Restricting economical growth

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Well, since nobody wants to open this topic, I will.

Vanilla end game suffers from economical over development. There are tons of different ways to improve base yield: advanced terraforming, crawlers, satellites, multiplying facilities, SP, etc. All of them combined allow an enormous yield that is very hard to balance. Remember opening 2-3 techs a turn in vanilla end game?

The only thing that stops it is ecodamage and only for terraforming and minerals. Nutrient and energy can grow completely unchecked. This is not a good solution as ecodamage hurts everybody and not just the abuser.

The better way would be to put the above improvements at check. The secondary goal is to eliminate any unlimited possibilities to remove rush exploits (like with unlimited crawlers).

Areas of consideration

• Terraforming/yield
• Crawlers
• Multiplying facilities
• Satellites

Initial propositions

Terraforming
Condenser do not multiply nutrients in its square
Soil Enricher increases nutrients by +1 instead of by 50%
Forest = 1-2-0 or 1-1-2, different suggestions
Fungus - its max yield is 2-3-3 by end game. Should this be reduced?
Borehole = 0-4-4
Platform = I believe it is good as is but some propose to disable +1 Minerals with the discovery of Advanced Ecological Engineering
Harness = is it good as is or should be nerfed too? I don't think so. Otherwise, land bases will outperform in energy production which is supposed to be for sea ones.

Crawlers
The main problem with them is their unlimited usage. One can cover whole planet with them just for a single base.
My thought is disallow harvesting altogether! Indeed, crawlers/caravans were designed to carry resources between bases and aid with SPs. Both above goals are unique in a way that you cannot achieve them otherwise. Except probably by disbanding units for half price for projects. At the same time, gathering resources is not unique thing and is already done by citizens. Harvesting is just and additional and most likely unneeded extra thing that SMACX introduced just for fun.
When this is eliminated, carrying resources between bases would become an important way to support poor bases.
I don't see any problems with contributing to SP as long as AI does the same.

Multiplying facilities
They are fine and limited but there are too many of them as many already noted. With all of them in place base mineral production can be tripled and economy/labs - quadrupled!
One solution is to keep them but reduce their benefit from 50% to say 25%. Probably reducing their cost as well, of course. That'll make total multiplication of 2 for minerals and 2.5-3.0 for economy/labs.

Satellites
Option 1. Reduce the limit to 1/2 or 1/4 of the base size.
Option 2. Reduce the limit to portion of corresponding resource surplus. I.e. no more than 10-25% of each.

[Nexii]

Forests aren't all that powerful by late game IMO. At most 3/2/2. 7 FOP is good but it's even less than sea tiles at 4/0/4. I didn't think forests needed a production nerf although they were too fast to plant. I did have boreholes and consendors reduced a bit for raw production. They do pollute more so that's a consideration, I think they need to be a little higher than forest or sea. Plus they take more former time. Solar/farm should be promoted a bit more since no one really does that. I had echelons quicker to make. Fungus is kind of a non-factor for most factions since the techs come too late. I suppose I could adjust this but I like having factions with fungus benefits without breaking the balance.

I like the idea of crawlers personally as they add some strategy, but one per base should be the limit.

Mostly it's satellites and transcendi that make the very late game fast. Could try a cost/tech increase on satellites and reduction on transcendi. I have their labs at 2, and thinker is also 2 psych 2 labs. Specialists are powerful partly because they also ignore efficiency. It becomes great to just build bases whereever and satellites compound this. I'd have to do more calculations to balance out satellites. They are like getting +1/+1/+1 on all tiles, which is definitely strong. Though you have to build a lot of them as well... just for size 14 bases that's 42 satellites.

I would say that the late game techs being a bit faster is probably okay, the theme of the game near the end is a feeling of runaway technology before humanity can adapt it properly. But if you're getting 2-3 techs a turn that's kind of a problem.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Please share your mod.

How did you modify condensers and boreholes yield?

[Nexii]

Borehole is editable in standard alphax.txt, where you edited forest. Condenser Yitzi added options for in the first section. I lowered condensor to just +1 N.

Also trying out with 1 less nutrient on sea, but 1 more mineral for mining platforms. It's not a full compensation I consider N > E > M.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Share your mod, please. Or point me to change list.

[Nexii]

It's attached in my last reply. Satellites I should probably put to 12-16 rows each I think

[bvanevery]

Against all other valid considerations, there comes a point at which the game actually has to be won.  It is not a crime to end the game and declare victory, rather than dragging it out tediously forever.  If a player is capable of getting on a 'runaway' earlier in the game, that is far more important than whether they can do it in the late game.  By the late game, they have probably already run away on tech.  If they have tech advantage, then they are going to beat the AIs.  It is only a question of personal style, how they are going to do the beatings.

