Idea: Play Around With Weapon and Armor Costs

[Anon Zytose]

In normal Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire, the weapons and armor have a more-or-less linear progression from weaker, inexpensive units to stronger, more expensive units. It's generally better to have one unit with 10 attack and 6 defense than one or even two units each with 5 attack and 3 defense. But what about going against three such units? Or six? My new idea is to mod the game such that at any particular point in the game, you could spend a certain number of minerals to build either a couple really strong and powerful units for the time or a horde of weaker units.

I'll need to start testing this idea myself. I don't yet know, say, how many units of strength X would be worth one unit of strength 2X. Maybe 3 or 4? Perhaps the cheaper units should be made available along the same paths as the Clean Reactor and things that give bonuses to support and police. Meanwhile, the very expensive stronger units could go along paths that allow better defense against probe team subversion. One major challenge could be working with how unit costs tend to gravitate toward the lower limit of reactor*1.5, rounded up. Hopefully one of the patches, perhaps the latest one by Yitzi, will help alleviate this issue. I also don't yet know how the AI will respond to these changes.

Thoughts?

[bvanevery]

You are going to totally swamp the unit design Workshop with your approach.  I had substantially bad problems when I was doing the "almost entirely fission era" version of my mod.  I'd get all kinds of new units, and my old units would not be obsoleted or retired, because technically there was nothing obsolete about them.  I had pretty much the available mix of less powerful and more powerful units, like you say you're interested in.

Once you run out of Workshop spots, nasty things happen.  Like your ability to make Planet Busters disappears, if you didn't keep a "representative" unit on hand.  That's because the game is trying hard to recycle the slots.  You can turn the unit recycling off, but then you just get clutter a different way, piling up all the units.  Eventually you have to go in and do this massive prune job.

This problem is part of the reason I brought Fusion and Quantum back into the game at a more normal pace.  They clear out old unit designs by making them irrelevant.

When you mod, consider whether "having the game take forever or go on forever" is one of your goals.  Those aren't my goals.  I want the game to end at some appropriate time, and to be winnable without adding extra tedium.  "Hey, let's put lots more units on the battlefield!" is very much against this idea.  You'll drown in mouseclicks.

Also, aren't you forgetting unit support costs?  I'm not seeing any advantage in a horde of peons that way.

Also, aren't you forgetting that you're going have a horde of cheap units to move anyways, no matter what?  I always find a use for my old scouts, old synthmetal garrisons, etc.  It's not like I sit around spending money to upgrade them, I just go use them.  Popping pods, starving an enemy to death, garrisons for a railhead invasion, bodies to fight the mindworm apocalypse, there are lots of uses for old units.

[Anon Zytose]

I had not forgotten about support costs. That's why I figured that units you'd build a lot of ought to be made available along with methods of keeping those units affordable to maintain.

I had forgotten about the tedium of moving a lot of units, though. I know in my own mod, I tend to make terraformers a lot more expensive to build for that very reason. Then again, at least in my games, I tend not to build a lot of combat units and the ones I do build usually just get stationed in my bases.

I have faced the slot limit in the unit workshop. In my experience, this had been almost exclusively due to the auto-design of a lot of units I didn't have use for. I clear out the excess generally by upgrading most combat designs to already present superior models, where I could affordably do so, especially after getting the Nano Factory. I do upgrade combat units, especially as I tend to not build very many of them but do tend to have fair amounts of energy to bring them up to date.

I'd still like to explore this idea at some point, albeit I may do so in reverse in the earlier game, where you can get quite powerful units... for a very high price. Building lots of very cheap units may come later when bases have far more minerals to work with. I won't be uploading a mod with such changes unless I try it out myself and find it worthwhile. If I get around to trying this and it turns out to be anywhere near as bad as you say, I'll just put the idea on the shelf and go back to having the values and costs of armor and weapons arrive in ascending order.

[bvanevery]

Do you usually try to do Transcend or Economic victory, as opposed to outright Conquest or the more abbreviated Diplomatic Victory?  Do you tend to play on standard sized maps and not anything larger?  I'm just thinking your comments don't seem to reflect the phenomenon of OMG, how am I going to clean up this huge sprawl of enemy cities?  It easily becomes mouseclicking hell.

[Anon Zytose]

I actually tend to play almost exclusively on large or huge maps. I confess, I tend to be quite vulnerable to the other factions' armies toward the beginning of the game, even if I choose a more aggressive faction to play as, and even the most pacifistic of neighbors will often try to pick a fight. Because of this, I also tend to play maps large enough that they can't reach me until I've had time to grow my empire's productivity and technology faster than they have. I should try practicing on smaller maps, I suppose. In the mean time, going after a lot of cities can take a while, but I find the main effort to be establishing transportation from my cities to theirs. That becomes easier if you have a lot of terraformers that can build mag tubes and land bridges directly to the enemy base.

