Turning SMAX back into strategy game

[bvanevery]

Don't be modest. It is twice as strong and comparable to contemporary weapon strength.
 

Twice?  No, that's exaggeration.  When I made the change, the "attacking a base" scenario went from the attacker predictably winning, to the attacker dying and the defender barely alive.  Which is fine, that says to me things are in balance.  You should need more than 1 attacker to take out 1 defender in a base, all other things being equal.

I actually think it's right and maybe it should be even slightly (20-30%) stronger that weapon to account for highly technologically advanced factions who will get better weapon anyway.

When I play my mod, usually the only faction who becomes more advanced like that, is me.  Caveat: the University, the Pirates, and the Morganites sometimes become more advanced, but not by much.  Factions aren't racing out ahead of the player as far as I'm seeing it.  Seems balanced.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Twice?  No, that's exaggeration.

What are you talking about? Your best armor rating is same as best weapon one. And the rest of them is about 1:1. Comparing to 2:1 vanilla that's about twice.

[bvanevery]

Hmm was vanilla that bad?  It's been so long since I've played it....  When I made the change in my own extensively modded tech tree, it did not jump double.  My pacing of weapons vs. armor may have already been implicitly changed, by probable technology acquisitions and so forth.  But then I made the change very explicit, purposeful, and designed, so that the tech tiers were absolutely uniform in weapon and armor progression.  That's when I saw defenders getting a slight advantage over attackers.  Couldn't just walk up to a base and kill them.

Put another way, my mod had somewhat the flavor of the original game's weapons and armor progression for quite some time.  For awhile I did not do anything explicitly to adjust this.

Used to be you'd crank up your Missile Marines and fry everyone with Doctrine: Initiative.  Not anymore.  You'll be poking along with Impact weapons.  If you've got a Colonialist advantage, you'll be attacking various kinds of Plasma armor and you'll probably lose some Marines.  If you don't have an advantage, you'll be attacking Silksteel - well until you decide you want to stop losing units.

The lore of the game is now off, because Missiles are mysteriously equivalent to Photon Walls.  Sadly I can't change weapons artwork.  Anything strength 6 has to look like a Missile.  I could call it something else, but I don't think it's worth disrupting people's knowledge of the weapons of the game.

[Geo]

The lore of the game is now off, because Missiles are mysteriously equivalent to Photon Walls.  Sadly I can't change weapons artwork.  Anything strength 6 has to look like a Missile.  I could call it something else, but I don't think it's worth disrupting people's knowledge of the weapons of the game.

You can rename the caviar files of a suitable looking weapon that you want to be at strength 6.

[bvanevery]

Then I'd have to distribute those though, which would end the nice neat legality of my current modding.  Not that that's a dealbreaker, but it's not worth it by itself.  If I could make new Caviar files, I wouldn't have that problem.  But I haven't heard of a way to do that?  Editing that 3D format seems to be a black hole.

[PvtHudson]

Let's look at the big picture.

Okay, now I finally comprehend the whole extent of the problem. Honestly, I don't think such a complex issue can be resolved only at combat odds level, not involving improvements in AI's tactics and diplomacy. Nonetheless, I wish you good luck with the mod.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Let's look at the big picture.

Okay, now I finally comprehend the whole extent of the problem. Honestly, I don't think such a complex issue can be resolved only at combat odds level, not involving improvements in AI's tactics and diplomacy. Nonetheless, I wish you good luck with the mod.

Thanks, man. Understanding is precious!
I agree with you that overall bad AI performance in combat area is a complex issue which cannot be fixed by combat odds only. However, I didn't mean to discuss AI performance in this post at all. The question I am focusing on is very narrow and it applies equally to AI and human. Specifically, there are circumstances when building an invading army and conquer neighbors is cheaper (more effective) than building a defending army and protect against invaders. These circumstances happens in 99% of vanilla games and result in quick and unavoidable factions elimination. This very narrowly described problem is quite simple as it caused only by imbalance of invasion vs. protection effectiveness. Said effectiveness is pretty much a number = how much do I gain from action X. Either I fork some resources to build an invasion army and then capture some bases to contribute to my power or I just direct these extra resources to build and research. Combat odds and relative unit costs directly impact this number as they dictate the size of the army you need to achieve same goal. As a result, effectiveness of your actions changes proportionally. If you change it enough to put back into reasonable range - the problem is solved. Of course, it is more effective and elegant to do it with both exe and txt modding rather than just txt. I am working with txt now but I don't restrict myself with it. If results are unsatisfactory then I'll turn to exe maybe.

[bvanevery]

The logistical distance between conflicting empires also matters for this equation of defensive survival balance.  That's why my mod recommends playing on Huge maps or larger, and why I don't take solving problems on Standard maps all that seriously.  They're too small!  AIs need time to build up and create a defense.  Offense is more difficult over a long distance.  AIs need some space to create a good extraction footprint, to get enough resources to build anything.  Huge maps slow down the collision time between empires, if they don't happen to start right next to each other, which sometimes still does happen anyways.  A lot can be gained just by using a better faction placement algorithm, but I don't have that in a .txt mod.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Hi All.
I am working with txt configuration and slowly approaching to the desired state. It seems playable but needs few more runs to get the feeling and see if it need to be tweaked at all. Let me reiterate that this is not a fully blown mod. This is a pretty narrow implementation targeting specific issue. It can be included or adopted by other mods in whole or in parts. I don't mind sharing as long as you give a feedback about an idea or implementation.
 

