Supply crawlers, need some opinions

[Nexii]

I think Democracy would be relatively weak in that set.  I've been modding similarly to avoid easy booms, and make more than the 4 popular SE choices viable.  That is PS/Green, Demo/Planned, Demo/FM, and Fund/Green (generally).  Police State is vastly underrated I think mostly just because B-drones were broken before.  Now I do agree that -POLICE doesn't fit FM, and mod similarly.  The problem I've found is keeping PS+FM the 'always-pick' strategy - it would be in your set and has been in a lot of my modded sets (I posted a more balanced SE set but it's still a work in progress).  At +2 POLICE this lets you control 6 drones with NLM.  Now for that reason I'm leaning more back to putting a more severe penalty on PS.  -2 ECON might be the only way, I'm not too sure yet.

As I've played more I've found that 1/2/1 forests are fairly strong.  However, at 1/1/1 I don't think you'd see much forests made at all.  I suppose they could remain the 'cheap/quick' thing to make but what really makes forests so good is their low former time at just 4 turns.  A better fix might be to increase this to 8-10 turns, and reduce farm/solar time.  Then, a reduction in raise/lower times would keep farm/solar competitive after Tree Farm/Hybrid Forest. 

Caps on the 3 separate T3 is a pretty decent change.  Though I have to admit it doesn't 'feel' right that Eco Eng gives boreholes which would be your typical way over mineral/nutrient cap.  So much hinges on T4 Eco Eng that you have to pretty much go GeneSplice into EcoEng even with that change.  So I'm thinking perhaps something like, EcoEng isn't needed for Condensor/Borehole.  Then maybe  make it so EcoEng is required to remove Fungus and level terrain instead.

[Seleuceia]

With police state and free market, you'd have +2 police, +2 econ, -2 support, -1 effic, and -2 or 3 planet (haven't decided which value to go with yet)...you can handle a lot of drones but the support hurts your expansion and military capacity (keep in mind you don't have cheap minerals from forests with this mod)...I haven't found it to be OP, as the support penalty counters the benefit of using multiple units for police...

The -2 police from democracy is really not that bad...yeah, you have less growth with my changes but growth is still one of the stronger SE modifiers, even at only +1..the efficiency also helps with B-drones, and since it no longer has -2 support it makes for a very viable SE choice for rapid expansion...it also still counteracts the penalties of planned and green (which were both halved), so I'd say it is still good...

As for forests, you have to consider the tree farm/hybrid forest bonuses...with those, you are at 3/1/2 which is about the same as a rainy+farm+1000m+some rocks tile....so, they are still great for regions west of ridges that don't have good rainfall and of course still have the bonuses of replacing fungus and reducing eco damage...I've found them to be useful early game for those crappy tiles, and with the population cap changes it's also good to be able to make the most of all 20 tiles around the base...

I should mention that in my mod, superconductor gives echelon mirrors and industrial automation gives boreholes (but not hab complexes as those are silksteel) while ecological engineering gives condensors....so, all the advanced terraforming and the resource caps are spread around 3 different tech paths...otherwise yeah tier 3 ecological engineering would be kind of silly...

[Nexii]

Yea though later game, farm/solar raising gets to be more productive than Hybrid Forested tiles.  The problem is the cost in getting raised to 3k m.

-2 SUP isn't the end of the world, for 3 military units (instead of 1) that's 2 minerals support.  Compare versus Rec Commons + HoloT (100m,4e upkeep), (20m,2m) upkeep is a lot less.  Granted PS needs this advantage with less EFFIC.  It's more that you can build way beyond the 9 b-drone free bases that Demo could do.  ICS endlessly and steal techs with surplus minerals (far bases get only minerals/tanks).  Close bases will be the only ones to get multipliers facilities, whereas far ones will make military/formers and stay small.  It's a hard thing to fix though really.

Putting boreholes to IA, Echelon to OptCon, Condensor to Gene Splice (i.e. T3 techs associated) makes sense. 