Conquest does seem to be my least frequent route of victory, even in games where I've eradicated up to half the other factions. It can take enough turns to send out units to reach everyone that Transcendence and Economic victory options become quickly available before I can send my forces to conquer the other half of my opponents. Also, unless I disable diplomatic victory, which I will likely do in my next game, or I play as a Progenitor faction, that option is automatically available once the needed technology arrives, and control of 75% of the votes tends to arrive sooner than getting support from 100% of the population as would happen in a conquest victory. I suppose I should just disable the Transcendence and Economic Victory options for my next few games and pretend I don't have access to them in my current game. I do want to own every base on the planet this time around.

[bvanevery]

That becomes easier if you have a lot of terraformers that can build mag tubes and land bridges directly to the enemy base.

That's why I have Monopole Magnets come much earlier in my mod!  They're not inventing Steam Engines, they know how to do some kind of rail already.  Late mag tubes is a Civ II -ism.

Raising land actually takes a bit longer in my mod.  You need Advanced Ecological Engineering.  If you want to get the Weather Paradigm, you have to get Ecological Engineering.

[Anon Zytose]

I had wondered why you made mag tubes available so early in your mod. I tend to push them even later, to the point where hovertanks can spend a while useful for more than just the number of times they get to attack in a turn. Also, I now have the idea of modding the graphics such that regular roads look like paved roads or railways instead of the dirt paths they currently appear as.

It's good to know that raising land takes longer. If it's too easy to do so early on, it also becomes too easy to forgo any kind of naval capacity, even on maps with very little land. I tend to prefer it where venturing into the sea is worthwhile on most maps and necessary when sea levels start out high. There are boats, kelp farms, subsea trunklines, so on and so forth. I much prefer to see them as viable options worth using at least to some capacity in many games, especially ones where I must fight an enemy on another continent.

[bvanevery]

Giant maps, which I define as 128x256, swamp such concerns though.  You'll be crying for an end to naval operations, because it just takes way too long to push ships to target.  Only rails will save you from that.  Hovertanks, they're just not that useful aside from their number of attacks.  They help with terraforming, especially buidling railheads right into an enemy's face, but that's about it.  From a simulation standpiont, it's completely irrational to expect mag lines to come after hovertanks.  If you can move that fast over land without friction from terrain, you can build some kind of rail.  I've seen various Civ-style games limit the maximum movement on a rail, so that they're not the insta-transport they are in this game.  However there comes a point where gameplay trumps realism.  It would just be too godawful tedious to do anything, if it took multiple turns to move units where you wanted them to go, on bigger maps.

[Anon Zytose]

Yeah, the largest listed map size in my mod is only 96x192. And so what if it takes multiple turns to carry one's ships from point A to point B? It's not like you have to remind them where to go every turn. That being said, for next game, naval units and regular roads are getting boosts in mobility. And yes, gameplay is supposed to win out, which is why I'd rather not have the only viable strategy for victory involve using most of my terraformers to connect mag tubes to the enemy for large portions of every single game. I want a good reason to occasionally invade another continent by loading some land artillery and interceptor planes onto some heavily armored transports or something.

[bvanevery]

Yeah, the largest listed map size in my mod is only 96x192.

My Enormous map size is 80x160, close to that.  Naval operations can be a drag.

And so what if it takes multiple turns to carry one's ships from point A to point B? It's not like you have to remind them where to go every turn.

Yes you do. If you don't do it manually, they will blunder into enemy units or wild Isles and be summarily killed.  There's also the difficulty of concentrating units in an area at the same time, and performing useful search and sweep patterns for defense on the move.  You might get away with route movement in totally unchallenged waters on the backside of your huge continent, but at some point you're going "into theater" and you can't do the automated stuff anymore.  Not unless your ships are so powerful compared to other factions that your victory in the game is merely a formality.  In which case, you might not want to do all of that naval stuff simply because it's so boring by then.

That being said, for next game, naval units and regular roads are getting boosts in mobility.

Hmm.  Do you mean road movement costs?  I think there are dire warnings about breaking the AI if you choose to do that.  If you mean infantry is going to move 6, speeders 12, hovertanks 18, well, that means a base is going to have an awfully hard time seeing what's coming.  Infantry get an attack bonus on bases, there's a reason not to make them fast.  I guess you could take that away.  Still seems to have an "offense wins" problem.

And yes, gameplay is supposed to win out, which is why I'd rather not have the only viable strategy for victory involve using most of my terraformers to connect mag tubes to the enemy for large portions of every single game.

I admit it's a problem.  My flooded holocaust game was mildly interesting for a bit, exactly because I couldn't build railheads. Until it got old.

I want a good reason to occasionally invade another continent by loading some land artillery and interceptor planes onto some heavily armored transports or something.

From playing many Civ-style games, not just SMAC, it only seems to be a good idea when your units are vastly more powerful than the enemy you invade.  Like a Colonial level of disparity, blowing the hapless indigenous into teeny tiny bits.  Otherwise, by the time you push everything across the water, your units are obsolescent and readily repelled.

Crossing the waters to wipe out an enemy's cities with chemical weapons, does sorta work.  It supplies that "tech differential" for one thing, and you don't need nearly as much force if you're going to commit genocide.  Too bad the game moralizes and mindworms kill  you.  Unless you're wiping out Aliens, in which case it's a goto strategy.

