Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => Modding => Bug/Patch Discussion => Topic started by: dino on June 03, 2017, 01:40:56 pm

Title: EXE patch ideas
Post by: dino on June 03, 2017, 01:40:56 pm

I'd like to start a topic that could contain suggestions / ideas for exe patches ( Ytzi's next patches in practice ).
I'd suggest to limit this thread to ideas that should be reasonably easy to implement given the chellange exe modders face ( assembler :/ ).

Below some of my suggestions:

AI factions
An option that automatically loads a faction from faction_ai.txt instead of faction.txt when faction is computer controlled.
Would make AI buffing with custom factions much less of a hassle

SMAC interface graphics
Make an option that use SMAC start movie and startmenu background also change start menu font color and ingame interface textures.
(I currently use SMAC textures renamed to SMAX variants ( added '_a' ) they work fine. It would make SMAC in SMAX engine conversion complete.

Option to adjust defensive structures defense bonus
Since AI can't into maneuvering in the field, I experiment with equalizing weapon and armor stats, but it makes bases with tachyon field too difficult to conquer for AI.

Option to disable stack splash damage when defender is destroyed in regular attack.
Again, since AI can't into maneuvering in the field,  human player can easily devastate its stack of any size, with a few times smaller stack of rovers.

AI disband or upgrade obsolete designs
Easy to conquer bases chock full of obsolete units eating into AI mineral output are scourge of the AIs. It could be limited to units with defensive plan.
Because obsolete offensive units exploring the map, gathering pods, planet pearls and making contact with other factions, or destroing terrain improvemnts, formers and crawlers are useful.

Along the same lines a routine that would prevent to build more units if unit support exceeds a certain percentage of base mineral output would help a great deal with proper development.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: MercantileInterest on June 07, 2017, 08:57:26 pm

Yitzi hasn't been here for a while. He has given much to the cause. *salutes*

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: gwillybj on June 07, 2017, 09:27:16 pm

Yitzi ;llap

I've been modifying my alphax.txt for years - all the way back to when I started playing in 2000. Yitzi's terranx.exe patches and alphax.txt additions have helped me in many ways. SMAX has become something I can't put down in favor of anything else. Sometimes I might play a few games of Space Empires IV, or get down to earth and play an all-out wargame in The Operational Art of War III, but SMAX always pulls me back.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: Yitzi on September 10, 2017, 02:02:24 am

Quote from: MercantileInterest on June 07, 2017, 08:57:26 pm

Yitzi hasn't been here for a while. He has given much to the cause. *salutes*

Yeah, the job search has taken a lot of my energy, particularly when I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.  Now that I've decided against actuary and in favor of software engineering, I'll probably be getting back to at least some extent.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 10, 2017, 02:51:48 am

[shrugs]  I've come to be quite fond of you just for you, independent of your monolithic value to the community.  I hope it works out that you can come around more.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on September 25, 2017, 10:37:48 am

An option that forbids planting forest in arid tile, as well as auto-spreading of forest into arid tile. Another level of the same option could kill off forest if tile beneath it becomes arid. Can make terraforming more diverse for those who used to forest "from sea to sea". Can also give a thrill to those who happen to planetfall at Upland Wastes, Uranium Flats, or Unity Wreckage. By the way: am I the only one who plays with 1-2-0 forests, and finds them still almost OP?
Another suggestion I saw somewhere on the forum: transfer "Prevent airdrops" function from Aerospace Complex to Tachyon Field. Loads off part of value from over-useful Aerospace Complex, and at the same time makes airdrop prevention map more observable.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on October 04, 2017, 10:38:33 am

