SMACX AI Growth mod

[ChaDawnFanatic]

About the Consciousness. Yes, it's weak. I would suggest you switch the "can steal technology when capturing base" bonus with something else. Spoils of War makes it redundant.

[bvanevery]

It was the Taiping rebellion from 1850-1864 and it was one of the worst experiences in Chinese history.

Guess I'll read up about it, but "religion is the opiate of the people" is straight up Karl Marx.  Stalin installed Mao, so....

Our government serves its dominant people as well.

The people in our government exist to serve the government actually.

I think many politicians get involved to serve themselves.  They have allies in this endeavor: corporate lobbyists with deep pockets.  The government isn't simply its own end in the USA.  It is very much a tool of corporations, bought and paid for.  Individual politicians like this gravy train, it's a way of getting rich.  Sometimes despite the self-serving bureaucracy and the corporate lobbying, the People get served anyways.  Other times they don't.

You can get very far in politics, if you can craft a message that stupid people will lock onto, that provides a simplistic explanation for everything.  If it sounds like it'll benefit them.  The best example from the last election cycle is Make America Great Again.  [Sleezebag] never had the power to bring jobs back to America.  Those jobs are gone because factories only need a few hundred workers now, not the thousands in eras before automation.  There's nothing basically wrong with US manufacturing, it's as high as ever!  It just doesn't need workers to do it, the jobs aren't there.

Will the AI swallow an industry penalty? If so maybe giving it an industry penalty is a good idea. Just make Green poweful  enough to compensate.

No the AI will not swallow any penalties in Green.  Unless you think the AI should wait around until it gets Locusts of Chiron before going Green.  I don't.  It takes a long time to go Green even without any penalties.

[bvanevery]

About the Consciousness. Yes, it's weak. I would suggest you switch the "can steal technology when capturing base" bonus with something else. Spoils of War makes it redundant.

Playing with Spoils of War is cheating.     I intend the game to work with default rules.  The stealing ability is weak.  It doesn't need replacing, it's a non-event.  The Cyborgs just need more stuff somehow.  I don't really want to give them free Network Nodes and make them the new sub-University, that seems really flavorless and generic.  I will try the probe related stuff.

I could make them ROBUST to POLICE penalties.  They already have IMPUNITY to Cybernetic, so the lowest they can go is -3 POLICE.  I think ROBUST would mean the lowest they could have is -1 POLICE.  Which simply means no nerve stapling.

[vonbach]

No the AI will not swallow any penalties in Green.

That is very weird. Have you tried adding growth and see if the AI will pick it then?
That has to be some type of bug.
Heres a thought could you make Green a value and make another economic system in its place? Or move wealth there and make it an unfettered free market system or something. Or simply replace Knowledge and add planet bonuses to it.

Playing with Spoils of War is cheating.     I intend the game to work with default rules.  The stealing ability is weak.  It doesn't need replacing, it's a non-event.  The Cyborgs just need more stuff somehow.  I don't really want to give them free Network Nodes and make them the new sub-University, that seems really flavorless and generic.  I will try the probe related stuff.

Hmm. Maybe give them something to help them in combat. Make them a more aggressive science faction. Or give them sharetech or something.

[bvanevery]

No the AI will not swallow any penalties in Green.

That is very weird. Have you tried adding growth and see if the AI will pick it then?

A GROWTH bonus could indeed work, but it's totally inappropriate to Green.  Deirdre's narrative about carefully controlling population growth is core to SMAC's story.  I'm not going to mess it up.

I can't very well give Green a massive number of bonuses just to get the AI to see sense.  There's still a human player who can choose Green.  I also don't even know if massive numbers of arbitrary bonuses would even work.  The code doesn't have to be "if all these add up to be more positive than negative, then choose it."  It could be "if there's any penalty, barf."

That has to be some type of bug.

It is.  It exists even in the original game.  I did a whole thread about it in the Bugs / Patches subforum.

Heres a thought could you make Green a value and make another economic system in its place? Or move wealth there and make it an unfettered free market system or something. Or simply replace Knowledge and add planet bonuses to it.

That's actually an interesting concept, as it's possible that the Economy line has the bug, and the Values line does not.    Or that the AI tolerates penalties in one area better than another.  I threw all kinds of penalties at Politics for instance and the AI still pretty much swallowed it.

It's not easy to decide what to do with other social engineering choices though.

This might also require extensive rewriting of dialogue to keep it from turning into nonsense.  I've been holding off on rewriting Fundamentalist and all "the Lord" stuff because it would require me to ship another file.  A file that technically does not have a permissions statement on it for me to change.  The legalese wouldn't keep me from doing it, but violating the purity of what I think I am (arguably) licensed to do, has caused me to keep deferring it.  That and there have still been plenty of game mechanical things to change anyways, enough on the plate.

Hmm. Maybe give them something to help them in combat. Make them a more aggressive science faction.

Been there done that.  Discover, Conquer focus doesn't work.  They have to have Explore in order to grow.  And Explore, Discover, Conquer isn't really a focus.

I don't want to give them a MORALE bonus, as it doesn't fit the character of Cyborgs.  Pointedly, the Politics that gives a MORALE boost - Fundamentalist - is not something they're allowed to choose.  You can't get Cyborgs pumped up about much of anything.

When a faction doesn't have an explicit military advantage, like a MORALE bonus, I don't like making them Aggressive.  It seems pretty stupid to attack attack attack when you don't actually have any special power to do it better than anyone else.

