This is a bit above my game grade, but here goes.
On 4, what difference does it make for the game that a secret project is counted as a facility?
On 8, I could agree on non-lethal methods not working, but I'd let the 'music of the spheres' continue to spread fear throughout the populace. The facilities are there as a threat, while stapling just dulls the drones.
Yes, but aversion of police is an entirely different thing then fear of torture. The latter is quite a bit more personal...
1. At higher difficulty levels, conquest drones and University drones are next to irrelevant, as the total drones before bureaucracy is capped at population. With several specialists, even Lal's talents become irrelevant likewise.
Proposed fix (optional): The total drones before bureaucracy will not be capped at population; any extras just become superdrones.
2. When determining whether to cancel talents with drones, superdrones are counted twice (once under "drones", once under "superdrones"). There is really no need for this (as the purpose of said cancellation seems to be so that there are enough nonspecialists to become drones and talents.
Proposed fix (mandatory): Don't count them twice.
3. If more than half the citizens are specialists (unavoidable for bases size 41 or above), it is impossible to have a golden age. Furthermore, after everyone becomes a superdrone any extras are lost.
Proposed fix (optional): Extra talents and superdrones won't show on the base screen, but will still be present in terms of effect.
4. The Planetary Transit System counts as a facility rather than a Secret Project.
Proposed fix (mandatory): Count it as a Secret Project.
5. Facilities, police, and secret projects quell superdrones just as well as normal drones. (Thanks to ete for pointing this out.) Furthermore, facilities do not quell pacifism drones. (Thanks to Petek for pointing this out.)
Proposed fix (optional; may be split into two if such is requested): Change these so facilities/police/projects have to first turn superdrones into normal drones before turning them into workers, and facilities do work against pacifism drones. (Note that this does not make pacifism drones anywhere near irrelevant, as you'll need your facilities for normal drones anyway.)
6. There can be "ghost drones" that show up in the main base screen but not on the psych screen and have no effect.
Proposed fix (mandatory): Make them not show up on the main base screen.
7. When finding police units, the Self-Aware Colony (which does not have non-lethal methods) counts before units which have non-lethal methods, so the project can actually reduce the effectiveness of police.
Proposed fix (mandatory): Make it not reduce the effectiveness of police.
8. -1 POLICE is negligible if you're trying to avoid atrocities anyway. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense that punishment spheres should work when nerve stapling doesn't, and thirdly punishment spheres make it too easy to avoid the drones of Free Market.
Proposed fix (optional): When you have a negative POLICE rating, punishment spheres do not work, and neither does the non-lethal methods ability.
Quote2. When determining whether to cancel talents with drones, superdrones are counted twice (once under "drones", once under "superdrones"). There is really no need for this (as the purpose of said cancellation seems to be so that there are enough nonspecialists to become drones and talents.
Proposed fix (mandatory): Don't count them twice.
I'm not sure I fully understand this one. Shouldn't superdrones count twice in all drone calculations?
Agree with the first part. I'm not so sure about the second part - in real life, I would compare regular drones to general unhappiness in a population, so it makes sense that things like Rec Commons and Hologram Theaters would quell them. Pacifism drones would be more like rioters responding to specific incidents such as war mongering. It makes sense, at least in my mind, that facilities would not appease them. Of course, this is a game and sometimes gameplay trumps realism, but I like having pacifism drones as a very nasty problem to deal with.
Not quite. When it comes to cancelling out talents, they should count twice. But when determining whether there are enough nonspecialists to become drones and talents, counting them twice is silly.
Basically, a size 4 base that's supposed to have 1 specialist, 2 talents, and 2 drones has to do something because there's only 4 citizens (what it does is reduce it to 1 specialist, 1 talent, and 1 drone). But a size 4 base that's supposed to have 0 specialists, 2 talents, 1 normal drone, and 1 superdrone should be able to stay how it is, as there are enough people for all the "roles". But what it in fact does is think "2 talents, 2 drones, 1 superdrone, 2+2+1=5, that's more than 4, better do something."
But aversion to police is a lot closer to letting the government commit torture.
On a somewhat-related note, what's the deal with when a base golden ages when the population is an even number, and won't no matter what you do when the population is an odd number (or it may be the other way around)? It may not count as a bug, but once I get the Cloning Vats built, it sure is annoying.
I've recently been playing with the 8 bitmap (mode 30 actually) enabled for Drones formula. These seem like good changes to avoid a lot of drone exploits. Is there any way that superdrones could be have a different graphic from normal drones?
Interesting! I never noticed - I guess since the drone/superdrone distinction never mattered until this fix. The graphic is kind of similar.
It's too bad SMAC didn't implement the citizen happiness UI from Civ2 - where population happiness is shown 'before' and 'after' certain modifiers.
If extra icons representing additional discontent(or happiness) can't be displayed, would there be any way to modify the PSYCH # in the city screen to make it more meaningful?
Ah jeez I should have known that too. Yea I guess this is fine. My only concern is the cases where you'd have a small captured base + B-drones.
Doesn't happen a lot I agree, only with --POLICE to not crush the superdrone. And usually at those settings you're not conquering because of the P-drones.
I've been playing with mode 30 and overall it's much better on Transcend. POLICE is really important
and the amount of drone control needed feels right. I've been playing custom Hive with Drone/4, and running custom SE with --TALENT (+2 DRONES/base). +3 POLICE SE and 3 military units in a captured size 6 base.
