Modding towards a middle ground between SMAC and SMAX

[EmpathCrawler]

I've long been a fan of the smac-in-smax mod (played with via Thinker) but I'm kind of bored of just Mind Worms and Isles. I like spore launchers and sealurks for variety and fungal towers give the sense that native life can control territory. So I've decided to try to find a midway point between purely SMAC-only features and expansion content that I like. It's been so long since I've played with SMAX-only stuff that I don't really remember what's worthwhile and what's OP.

I'm keeping the tech tree SMAC stock and removing all of the added weapons and armors. There are enough weapons and armors already and I'm keeping all of the Progenitor stuff purged.

Of the special abilities, I think I'd only keep Algorithmic Enhancement as a counter for the Hunter Seeker Algorithm.

Of the facilities, I'm less sure. The Flechette Defense System seems like a nice counter to missile spam. Maybe keep the Covert Ops Center, too?

I'm definitely not re-adding the Cloudbase Academy. The Manifold Harmonics has an interesting effect, but I doubt the AI is going to leave enough fungus around to make any use of it. Only I would understand its purpose which feels unfair.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

RE: SMAC vs. SMAX.
This question makes sense for vanilla adepts only. For them, obviously, there are only two options. Starting from simple text modification one can turn any specific feature on and off. Question does not make sense anymore.

You are essentially asking people to list their preferred/unpreferred features. It is like 100 items list.
😄

[bvanevery]

It is like 100 items list.
😄

No it isn't.  I've kept things because I know that the biggest audience is for people who want all the bells and whistles of the expanded game.  Not because I have a high opinion of those things in the game.  I have "soft retired" many of them.  That's when they're put so late in the game, as to be irrelevant.  At least, irrelevant to people actually trying to win the game in a hurry.  Sandboxers don't care, they're just playin' around.  So the toys are there for them.

Get rid of the Brood Pit.  Ridiculous overpowered piece of junk.  I simply don't have the courage to 'cut' such a lousy thing.  It has to be "Chopper bad" for me to cut something. 

Get rid of the Planetary Energy Grid.  I've balanced it in my mod but you have to tear up the whole tech tree to do that.  It's not worth the effort.  Path of least resistance is to get rid of it.

Get rid of Soporific Gas Pods.  Gaaagh!

You really aren't going to miss Tectonic Missiles or Fungal Missiles.  Although I don't consider them atrocities, in real games I have almost no use for them.  Tectonics can be used to lift sea bases out of the water, so that you can conquer them more easily by land.  They can bridge continents faster.  They can help you if global flooding is coming on strong and fast and everything is sinking.  But none of these things are all that important.  That pretty much makes it a terraforming toy.

Fungal Missiles, I think they're just too many mouseclicks for the bother.  Only the Singularity versions have much in the way of results.  By then, there are so many ways you could have already creamed everyone.  What you get is a bunch of worms and fungal towers.  It's not exactly a strategy.  I suppose you could farm them, but that's boring.

Get rid of Dissociative Wave.  Buff of a rebuff of a counter-buff is a distraction.

Get rid of Fuel Nanocells.  You will almost never remember to build anything with them in the real world, nor will you actually need them.

The only 'good' additional ability is Marine Detachment, if that's to your taste.  It has serious game mechanical consequences.  You'll find you don't want to put high tech ships in the water, for fear of the Pirates capturing them and turning that high tech against you.

The Nethack Terminus is honestly rather boring.  By the time you get it, who cares.

The Manifold Harmonics is actually a mildly interesting late game mechanic.  However it often dominates one's concerns if one builds this SP.  It would be reasonable to forget about it, just to keep players from having to suffer that angst.

The whole vanilla probe team thing is stupid and sucky.  There are way too many ways to beef up a probe team.  All those techs that have a "probe team improvement" flag on them, I removed the flag.  Covert Ops Center is stupid.  I never build them.

I think Flechette Defense System is kinda pointless.  If everyone's hurling Conventional Missiles at you, then you've probably done something wrong earlier.  If you do things right, then you eventually find yourself building a bunch of FDS "just in case" and it feels like a pointless waste of mouseclicks.

The Geosynchronous Survey Pod is actually worth something, because it extends your sight distance around your base.  That can be helpful.  That said, again, what have you done wrong that you're getting invaded?  So, you could skip this.

Aquafarm, Subsea Trunkline, and Thermocline Transducer are like more terraforming gear for the oceans.  They all have strong effects, and thus I've put them late game.  Aquafarm in particular is pretty powerful, even more than a Hybrid Forest really, food-wise.  This fits into when you make Hab Domes available.  I make them available relatively early, as these things go.  There are tradeoffs of where to put these techs in your tree.  I would warn against giving them out early, as they'll unbalance things.

Think I just covered the "100s" list.  I had the alpha.txt and alphax.txt out as I was going over it.

[EmpathCrawler]

RE: SMAC vs. SMAX.
This question makes sense for vanilla adepts only. For them, obviously, there are only two options. Starting from simple text modification one can turn any specific feature on and off. Question does not make sense anymore.

