SMACX AI Growth mod

[bvanevery]

Global warming is bunk but thats besides the point.

Heard on NPR this is the hottest recorded year for the whole planet.  I've had questions about the role of humans in it, but the changes I've seen in Asheville are gradually making more of a believer out of me.  The difficulty is actually swallowing climate science, as opposed to just taking someone else's say-so, is a lot of work.  At various times I've tried.  My last go, I failed because the publication had 35 pages of references alone.  How am I supposed to get through all of that?

especially with clean reactors showing up later in the game.

I tried them early in the tech tree at one point, although I don't think I released it.  The AI simply didn't use them.  Now granted, I could make predefined units with Clean Reactors.  However my experience has been they're not that useful in the real world.  By the time you get them, you typically have enough minerals that you don't need them.  And if you're trying to crank out troops for a war, you're going to take casualties anyways, and speed of production is more important than using up SUPPORT.

I suppose if I made the cost of a Clean Reactor depend on the power of a weapon, I could pretty much solve the problem of the AI exhausting SUPPORT, with all the defensive units it builds.  It would have to be available from pretty much the beginning of the game, before the AI starts obsessing about building too many defensive units.

Morgan is getting +1 support next patch? Interesting.

But he's also dropping to +1 ECONOMY and getting -1 PLANET.  He retains his Commerce bonus.  I have observed that AI Morgan doesn't crank up his ECONOMY all that much.  It's like he starts with so much ECONOMY he doesn't feel like he needs more.

[vonbach]

Heard on NPR this is the hottest recorded year for the whole planet.

Its NPR or National Peoples Radio as I like to call it. The studies and data they use to justify global warming are BS.
The Russians leaked them some time ago. Even if the whole western world went totally green and went back to the horse and buggy days
it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. India and China crank out far more pollution. I'm also old enough to remember when they
were talking about global cooling.

I suppose if I made the cost of a Clean Reactor depend on the power of a weapon, I could pretty much solve the problem of the AI exhausting SUPPORT, with all the defensive units it builds.  It would have to be available from pretty much the beginning of the game, before the AI starts obsessing about building too many defensive units.

This is one of the reasons I'd hand out support for some of my mods. Just to keep the AI from choking itself to death on units.

But he's also dropping to +1 ECONOMY and getting -1 PLANET.  He retains his Commerce bonus.  I have observed that AI Morgan doesn't crank up his ECONOMY all that much.  It's like he starts with so much ECONOMY he doesn't feel like he needs more.

What no Morganite green mean machine anymore?
Speaking of Green +1 Planet isn't all that good. It's ok but not very effective.

[bvanevery]

The Russians leaked them some time ago.

That claim doesn't even pass a smell test.  You can't fake an entire corpus of peer reviewed science papers.  A few papers here and there, sure.  But there are lots of climate scientists producing lots of papers in all kinds of countries, all with peer review.

Asheville NC happens to be climate science central in the USA, for historical cold war reasons.  They wanted data to be near to Washington D.C. and available, but not destroyed if nuked.  So locally we have a place called The Collider, which is a market driven incubator for climate science solutions.  Some time back, they were giving away the 2016 "status on climate" report away for free.  It has 35 pages of references in the back of it, all of them peer reviewed.  That's not leaks, that's science.

People who don't understand the profession of science, or peer review, aren't qualified to pass judgment on the material.  A general problem of science, according to Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that when professional scientists arrive at a paradigm for their work, they only end up talking to themselves as an audience.  They leave the lay public way behind.  Well, I certainly had that experience trying to sift through that 2016 report.  I don't have the background to understand it, and it would take much more energy to gain enough background, than I've been willing to put into it.