An option that lets everyone to decide for themselves: is Probe Team ability to provide circumvention of Zones of Control to regular units a bug or feature? I.e., when the option is set, regular unit trying to move to tile with friendly Probe Team (and without friendly regular units) is not exempted from ZoC check. Sorry if I missed that already has been implemented.
Also I'd like to once again raise the question of non-finishing airstrikes. I'm afraid, this feature as described in http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17418.0 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=17418.0) has been over-engineered and is therefore hard to implement. To me, it is quite sufficient in its original edit:
Attack by air unit cannot reduce land unit's health below 10% outdoor, 50% in base or bunker. Ideally, collateral damage to population from Nerve Gas Pods should still apply. Probe teams can be obliterated, inglourious basterds they are! And probably SAM land units must fight to the death.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on November 13, 2017, 08:36:04 am

I wonder, how an option 'Treat use of natives against human units and, especially, bases, as atrocity' could change the game? Probably, good for roleplaying, but bad for gameplay. And not so easy to implement, as it involves changes to AI code.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on February 22, 2018, 04:58:21 pm

Quote from: Yitzi on September 10, 2017, 02:02:24 am

Yeah, the job search has taken a lot of my energy, particularly when I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.  Now that I've decided against actuary and in favor of software engineering, I'll probably be getting back to at least some extent.

It is unfortunately the life cycle of any kind of volunteer software projects, whether open source coding or making content for games or patches or what have you.  You have time, until finally in Life you don't.  You get real world job pressure.  I guarantee you you're going to spend time on the real world job pressure, first and foremost before all else.  Then at some point a lot of people meet Significant Others.  That takes more time.  A fair number of people get married, many of those have children.  More time.

Fighting battles with ancient game binaries is frankly not a sustainable practice in such circumstances.  Even if you had the full source code, you can easily come to the point of saying, uuuh, all this tweaking and fiddling is not worth it.

Example: we've had FreeCiv for quite a long time.  The code was a mess, and I find myself reluctant to discover whether anything has changed in that regard.  Also the code is GPLed, which in practice makes it commercially worthless.  Which means pouring buckets of labor into it to make $0 is pretty much a non-starter, at least for someone who's been at Life long enough to know what careers require.

Past a certain point, pouring blood on the table for a game is only worth it, if one makes enough money to pay for a reasonable quality of life.  That's the reality.  When people are younger, they spend a lot more hours of their lives on their "enthusiasms".  Then eventually the harsh world makes them realize that they have to make money somehow.  Or else live homeless out of a car and forego a lot of things that other people have ready access to.  I've been doing the latter for 8 years now.  Even that gets old and frankly I wouldn't mind "graduating" from it now.  But I will only do it on my own terms, I'm not going back to "the traditional grind".

I would encourage you, as someone who has put a lot of time and energy into this genre of game, to think seriously about making a commercial effort of some kind.  I do believe this genre isn't "done yet" and that there are things SMAC started to achieve, that other games haven't.  That's why I'm still playing it almost 20 years later, warts and all.

For my part, in almost 20 years I've never come up with a solution for "various difficult SMAC-like problems".  If I had, I would have kicked that game out the door.  I may yet realize something I previously have not.  One thing I think has really held me up, is how much I basically hate the programming tools of the game industry.  They're primitive.  I've spent a lot of time working on better tools rather than better games, and honestly that hasn't proven to be any easier.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on May 19, 2018, 07:07:31 pm

Dino, I am doing preliminary investigation to decide how much work is or isn't involved with .exe AI modding.  I definitely have my own priorities, as a game designer, and a person conscious of real world career-killing time expenditures.  The main thing that concerns me right now, is how easy or difficult it is for random ASM programmers such as myself, to show up in this community, and actually get started with something useful for patching.  I have no decompilation and reverse-engineering experience.  That doesn't mean I can't learn, but I'd like it to be quick, not an effort months in the making.  The key infrastructure I think is needed, is a symbol table with function entry points, so that I can just get started recoding things instead of scratching my head where to even begin.  I am examining various archives, threads, and repositories to see what's already been done about such things to date.

