gameplay changes in Yitzi patch 3.5d?

[bvanevery]

I've spent some time wrapping my head around what Yitzi patch actually does.  I've read readmes for some of the various releases, and I found the wiki page for Yitzi's Patch.  Mostly the intent seems to be to fix bugs and provide options for modders that don't have to be used.  Thus dropping in a Yitzi patch usually wouldn't change gameplay in any way.  However, going over alphax.txt with a diff tool I've noticed 3 places where gameplay might indeed have been changed:

• the firepower of Conventional Missiles is changed from 12 to 18
• the minerals cost of Stockpile Energy is changed from 0 to 2
• the tech requirement for Ascent to Transcendence is changed from "Thresh" to "None"

I found an old thread about Conventional Missiles.  It talked about the original code having "firepower + 50%" as the actual effective attack of a missile.  So in the original game, if the firepower is 12, the actual attack is 18.  Now, it could be that Yitzi changed how the game formula actually works, so that if you write "18" in the alphax.txt file, now you get an actual attack of 18.

The problem is, from a modder's perspective, it's not good to have Yitzi coding values one way and a standard SMAC game coding values another way.  I want to write 1 number that works the same way as in a standard game.  I don't want to have to write a "Yitzi version" of a mod that I make.  In fact, in general, I've decided that I never would, unless I wanted to take advantage of Yitizi's specific modding features.  If I want to get into fungal pop stuff, Yitzi offers a lot of options for that, and I'd require Yitzi for such a mod.  But as it happens I don't, I've mainly concerned myself with reshuffling tech trees.  I have been modding missiles, although at present I've been more worried about Planet Busters than Conventional Missiles.  If I could figure out how to add more than one missile chassis to the game though, then I'd definitely have reason for concern.  I don't want the behavior of my mod to change if someone is using a Yitzi patch.

The issue came to my attention due to the recent Game of the Month, April 2018.  Enemy factions lob a lot of Conventional Missiles at me.  Mart's original scenario required a Yitzi patch.  Then he realized none of his changes actually required Yitzi, so he made a "standard SMACX" version of the scenario as well.  Since I was getting hit with so many missiles, I started to wonder if choosing to play Yitzi vs. straight SMACX, would change the amount of damage that missiles did to me.  I'm not clear what the answer is, which is why I've asked the Question.

I'm less in a stew about Stockpile Energy, but again, is this some internal equation change that Yitzi made, so it all works out the same?  That's still not optimal for a modder, because now there are 2 ways to encode values.  On the other hand, if Yitzi actually made it more expensive for a player to Stockpile Energy, I'm not in favor of a patch changing the game like that.  Maybe there was some bug with exploiting Stockpile Energy that he thought he needed to solve by doing that, but I think I'd rather have everyone's games working the same way.  I don't know what the actual story is here as I haven't pored over the archives to find an answer, hence a Question.

Finally, Ascent to Transcendence, I'm not sure what's going on here.  Pretty sure either the Datalinks or the flavor text said, once Voice of Planet has been built, anyone can build the Ascent to Transcendence.  But the straight SMACX file would seem to say, you have to know the Threshold of Transcendence in order to do it.  I don't remember how it actually works in practice, because I don't like transcending.  I'm like Roze in the current Game of the Month, I'm morally opposed to ending individual sentience.  So I will always never do it, it represents the death of humanity to me.  Anyways, the point is I don't have enough clues here.  If a standard game is doing it one way, and Yitzi is doing it another, that's a pretty big change!  A patch shouldn't do that.

Now, depending on answers, what to do about it... well I've been reading the "disassembly coordination" thread.  But Yitzi patch might be a difficult piece of work to modify and maintain, in his absence.

[Green1]

You should not have to defend anything. You should go with what works, and discard anything that does not. While hard work is appreciated, only someone with issues with criticism would be offended if their work was not used.