Climate science is frustrating because there's no clear high school level lab test that can verify anthropogenic global warming.  Whereas, if I want to know the charge of an electron, I can do that.  If I want to know the speed of light, I can do that, provided I'm willing to stand on 2 mountain tops far apart.  Heck I can even prove abiogenesis in a lab!  I can demonstrate the spontaneous production of amino acids, under the right simulated atmospheric conditions.  Yet I have to just swallow climate science because "it's complex" ?  Doesn't sit well with the amateur scientist in me.  I thought I was going to be a physicist in college, but ended up doing sociocultural anthropology instead.

India and China crank out far more pollution.

Policy problems are a different can 'o' worms.  I'm not impressed by carbon taxes, or trading carbon offsets, because I think industries and nations will respect those to about the degree they respect nuclear non-proliferation treaties.  They don't!  If you're really serious about stopping carbon emissions, you should shut down offending factories at gunpoint.  Or even invade other countries, if the world gets bad enough.  Fortunately it isn't yet.  But these are all ideas about enforcement and the reality is, if people don't want to enforce, then very little will change.

So, we'll see if we bake, drown, or get killed in mass riots or not.  At some point, I suspect the displacement of people from coastal population centers will be the real danger, not the climate itself per se.  Better be rich with thick walls and a private army, or else know how to make a bow and arrow, because there are going to be too many people running amok to have enough ammo for all of them. 

For now, I'm still putting my energy into computer games rather than how to make weapons.  I've tried making an arrowhead out of man-made obsidian, i.e. the bottom of a beer bottle, but I didn't do very well at it.  Maybe a YouTube video exists for that and would set me right. 

I'm also old enough to remember when they were talking about global cooling.

The basic hole I've found in the research claims, center around the subject of "ocean upwelling".  Having more radioactively dead carbon in the atmosphere, is supposed to be the fingerprint of anthropogenic carbon emissions.  But what if the oceans are spewing up radioactively dead carbon from their depths?  I haven't found any research materials providing any clarity on that.  Volcanoes can also spew radioactively dead carbon into the atmosphere, but the claim is they don't put out anywhere near enough volume to account for what's observed.  I'm prepared to believe that, because we haven't had all that many world noticeable volcanic events recently.  But the oceans are big.  So if there's some process whereby they can put millions of years old carbon into the atmosphere, it could matter a great deal.

This is one of the reasons I'd hand out support for some of my mods. Just to keep the AI from choking itself to death on units.

I'm moving forwards with Clean Reactor being available from the beginning of the game.  Initial testing is about whether the AI will make appropriate use of predefined units.  So far, it seems that they will. 

What no Morganite green mean machine anymore?

I suppose that is a consequence.  Won't happen in the early game unless he went Green and controlled the Manifold Nexus.  In midgame he could choose Green and Knowledge and get +1 PLANET that way.  Given how easy it is for almost every other faction to go Green in my mod, I'm not sad about this. 

The Believers also have +1 ECONOMY.  Maybe they'll end up being better Morganites than the Morganites, but the AI still plays them as a combat faction.  Hm, maybe I'll dump the ECONOMY bonus and give them +1 SUPPORT instead.  Pity to lose my description "tithings keep the church solvent" though, I bloody love that line.

Speaking of Green +1 Planet isn't all that good. It's ok but not very effective.

It's enough to let you capture quite a lot of mindworms at the beginning of the game, with no penalties for doing so.  It's plenty good.  You can make piles of money that way, fish lots of Artifacts, and mindworms are really the only good early game weapon available.  You'd have to think about what you're doing, but you can definitely destroy a nearby faction with Scouts, Synthmetal, and captured mindworms.

[vonbach]

Global warming is a hoax. They've been caught falsifying the data. Its just an excuse to ship all our well paying jobs to China
so they can work for pennies in what used to be our well paying jobs.

https://www.newsmax.com/MKTNews/global-warming-hoax-facts/2014/10/17/id/601458/

https://www.naturalnews.com/045695_global_warming_fabricated_data_scientific_fraud.html

NaturalNews)

When drug companies are caught faking clinical trial data, no one is surprised anymore. When vaccine manufacturers spike their human trial samples with animal antibodies to make sure their vaccines appear to work, we all just figure that's how they do business: lying, cheating, deceiving and violating the law.

