games as I have, for testing purposes, the pattern is quite clear.  The stock binary cannot handle fungus.  Gets early colonists killed all over the place, or mills them around.

I design for Transcend and only play on that difficulty.  The University has historically been one of the underperforming factions.  Even when I got rid of all their penalties.  Pure Discover just probably isn't a good research focus.  But in my paradigm, someone's gotta do it!  Other modders have noticed that +2 RESEARCH just isn't that great, in their own mods.  I think we nearly have consensus on this, that RESEARCH is a weak bonus compared to others.

Whereas, RESEARCH penalties of -2 or greater, seem to greatly harm AI empire development.  That's why my Theocratic only has the very modest, token -1.  I didn't have any penalty for a long time, but very recently, went back to Miriam's roots as a bible thumping moron.  I seriously toned down the anti-Christian stuff, but, y'know, gotta have game balance.
 

[Patient Ember]

Ah okay good to know! I'm really partial to the university because I just love having those network nodes to cash in alien artifacts early on. So I probably haven't noticed the university under performing because I often play them. I also like playing the gaians and peacekeepers sometimes too.
Despite having played the game a ton, I'm not super good. I can do transcend if I'm willing to save scum but I'm trying to get out of the habit of save scumming. So for my first game and first try of your mod I figured I'd do librarian but no save scumming (iron man mode?).
Good to know that you balance your mod for transcend difficulty though. I will definitely be trying to work my way up to transcend + ironman mode.

[bvanevery]

I don't do ironman.  I don't typically save scum but if some real BS loss happens, I will.  Or a slip of the finger at the beginning of a turn, when it matters, like at the beginning of the game.

My great Fusion Power offensive hasn't been so great.  It's taken time to manufacture all the units.  I have secured my borders from the spam, and terraformed all sorts of land around my cities that was previously overrun by the Spartan horde.  I've even squashed 1 Spartan city.  But the great invasion, hasn't really happened.  I'm now Police State Green Wealth Cybernetic.  PLANET is 0 and I'm doing a surprising amount of eco-damage in some cities.  This has made me cautious and I'm preparing to produce Hybrid Forests in some places.  I'm hoping a few fungal pops here and there will calm things down, and that I don't need so many of them.  Also some tree planting.

So now it's Mission Year 2080.  I just got C5 Doctrine: Air Power.  I think that means my changes to make it a more distinct and delayed path, worked.  The Spartans were already going to be toast, and now they'll really be toast.  Thing is they've built very little infrastructure, they've been producing spam all this time.  So they're this continental sprawl of spam spam spam sausage and spam.

I've reconsidered the renaming of C4 Single-Sided Surfaces.  Given what the quote talks about, it's still a decent name.  Maybe it's not the best name I could ever fantasize about, but I do have to work with the quote.  I don't really want to talk about things being frictionless, and stuff being single sided, does go with the idea of a surface "hiding from itself".

[desertsasquatch]

Edit:  I asked where to find the latest version.  I see it's on the first post of this thread.  And now I don't know how to delete this post.  Don't mind me

[bvanevery]

Always good to see the sasquatch race properly represented in an arid climate.

[Buster's Uncle]

 

[zoneplate]

Single-Sided Surfaces is my rename of Frictionless Surfaces.  I used to have it for Clean Reactors, the idea being that you needed a Klein Bottle topology to recycle fissile byproducts.  That's ancient history though.  It's been used as "ECM and Pulse stuff" for a long time now.  I think it needs a rename, but Frictionless doesn't make any sense.  So I have to think about the quote and come up with something else.

if you're looking for something like that, how about advanced metamaterials? works well as a stealth/ECM tech thing, after all.