Recently I carried out a sequence of expensive weapons and armors all the way to the end of the game.  There is no free lunch for an unarmored unit, you will pay through the nose for a big gun.  I accomplished all of this with *.txt modding only, although it took a lot of hair pulling to work out.  And what's the end result?  I don't really use endgame weapons because I'm perfectly capable of beating up the hapless AI long before then.

There's sort of a moral lesson in that.  You don't really need to refine every aspect of the game, past the player's rational ability to plan and win the game.  I did it anyways because those cheap units bugged me.  So now those units aren't cheap and now they're not getting used.

When you refine a game design for a long time, you find out what the essential core of the game is.  What is really needed to win.  What isn't.  What is just some toy or gewgaw, that Firaxis threw on top of the whole pile, to make more money selling an expansion pack.  4X TBS AIs play abysmally in general, because commercial devs do these gewgaws to make more money.  This is the reality of how games get funded and remain commercially sustainable.  It's not based on the game design or AI.  It's based on the artwork, and the players' perception that they're buying a feature.

Players are stupid.  Or, alternately they are children, building sand castles.  Devs sell them software toys, not games.

Players in the 4X TBS demographic have noticed that the AIs are all bad though.  They complain about it in r/4Xgaming.  Not sure if they understand what kind of design discipline it would take to write a good AI, to support that, but it's possible that a constrained + good AI game would be salable.

I'm just trying to paint the 'big picture' before everyone gets down in the weeds about what should be +1 or +25% or +10% or removed from the game or whatever.

Nutrients: these feed Diplomatic Victory.  It is one of the shorter ways to end the game, and players need the votes.  Don't lose sight of that.

Economic Victory: for some reason in my own mod, it has become ridiculously expensive.  I can count on needing 100k credits to win.  I don't remember vanilla well enough to know if it was bad like that.  But there's really no such thing as having too much energy, when you're faced with that kind of cost to win the effin' game.  And I do have Orbital Power Transmitters long delayed in my mod.

Conquest Victory: it has its own constraint, pushing units.  If you've won by that on a Huge map, you've earned it.  It's taken a long time to push those units, and it should not go on tediously forever.

I don't like the tech tree 'race' and as others may note from another thread, I'm morally opposed to Transcending as portrayed in this game.  Having most of humanity upload itself into a fungal neural net is not an attractive endgame for our species IMO.  If I had the license for this game fiction, and the budget and development team, I'd have ways to kill Planet.  I think it's a really good idea to go into the future without this damn thing, if it cannot be curbed and lived with harmoniously.  The human race should not be giving up what it is, just to avoid being wiped out.  And the idea that "well, of course most people are going to think being a Transcendii is best," is a sap unexplored story.  Plenty of other sci-fi works have explored such things, and it does not always go so well, that this is obviously what you want to do with yourself.  So if I had the franchise rights, I'd put more into that aspect of the fiction.

I don't, so I won't bother.  If I ever write anything like SMAC, it's not going to have a sentient planet.  I'll just skip the whole mess, it's easier.

So I come from a perspective, where I think the game should be winnable about halfway through the tech tree.  That really changes my personal weight, about what I think is important to be done / to be refined.  I thought I'd better share that basic perspective with you, that this game has 3X more junk in it than a game needs.  Board gaming sensibilities inform this as well.  You only need to produce as much stuff as is necessary to win the game.  Various shorter board games, will penalize you for overproducing stuff, for failing to recognize what's needed to get to the victory condition.

So as you wrestle with this pig, I hope you consider some of this perspective.

[Nexii]

I think that traditionally writing a good AI for 4x games was very difficult. Limitations for processing power had a lot to do with it. Also a lot of strategies were discovered by players that the devs didn't anticipate. A small test team will never catch all the things that thousands of players will. It wasn't really even AI technically so much as heuristic behavior.

Only recently have desktop computers become able to store enough and process fast enough for meaningful advances in AI. Now you have algorithms learning to play all sorts of games by playing themselves billions of times. This will probably become more of the standard going forward rather than trying to program an AI for a complex game and then giving it raw bonuses to keep it up with a human. It also has the benefit of being able to adapt better to modifications and patches.

[lolada]

Ok first i have to say its important to play the mod - i believe many didn't try it for meaningful duration and lots of talk is guessing / theoretical. I see some suggestions around that have nothing with the mod -_- its a bit dishonest/unhelpful.

