No Survivors, No Secrets - SMACX AI Growth mod version 1.42

[bvanevery]

Well it's low budget torture.  The sphere does as it does.   

Details the final boom

the final boom

MY 2413.  I switch to Socialist, which surprisingly only cuts my income by about 100 credits.  Combined with my faction ability, I now have +4 GROWTH.  My Hab Domes are all completed, so this is a pretty good time to start cranking out the citizens.  I'm sure I could have done everything much sooner, but there's this sort of inertia, having been traumatized by the planet flooding for so long.  I anticipate needing roughly 1200 votes and I've got 810.

Won't it be amusing if they don't accept me?

[bvanevery]

Details the sort of date replacement technology

the sort of date replacement technology

MY 2414 .  Previously I always thought this was about Lal suffering a tragedy.  But he may just have had a hard time getting a date!

[bvanevery]

Details infernal isles

infernal isles

MY 2416.  I had a fungal pop this year, and I lost a lot of ships trying to figure out how to harvest the stack of Isles.  Eventually I got it and made 840 credits, but I lost one of the expensive Tachyon ships, thinking too much of its capabilities.  You'd think with Air Superiority it could just shoot at a Locust directly, but it died.  The 2nd version of that ship, I shelled the whole stack, doing the top Locust some damage.  The other factions keep bothering me with Isles, but they just suicide on my Cruiser Formers.  You'd think the AI could be a little smarter about attacking Trance 3-Res units.

Details singing kumbaya with Planet

singing kumbaya with Planet

I switch to Knowledge, as once again it doesn't affect my income much.  Even my Gaian cities are starting to build Industrial Labs now.  With all the corruption in those distant cities, they must have some really frivolous research going on over there!  Like how to make better chocolate bars out of human flesh.

Details grow the vote

grow the vote

In 3 years I've grown 112 citizens.  Pretty good growth rate!  Someone said that the AI will never build Hab Domes.  Now I think the point is moot in this game, as I don't think the other factions have even had the tech.  But I wonder if that's true?

[bvanevery]

Details my reward for caring

my reward for caring

MY 2417.  For having bothered to complete a Temple of Planet, I'm doing 54 eco-damage?  What is up with that?  It's not like I use chemical weapons or plagues on anyone anymore.  If I had some previously built up eco-damage, fine, ok, but they could have told me about it already.  This just seems janky and broken.  In a lot of games I've played, 45 minerals is not a large minerals output for the late game, let alone the endgame.  I'm also at +1 PLANET, not exactly a polluter.  What is Planet afraid of, all my burgeoning population peeing in the ocean?

Details and another one

and another one

Could a Temple of Planet actually increase eco-damage, in some buggy way?  Although at least this city was genuinely a minerals haven.  Still, it's only 46 minerals, not any more than the other offender.

Details I don't get this

I don't get this

3rd city that has completed a Temple and jumped to big eco-damage overnight, with no atrocities committed.  I know I did shuffle my social choices around recently, but previously I was Green Wealth.  Then I was Socialist Wealth.  Then Socialist Knowledge.  So PLANET went from +1 to 0 to +1.  Maybe it's some kind of delay on seeing the effect of 0.

I don't know how much a patch of sea fungus counts towards alleviating eco-damage, if at all.  I haven't cleared any of them.  They just naturally turn into kelp sometimes.  Not that Planet would care about artificial vs. natural change.

One big difference between this waterworld and a normal map, is the absence of forest to mitigate eco-damage.  I could raise land and make forest.  However I think the game will be over before such a massive engineering project would have an effect.  Or I will have gotten enough fungal pops to curtail the eco-damage.

I just think the phenomenon I'm experiencing is lame, because aside from growing, I'm doing things right.  And there aren't any more facilities to reduce eco-damage from growing.  960 votes.

[bvanevery]

Details close to the end

close to the end

MY .  Santiago dreamed this up.  As if.  I'm spitting distance from winning, if Infamous people can rule Planet.  I've never committed an atrocity against the 2 remaining factions though.

Details the failsafe

the failsafe

If they don't obey me, I will wipe them out all at once.  I've done quite enough Planet abatement this game, thank U very much!

[bvanevery]

Details almost finished

almost finished

MY 2424.  I'm just a couple of squares away from having completely terraformed all my home territory.  I've also got the votes!

Details lungs of Planet

lungs of Planet

I long since completed the Gaian captured territories.  My surplus land Formers are making gratuitous forests to help Planet calm down.