But, to be fair, Yitzi had a lot of drive by downloaders that would just try it out, see it crashed their game (or would not install), and never show up again for feedback. Yitzi really needed willing guinea pigs... and listened to said guinea pigs. AC2 probably dropped the ball there. But neither were the bugs like the faction graphics multiplayer bug fixed that everyone really wanted. No one listened.

[bvanevery]

I'll be fine with whatever I personally decide to do.  My provisional conclusion is that Yitzi patch does not do anything important to me as a modder.  So I will not write towards it as any kind of standard.  I see a major advantage in being able to tell a noob player, "drop my mod on top of your standard SMAC" installation and call it good.  Installing Yitzi patch currently has extra futzy steps.

But for ongoing community effort, breathing life into an old game, I have different concerns.  Yitzi and others put a lot of work into their .exe modding voodoo.  I have the raw technical skills to continue with such work.  That doesn't mean I will do it; there needs to be a value proposition for me in doing it.  For instance, a multiplayer graphical bug might be very important to a chunk of this community, that focuses on multiplayer.  I never do, that problem is invisible to me, so I wouldn't be going to any effort to put that one to bed.

One thing that really baffles me reading old threads and wiki entries about bugs and .exe modding, is the exceedingly trivial concerns that were addressed.  Like, if you were under a performance deadline, did you need to tackle that problem?  Couldn't you have lived with that one, maybe hand waving "bug for bug compatibility" as to why you would?  Weren't there any more strategic concerns you could have gone after, like making the AI not stupid?  But trudling through an .exe decompilation might be highly opportunistic for all I know.  Maybe they shot at the fish they saw swimming at the bottom of the barrel.  I just know that I wouldn't waste the real world development time on a lot of the things I saw being "fixed", thinking about all the paid hours of professional Quality Assurance that could represent.  For a bad medium: decompiled ASM code without guidance, for software that one has no legal right to profit from.  Definitely would sooner spend the time on a new game in most of these cases, with the lesson learned to make gameplay mechanics available in source code.

Nevertheless it really pains me to see guys like Yitzi and the others spending years on technically excruciating work, only to "tap out" when faced with real world mundane concerns.  Like getting a job, seemingly choosing between accounting and programming work, in Yitzi's case.  I hope he figured out how to get someone to pay him gold bars for the actual .exe modding skills he has.  But if he didn't, well that's a sad, sad story that I personally can relate to, all too well.  So I feel for Yitzi, and would like to see his work survive and be maintained, if it isn't actually a losing value proposition for those coming after him.  Not to mention the work of the other usual suspects.

Some issues with Yitzi and other patches are solveable.  For instance, the need for everyone to step all over the same alphax.txt, modders included.  Scripts that automatically merge this stuff can be made.  I think PracX already tries to do that.  The proper way to solve it would be to have all mods and patches using the same method, hosted in the same source repository.  Then the machinery of merging patches becomes a solved problem, not an ongoing derailment.

I ask about the Yitzi gameplay, because having different encodings is no good for having a standard.  Sure as an individual modder, I can blow anything off.  But as a community, when there's Yitzi with one standard of value codes, and straight SMAC as another, and who knows for what other patches I haven't investigated yet, it destroys the maintainability of mods.  It splits effort, and faced with different numerical encodings, things are guaranteed to bitrot.  I'm trying to decide if that's worth heading off at the pass.

I have a man month into my mod, which I'm not sure much of anybody has even tried yet, and nobody has commented on it.  I don't like thinking that I might have spun my wheels for a month producing that content.  That a year from now, I might not care and might not be worrying about it, as oh so much water under the bridge.  Although at least I did learn a lot about designing and redesigning tech trees.  That's not completely wasted time... but I won't go through it again, until it's for my own 4X TBS.

To summarize the concerns:

• the encoding of Conventional Missiles has been changed.  Has the gameplay changed as well?
• the encoding of Stockpile Energy has been changed.  Has the gameplay changed as well?
• the prereq for Ascent to Transcendence has been changed.  Does this change the actual gameplay?