Now, in what might be the largest scientific fraud ever uncovered, NASA and the NOAA have been caught red-handed altering historical temperature data to produce a "climate change narrative" that defies reality. This finding, originally documented on the Real Science website, is detailed here.

We now know that historical temperature data for the continental United States were deliberately altered by NASA and NOAA scientists in a politically-motivated attempt to rewrite history and claim global warming is causing U.S. temperatures to trend upward. The data actually show that we are in a cooling trend, not a warming trend (see charts below).

This story is starting to break worldwide right now across the media, with The Telegraph now reporting (1), "NOAA's US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been 'adjusting' its record by replacing real temperatures with data 'fabricated' by computer models."

Because the actual historical temperature record doesn't fit the frenzied, doomsday narrative of global warming being fronted today on the political stage, the data were simply altered using "computer models" and then published as fact.

[DrazharLn]

This is not true.

This is a debunking of a similar story, perhaps the one that your source is derivative of:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/02/08/noaa-scientists-climate-change-data/

In general, the very best way we know of for obtaining correct information is the scientific method. Many, many peer-reviewed articles attest to the reality of climate change.

Contrasting that, we have a variety of articles by generally unreliable newspapers and blogs and a few fairly isolated cranks and industry apologists.

It could still be that anthropogenic global warming is not happening, but the balance of credible evidence is strongly supportive of anthropogenic global warming..

Really, if there is a climate change conspiracy, who benefits?

[vonbach]

Really, if there is a climate change conspiracy, who benefits?

Communists want control Its just disguised as environmentalism. Never mind all the money they can make grinding
every last dollar out of people with "carbon taxes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSQuc69R9c

[DrazharLn]

Communists are not a powerful group in the world any more, certainly not powerful enough to influence almost the entire climate science community into malpractice. Anyway, I'm not going to derail this topic further.

[bvanevery]

Whatever China is or isn't doing about its own environmental problems, and what it publishes about that, might be an interesting thing to study.  Personally I think China pays lip service to Communism.  It's been more of a Single Party State for a few decades, mostly Capitalist, and lately quite autocratic.  I've read that Xi Jinpeng has set things up so that he'll be in there for life.  He has an Economics background of some kind.

Eco-damage is going to be a bit tamer in 1.34 as I'm eliminating the PLANET penalty from Wealth.  Too difficult for the Gaians to make money with such an obstruction.

Doesn't look like I'm going to give Morgan a PLANET penalty after all.  It was keeping him from choosing Capitalist!  Doesn't make much sense, as the AI would pick it just fine when the penalty was all -3 under that.  But split it across categories, and Morgan was balking.

Decided I'd take the Usurpers' PLANET penalty away while I was at it.  It's not fun starting the game with a fungal bloom before you've even settled your 1st base.  The Caretakers don't have any penalty and the Usurpers are the only faction that has one.  Not sure if removing this makes them too powerful or not, my jury is out.

Looking at reducing Cult of Planet to +1 PLANET, but giving them +1 SUPPORT to model their cultishness.  Believers getting similar treatment, no more ECONOMY bonus but instead +1 SUPPORT.

I'm running out of magic tricks to try to dissuade the AI from building Synthmetal Sentinels and Plasma Sentinels in abundance.  It's just what the AI likes to do.

The Clean Reactor does help with the SUPPORT situation somewhat.  I hope I haven't turned it into a cakewalk for the human player, but so far, I rather like the clarity that early Clean Reactors provide for my decision making.  First I built Clean Scouts, which are consequence free since they cost the same as regular Scouts.  Then I build regular Formers until I've used up my base's support.  This tends to put a lot more Formers out early than would otherwise happen.  Then I decide whether I want to build more Clean units or more dirty units.  Clean units take a lot longer to produce at the beginning of the game, so it's not obvious that you'd just want Clean units for everything.