Then what for we are balancing this, i presume Transcend and high-skill play. Not exactly T-Hawk level, but certainly not for Talent difficulty, and i wouldn't try to remove exploits heavily. If someone wants to exploit Condensers on every freakin tile I don't see why stop them. Or build crawler on every sea square for that energy. If you remove Condensers they'll spam something else every tile and break the game anyway.

Terraforming

Forests

So forests are 1-2-0 and 12 turns to build. It looks crap, but build time is really not important, its a slight early delay - once you place a few and go do other things like building farm/solar they spread on its own and they just keep spreading more and more. Yield is good nerf; -1 energy really hurts them. Forest now have big deficiency - one must rely on something to get energy. In vanilla thats not the case. I really like this chance because its different playstyle and it bring in variety. Forest all is not the total solution.

Now Tree Farms turn forest into 2-2-0 +50% economy has nothing to boost if you plant all forests, psych is still great. But you can totaly crap land turn into 2-2-0 useful tiles and good production base. And once Hybrid forests come, which is kind of late unless you tech for it.. you have 3-2-1 tiles that are good, but not great. Its still good to have something other than forests.
This allows ton of space to place farm/solar collectors and once can also use boreholes for energy and minerals. This is nice variety. Add to that that fungus is very useful - people didn't play the mod i think so they don't know. With Centauri Psi (E5 technology) which is not late.... fungus is 2-1-2 tile. Now if you compare - do you use forest 2-2-0 (that requires Tree farm investement) or free 2-1-2 fungus tiles?

I tell you - you often want that energy - and placing base near fungus field without any terraforming is possible and its a good idea - hell i did that with Miriam. But you need positive Planet rating. And fungus is not total solution - its only every 2 food (gaians 3) and minerals are low.. until very late so it doesn't count. If you want mineral forest is better - but then you don't have energy. So its nice up and down play.

System is working great and i don't see why would we put forests to say 1-1-2. Everyone agrees there's too much energy in the game and that tech is too fast - so why would we add more energy into the game when we want less ?? Beats me.

Condensers and boreholes

These are obviously strong but nerfing them means changing lots of things. I don't have big preference. If someone wants to abuse Condensers i don't know why stop them. AI build condensers and boreholes and uses them well. There's too much energy in game - so i can see good reason to nerf that 6 energy, its huge. Eco multipliers come on early. Minerals are capped in two ways - ecology and % multipliers come late and are expensive. So for example turning Thermal Boreholes to 0-6-3 is reasonable. They are huge eco damage dealer and you can't spam them too much.
Condenser on the other hand deal 1/2 eco damage of Borehole. One could up that - but i don't know if it will break AI and floods. AI spams them and they grow big bases - and use specialists.. fine by me.. it does speed up tech so nerf could slow that. Reducing food a bit maybe.. i wouldn't mind.

In any case - I don't think there's too many minerals in game. But there's way too many energy in game. Food is not a problem - drones stop you from growing and food helps AI a lot since it has relaxed requirement.

Possible changes:
- Tree Farms to be cheaper - they are not as good as in vanilla. Hybrid as well.
- Fungus is too good energy producer.. it gets to 2-2-4 late i think but mineral comes in later. Energy 2-1-3 is relatively early.. and 2-1-4 is before minerals.. So i'd keep fungus at 2-1-2 until late game then it can go 2-2-3 (gaians will have 3-2-3)... and hybrid forests are 3-2-1.

Here is quite late in game - without manifold nexus. Its great energy produce but it has mineral weakness - which is good otherwise its op.



- The Manifold Harmonic is B6 tech and only 600 minerals and is totally overpower with +3 planet - that needs to go to level 10+ and higher cost



Crawlers

I would remove them from the game for one reason - they ruin special projects - its impossible to balance or tech AI to do it.

I think Tim solved crawler spam problem with 120 fixed mineral cost - its stupid to spam them and they are not spammed - few tactical crawlers are good. Its way better to build other things than to waste minerals on crawlers - there's only so many mines or condensers. Exception is secret projects - and i don't know how to fix that.

Better solution is to leave them be and ban rushing of secret projects. Its very unfair advantage  to player. If thats possible thats my first choice. I'd also ban energy rushing them as well.

Multiplying facilities

- There's way too many energy. So reducing some facilities to 25% could make sense. Nerfing borehole energy output. Forests are nerfed already. Fungus needs energy nerf. Sea squares also produce lots of energy - but that can be dealt by reducing energy % bonuses. AI even spams Tree forests in sea bases and i don't blame them - its +50% energy and psych bonus is great.