My Spartans, in contrast, are Aggressive because they've got +2 MORALE.  It's worth noting that in the original game they are not Aggressive, they're Erratic.  Also in the original game their research foci are Discover, Conquer.  Which makes basically no sense, except to the extent that the original tech tree had some snazzy powerful weapons under Discover.  Now they're all under Conquer, in my opinion where they should be.

Or give them sharetech or something.

That's the Data Angels.  They don't even have to infiltrate anymore.  It's too much to expect the AI to push infiltration teams all the way across a Huge map.  I find that the new Data Angels have enormous early advantages, then tend to lose tech power as some factions pull ahead and become the actual research leads.  However with the new Explore research focus, they are triggered to grow a proper empire, so they can make up for it on sheer size.

I'm not sure if the Data Angels probe teams are a big threat or not now.  I've been using Isles of the Deep to fend off their numerous foil probe team ships.  They sent some regular ships at them as well, and I've had attrition, but I captured so many of the darned things at the beginning of the game that I had a lot to lose.  I've scoured Planet almost completely clean of supply pods, and I have a large number of uncashed Artifacts to show for it.

In my current game, the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm costs 500 minerals and can take a long time to get done in the real world.  I kept wanting to finish cheaper Secret Projects instead.  Supply Crawlers come late midgame so you can't rely on that.  I have numerous Artifacts but I want to pop them for a big tech rush.  I'm just waiting to steal the last tech that the Data Angels have managed to cobble together for themselves.

[vonbach]

A GROWTH bonus could indeed work, but it's totally inappropriate to Green.

It is but Its one of the few solutions I can think of other than simply removing all the penalties.

That's actually an interesting concept, as it's possible that the Economy line has the bug, and the Values line does not.    Or that the AI tolerates penalties in one area better than another.  I threw all kinds of penalties at Politics for instance and the AI still pretty much swallowed it.

It's not easy to decide what to do with other social engineering choices though.

I experimented with something like that in the past years back. I think It should work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system

Maybe this can give you some inspiration. Maybe some variation on the three main types of economic systems.
Free market Capitalism. Planned and a Mixed economic system like Socialism or Corporatism.

[bvanevery]

A GROWTH bonus could indeed work, but it's totally inappropriate to Green.

It is but Its one of the few solutions I can think of other than simply removing all the penalties.

What if it's only the third slot that has the bug?  Maybe if I swap Socialist and Green, things work??  I will find out.

What if I switched columns, like made the "Nones" all the way to the right?  What if I switched rows, like Politics for Economics?

[vonbach]

What if it's only the third slot that has the bug?  Maybe if I swap Socialist and Green, things work??  I will find out.

What if I switched columns, like made the "Nones" all the way to the right?  What if I switched rows, like Politics for Economics?

Thats something to test actually. Heres a thought try your standard Green with - growth penalty but put the negatives ahead of the positives and see if that works.

[bvanevery]

Boy it would really suck ass if it's an order of appearance bug.  I wonder how many permutations of stuff I'll end up going through before finding an answer, if there's an answer.  Could end up being a NP completeness test matrix, have to try everything.

I wonder what happens if I put -GROWTH and +GROWTH in the same choice?  Like could it get the code to take a different branch path?

[Geo]

Same might count for those SP's that negates the negatives of certain social settings. If they're slot-linked as well...

[Vidsek]

   I see an opening here for several Unpaid Modtester positions.  You should advertise

  Multiple OCD 'completionist' gameplayers instead of multiple CPUs: it'd be like a supercomputer

      <suddenly realizes what he might have talked himself into and wishes he wasn't too lazy to delete this post....>

[bvanevery]

Don't worry, even with 4 volunteers, the exponential complexity of NP complete problems will kill all productivity.     This is like 1st year Computer Science theory, big O() notation.

The simplest test is to swap the positions of Socialist and Green.

I'm just in the middle of a game now.  I'd like to think I'm going to win it Real Soon Now.  I popped like 18 Artifacts in 1 turn.  But now there are all these expensive Secret Projects to build, and I don't have the productivity to just bang them out.  As I take over my enemies with rails, I need garrison troops, so I've stopped making supply crawlers.  I do make a lot of money at least, so eventually things will get done, but it doesn't feel like a blitz.

[vonbach]

Try reversing the negative values. I got one of my custom factions to use Green doing this.

Most are using simple economics though. You might want to remove any bonuses from it.

[Vidsek]

    If you'd like a break from the same-ol-same-ol railway to victory, I've made a map that has seven small continents with decent ocean gaps between them.  It's a 'Go Navy or Stay Home' setup that encourages extensive early building.
   I've been using it to see how the various factions compare in early game preconflict situations.
   It can be easily adjusted to rich or poor resources, and my tests with starting random placement games showed that the AI only puts two on the same continent about 40% of the time.  The rest have them nicely separated.

   Productivity is largely dependent on personal motivation.  Give an OCD Completionist person a goal and you just have to clear the way for them. 
  If you want to make a new game you should start gathering a team now.

   And no, I'm not exactly volunteering, my OCD is dedicated to the weeds on my property and these damn Argentinian pissants that are intruding in my house.

[bvanevery]

    If you'd like a break from the same-ol-same-ol railway to victory, I've made a map that has seven small continents with decent ocean gaps between them.

What size is the map?

  If you want to make a new game you should start gathering a team now.

Oh hell no.  You've obviously never read Fred P. Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month.  The only way I'll ever have a team is if I'm already making money hand over fist, so that I'm the boss and there's no (strategic) arguing over what direction the game is going in.  Even then, it remains to be seen if I'll ever want a team.