[Green1]

More power to you. I think though, there is more of a demand for people that play mods than make them when a game gets this old.

But, if your alphax stuff makes more the kind of game you personally like.. that's the thing to shoot for. Personally, I changed that pesky mandatory retirement date. I don't like a computer shutting it down if I still want to play. Then again, I play tech stag abundant life games a lot. Gives it a real "harsh world feel" that only one other game -Elemental :Fallen Enchantress by Stardock- has matched that I have played.

Speaking of which... I remember someone had an alphax that changed builds for the AI. Made it build important hard-to-counter stuff like probe foils and stuff. Something like that would be interesting.

[Mart]

...

[li$i]the prereq for Ascent to Transcendence has been changed.  Does this change the actual gameplay?

The Ascent to Transcendence can be started after completing The Voice of Planet, which still needs the Threshold tech. So in this regard, it is like nothing changed, but I am not sure, if ability of building of AtT by all factions after VoP SP is completed is the same. I would need to check.

[bvanevery]

Made it build important hard-to-counter stuff like probe foils and stuff.

My "SMACX AI Growth mod" has Foil Probe Teams, and Cruiser Probe Teams, and has Police State as the political choice you do probes with, not Fundamentalism.  I don't like giving the AI these new units, as they do come all the way across an Enormous 80x160 map just to grief you, taking over sea bases you didn't put a probe team in to defend with.  But it's never been fair that I could do this by sea for almost 20 years of gameplay, and the AI could never do it back.  So I put it in.

The point is as far as modding goes, is I just solved this problem and you (the potential audience) don't even know about it.  Pretty sure I listed this as a feature on my writeup of what my mod does, but even if true, there are a lot of words to read about what my mod does, 'cuz it's big.  Getting the message out to you or anyone else is a serious deployment issue.  I myself have been put off to trying anyone else's mods, because I expect them to suck, and not offer me anything I actually want fixed.  I recently got over that and tried Mart's new rules in the April 2018 GOTM, because it had such a big community push to be tried out.  And what I see there is... only 3 people including myself are known to have tried it out.  Only 2 including myself have submitted victorious games, myself using the wrong alphax.txt for half the game.

Anyways, something I really want in the .exe. modding dept., is to change the cost of mind controlling a city, so that you have to pay for all the units you capture in the city.  Not just some bonanza where you pay this trivial cost for the city and suddenly you've gotten 10..20 units to go along with it.  Probe Teams are superpowered in SMAC and I'd very much like to see this sorry state of affairs ended.  It is not basically fun to have to build "yet more units" to ensure that any given kind of invasion is successful.

I rage quit Civ IV over this nonsense, snapped the DVD in half, haven't played since.  With the defense rules being what they were, you simply couldn't win unless you brought a Pikeman and an Archer and a Catapult and a Cavarly of some kind and a Swordsman... probably at least 4 of each, on and on and on and on, and you could expect a good contingent of your units to die before they finally started getting offensive advantage matchups against the weakened defenders.  I call this the "Vectorization" or "Collect All Six" problem, where a game makes you take Nx as much time to play it by requiring N different unit types to lead a successful assault.  It's not fun, it wastes real world wall clock time.   It reminds me very much of MMORPGs that make you walk slowly to places, so that you'll spend more hours in the world and have to pay more in subscription fees.

[Green1]

You need a thread for your alphax. I may plug it in next time I fire up a game.

Been considering rolling 2d10s on all the old Network Node factions choosing 5 of them and adding Himlee just for an alien monster. Not sure what I would play myself. Probably Miriam. Put this on a large map with tech stag and abundant life. Would be fun to see how that works.

[bvanevery]

You need a thread for your alphax.

It's got one, in the Modding subforum.  That's how I deployed it.  It's not in the "Downloads" section yet.

Been considering rolling 2d10s on all the old Network Node factions choosing 5 of them and adding Himlee just for an alien monster. Not sure what I would play myself. Probably Miriam. Put this on a large map with tech stag and abundant life. Would be fun to see how that works.