Quote from: dino on June 03, 2017, 01:40:56 pm

AI factions
An option that automatically loads a faction from faction_ai.txt instead of faction.txt when faction is computer controlled.
Would make AI buffing with custom factions much less of a hassle

Although it's not a bad idea, strategically, I do not value this.  I just spent 1 man month working on my "AI Growth Mod", which is essentially a kind of AI buffing, based on some poster's previous experience with Explore settings.  It's at release 1.1, "stable", bugs and oversights fixed.  Some people have downloaded it; nobody has commented upon it.  I bet nobody's really tested it yet.  I haven't even had time to field test it for full games yet, only to ensure that opening games aren't completely stupid.  I think getting people to even try a mod, in an organized, packaged, promoted way, is a far more pressing problem than this kind of modding "convenience".  That is to say, you can make any "monster" faction you want, but if you can't get people to actually play it, it doesn't even matter.  You will have simply wasted all your hard work.  Until there is better modding deployment infrastructure in general, I don't see much point in this specific programmer-centric convenience.

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SMAC interface graphics

To me this is cosmetic and not worth spending valuable, limited .exe modder resources on.  Of course, anybody who actually insists on doing anything in particular, will run with it and have whatever success they have.  For coordinated and sustained effort though, I would caution against thoughts like "gee I could spend my time that" unless it's really really important to you.  Typical life cycle is you throw your time into something that, you find it takes weeks instead of days for fully loaded development and debugging cost, you get bored, now you don't have energy to do something more important.

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Option to adjust defensive structures defense bonus
Since AI can't into maneuvering in the field, I experiment with equalizing weapon and armor stats, but it makes bases with tachyon field too difficult to conquer for AI.

I'm surprised if you can't already solve this at the modding level by rebalancing weapon and armor stats.  Also alphax.txt already has this line:

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25,      ; Combat % -> intrinsic base defense

which in Yitzi patch is annotated slightly differently:

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25,      ; Combat % -> intrinsic base defense {-100 to 32767}

Does this solve your problem?  Anyways if it doesn't, I caution about spending a lot of work on such a thing.  AI can't really conquer any of my bases at all, let alone with a Tachyon field, a pretty late game concern.  There are bigger fish to fry in the AI competence dept.

Quote

Option to disable stack splash damage when defender is destroyed in regular attack.
Again, since AI can't into maneuvering in the field,  human player can easily devastate its stack of any size, with a few times smaller stack of rovers.

Freeciv had the option to change this and I've played both ways.  In the Freeciv case, it would then tend to move around with Stacks of Doom, like 30..50 units you can't do anything about except kill them all one by one.  Yes you have upgraded the challenge, but you've also required a lot more mouseclicks to play the game.  This isn't necessarily fun, and for a single player fighting an AI, I'm not personally convinced it's worth concentrating on such features.

Also there's the problem that when you change game behavior, the AI often doesn't know or understand the new behavior.  This can have unanticipated consequences.  Freeciv is an open source GPLed project so maybe someone wrote some code sometime to take advantage of the change in behavior.  SMAC is unlikely to get an update that will inform the AI of how to use the behavior.

Quote

AI disband or upgrade obsolete designs
Easy to conquer bases chock full of obsolete units eating into AI mineral output are scourge of the AIs. It could be limited to units with defensive plan.
Because obsolete offensive units exploring the map, gathering pods, planet pearls and making contact with other factions, or destroing terrain improvemnts, formers and crawlers are useful.
Along the same lines a routine that would prevent to build more units if unit support exceeds a certain percentage of base mineral output would help a great deal with proper development.

Building way too many defensive units and achieving "vapor lock", where a city can't build anything more, is the AI's biggest problem IMO.  I think you make a good suggestion here to do something with existing old units.  Sitting around doing nothing is incredibly wasteful.  I've also thought that the AI should throttle support to some minimum amount of minerals production.  I do this in my own play: I typically won't take on new support burdens if it would push my city below 5 minerals output.  This depends on the stage of the game I'm at, it's contextual.  I'm not sure how much assessment would be necessary to set a minimum minerals for any given city at any given time.  But if a city is down to No Minerals it's a problem, and the AI should be intervening in the production and support somehow.