Details nascent effort

nascent effort

I've managed to get some Trance 3-Res Cruiser Formers down to the conquered Peacekeeper cities.  They're barely beginning to raise the ocean trenches.  These came from the Gaian territory.  The rest would have to come from my home waters and would take some time to arrive.  This is the sort of thing a Psi Gate would help with, but I haven't prioritized research.

Details I am infamous!

I am infamous!

And I'm not nearly as bad a guy as people make me out to be.  I only murdered the number of people necessary to secure my reign.  I could have easily ended the game with Total Conquest a long time ago.  I am so kind.  So kind!

 

Details that looks a lot more like Lal

that looks a lot more like Lal

Real rulers don't wear robes.  They wear cybersuits wetsuits.  After I murder everyone wearing the wrong thing, people will get the message.

Details Yang embraces Planet

Yang embraces Planet

This screenshot is a little tricky to capture because the CTRL-ALT-TAB Snip & Sketch technique causes it to immediately vanish.  Instead I use the Fn-WindowsIcon-PrntScrn technique.  Then I have to cut and paste into Paint 3D, which takes awhile to load up.  One of these days maybe I'll find something faster than Paint 3D.  Snip & Sketch is much faster, but it doesn't handle this peculiar case.

Details just not priority

just not priority

This is a low scoring game compared to ones I recently remember.  I don't play for score though.  This is what happens when you tie one hand behind your back and also persist in doing several things wrong.  Nevertheless, I think it's my first complete and total victory over a 100% Planet Vengeance and Flood scenario.  I'd say it did require the Neural Amplifier to pull off, but it didn't need much more than that.  Well, perhaps I'm belittling the implicit preparation of several previous attempts.

Details middle rank

middle rank

I'm not sure how long my victorious games have been recorded.  I've probably cleaned out some *.tmp files at some point, but I've also had sound mod in my SMACX AI Growth mod development installation for a very long time.  I don't have a lot of perspective of how many of my games I may have bumped off my own list.  Wish there were some real world dates recorded for these.

Watching the Replay was silly because it didn't track the changes in land mass, and the oceans don't have territorial control info shown.  So it's like watching 3 small island change color, otherwise paint drying.  It was another one of these difficult-to-capture screenshots, so no picture.  You didn't miss anything.  Imagine a field of ocean blue with 3 changing color spots in it.

I didn't feel like taking a screenshot of the final "Go away!" screen.  I don't regret this game, but I don't think it's the best showpiece either.  Don't think I'll be making note of it on r/4Xgaming.  I'd like to someday publish a 1.42 game that I've done "well".  I suppose COVID-19 has given me the time to be awfully picky about what that means.

[lolada]

Congratz on victory!  Weird game never seen anything like it.

Funny to see so many strong worms and everything flooded. Eco-dmg really goes bonkers, but its fun anyway, there's real penalty to being bad boy. Mineral limit is kind of annoying, atrocities are -5 clean minerals which is huge, i'd mod that out maybe (thats binary?) its too harsh due to stacking. Nexus mining - orbital minerals are apparently clean.

I think fungal pops are +1.. and Centauri Preserves and Temple of Planet help but not that much. There's that eco-dmg formula, but i didn't take a serious look at it.

[bvanevery]

I had forgotten about the orbital minerals cheat.  Now maybe it's debatable whether it's a cheat or a simulation.  Mineral extraction on asteroids might create a lot of space debris, but it wouldn't have a direct environmental effect on Planet.  Transporting those minerals down Planet's gravity well is probably not particularly polluting.  However, vehicles do have to come back up the gravity well again, so I don't think their movement is environmentally cost free.  A more detailed simulation would have you stockpiling the chemicals needed to drive cars or launch rockets, and you'd do the eco-damage wherever you're extracting those chemicals.  Emperor of the Fading Suns had that level of resource representation, but didn't have eco-damage as a game mechanic.  I suppose you could avoid all extraction costs in Planet's environment, if you dropped enough chemicals from orbit, sufficient to get rockets back up again.  Of course, there is the environmental cost of burning the chemicals, which isn't modeled in SMAC.

It should be noted that all of my minerals were completed long before I got the Nessus Mining Station.  I didn't build any additional Mining Platforms, I only built Tidal Harnesses and kelp.  So I was still going to get the eco-damage I actually got.  This game definitely suggested refraining from building Robotic Assembly Plants.  Genejack Factories and Subsea Trunklines are quite enough minerals from an eco-damage standpoint.