Credits designers of following mods: Yutzi's, Scient, Binary Dawn, AI Growth, Thinker - where I've got some of my inspiration and ideas from.

Please bear with me as this is work in progress. I am going to split it to multiple posts since there are a lot of concepts to explain. So much for simple modification.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

HIGH LEVEL GOALS

Currently conquest victory is the fastest and easiest achievable out of them all by order of magnitude. I'd like to make it a lot harder to make other strategies viable. This means conquering enemy bases may still be a good move. Sometimes.

Factor in economical element into the war. Fully developed bases is a juicy prize. Conquering them should cost a lot so that economical-technological-political impact incurred by war outweighs benefit to the extent where global acquisition of another faction is not obviously best option.

Increase importance of other factors in influencing combat resolution as much as possible: Planet, Morale, attack and defense bonuses. That covers both faction-faction and native AI encounters.

Spread out military discoveries more evenly along the technology tree so that they appear at more or less adequate intervals - not too rare, not too often.

Make military units cost proportionally more to decrease army sizes and related mouse-clicks especially toward the end of the game.

[bvanevery]

Heh, no problemo, I'll look at it when you're ready.  N.B. "Binary Dawn", "AI Growth", and "Thinker" are the names of mods, not the modders.  I am bvanevery or Brandon Van Every, I'm ok with either.

Diplomatic Victory is abbreviated Conquest for the most part.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Heh, no problemo, I'll look at it when you're ready.  N.B. "Binary Dawn", "AI Growth", and "Thinker" are the names of mods, not the modders.  I am bvanevery or Brandon Van Every, I'm ok with either.

Diplomatic Victory is abbreviated Conquest for the most part.

Yep. Bad wording again. Corrected. I explicitly wanted to list mods as many people know mod names better than mod authors.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

CASE STUDIES
I have devised some generic metrics for myself to see that my implementation matches initial idea more or less good. Whenever I estimate combat odds I assume weapon and armor are at about the same technology level and all other factors (Morale, Planet) are equal if not mentioned explicitly.

attacker to defender relative strength in different conditions
in open = about same or somewhat stronger - Since all other conditions favor defender I think attacker should shine somewhere.
in rough = about same or somewhat weaker - Rough terrain defense bonus should be significant enough to encourage its use.
in rough with sensor = at least half weaker - Building sensors takes time. This time should pay off by beefing up defender noticeably.
base = about the same - I don't really care about this. Of course, it is more stable state when you cannot take base with a single blow. However, I am more concerned about making prepared defense stronger. I'll leave this case for other to decide which way they prefer it.
base with sensor = about half weaker - Same consideration about building sensors.
base with sensor and perimeter = about three times weaker - Same consideration about time and minerals spent. Prepared defense should pay of and pay of well. That is invader should spend much more minerals attempting to penetrate defense comparing to the cost of defense.

Psi combat
Psi combat should have equal base odds regardless of realm. This way secondary factors like Morale, Planet, attack and defense bonuses play tremendous role and force player to chose SE models wiser. Free Market's -3 Planet now is really bad penalty. In other words, you still can tune you faction for psi combat but you have to make specific SE choices and pay the price.
Non trance base defenders should be able to sustain worm attack at least half of the time.
Equalizing psi combat odds also discourages free planet pearls farming. You still can do it but you need to beef up your units with Morale, Planet, or promotions to do it more effective. Without this you have about 50% chance to lose your unit when attacking natives.

Non combat units
Non combat units should be able to sustain worm attacks at least sometimes. Again player may additionally increase/decrease non combat units defense by consciously beefing up secondary combat parameters.

Unit cost (general considerations)
Adjust unit cost so that strongest available attacker/defender is built in about 4-10 turn in most productive bases throughout the game. With 20-40 minerals toward the end of the game building needlejet in one turn increases total number of active units and, therefore, mouse-clicks. Reducing number of actively moving units does not change relative balance of powers but allows player to appreciate each unit more.
It would also be nice if stronger unit costs proportionally more. This way it may be sometimes beneficial to produce weaker but still useful units for less.

[bvanevery]

Free Market in the stock game is ridiculous.  -8 in penalties!  My regime for Politics, Economics, and Values choices is "3 bonuses, 2 penalties".  You get -5 POLICE by choosing Democratic Free Market Knowledge Cybernetic.  You have to work at it.

If you are not married to providing the original content of SMAC (as I more or less am), consider taking the advanced factories out of the game.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Free Market in the stock game is ridiculous.  -8 in penalties!  My regime for Politics, Economics, and Values choices is "3 bonuses, 2 penalties".  You get -5 POLICE by choosing Democratic Free Market Knowledge Cybernetic.  You have to work at it.

I am with you on that, man. Didn't understand the context, though. I am not working with SE in this topic.