deep ocean gameplay

[bvanevery]

In a recent After Action Report, the lousiness of someone's starting position was noted.  They were on a small island surrounded by mostly Deep Ocean squares.  No faction can improve the land value of a Deep Ocean square at the beginning of the game.  Eventually in midgame with Advanced Ecological Engineering, anyone can spend an exorbitant amount of time raising it to Ocean Shelf, which can be worked with kelp farms and tidal harnesses.  Only 1 square at a time can be so raised, and it costs a certain amount of money.

By comparison, raising coastal land is a much cheaper way to turn Deep Ocean into Ocean Shelf.  You can typically cause 3 Deep Ocean squares to rise up and become workable, and it may cost you all of 4 credits to perform the operation, depending on how close to your own territory you are.

The Pirates have a special dispensation that they can work Deep Ocean squares directly once they discover Advanced Ecological Engineering.  This still doesn't happen until midgame though.  And obviously, the other 13 factions aren't aquatic factions!  So it's pretty irritating to everyone else.  The Pirates also get their vaunted +1 minerals bonus in Ocean Shelf squares, which is the biggest most imbalanced giveaway of the whole game.

So the question ensues whether these problems should be modded.  Whether in world generation parameters in alphax.txt to create more Ocean Shelf squares, or binary hacking to remove the Deep Ocean limitation.  And whether something could be done about the Pirates' +1 minerals bonus while one is at it.  They can't very well live on the ocean with no minerals, but perhaps the frequency of sea mineral bonus squares could be increased?  All factions could use those, and then the Pirates' +1 minerals bonus could be taken away.

A baseline for world map generation is in order.  The following changes from the original game have been field proven in my mod for a very long time.  They result in more solid continental masses with big oceans between them, more like what we see on Earth.  I do tend to experience almost Pangaea like worlds fairly regularly.  But they're "almost", they tend to have 1 square water channels separating distinct continents.

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30,  ; Continent base   (Base size of a land mass seed)
60,  ; Continent modif. (Increased size from LAND selection: x0, x1, x2)
0 ; Islands          (Higher # increases island count)

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Thank you, bvanevery. Nice summarization.

I can clarify about raise/lower cost. It gets bigger the farther terraroming tile altitude is from shoreline (in both directions). That means further raising 2500 m tip of the mountain costs same as lowering it. Even though lowering a tip of the mountain affects just a single tile! That's why cost of raising deep ocean floor is about equivalent to further raising level 3 mountain. Raising ocean floor cost probably can be reduced. However, it doesn't solve main problem until such terraforming option is available.

Regarding your world builder parameters. I understand you didn't pursued the goal in topic specifically and the proportion of deep ocean is the same in your mod? If so, I would probably research these values instead. They seem to regulate this ratio instead.

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8,   ; Deep water       (Encourages fractal to grow deep water)
10,  ; Shelf            (Encourages fractal to grow shelf)


[bvanevery]

I've got piles of deep ocean in my world building baseline.  Because I insist on having real continents.  Oceans need to exist as major logistical barriers to conquest, and the AI does better invading over land anyways.

So I definitely know what the problem is with Deep Ocean.  The vast majority of my games have plenty of it, because I'm not generating Archipelago worlds.  On rare occasions, I'll get some worlds with a lot of very shallow ocean in large numbers of places.  Disproportionately huge continental shelves.  I don't know why that happens, but it's not typical.  It could change gameplay if I were inclined to exploit them, but the reality is, an efficient empire builder develops whatever is nearest to where they first landed, for the most part.  This game doesn't favor vast, far-flung empires.

Also, with Foil Probe Teams enabled for the AI's use, the stock binary loves to mind control your sea bases.  It's such a huge problem in my mod, that I'm terribly averse to making any sea bases until I've got a lot more resources to protect them.  Like midgame at least.  I think I might be able to get away with sea bases very close to my capitol, as I did crank up the mind control cost hugely.  2x cost in my mod, which seems to dissuade the AI from such abuse, at least within a certain radius of my capitol.  But my "gunshy" habit has kept me from having much recent insight about just what one can and can't get away with.

I would probably research these values instead.

You don't do "instead".  You start from a sane baseline.  And it took me a lot of iterations of tweaking options, to come up with only these 3 parameters as my solution to continent and ocean generation.  It was at least a month's worth of work at one point.  Don't be fooled by the fact that it's only 3 values and easy for you to copy now.  These reflect tons of experimentation, and if you really insist on falling down that rabbit hole, a month from now don't say I didn't warn you.  I do have a back thread about all that work, if you really insist on going there.

Removing Islands is absolutely required for mitigating 1x1 island faction placement bugs in the stock binary.  YMMV with Thinker Mod derived code.  I seem to recall Induktio doing some things with the faction placement algorithm.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Tried to play with different parameters. More solid continents, more fractal continents, less islands, more islands, etc. It doesn't seem to change it much. Still quite a large proportion of the ocean is deep. Geography varies. So sometimes I see big patches of shelf here and there but not consistently.

I probably can run a custom code to raise all ocean tiles upon creation instead of breaking world builder. Essentially, give them something like 2/3 of their depth. This'll convert all trenches into ocean and half of the ocean to shelves. I guess nobody will cry about lost trenches. Not that they any different from regular ocean.

[lolada]

I wouldn't mind having ton of shelf squares around - AI is anyway limited by that expand factor to a certain number of bases and they stop expanding even if they have more land nearby. Likewise player stop expanding because nobody likes to micro 100 bases and at one point you get fed up oh having infinite drones. Also after awhile you don't want to settle new bases too far from HQ anyway. And they are hard to protect from probe teams as noted.

Lots of shelf squares also leads to that annoying issue that AI settles on the coast - you can see that in my Cha Dawn AAR. Its stupid since they can't work land tiles of another faction anyway and settling on own coast takes tiles away from land bases. Then those are easy target for player eventually since one can attack them with Amphibous units.

- So if you guys can lower the ocean depth overall by 1/3 or smth like that - thats one solution. Ofx unless this screws map generation somehow.
- Raise/Lower sea tiles can be moved early in tech tree and made cheap (is it separate from raise/lower land?). It would be nice if AI would know how to use it.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

- Raise/Lower sea tiles can be moved early in tech tree and made cheap (is it separate from raise/lower land?). It would be nice if AI would know how to use it.

Or that.

[bvanevery]

Is the AI affected by the player's preferences about whether terraformers can raise / lower land?  I have a suspicion that it might be.  Yes it would be a bug.

I have definitely seen the AI raising land, such as when they've gained the Weather Paradigm.  Not sure I've seen the AI raise ocean floor.  If I automate my own sea formers to only improve the land around their home base, and my preferences allow raising, they will raise ocean floor.

Raising / lowering land / ocean in the early game, absent acquisition of the Weather Paradigm, is controversial.  For one thing it seriously cheapens the strategic value of completing the Weather Paradigm.  That said, Advanced Ecological Engineering does come along by midgame in the original game, and in my mod as well.  So the time intervals on "when you get to do this" are reasonably well understood, via the example of the original game.

Narratively, it makes it into a "toy" game though.  Not really a good reason why everyone should have the superpower of changing continents around, soon after landing on Planet.  Generally I do not like game mechanics that don't fit the narrative of the game.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

# Version 122

* Ocean tiles depth is modified upon world build. Configuration option: ocean_depth_multiplier.