Maybe it's just me but I don't rate +GROWTH that doesn't easy-boom so highly.  At least not early game, since to get to pop 2 it's only 20 N.  The bottleneck is minerals for more bases and rarely nutrients once you get a few formers and the energy to buy recycle tanks.  Only once the resource caps are raised do I find building bases up that beneficial.  Until then the raw upkeep of more workers barely outweighs what you gain.  3-4 FOP/sq isn't that great when each new worker takes 2N and 2PSY to control.  At best it's 1e>4PSY from Rec.  But that still leaves bases very tiny at size 3.

[Yitzi]

Yea though later game, farm/solar raising gets to be more productive than Hybrid Forested tiles.  The problem is the cost in getting raised to 3k m.

Keep in mind, though, that by raising one square to 3k, you raise all the ones next to it to 2k, so that cuts the cost significantly.

[Nexii]

Cutting down the productivity of forests isn't a bad change.  Combined with some crawler nerfs/limits this really hampers the crawl tons of forests strategy.  I think 1/2/1 can be okay if you really up the former time requirement to something like 12 turns instead of the ridiculously low 4.  Personally I don't really like Forests everywhere as I feel Fungus should stick around longer and be a lot harder to get rid of.  I'd rather there was a way to turn off Forest spreading into Fungus.

I thought about this, solar needs a boost badly instead.  From what I've seen of speed runs it's always boreholes for energy...never solar.  Give me stronger solar, I'd love to see more viable crawling energy strategies over boreholes everywhere.
Solar to 2E base + 1E per elevation

Unfortunately it doesn't seem solar can be modified in alphax.txt.  I think with a boost to solar it would make uncapping energy first more viable (especially with FM).  If you put Boreholes to IA I found it was always better just to get IA to uncap M before E.  Whether to get condensor before boreholes, now that I'm less sure of.

[Yitzi]

Cutting down the productivity of forests isn't a bad change.  Combined with some crawler nerfs/limits this really hampers the crawl tons of forests strategy.

Actually, decent limits to crawlers should do that even without a forest nerf; I get the idea that the "tons" part is quite essential to the strategy.  Move mineral cap lifting to IA, and mines (with rocky and road) will be better for crawling than forests as soon as you get crawlers, so your limited crawlers would be better spent there.

[Nexii]

Yup agreed.  Would making it so that solar output variable isn't ignored in alphax.txt be a major change?

[Yitzi]

Yup agreed.  Would making it so that solar output variable isn't ignored in alphax.txt be a major change?

No, that shouldn't be too hard.  It would probably wait for the same time that I do various other (mostly fungus-related) resource things.

Although...a bunch of 3000+ elevation farm/enricher/solars with mirrors and condensers are already a far more valuable (though more expensive) midgame terraforming strategy than forests (unless you value minerals substantially higher than nutrients and energy).

[Nexii]

Cool.

For a single base:
Raised solar is around 90/10/75.
All forest is 63/42/42.
Condensors/4 Boreholes is 99/34/27.
Forest/4 Boreholes is 48/56/56. 

But yea the problem is that the setup time for raised solar is very prohibitive.  I think raised solar only wins out in really long games (satellites/long boom) or when having a lot of commerce.  I think that raised solar needs a bit more E production.  I'd be interested in playing a few games with 1+2*elevation for solar production also, or perhaps making Echelon Mirror double nearby solars instead of +1 (a collector could only get doubled once).  Even making small crawlable plateaus should be viable (think of a 3k plateau with 1 mirror and 8 solars).  8-10E would make it competitive with crawling nutrients.

Similarly mines probably need a mid-late game boost.  At just 4 minerals they end up useless compared to boreholes.  Unless you accept they go obsolete

[Yitzi]

Cool.

For a single base:
Raised solar is around 90/10/75.
All forest is 63/42/42.
Condensors/4 Boreholes is 99/34/27.
Forest/4 Boreholes is 48/56/56. 

But yea the problem is that the setup time for raised solar is very prohibitive.  I think raised solar only wins out in really long games (satellites/long boom) or when having a lot of commerce.

How long is "really long" here?  Because I think part of the problem might be that games are too short due to aerial offense being so strong and the defensive techs usually not gotten.

I think that raised solar needs a bit more E production.  I'd be interested in playing a few games with 1+2*elevation for solar production also, or perhaps making Echelon Mirror double nearby solars instead of +1 (a collector could only get doubled once).  Even making small crawlable plateaus should be viable (think of a 3k plateau with 1 mirror and 8 solars).  8-10E would make it competitive with crawling nutrients.