In theory, a human player could swamp an AI faction with an infinite number of Clean Scouts.  In practice, they're slow, and they do take time to make.  I think a human might find it boring pushing all those units and might not bother in practice.  We shall see.  If it doesn't work out in practice, I could do what Fission Armor mod did, which is make chasses cost 2, 3, and 4 instead of 1, 2, and 3.

[vonbach]

Communists are not a powerful group in the world any more, certainly not powerful enough to influence almost the entire climate science community into malpractice.

Sure they are they just call themselves the left now.

Here's a question. Have you ever tried a test game after removing all the penalties to all the policies?
Just to see how the AI handles things and how much easier it makes life for the AI.

[bvanevery]

Strictly speaking, no I have not tried that.  But I'm very aware of the lower bounds of what the AI will and won't swallow in various cases.  That's why Green doesn't have any penalty to it.  Can't otherwise make the Gaian AI swallow it, even in the original game.  Even without any penalties, it's not a popular choice for other factions.  I've seen the Pirates do it fairly often, but that's about it.  I even caught the Cult of Planet doing Capitalist the other day!  Well the Cult can be a pack of liars, so I'm not completely opposed to that, but they are ignoring the PLANET secondary compulsion I gave them.

It's not my agenda to completely redo the SE table that I've spent so long developing.  This is the culmination of many months of work and testing.  I doubt there is ever going to be a perfect table, just as it's generally not possible to pack a knapsack perfectly with rectangular objects.  It's one of those problems where you have to try every single possibility to get any kind of answer.  Over the past 16 months, I've certainly tried enough possibilities!

Removing faction penalties is where I uniformly applied the "no penalties, to help the AI" sensibility.  I see no downside to that, as picking a faction is 1 choice at the start of the game.  The point of the SE table is to have 16 choices during the game.  I believe in having tradeoffs, where you don't simply get kewl stuff for having made a choice.

Having said that, Democratic is nearly consequence free now.  I wanted police units to be usable by the AI, so it had to be done.  Also some factions can't choose Democratic, and some factions will go to war with you for choosing it.  I suppose nowadays that's only the Hive and the Cult of Planet, because the Believers have free will.

[vonbach]

Heres a question have you tried making a SAM as a missile unit. There is a way to do I've done it once but I don't remember how.

[bvanevery]

Don't see any reason why that would be hard.  You'd make a predefined Missile unit and give it Air Superiority in its flags.  Thing is, my mod currently has no need for this.  I made the Needlejet chassis way too expensive and the AI isn't making hardly any planes.  I'm reducing the cost for 1.34 but I haven't gotten far enough in my testing to know if the AI will make all that many of them.  You don't need SAMs if nobody really has an air force.  In the original game, dealing with all that Needlejet spam would make sense, but it just hasn't happened in my mod for many releases now.

The Missile chassis in my mod is also pretty much reserved for long range ICBM type missiles.  They don't use fuel, which means they can hover indefinitely and get to anywhere on the map eventually.  That's rather un-SAM-like.

[DrazharLn]

Indefinitely hovering ICBMs would certainly make a continuous deterrent easier to set up.

In the base game you have to build sea transports (not that it's really worth it - I've never known the AI to try really hard at nuclear war and I think they're pretty conservative when you've got nukes of your own anyway)

[bvanevery]

The downside of my hovering ICBMs is they are exploitable as cover for ground troops.  However they're also rather expensive, so if you can afford to do that, well I might say you're just sandboxing the game at that point anyways.

I've run into trouble with my new "Clean Reactor from the start of the game" paradigm.  It's become apparent to me just how effective a swarm of limitless Clean Scouts is at close range.  It only takes a city with a Minerals bonus to really spew the things out.  I suppose this problem is why SUPPORT was invented to begin with.  I hope I can find a way to rearrange the costs and not just have to abandon the effort.