You are essentially asking people to list their preferred/unpreferred features. It is like 100 items list.
😄

There aren't a hundred differences between SMAC and SMAX. I think you've misunderstood what I'm proposing: I'm saying what, if given the choice, is worth adding to the SMAC experience from the SMAX abilities, facilities, etc.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

You both understood me wrong in context of SMAC vs. SMAX. Ugh. Come on, guys, think out of the box.
I didn't mean to list differences between two releases. Why would any modder care? There are just bunch of features (facilities, units, abilities, strategies, concepts, etc.) those need to either checked in or out. And the list is huge. Same way one can exclude SMAC feature like bunkers our of the game because they don't like them. So the new mod will be a collection of rules carefully selected from everything available. That's it.

[bvanevery]

Yes... and with my abundant modding experience, it took me 1 hour to exhaust 99% of the subject.

[Hagen0]

Battle ogres (or whatever they are called) and spore launchers make the game worse just by their existence. They are one reason Smac is a better game than Smax.

Worthwhile are the factions (though only a few of them are good) and the sea base improvements. There is no reason to put them into late game as bvanevery did. They are not that good but help a sea bases little which sorely need it. A way to circumvent the HSA is another good addition to the add-on.

Cloudbase Academy and Planetary Energy Grid should be disabled. They are too good.

[EmpathCrawler]

Battle ogres are definitely staying out, but I'm curious why no spore launchers? What I like about them is that they kind of create a consequence of leaving fungus too close to your terraforming but like I said I haven't played with that stuff in a long time.

[bvanevery]

Worthwhile are the factions (though only a few of them are good) and the sea base improvements. There is no reason to put them into late game as bvanevery did.

And you have 3.5+ years of mod playtesting and balancing, that's been released widely to the public, to back up your claim here?  There jolly well are reasons to put them into late game.  Calibration: thermal boreholes, supply crawlers, and condensers are all late game too.  And my forests cost 6 turns, not 4.  GROWTH is difficult to obtain in my mod.  Pop booming takes real work.

[bvanevery]

Battle ogres are definitely staying out,

An alternative is to nerf and repurpose them.  My R-Lasers only have strength 3.  I gave them Deep Radar so that they're useful as a land scout.  That works fine for the mk I.  The mk II and III are kinda pointless, because if you don't give them a big gun and abilities, what's the point of getting them?  Usually if I get those in a game, it takes me awhile to bring it somewhere useful.  By then, their armament and armor is probably obsolete.

[EmpathCrawler]

Battle ogres are definitely staying out,

An alternative is to nerf and repurpose them.  My R-Lasers only have strength 3.  I gave them Deep Radar so that they're useful as a land scout.  That works fine for the mk I.  The mk II and III are kinda pointless, because if you don't give them a big gun and abilities, what's the point of getting them?  Usually if I get those in a game, it takes me awhile to bring it somewhere useful.  By then, their armament and armor is probably obsolete.

While that's not a bad idea, but for me I'm excluding them purely for reasons of aesthetics. Discovering an alien-built mech is a little too goofy for me in a way that monoliths or alien artifacts aren't. At least there's sort of a mystery to the latter two. They're fairly rare, anyway, so I don't think that I'll miss them all that much. Someday I'm even going to dig out the original artifact art and replace the Progenitor-style one.

[Hagen0]

@EmpathCrawler: You don't have any choice but too leave fungus about. Particularly in a high native game the stuff is everywhere and you can't (and shouldn't try to) remove it until (late) midgame. If a spore crawler sits in a fungus field destroying your improvements early on there is often little you can do about it except park a scout patrol somewhere and have it shoot that instead of your forests/farms. They just incredibly annoying and little to the game outside of that.

Worthwhile are the factions (though only a few of them are good) and the sea base improvements. There is no reason to put them into late game as bvanevery did.

And you have 3.5+ years of mod playtesting and balancing, that's been released widely to the public, to back up your claim here?  There jolly well are reasons to put them into late game.  Calibration: thermal boreholes, supply crawlers, and condensers are all late game too.  And my forests cost 6 turns, not 4.  GROWTH is difficult to obtain in my mod.  Pop booming takes real work.

Would be helpful if you could say what those are. Balance in your mod is wildly different und you can, of course, play as you like. However, we were not talking about your mod and if balance is anywhere close to vanilla all the water base facilities can stay early because they aren't that good. Paying 8 rows of minerals plus 1 energy maintenance for some more food is fine but you can 4/1/0 condensors on land instead which are about equal in tile strength. Then the minerals can go into formers which are much better value then facilities early on, particular something as toothless as aquafarms.

[bvanevery]

There's no point discussing balance in the vanilla game.  It is not balanced.  You either change it to be more balanced, or you don't.

SMACX heaps even more silliness on top of an already silly game, as I enumerated in my 1st comment above.

[Hagen0]

I used to discuss how to balance Smac stuff in the WTP thread. But I have come to the conclusion that this is fundamentally wrongheaded. The way a Smac faction's economy reaches escpape velocity with boreholes, pop-booming, +1 energy on every tile, food satellites, crawler parks and huge multipliers from facilities on one hand and the absolute devastation even a few combat units can dish out on the other hand is what makes the game fun. It's the essence of Smac. The silliness is the point. If you want to play a balanced 4x there are much much better games about.

[bvanevery]

If you want to play a balanced 4x

there's my mod.
It's not for people who revel in Teh Slly

You can balance SMACX.  It takes 3.5+ calendar years of work.

All of my 1st comment was about things that are silly.