I think crawling nutrients from condensers is already too powerful, which is why I provided a way to nerf it...

Similarly mines probably need a mid-late game boost.  At just 4 minerals they end up useless compared to boreholes.  Unless you accept they go obsolete

Well, they are a lot cheaper than boreholes.  But yes, boosts to mines might be a good idea...I'll have to think about how it would best be implemented.

[Yitzi]

Here's an idea (shamelessly stolen from earlier Civ games): What if a maglev in a square with a mine granted +1 mineral, +1 in rocky, +1 with a mineral bonus or landmark?

[Nexii]

Yea that might be good for maglev+mine.  I feel that mines should get to 5-7 minerals later in the game.  It might also be a good idea to boost solar also (+1 energy to solar with road, +2 with maglev).  Early on that would be a slight ecodamage increase since road is an improvement.

Nutrients might be strong very late, yea.  I think this is more a function of satellite/Transcendi power (note specialists don't increase commerce energy).  Otherwise 6/0.5/0 wouldn't be so overpowering for Condensors.  Also I feel like weakening Condensors only makes the Forest strategies better because before that point they aren't as overpowering. 

[Yitzi]

Yea that might be good for maglev+mine.  I feel that mines should get to 5-7 minerals later in the game.

This would come out to 3 on non-rocky, and 6 on rocky, so that's good.  (It'd be inferior to a borehole unless you're crawling, but also a lot cheaper.)

It might also be a good idea to boost solar also (+1 energy to solar with road, +2 with maglev).  Early on that would be a slight ecodamage increase since road is an improvement.

That doesn't make as much in-game sense, and because solar can be placed in most places it doesn't have the same tendency to create interesting road networks.  Also, solar already has a way to boost it: Raising land.

Nutrients might be strong very late, yea.  I think this is more a function of satellite/Transcendi power (note specialists don't increase commerce energy).  Otherwise 6/0.5/0 wouldn't be so overpowering for Condensors.

Nutrients' strength due to satellites and transcendi is definitely a huge part of it, but the third part is the fact that farm/enricher/condenser is ideal for crawling.

Also I feel like weakening Condensors only makes the Forest strategies better because before that point they aren't as overpowering.

Not as overpowering, but I think as soon as you get enrichers (by that point you already have engineers) they become too powerful.  It wouldn't need a huge nerf, though; lowering it from 6 with farm and enricher to 5 would probably do it.

[Nexii]

Well I don't think 6/0.5/0 is any worse than 0/6/6 that Boreholes give.  Enrichers come pretty late anyhow, and farm+enricher+condensor is 20 turns.  You can down condensors to 5/0.5/0 but then that makes raised solar even weaker against Forest/Borehole or all Forest strategy.

Not saying that 5/0.5/0 Condensors are bad - if you keep sats and specialists as-is that's ok.  But raised solar isn't superior in the mid-game.  Only late-game does it become superior because of the extra nutrients.  I'd take 56M/56E of Forest/Borehole over 12M/75E with raised solar.  The other problem with raised solar is that the former time is orders of magnitude higher. You're looking at an average of 32 former turns per square or so (12 to raise, farm+enrich is 12, plus ~8 (50% solar/25% ech/25%cond)) plus the raising costs.  Compared with Forest at 4 former turns/sq (more like ~2 considering auto-spread).  Even adding 4 Boreholes only makes this 9.6 former turns/sq (20%*32 + 80%*4, but again more like 8.0 with auto-spread).

I stand by saying solar needs a significant boost.  Making echelons double solar output might be the best option.  This would take raised solar up to around 104/12/96 even with condensors at 5 (this is running more condensors due to less echelons, ~40%).  Also if echelons doubled, this would put 3k solars up to 8E.  At 8E, it would be a more difficult decision whether to crawl nutrients or energy.  It would also make raised solar plateaus something worth making.  Right now it's a lot less former time to drill an off-base borehole and crawl that.

[Nexii]

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To clarify, I meant that echelons would double any touching solars.  But a solar would only be able to be doubled once.  Such that a solar touching echelon would produce 8E at 3k elevation (4*2), and 9E I suppose with +2 ECON.