Ecodamage mod/fix

[Nexii]

Has anyone played around with Yitzi's patch options for ecodamage? This has been a sort of backburner project for me.

As I see it there were these issues:
1) Clean minerals are very powerful. If you get enough of them your PLANET rating and the divisor facilities don't matter at all.
2) When you do have ecodamage the amount per mineral is very steep. The rate is so steep that it doesn't make a big difference whether you're at +2 PLANET or -3 PLANET.
3) You are rewarded for creating ecodamage by 1 clean mineral per fungal pop.
4) The AI gets a 5 fold or so reduction to ecodamage, possibly prevent global runaway flooding or clean mineral issues. This bonus is very extreme compared to growth, industry, etc.

The goals would be:
1) Make PLANET rating matter for ecodamage.
2) The divisor facilities should be desirable.
3) Ecodamage should be present but not overwhelming.

I've been trying out this:
1) No clean minerals for facilities or fungal pops.
2) Ecodamage scaling with TECHs disabled.
3) -1 ecodamage per base as the formula seems to round up fractions.

With the default ecodamage divisor of 300, this works out to:
1 ecodamage per 10 minerals at 0 PLANET.
At 2+ PLANET, it's 1 ecodamage per 30 minerals.
At -3 PLANET, it's 1 ecodamage per 5 minerals.

Minerals includes production plus extra minerals from terraforming damage.

[bvanevery]

3) You are rewarded for creating ecodamage by 1 clean mineral per fungal pop.

I don't think that's a correct way to state things.  Rather, the game mechanic is Planet becomes more tolerant of your abuse.  When you offend, it punishes.  You may not actually survive the punishment.  But if you do, there's a higher threshold for what you have to do to cause Planet's ire.  To say that you are being rewarded, is to fail to notice all those mindworms etc. that are trying to destroy your cities.  They are perfectly capable of succeeding, and it is only because I've played these doomsday scenarios a fair number of times now, that I'm starting to consistently survive them.

You could make a system where Planet's tolerance is absolute rather than relative.  But that's a different system.  The consequences of using a different system, should be understood and noted.  An absolute system is going to function as a hard cap on how much productivity can exist in your empire.  Pass that seemingly magic line, whatever it is, and you'll get empire-crushing piles of mindworms and massive floods.  You won't basically be able to build your empire out any larger than that magic line, because it will cease to function.  The only reason it can function now, is because the sieges will end.

What should the line be?  You built Genejack Factories in all your cities?  You built Robotic Assembly Plants?  (That seems to be the tipping point in practice.)  Quantum Converters?  Nanoreplicators?  So many Boreholes per capita?

The goals would be:
1) Make PLANET rating matter for ecodamage.
2) The divisor facilities should be desirable.

It does.  They are.  With the stock game, I mitigate eco-damage this way all the time.

The problem that I've seen, is that illegal chemical attacks do absurd levels of eco-damage.  And that if they're legal, or outside of the framework of law in the case of the Aliens, they do no eco-damage.  That makes no sense at all.  It's clearly not about Planet being irritated by actual chemicals.  It's just a game mechanical fiat that "you've been bad".

When you use chemicals, there's nothing gradual about it.  You're doing fine, everything's normal, for maybe the first 25 chemical attacks.  Once your reputation becomes Infamous, you go off a cliff!  The whole game gets dialed to 111.

3) Ecodamage should be present but not overwhelming.

Ecodamage should be overwhelming, when you have actually been warned of the consequences, and can make choices as to what to do about it.  In the stock game with chemical attacks, you can't.  It's only from a position of premeditation, that I can survive such things now.  Pretty much have to build or capture the Neural Amplifier, and build up a lot of Trance 3-Res units quickly.

[Nexii]

Each atrocity is 5 minerals by default, added to production and terraforming minerals. Yitzi had put in an option for making this only apply to Planet Busters, which probably does make sense to enable.

Almost all the mitigation you see is from Clean Minerals not PLANET rating and divisor facilities so much. Because TECHs is such a high multiplier.

Example: midgame (40 techs) base making 30 minerals; 14 in excess of clean. That's 56 ecodamage. Even if you go Green and make a Centauri Preserve it's 10 ecodamage which is like a pop every other turn.

[bvanevery]

However the difference between 56 eco-damage and 10 eco-damage is quite large, both in terms of subjective impressions of numbers put on the screen to the player, and what in practice you can actually expect to happen based on your game experience.  Saying that changing your PLANET rating doesn't matter, is simply wrong.

There are plenty of games where I've gone Green for no other reason than to blunt Planet's imminent vengeance upon me.  To reduce 50 to 10.

Chemical attacks in my last AAR regularly got me eco-damage in excess of 250!  With all the mitigating facilities built, and as high a PLANET as I could manage.  Only +2 because the Manifold Nexus was remote and also sinking.  That's another problem, once the sea level starts changing, the Nexus is hosed.  You can't save it by raising land, that will destroy it.  It's stupid that way.

[Nexii]

Arguing for argument's sake. Playing extremely suboptimally doesn't prove it a valid strategy. In any normal game one just negates all ecodamage with clean minerals.

Anyways if someone who understands the ecodamage formula would like to share constructive feedback, feel free.

Observationally the chance to fungal pop seems to approximate 1% per 1 ecodamage.

[bvanevery]

Arguing for argument's sake. Playing extremely suboptimally doesn't prove it a valid strategy.

Wat?  I've just told you the valid strategy I've been using for the past 20 years.  You're Free Market, things start popping too hard, you go Green because you need the madness to stop.  There's nothing suboptimal about it at all.  Has nothing to do with "chemical attack demo" games.  I do this in any ordinary game where I need the eco-damage to beg off.

In any normal game one just negates all ecodamage with clean minerals.

People by default don't know what clean minerals are.  When some noob on r/4Xgaming gets their interest piqued enough to try SMAC, nobody's chiming in to tell them "Ah, yeah, the Clean Minerals."  You have been playing this game for so long, that you think it's about under the hood formulas, rather than the default empirical received reality.  Changing your PLANET rating does work in that reality.

[Nexii]

When I was new to SMAC I rarely had ecodamage show up because I would build a lot of bases with Tree Farm / Hybrid Forest. 100% forests was easy and powerful. This has the problem of missing all the story interludes as the game goes on, as they're tied to fungal pops.

I think that they added TECHs as a multiplier late in development so that fungal pops would happen for certain in the late game. Then when ecodamage got out of control they patched that up with Clean Minerals so that pops wouldn't happen in the early game. This in turn created new issues. As evidenced in clean mineral count not being visible in-game despite its extreme effects. As a new player it wasn't understandable why my ecodamage would wildly swing from 0 to 100 and back to 0 in the games where I went just a bit over clean minerals. It seemed at the time like a bug, not knowing the formula. After awhile I figured out there was some kind of breakpoint by adding/removing workers but it was still very opaque what was going on.

I think this because 300 as an ecodamage divisor is very reasonable otherwise. So I'll keep it at this level.

[bvanevery]

It's still a bug regardless of knowing a formula.  The eco-damage swings in some circumstances are crazy.

I have become very gunshy about building factories.  So I'm not strictly convinced that fungal pops will always happen.  Only as I've started to master the art of surviving apocalyptic mindworm attacks and floods, have I gotten more bold about doing more eco-damage.  There comes a point at which it's like, who's counting anymore?