So of your list, there's really only this 1 thing that I think really needs and deserves the work.  I don't know if you've actually worked on any of this since your original post 11.5 months ago.  If you have, we'd like to know what you actually did.  If you haven't, then please take my input seriously about deciding where to spend the time.  I see a pattern in the .exe modding archives of fixing things that aren't really all that important.  Anything like that burns time and concentration, meaning other things will not get done.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on August 13, 2018, 10:16:35 am

Why are airdrops to sea bases forbidden? If not declare this a bug outright, it should be at least option-controlled. Maybe 3-level option: forbid, allow to my and allied bases, allow to empty enemy bases.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on August 13, 2018, 03:15:10 pm

Dropping into the sea is forbidden.  Whether there's a base is incidental.  I agree that the rule is arbitrary.  However I think a unit should be ocean capable if it's going to drop in the sea.  Otherwise it should be allowed, and the unit should drown.  In my mod, ships and air units can have drop pods.  An interesting tactic is to land on any coast and scoot into the water.  So, even if you can't do everything, you could play my mod.  Or just change the 2 bits in alphax.txt that control this.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on September 09, 2018, 07:40:56 am

Is there any workaround about annoying AI behavior when they ignore or decline your attempts to initiate diplomatic negotiations, even if you aren't warring? I had accrued whole lot of captured bases of all sizes, and no one of remaining AIs answers my ringing so that I could shove off this treasure/burden on them! A three-level option is begging for implementation: 1) as it is now; 2) don't ignore if not in vendetta; 3) don't ignore at all. Possibly split 3) in two about being atrocity victim.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on September 09, 2018, 10:00:42 pm

Refusing to talk to you isn't a bug, it's by design.  It means they don't like you and don't want to deal with you.  They don't want you to initiate conversations that can have negative consequences for them, like you threatening them, or demanding money from them.  Imagine as if you're their landlord, their rent is late, and they'd rather not pay you.  Or you're some bum that wants to borrow money or beg techs from them, and they don't want to be chiseled.  Or you're the extreme opposite from their political party, they have no respect for you, and don't wish to give you the time of day.

Workaround: walk or a sail a probe team next to their base.  That usually gets their attention.  They'll suddenly start talking to you, often to sign a Truce or Treaty.  That way, if you do a probe team action on them after just signing that, they will have proof that you're untrustworthy and cause for a vendetta.  Assuming your probe team is nothing special and is detected.

Bringing any of your units in contact with any of their units, may also get a response, depending on circumstances.  This is often a good reason to avoid getting anywhere near an AI faction, say that you're on pins and needles with.  If it's not in your interest to have a war right now, why give them an excuse to open their mouths and start one?

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: Dewbacca on September 10, 2018, 06:36:14 pm

I'd like to see a .txt file govern what pops from Unity/ Goody Pods.

Binary would be fine, even better would be a -1, 0, 1 option allowing various options to be off (-1), infrequent (0), or frequent (1).

I am so freaking sick of earthquakes and fungal blooms... or unity foils.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on September 10, 2018, 08:25:05 pm

It's a good idea.  I think assigning a weight for any possible outcome, would be the right way to implement it.  Add up all the weights, divide by the number of possible results, roll the RNG.  No idea what it takes to code or patch that.

General problem with new .txt capabilities is interfering with alphax.txt.  Best policy would be to create some completely new modpatch.txt or some such name for completely new capabilities.  That way, when a binary patch is installed, it doesn't step all over alphax.txt and people don't have to make "Yitzi versions" of their mods, for instance.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: Vidsek on September 11, 2018, 04:38:50 am

  Fine idea Dewbacca!  That was exactly what I suggested to Yitzi in his last (active) patch proposal thread.  Well, I was thinking of being able to assign percentages, but three bins of none, some, lots, would be just fine.

  And Bvanevery, an excellent suggestion to have all the additions to alphax.txt shifted over to a separate text file so we have the mods/new features collected in one obvious place.