I started another game where I proposed to Repeal the U.N. Charter during the Laser era.     For some reason, Lal acquiesced.  So I committed atrocities on the Data Angels, the Believers, the Hive, and the Pirates.  I was the University, allied with the Peacekeepers and the Cyborgs.  My faction was either runty or highly vertical, depending on how you want to look at it.  Lal was going nuts because I'm experimenting with new faction research settings.  Explore, Build really superpowered him.  He was beating me in various kinds of research, although I did finish the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm.  The game might have been interesting to continue, but I'm experimenting with lots of faction research settings.  I'm looking at a regime where all factions have a different set of research foci.  There's 14 possibilities if you include all the 1 choice, 2 choice, and 3 choice options.

[Jagged_One]

Thanks, that was fun to follow !!!

I saw some things I have not heard of before, and I don't know if they are part of regular SMAX or you added them with your mod(s):

- what is the "ship in port" penalty ?
- what is the "orbital minerals cheat" ?
- I have never seen a faction knock out another faction's satellite...

Lastly, several times you would go look and see what techs another faction had. I do not know how to do that in regular SMAX, even if I have infiltrated them or am Governor. Actually, I would like to be able to list all the techs *I* have learned, but don't know if there is a way to do that either.

Thanks again !!!

[bvanevery]

In alphax.txt, here are some naval combat factors that are different in my mod than stock:

Code: [Select]

0,      ; Combat % -> Land based guns vs. ship artillery bonus
0,      ; Combat % -> Artillery bonus per level of altitude. Affects Ocean to Ocean Shelf ship combat!
0,     ; Combat % -> Bonus vs. ships caught in port. Affects ship in sea base!
Although the artillery height mechanic was somewhat tactically interesting, I consider having different heights on the same flat ocean surface to be an egregious bug.  So, it had to go.  I also didn't miss having to futz with optimal artillery placement, all said and done.

Most of the time. the Pirates are going to be defending sea bases with ships.  From that standpoint, "ships caught in port" is a bug.  They could have solved this problem by distinguishing between a sea base and a land base, but they didn't.  I don't miss having ships being sitting ducks in land bases.  Sometimes unfortunately they now turn out to be super powerful defense points, but eh, I'm not going to deal with that until some players notice and say it's a problem.  It's just more important to have all sea bases be defended correctly with ships.

I didn't think navies should have any special penalties vs. coastal batteries.  I mean, tell it to the big battleships of WW II.  I think it's an artifact of wanting Pirate spam to be less than awful.  Well, I just told the Pirates to settle down and stop being Aggressive.  Actually I have them as Passive now.  They've got this huge resource rich moat around them called the ocean.  They needn't compulsively fight anybody, they've got the best resource deal of the game.

The "orbital minerals cheat" is that if you make a Nessus Mining Station, those minerals don't do any eco-damage in your bases at all.  I say it's a cheat because even if you don't do any eco-damage on Planet extracting the minerals, you would have to pay some fuel costs flying ships out of Planet's gravity well at some point, and processing those minerals on Planet is going to do some eco-damage.  The accountancy is not terribly honest.

Generally I inspect techs by opening the menu of factions you have contact with, on the right side of the screen.  Right click on one of them to inspect the faction.  You could also hit F2 and then select a faction icon other than your own.

[Jagged_One]

>Generally I inspect techs by opening the menu of factions you have contact with, on the
>right side of the screen.  Right click on one of them to inspect the faction.

Been using the Commlink panel to contact the other factions since Day One, but never thought of right-clicking it...doh


>You could also hit F2 and then select a faction icon other than your own

OMG, I've played this frickin' game for decades and never noticed the bottom or the lower left panel of the F2 screen.

I can't believe I just admitted both of these facts in public !!! It's just an example of habits and tunnel vision, I guess....

Thanks dude !!!!

[bvanevery]

Thinking about this, made me wonder if there were other parts of the UI that are right-clickable, that I've simply never right-clicked.  Turns out there are indeed some other UI panels that can be right-clicked.  I don't think they yielded anything profoundly helpful, but maybe some of the shortcuts might be useful sometime.

[Jagged_One]

And what about the "satellite warfare" ? Is that something you added in your mod ? I don't remember ever seeing anything about destroying satellites before....

[bvanevery]

No, satellite warfare will happen in the stock game if the situation allows.  Maybe you previously always beat the pants off the AIs, so they didn't get around to it.

[Jagged_One]

So can I kill the sats of the other factions, or is it just something the AI can do to me ?