In my mod, all missiles are ICBMs.  They can hit most stuff on a Planet the same turn they launch, and anything can be hit in 2 turns, up to a Giant sized 128x256 planet.  It gets old flying ICBMs into things.  The mouseclicks required to move that far wear me down, it's like whack-a-mole.  Maybe if I selected some of those "don't stop for an enemy" options, it would work better.  The biggest strategic difficulty is there's no "city conquest" unit to go with those missiles, not until you get orbital insertion capability.  Fine, that's by design... I'll try out flying the missiles without having my movement stopped and see if it works better.

Hmm, I could put a "poor man's orbital" into the game, by making a Transport Rocket.  It would definitely only carry 1 unit and would burn up on re-entry.  This is assuming the "no abilities on missiles" admonition is not strictly true, if we're talking about predefined units.

[Anon Zytose]

I suspect there's something I'm not getting... If you don't mind sharing, what is your exact method for sending out units to avoid the whole issue with blundering into enemies?

Yeah, definitely accelerating naval units. Currently at 6 and 10 spaces. Now if only sea roads would work...

My idea for road movement costs were milder than that: 1/4 point per space traveled. Infantry would get 4, speeders get 8. Hovertanks I accelerated to 4 points so they'd get 16 spaces on these roads. And sure, you can send an infantry unit in from multiple spaces away to attack a base, but it would usually have an attack penalty for insufficient movement remaining.

When you send your ICBMs out, how many spaces at a time are you moving them? Also, the transport rocket idea actually sounds pretty cool.

[bvanevery]

If there are any "safe" waters before entering the theater, I will click on a place on the map to send a ship through them.  Typically rounding the tip of a continent or some such.  After that, all movement is manual, for every unit.  There may not be any safe waters at all, I may be actively at war with someone who's managed to penetrate into my home waters.  So then it's a lot of tedious manual movement for a very long time.

Hovertanks in your system are going to be the new form of Chopper abuse.   I gave Choppers less movement in my mod so that they wouldn't have so many attacks available.

ICBMs can move up to 66 spaces in 1 turn.  If I click a route, they are constantly getting stuck on enemies over that distance.  Thus, I may push them manually.  I can't push them too fast though, because if I'm tooling through the mouseclicks, it'll hit something unseen and blow up.  Pushing the ICBMs long distances has gotten really old.  I would rather be able to just drop them from space, like an orbital insertion at all times.

[Vidsek]

If there are any "safe" waters before entering the theater, I will click on a place on the map to send a ship through them.  Typically rounding the tip of a continent or some such.  After that, all movement is manual, for every unit.  There may not be any safe waters at all, I may be actively at war with someone who's managed to penetrate into my home waters.  So then it's a lot of tedious manual movement for a very long time.

  I use the same tactics and methods.


ICBMs can move up to 66 spaces in 1 turn.  If I click a route, they are constantly getting stuck on enemies over that distance.  Thus, I may push them manually.  I can't push them too fast though, because if I'm tooling through the mouseclicks, it'll hit something unseen and blow up.  Pushing the ICBMs long distances has gotten really old.  I would rather be able to just drop them from space, like an orbital insertion at all times.

  "Ballistic" missiles in SMAC act more like nap-of-the-earth cruise missiles than high arcing ballistic ones.   An ICBM doesn't have to care what it's flying over.  I choose to pretend they *are* cruise missiles, just misnamed.

My idea for road movement costs were milder than that: 1/4 point per space traveled. Infantry would get 4, speeders get 8. Hovertanks I accelerated to 4 points so they'd get 16 spaces on these roads. And sure, you can send an infantry unit in from multiple spaces away to attack a base, but it would usually have an attack penalty for insufficient movement remaining.

  Slightly faster on-road movement sounds interesting to me, and I think I will give it a try, although I see it as especially valuable in moving both combat and non-combat units around my own little empire.  Rather similar to how the US Interstate highway system was originally envisioned as providing quick movement of defending forces in case we were attacked, but has become a huge part of the civilian infrastructure in actual practice.

[bvanevery]

The Datalinks don't actually call them ballistic, they're just "missiles".  I didn't actually rename them to ICBMs either.  I tell people I put ICBMs in the game to describe their intended function: hit anything on Planet.  I succeeded!  The play mechanics for this turn out to be less than wonderful though.  What does matter, however, is the AI can nuke you anywhere.

[Geo]

ICBMs can move up to 66 spaces in 1 turn.  If I click a route, they are constantly getting stuck on enemies over that distance.  Thus, I may push them manually.  I can't push them too fast though, because if I'm tooling through the mouseclicks, it'll hit something unseen and blow up.  Pushing the ICBMs long distances has gotten really old.  I would rather be able to just drop them from space, like an orbital insertion at all times.

Can't you put the Drop Pod ability on the Missile chassis?
The underlying thought would be it reenters the atmosphere after launch (whether launch happens on a planet-based platform or an orbital one), and goes to cruise missile mode for the remainder of it movement points.