- Mineral facilities - they are in better place. Genejack factory is decent cost and creates a drone!!! Robotic Factory is expensive and costs lots of maintenance and comes later. I don't get where you guys build things in 1 turn ?! Thats my capital above lategame it produces 65 minerals. I had best bases producing 103 minerals i think with everything build when its game over. Tim has special projects worth 2000 (Cyborg Factory) and Singulary Inductor (+50 minerals everywhere), Self-Aware colony is 2000 minerals.. Cloning Vats is 4000 -_-.



This is not even endgame unit.. its one good ability and not the best weapon. I see other people build things in 1 turn ... beats me. My best cities take 3-4 turns to get one unit like this. Very late game its 2-3. So i don't see why ban mineral production. 21-1-16*4 Needlejet with Deep Radar (zero cost) is 144 minerals.

Satelites

These are obviously very powerful but Tim placed them very late and AI builds them. Sky Hydroponics is E11 tech. Endgame is level 14 (Threshold to Transcedence). Mining and Energy satellites come after Sky Hydroponics. Basically its game finisher and doesn't matter much - its enough to see how they work, but you have won by the time you get them. Once could just remove Cloudbase Academy from the game - I wouldn't mind - its 1200 minerals and player can snipe it always with crawlers before AI builds it.

[Nexii]

Manifold is kind of a good comparison to satellites. +1/+1/+2. Of course it's not either/or. Manifold does require you not tanking PLANET rating. Having it come early or even midgame could be hard to balance around. I never put too much focus on lategame SPs having to cost a lot more because by that point theres only like 20 turns left in the game. That's a very short payback time. Kind of the same with late facilities. They're only multiplicative on the base amount. I think in most speedruns only the mid-tier economic facilities are usually made.

I think that with Forests at 1/2/0 they were barely worth it. Farm+Solar or Farm+Mine were better in all but the very worst terrain. I also tried 1/3/0 to entice some variety, it wasn't too bad I can't remember why I went back. It might have been just that the default AI suffered to get much energy and it made the early game quite slow. It made Free Market or whatever your +2 ECON options are pretty much necessary.

Most of the time solar was only +1 E which was quite weak. It was something I tried to do, make options for going either minerals or energy on land. Though it's tricky, I'd say energy is better most of the time. Energy boosters come earlier plus there's commerce, plus it doesn't make ecodamage. If anything minerals need a buff more than energy. Increasing the rush cost ratio might help. Boreholes having more of a focus one way or the other too. I had them E focused but I think lolada brings up good points, they probably should be M focused. M is better than E for military due to the higher rush costs.

[Nexii]

Another thing you could do is to write down your tech rate at various points in the game. This can vary a lot from game to game. So maybe also look at how much labs the AI players are getting at various points. I'm not sure if your tech formula is altered, but universally that can be helpful.

Sometimes the things you see are surprising. I saw one game where Yang went from like 100 labs, to 2k labs. From hitting transcendi specialists alone. Because his empire was gigantic, and his EFFIC was mediocre as is typical for Police State.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Let's analyze fungus a little.

Best end game yields.
Land: 4-1-4, 3-4-0. Sea: 4-0-4, 3-3-0. Forest: 3-2-1. Fungus vanilla: 2-3-3. Fungus WtP: 2-2-4.
At first glance it seems about same as best terraformed square. However, since it doesn't take much efforts to plant and does not cause eco-damage, we could nerf it a bit. Probably make it comparable to forest yield at end game.

How about 2-1-3/4? This makes it self sustainable although not contributing much to growth. Minimal mineral output with emphasis on energy. One can still use it impeding their economical growth a little but incurring no eco-damage. It also good starting point for brand new bases those not yet terraformed. Of course, it requires positive PLANET to keep at this level. Goes down to 1-0-2 with -1 rating.

The Manifold Harmonics is a cool boost for fungus bringing it to 3-2-5 with all the techs and with +3 PLANET. It is little better than the best terraformed square. However, it requires technologies and constant lock in high PLANET rating which is very difficult to achieve. In other words, you loose a lot by locking yourself there. That is why I don't think it is OP - it has its limitations and down sides.

Proposed progression
https://github.com/tnevolin/thinker-doer#fungus-production-guidelines

[Nexii]

Yea I've sort of gone in all directions as to what fungus should be. I like the idea of boreholes being more of an upgrade to mines. Echelons should be the upgrade to solar. Boreholes being at 6 E means you don't need to make solar. Solar can sometimes get a bit better than 4-1-4 with a lot of raising and optimal echelons, but it's a fair approximation.