My current approach to Clean Reactor is "cost varies with weapon and armor".  This does leave Gun + Scout armor units an awfully good deal.  I'd like to define a weapon that has offense 0, can't attack, and is still considered a weapon.  I have a feeling that when I try, it's not going to work.

[bvanevery]

CHANGELOG
Changed from version 1.33 to 1.34:

SOCIAL ENGINEERING:

- Wealth: removed PLANET penalty.  It was hard for the Gaians to boost their economy.  The Usurpers are now the only faction that can get to -3 PLANET.
- Eudaimonia: reduced GROWTH bonus to +2.  Reduced JUSTICE bonus to +1.  Added +1 ECONOMY bonus.  I thought having +3 GROWTH looked really awkward and hacky.  From now on, most factions won't be able to pop boom unless their cities enter a Golden Age.  The exception is the Hive, because they have a +1 GROWTH bonus.

FACTIONS:

- Believers: removed ECONOMY bonus.  Added +1 SUPPORT bonus.  As much fun as it's been to talk about tithings, the Believers have had a confused identity for awhile now.  They don't excel as an economic faction the way, say, the Pirates do.  Generally speaking the AI plays them as a conquest faction, so their bonuses are shaped more towards that, and more like the original game.  With the new Extremist mechanic, they can gain +3 SUPPORT easily if they want to.
- Cult of Planet: changed research foci to Explore, Build.  Slightly rephrased description of ROBUST research.  Doctrine: Loyalty is now a Build technology and gives Extremist, which is what the Cult wants.
- Cyborgs: added +1 PROBE bonus.  Lowered PROBECOST to 125.  Now starts the game with D1 Information Networks and a BONUS TECH.  They're cyborgs, they should be good at probe stuff.    They are a weak faction and need strengthening.
- Morganites: reduced ECONOMY bonus to +1.  Added +1 SUPPORT bonus.  Set secondary compulsion to ECONOMY.  Morgan should try to raise his ECONOMY to +5.  I want the max to be +5, which means he can't start at +2.  He needs something else to keep him strong and no other factions have a SUPPORT bonus.  In my mod, SUPPORT is regarded as a form of Wealth.  Also Extremist is a kind of Wealth creation, so Morgan could go to +3 SUPPORT if he wants.
- Pirates: made them ROBUST to MORALE penalties.  Despite having a Passive personality, the AI always gets in fights.  It was not choosing Wealth because it didn't want a MORALE penalty.
- University: made them ROBUST to POLICE penalties.  Starts with a BONUS TECH, as in the original game.  They are a weak faction and need strengthening.
- Usurpers: removed PLANET penalty.  The Caretakers have no penalties, and now the Usurpers follow suit.  Starting the game with supply pods that turn into fungal blooms is not fun.  A PLANET penalty seems to make it happen more.

TECHS:

- Clean Reactor: now costs 2 as in the original game, and is available from the beginning of the game.  The AI obsesses about building various kinds of units, which runs it out of SUPPORT.  Clean Reactors help with this problem, even when units are more expensive to produce.
- Progenitor Psych: now an E2 tech, due to change in Field Modulation.
- Field Modulation: now a C3 tech.  This is an artifact of fooling with Clean Reactors, but it's good for prereqs so I left it.
- Biogenetics: set power=4 and growth=3, making it a C2 tech.  Police State increases PROBE.  Biogenetics is currently a prereq for 3 Conquer techs.
- Children's Creche: moved to B2 Ethical Calculus.  I have restricted early game growth a great deal.  I think the Creche is needed earlier to compensate.  The MORALE and anti-probe bonuses it gives are also needed for defense.
- Ethical Calculus: set power=3 as it now gives the Children's Creche.
- Intellectual Integrity: set power=0 and wealth=0 as it no longer gives the Children's Creche.
- Ecological Engineering: no longer gives +1 NUTRIENT production.  I'm regarding Build as less PLANET friendly.
- Centauri Meditation: now gives +1 NUTRIENT production.
- Advanced Ecological Engineering: no longer gives +1 MINERALS in fungus.  It was giving away too much stuff.
- Eudaimonia: set wealth=4 and growth=3, making it a B6 tech.  Eudaimonic now gives +1 ECONOMY.  Empaths make money.  Winning the Governorship with the Empath Guild is worth a lot of money.
- Subsea Trunkline: moved to B7 Industrial Nanorobotics.  B6 Bio-Engineering already gives Genejack Factory.  That's too many minerals to give away at once, especially if the Pirates combine it with their oceanic minerals bonus.
- Secrets of the Manifolds: now gives +1 MINERALS in fungus.  The lore fits, and I want fewer minerals earlier in the game.