  Plus, all of them should have either an easy (probably default) disable setting, or a clearly labeled setting that is identical to the original.  The player could pick and choose among them and customize single player games and scenarios conveniently.

  There might occur issues with certain new features being incompatible with certain others, but a little feedback and documentation could give warning.

  Oh, say, I've forgotten where Yitzi's explanations of his work wound up.  Is it over in the WIKI perhaps?  I'll go snoop around.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on September 11, 2018, 05:46:15 am

He had some stuff in some files with his patch.  I don't think there's a consistent clearinghouse of such stuff.  I think that's been cited as one of the ongoing problems of maintenance.  Awhile back, I declined to become the "Yitzi maintainer / disciplinarian" because I didn't see how my own concerns and priorities would benefit from the effort.  I admire the amount of work he did, but he mostly didn't work on things that I thought were critical.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on November 02, 2018, 11:05:02 am

Today, when my precious independent Unity Chopper once again was lost trying to intercept enemy worthless trivial missile bomber, I once again remembered discussion in one of Yitzi's "Vote for feature" threads about change to interception behavior. Wouldn't it be reasonable that interceptors do interception runs only when put on alert (Shift+L)?

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on November 02, 2018, 12:50:14 pm

Not really because then it becomes a permanent bureaucratic task for the player.  Instead of building an Interceptor that performs the job of well, you know, interception, you'd have to build it and activate it.  Dumb, tedious, bad design in a game that already has too much to do.

This is basically an "opt in" vs. "opt out" debate.  I think it would be perfectly reasonable to have an opt out available.  Can't really use "H" or "L" because those already have legitimate uses for expected gameplay.  Perhaps "M" for Mothball?  Maybe that's too obscure, but that's the concept.  A unit you don't want to have do anything, not even fight unless it's the very last thing in the base.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on November 12, 2018, 01:19:27 pm

What's a rationale behind feature "open diplomatic conversation (not first contact) on units' touch"? It not only results in clicky and gamey behavior for a player not wanting to talk to AI, but can put AI at a disadvantage. If such contact occurs near the end of AI's turn and results in war, the other player gets a first strike opportunity, which obviously should be an aggressor's luxury.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on November 12, 2018, 04:31:16 pm

Quote from: PvtHudson on November 12, 2018, 01:19:27 pm

What's a rationale behind feature "open diplomatic conversation (not first contact) on units' touch"?

I reread this thread and didn't see such a proposal anywhere.  Assuming someone proposed it somewhere sometime, I assume it means that upon physical contact, the other faction is forced to talk.  Politely declining to speak to you would not be possible.

This is a bad idea in 2 ways.  First is that when any substantial amount of mutual movement in an area occurs, you'll be talking all the freaking time!  That's gonna get old real quick.

Second is that factions have legitimate reasons to avoid talking to you.  Such as not wanting to pay you, not wanting to be sucked into wars by you, not wanting you to beg them for technologies, not wanting to be threatened by you, etc.  If you do various things without observing the diplomatic niceties, your Reputation suffers.  So other factions endeavor to have your Reputation suffer.  They deny you the avenue by which to perform a diplomatically legitimate action.  They want you to be seen as an aggressor that cannot be trusted.

Incidentally, I have found that there's no clear pattern to when an AI will start talking to you.  Bringing a threatening military unit into contact, or a probe team, does not automatically trigger a conversation on the AI's part.  I used to think that probe teams had a higher chance of this, when say you're in a Truce with a faction.  That the AI is trying to talk its way out of being probed, just before you do the probe.  But I've seen plenty of instances where my probe just did whatever it was going to do, no AI conversation triggered.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on November 13, 2018, 05:50:17 am

Quote from: bvanevery on November 12, 2018, 04:31:16 pm

Quote from: PvtHudson on November 12, 2018, 01:19:27 pm

What's a rationale behind feature "open diplomatic conversation (not first contact) on units' touch"?

