Modifying Difficulty Levels...

[neon]

Hello,
Long time lurker, first time poster! I have been playing SMAC/SMACX since I purchased it in from a scholastic book fair catalog (oh dear god, that was that 20yrs ago!?!) Generally I play vanilla SMACX but I have been experimenting with modding the game in the past couple years. I am posting because I am interested in modifying the settings of the difficulty levels in game and I am not sure exactly how (or where) to do it.

Here is the scenario/situation I am trying to mod in relation to difficulty level:

"Secret Projects. At Talent and below, the other factions can’t start work on a Secret Project until you, the player, have its prerequisite tech, even if they already have the tech in question."  -Source: https://alphacentauri.gamepedia.com/Difficulty_levels

Is there a way to make it so harder difficulty levels (Librarian, Thinker, Transcend) still maintain the "the other factions can’t start work on a Secret Project until you, the player, have its prerequisite tech, even if they already have the tech in question"? I have looked through some of the various .txt files and have not seen anything to change. I figured there is/was no way to change this until very recently. I have recently downloaded and started playing the Thinker mod V 0.9 (https://github.com/induktio/thinker) and I found that other AI factions are building secret projects before I have preq tech. I figure this means that this is an editable setting somewhere.

I have been poking around through this forum as well as doing some good old fashioned google searches but I cannot seem to find documentation referencing modifying the difficulty levels.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be superb! Otherwise, keep up the good work and see you in the Recreation Commons!

[bvanevery]

There is no .txt file that will change this.  I've modded all .txt files for 1 year calendar time and 6 full person months work time spent on it.  I know all settings in the .txt files like the back of my hand now.  Nothing can be done at that level.

I've not gotten quite as deep into the Scenario Editor, but I've used it to make AIs fight each other for testing purposes.  There aren't all that many options to the SE and it's pretty easy to go through all the menu entries.  There simply isn't anything broken out at such a fine grain as you have in mind.  Under "Edit Scenario Rules" you have "No Secret Projects can be built" and "Force current difficulty level".  Don't know if you can reimagine your desires in those terms.

I don't know anything about hex editing save files or Scenario files.  Maybe there's a solution there.

.EXE patching is involved, not my thing.  Induktio and Scient are the best people to talk to about the doability of changing it so you can get what you want.  There's also the source code of their projects if you want to wrap your head around those.

The path of least resistance is to accept realities about difficulty, or mod the expense levels of Secret Projects to make them easier or more difficult to get in practice, or....

[neon]

Thanks for the info! I appreciate the thoughtful response. I will keep looking and playing around!