UNITS:

- Free units that have a reactor: now all have a Clean Reactor, so that they can never cause a SUPPORT problem for a base.
- Clean Transport: new predefined unit available with C1 Doctrine: Flexibility.  Costs more but helps AI with SUPPORT.
- Clean Formers: new predefined unit available with B1 Centauri Ecology.  Costs more but helps AI with SUPPORT.
- Clean Rover Formers: new predefined unit available with E2 Centauri Empathy.  Replaces Rover Formers.
- Clean Synth Foil, Clean Synth Transport: new predefined units available with C2 Adaptive Doctrine.  They cost more, but attempt to distract the AI from building too many garrison and transport units.
- Clean Sea Formers: new predefined unit available with B2 Ethical Calculus.  Replaces Sea Formers predefined unit, which was only enabled in version 1.33.  The mechanism by which the game introduces a Sea Former is unclear to me.  Sometimes the game doesn't seem to do it at all, which might be a bug.  The Clean Sea Former is a viable alternative should that happen.
- Clean Synth Garrison: new predefined unit available with C2 Biogenetics.  This tries to distract the AI from building too many garrison units and running out of SUPPORT.  Note that although a Speeder based unit would be equivalent in cost, I don't offer it, because the AI will obsess about it and commit suicide with it in combat.
- Clean Synth Police, Clean Police: new predefined units available with C3 Neural Grafting.  These try to distract the AI from building too many garrison units and running out of SUPPORT.  The Scout based Police unit needs to be defined as 3=Reconaissance.  If it is defined as 2=Defense the AI will obsess about building tons of these, and they don't offer good defense.
- Clean 3-Pulse Garrison, Clean Plasma Garrison, Clean 3-Pulse Foil, Clean 3-Pulse Transport: new predefined units available with C4 Single-Sided Surfaces.  These units try to distract the AI from building too many garrison and transport units and running out of SUPPORT.
- Clean 3-Res Police, Clean 3-Res Garrison, Clean 3-Res Foil, Clean Trance 3-Res Transport, Clean 3-Res Transport: new predefined units available with E4 Bioadaptive Resonance.  These units try to distract the AI from building too many garrison and transport units and running out of SUPPORT.

- Needlejet Chassis: now costs 15.  In version 1.28 it was made excessively expensive.  It wasn't worth it, as it is just a flying gun, no more powerful than a cheap infantry gun.  The Fission era lasts quite a long time and calibrating the chassis soley upon Fusion costs isn't reasonable.
- Slider Probe Team: removed Deep Radar ability.  It increases the cost.
- Destroyer Probe Team: renamed to Cruiser Probe Team.  It does not carry offensive weapons.
- Trance Colony Pod: removed.  E4 Bioadaptive Resonance occurs too late in the game to be of much use for colonizing.
- Super Cruiser Formers: removed.  The AI designs Foil units.  In the Fission era, they are cheaper and work just fine.
- Trance 3-Pulse Cruiser Transport: removed.  The AI makes very few of them.
- Sea Supply: removed.  The Fission version is prohibitively expensive and the AI will never build it.
- Sub Probe Team: removed.  The AI rarely builds them.


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 1.34.  It was downloaded 100 times before I moved it here.