So that leaves forests and fungus. They could be all-arounder options like they are now. Forest at (3/2/2), fungus at (2/3/3) or your similar 2/2/4.

I feel like Forests should be slanted more to minerals, and fungus either to nutrients or energy. When I think of fungus I think of it being food first, then its energies from planet second. I feel like it would be weaker in minerals. Plus it's a little strange that ecodamage makes terrain that would make even more minerals.

I feel like fungus shouldn't be better than forest probably. It's a tough one to rate because by the time it gets good you would have to plant it. A lot will depend when it gets its improvements. Giving it too much too early means you don't have to terraform at all. I ran into that curiosity by making a fungus faction.

It's something I need to mod too. I might go with Forests returning to 1-3-0, reaching 3-3-1 with TF/HF. The 1 E from Hybrid Forest represents Fungus being good at energy. And fungus reaching 3-1-3 or so with techs. Maybe 3-1-4 a bit later. Though those techs need to come before the very end of the game. Right now they're so backloaded that you probably wouldn't re-terraform unless you got Manifold Nexus.

[bvanevery]

Ok first i have to say its important to play the mod - i believe many didn't try it for meaningful duration and lots of talk is guessing / theoretical. I see some suggestions around that have nothing with the mod -_- its a bit dishonest/unhelpful.

I agree that that happened in the previous thread.  But, this thread isn't specific to The Will To Power.  I took that as implicit in Tim's framing of late game economic issues in vanilla.  Now, if he actually mean to discuss only TWTP, then the OP should be edited to that effect.  But I doubt that was his intent.

I have a lot of opinions on putting games on a diet.  Not just this one.  My other open source claim to very limited fame, was the best Battle For Wesnoth campaign back in the day.  That was a 4 person month full time project, that I actually did in 4 calendar months.  The scope was a lot less than what I've presently done with SMAC.  I'm not going to name the project because I had a falling out with its lead dev.  I contributed enough to the project to belatedly realize that under US law, I had become a "joint author" on the project.  But there was no money to be had out of it.  That project is the reason why I don't work with other devs on game design stuff.  Programming stuff, SMAC oriented things just didn't happen to work out in my timeframe, but I digress.

A lot of what I did for that Wesnoth campaign, is make sure that on all the different difficulty levels, the amount of Gold the player was given at the start of a scenario was the right amount.  So that they wouldn't "get rich" over time and just have buckets of Gold to spend on their army.  Wesnoth is a game where you level up your army over repeated scenarios.  If you make it too easy for the player, then much like a 4X TBS, they can snowball and crush anything.

It was a lot of playtesting to arrive at my Gold weights.  That's pretty much exactly the same as when doing a "serious involved" SMAC mod.  You have to write the specific mod and keeping feeling out the specific weights.  Lots and lots of playtesting.  It's the only way to verify and ensure quality of results.

Similarly, a writer has to write their novel.  Every sentence that actually goes onto a page.  The quality is contained in the writing itself.  In a game design, much of it is contained in the quality of the weights.  From moment to moment, as experienced in the game.  Just like word to word, as it is read on a page.

But you can totaly crap land turn into 2-2-0 useful tiles and good production base.

It occurs to me that one approach / question hasn't been brought up yet.  Why are forests allowed to be built on Arid land at all?

This doesn't work in the real world.  I've traveled all over the USA.  I can assure you that Eastern Washington state is mild desert.  There are no forests there.  You can get shrubs, and sage.  You could grow some asparagus and apple orchards if you cultivate it.  But soaring evergreens, the kind you get big lumber out of?  Forget it, you have to be on the eastern slopes of the Cascades.  They are at least moist.  The western slopes, they're a rainforest!  Tons and tons of moisture, giant giant very green redwoods.  A bit of stuff manages to get over the mountains, and there's snowpack that melts.  So trees do get water on a mountain.  But the traversal of moisture over a mountain range is mostly blocked.  So you get the Arid land in the "rain shadow" of a mountain, according to the prevailing winds.

On the Olympic peninsula, there's even a small town called Sequim, that is in the rain shadow of Mt. Olympus.  It's as dry as Eastern Washington, in an area that's otherwise all rainforest, straight from the Pacific ocean winds.

The game implemented all of this already.  They just forgot that forests don't grow on Arid land.

So, if one of you badass binary coders wants to get in there and fix it...

[Nexii]

Another thing I forgot about fungus is that +2 ECON doesn't give it +1 E per square like other terrain. And obviously the need to keep a decent PLANET rating, which may or may not be hard depending on your SE set.