I reread this thread and didn't see such a proposal anywhere.  Assuming someone proposed it somewhere sometime, I assume it means that upon physical contact, the other faction is forced to talk.  Politely declining to speak to you would not be possible.

This is already existing behavior. Not forced talk, just occasional. Contrariwise, I propose to disable this feature. If AI has something to tell you, let he say at the start of his turn, not when his last unit runs into yours. About avoiding conversation when player dials vs just denying player's demands in a conversation (if AI doesn't get provoked into vendetta you still are aggressor) - it's controversial feature, I'd prefer it be optional. After all, you might just be trying to improve your standing with him.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on November 13, 2018, 12:17:10 pm

How is the AI going to know that you have units in range that can affect it?  Waiting until you actually make physical contact is a way to ensure that.  Otherwise the AI has to sit around trying to predict what you could, would, or might do.

Denying you an audience, is actually a historical method of diplomatic control.  Stalin did it to Mao a lot.  Drove Mao nuts.

In a perfect world of diplomatic discipline, you may be right that a diplomatic AI should be expected to just tirelessly rebuff the player.  However, I see a problem with "getting that train started".  What if there are exploits available to the human player?  Can't exploit what you can't even talk to, it's a more secure implementation.

The game is also conditioning you that you're not supposed to / allowed to spend infinite amounts of time on this.  You don't get to talk to other faction leaders forever, they get tired of you.  This has some benefit of protecting the player from himself, his desire to drive himself nuts with diplomatic micromanagement.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on December 11, 2018, 08:59:20 am

Before ThinkerMod AIs rarely made it to the satellites stage, but now AI's sats are a common sight. And this raises a couple of questions.
First, one of the best SMAC features is that there are several ways to do most things. But sats distinct in that there is only one way to deal with them - ODP. Wouldn't it be logical to add a probe action to destroy or even hijack enemy sat? Probably restricted to bases with Aerospace Complex.
Second, how does the game store sat (sans GSP) data? Are they tied to bases that built them or it is a common pool? In latter, far more probable case, there is a possibility for an option what to do with sat pool of defeated/surrendered faction with variants: a) let them orbit idly as a memento; b) destroy; c) transfer to conqueror.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on December 11, 2018, 01:19:26 pm

Quote from: PvtHudson on December 11, 2018, 08:59:20 am

Before ThinkerMod AIs rarely made it to the satellites stage, but now AI's sats are a common sight.

I see them in SMACX AI Growth mod as well, if I diddle around long enough, maybe on an Enormous map.  I have fought major, major, spawn-from-hell satellite wars.

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But sats distinct in that there is only one way to deal with them - ODP.

If you can deal with them endlessly that way, you're more stalwart than I.  The computer does not get bored with the mouseclicks, but I certainly do.  From a mouseclick sanity standpoint, just letting the AIs build and build and build satellites, as I do the same, is a pretty reasonable way to go.  Satellite combat favors the defender for the most part.  ODP pod attrition rate when they attack is pretty horrific.

If you're determined to take out enemy satellites, it is far more efficient in terms of mouseclicks to launch missiles at ground targets.  The AI will burn up its ODPs to intervene.

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Wouldn't it be logical to add a probe action to destroy or even hijack enemy sat?

You are asking to participate even more deeply in greater and greater quantities of spam.  It is not worth it.  You can build your own satellites with fewer mouseclicks than stealing them.

I also think intervention on the ground is the True Way to deal with this spamming problem.  No matter how big the map, there's always a rail.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on December 17, 2018, 08:19:37 am

AI (usually) refuses to trade SP-enabling techs, presumably because of large impact the SPs can have. From this standpoint, it is logical to have an option to restrict trade of other impactful techs, namely reactor, resource caps lifting, crawling-enabling, PB-enabling. Maybe even generalize approach: add to Alphax.txt #TECH lines TradeValue column, then map somehow these values to AI behavior through an option.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on December 17, 2018, 05:37:21 pm

A decent idea, although I wonder how one prevents everything in the tech tree being deemed "important", for "some reason".