Bear in mind that if you try my mod, all of the standard 14 factions have been changed.  This was partly necessary for the new Social Engineering choices, especially for the Believers and the Hive.  The Believers are not a probe team faction anymore, I never believed in their ability to do Probe teams more successfully.  Now the Hive is, to the extent that he'll do Police State, which he has Impunity to.  Roze is still the best Probe faction though, she kept her +2 Probe.  All of the other factions have been modded to be more "centrist", not so extreme in their penalties, with some but not many bonuses removed to compensate for that.  I think the "extreme" faction penalties just make the AI play badly.  The worst offender was Morgan's -1 Support, which is gone.

Maybe if you put in "monster" factions, you won't care what the Social Engineering changes are, because they'll be such extreme factions anyways.  But for "balanced" factions, you may experience unanticipated consequences under the new Social Engineering regime.

[Green1]

As far as the Believers and their probes was intended more a defensive measure, but was used as offensive in actual game play by some play styles. It was to simulate that it is very hard to infiltrate die hard zealot theocracies without hardcore experience.

"So tell me, parishioner ILOVE ROZE, your ID card says you grew up in New Jerusalem creche. You remember passage 12:8 of Isaiah in the Conclave bible?" Like the typical Data Angel would have cared.

[bvanevery]

I don't think it's inherently harder than infiltrating Germans in WW II.  Know the scene in Inglorious Bastards where the Brits finally get caught?  The guy uses the wrong fingers for the German "3" hand signal.

What I've done, essentially, is reintroduce the old Civ II "Democracy vs. Communism" play mechanic.  As the Soviets were willing to be more ruthless, they have better spies.

[bvanevery]

Getting back to topic,

li]the encoding of Stockpile Energy has been changed.  Has the gameplay changed as well?[/li][/list]

I chanced upon the following partial explanation from Yitzi:

[I changed] the "cost" of stockpile from 0 [to 2] to allow it to be used to control how many minerals it takes to produce 1 energy.

If I infer correctly, I think this means the parameter now means something that it didn't previously mean.  If the original SMACX simply used the parameter as a dummy and ignored it, then no gameplay change may have happened here.  On the other hand...?

[gwillybj]

I started using Yitzi's patches very early in version 2 and stayed with them. I knew the game well enough to be able to tell him if a patch caused an issue and what the issue was. I hope he understood most of my notes along with the other players' feedback.
I understood his desires were both to kill bugs and to make the game's guts more accessible to players who wished to go there.
I now use version 3.5d, the last one issued. I've used the information in Yitzi's supporting documents to fine tune editable values in alphax.txt. I've made some changes to the tech tree for my own pleasure.
For me, the game now plays quite well. I'm not sure that I would need the things Yitzi had in mind for further modification.

[Vidsek]

   Stockpile Energy is rather unique among the "Facilities" in that it is more a type of production rather than a virtual "structure".  Instead of making some sort of unit or facility you are making energy.

  Why the original designers chose to group it with Facilities is a mystery now, but since it's "cost" is figured differently than regular structures, they did apparently make a special case of it with the ratio of minerals used to energy produced coded in the .exe (I think 1 energy for 2 minerals?) and the zero in alpha(x) being......just to fill that space?

  With Yitzi's patch, the value for "cost" is now the number of minerals needed to produce 1 energy.  So a setting of 2 means one energy from two minerals (same as the stock game).

  I have tested values from 1 to 4 and all work, resulting in one energy per the number of minerals specified.

  This also explains why a value of 0 crashes the game: the ratio would be 1/0 and dividing by zero is forbidden.

  Bottom line: using a value of 2 duplicates the original game.  Values close to that (1, 3, or 4) have very little effect until later in the game when you have dramaticly pumped up mineral production.
  I haven't had a chance to play enough late-mid to late game to say if having more or less cash from this source alters gameplay in any significant way.