Couldn't we hack this as is, by creating bogus Secret Projects?  What do Empty Secret Projects 38 through 64 do when you associate something with them?

I'd definitely like to make the AI completely unwilling to trade Probe Team technology to anyone.  I'm not willing to spend a real Secret Project to do it, as there are not enough of them, and they need to come at appropriate times and places in the tech tree.  I don't allow any Secret Projects before Tier 3, and I've got Planetary Networks at Tier 2.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on January 24, 2019, 08:47:25 am

Given how powerful TECHSTEAL and Spoils of War are, a 3-level option to govern them is desirable: 1) as it is now; 2) only give tech if captured/destroyed base had a Network Node; 3) only give tech if captured base still has a Network Node.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on January 24, 2019, 05:46:30 pm

Why do you think TECHSTEAL is powerful?  Are you biased towards primarily playing multiplayer games?

In single player, I don't even see it as consequential.  The cost of stealing a tech, is making a completely disposable probe team.  You have to either sneak to the base, or bring a shielding unit to get into range safely.  You could even use the armor exploit and send an armored probe team, although it would be more expensive than just sending 2 units.  It's still easier than conquering a base.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on January 25, 2019, 06:29:46 am

Quote from: bvanevery on January 24, 2019, 05:46:30 pm

Why do you think TECHSTEAL is powerful?  Are you biased towards primarily playing multiplayer games?

I only play single.
You are right in that currently TECHSTEAL isn't particularly better for "alternative teching" than other means. The proposal is rather part of game where techs are much harder to obtain bypassing research. Where probe teams steal techs only from bases with NN, and not from every shoddy seabase founded last turn. Where their success chances are much, much lower. Where AI doesn't neglect defensive probe teams on infantry chassis (I call them security teams). Where AIs don't sell techs for 100 EC.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on January 25, 2019, 06:51:15 am

Sure is a lot of stuff to fix first and balance.  Power to anyone who wants to implement all of that in an .EXE patch, but I'd sooner work on a brand new game.  Having learned all these great lessons about systems that don't work.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: PvtHudson on February 02, 2019, 07:37:29 am

Generally I find SMAX UI convenient and robust, but there is no such thing that cannot be improved. It would be useful if the game displayed relief changes, at least from terraforming, at least adjacent to your borders, more prominently. So that you won't discovered enemy landbridge raised several turns ago all of a sudden only when hostile troops start pouring through it..

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: bvanevery on February 02, 2019, 07:15:26 pm

You mean a new land bridge in multiplayer?  In single player, the AI has no concept of doing that.  Occasionally it happens due to popping a pod with an earthquake.  Hilarity can ensue if suddenly a powerful Spartan faction has land access to you.  Otherwise though, this doesn't come up much in single player.

I think the whole game could be criticized in terms of "hey, how about attention / warning to this stupid thing over here?"  How many times have I been attacked by a mindworm when I could have attacked it first?  I've gotten sick of replaying turns just for small "D'oh!" mistakes like that.  I usually just let it slide.  I don't enjoy it though.  I could have every unit set to "L", but that's also used for loading a Transport.  For a coastal base or sea base, that's a problem.  It's also just a drag anyways, why should I have to bother?  I have all my units set "H".  Pestering and administration is definitely part of game design.  Not the best possible system in SMAC.

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: hyperdriveJ on June 03, 2019, 05:22:28 pm

How

Quote from: Yitzi on September 10, 2017, 02:02:24 am

Quote from: MercantileInterest on June 07, 2017, 08:57:26 pm

Yitzi hasn't been here for a while. He has given much to the cause. *salutes*

Yeah, the job search has taken a lot of my energy, particularly when I wasn't sure what I wanted to do.  Now that I've decided against actuary and in favor of software engineering, I'll probably be getting back to at least some extent.

How are you Yitzi?

Title: Re: EXE patch ideas
Post by: vonbach on September 18, 2019, 12:28:47 am

An Auto plant forests be nice.