I tested a bunch of cases because PSYCH seemed weak. Often times turning a base to all specialists wouldn't quell riots.
10 psych - riots
11 psych - no riots
14 psych, --TALENT - base riots
15 psych, --TALENT - no riots
0 psych, --TALENT, Rec - riots (4 psych equiv)
0 psych, --TALENT, Rec+Holo - no riots (8 psych equiv)
0 psych, --TALENT, +2 normal unit to Police - base riots (8 psych equiv)
0 psych, --TALENT, +3 normal unit to Police - no riots (12 psych equiv)
So the TALENT SE seems right, as it's equivalent to 4 PSYCH (15-11). What's weird here is that Rec Commons and Hologram theatre stop riots more effectively than just PSYCH (8 equiv psych instead of 15 allocated psych). Also NLM police units seem to crush drones more effectively than Psych but not as effective as Rec Commons and Hologram theatre (12 equiv psych instead of 15 allocated).
I'm also seeing in the city that talents will show up before all superdrones are eliminated - at least for Talents from secret projects and perhaps in other cases too.
I should clarify the police units better in my test cases, I think I was confusing. It's definately something to do with the specialists
10 psych, 3 non-NLM units - riots
11 psych, 3 non-NLM units - no riots
14 psych, --TALENT (FM), 3 non-NLM units - base riots
15 psych, --TALENT. 3 non-NLM units - no riots (4 doctors)**
15 psych, --TALENT. 3 non-NLM units - riots (5 doctors)**
0 psych, --TALENT, 3 non-NLM units, Rec - riots
0 psych, --TALENT, 3 non-NLM units, Rec+Holo - no riots
0 psych, --TALENT, 2 NLM units and one non-NLM unit - base riots
0 psych, --TALENT, 3 NLM units - no riots
I'm still not too clear on why Rec+Holo is enough to suppress but it requires around 15 psych to equal those two facilities. Shouldn't they be closer to 8 psych equivalent?
Similarly why is 3 extra police suppression somewhere in between? It does seem like they're suppressing all the extra superdrones, with an effectiveness somewhere in between Rec+Holo and psych.
Ok thanks! So you're saying that the specialists get converted to two phantom drones rather than one superdrone. I'm not sure that really makes intuitive sense though. What's the reasoning behind specialists affecting the number of superdrones vs phantom drones? I assume this is partly to mitigate all specialist bases that don't riot? I guess what I'm asking is why not convert all those phantom drones into a lesser amount of superdrones? Essentially this weakens Psych from specialists to an extreme degree because two normal drones is worse than a super drone.
And yea I agree this is perhaps an extreme example, but these scenarios do come up more than you'd think. If you're playing a war-based game on Transcend you are going to have a lot of B-drones and C-drones to deal with. I guess it wouldn't really be such an issue if there was a way to know if a base was due to riot on the next turn. But when all you can see in game is non-Drones and specialists in your base, you can only hope and assume it won't riot. I think it's a good fix in terms of difficulty but I find I'm guessing a lot on the riots
Yea. I also think that how police can crush superdrones as good as normal drones might be a bit too powerful. If that sample game showed me anything its just how crucial (I'd argue non-optional) running a positive POLICE SE is - and not just as this extreme version of Yang.
I might suggest toning down B and C drones a bit to compensate?
Sort of on the side topic of drones and drone modding, I've modified Democracy to be the -5 POLICE SE. I wanted an alternative mechanic to the base FM where +2 ECON is used to run 20%+ PSYCH to compensate.
If you're -5 POLICE then really you have no hope of even getting to -1 for even 1 military unit per base later game.
I assume it'd be difficult to add any new SE settings like TALENT/X citizens or DRONE/X citizens. But how about if +TALENT from SE was modified by PSYCH facilities? It's essentially like +2 PSYCH per base anyways...only that it seems tacked on separately.
Ok. B-drones are really one of the few things that remotely stop ICS
The thing is EFFIC is far worse at stopping B-drones than POLICE.
Well anyways Police is very powerful now.
Far bases pretty much only make minerals with Police State.
As far as the P-drone modifications, I noted I was always getting P-drones from unarmored sea transports no matter what setting (other than no P-drones). Has anyone else seen this? I think they might be getting classified into some 'other' category.
Yitzi do you have the production check order documented? I've noted that population growth can again cause a drone riot the same turn.
It seems to go something like growth check, minerals production, population is added, drone riot check.
IMO it should go: drone riot & GA check, minerals production, population (or starvation) check.
Also semi-related, I've found that the multi build works only if production is in excess of 2x the required minerals. For example 20 minerals will make 2 scout patrols if they cost 10. But mineral carryover doesn't seem to work, excess minerals are being discarded (this line). Positive or negative it doesn't seem to matter - they aren't converted to energy either.
A third sort of related thing I noted, more related to the population growth check. If say a size 1 base has 19N stored, gaining +2N a turn, it won't grow even though hitting 21N. Bases seem to need to fill the nutrient bar before being able to grow. If you re-work booming this will become more apparent. Perhaps not a bug but I consider it a flaw because if playing optimally, this adds a ton of micromanagement.
No that was with don't recalculate to not active. Putting that variable to zero fixes the drone riots. I rarely got revolts even with how it was, perhaps the revolt check is bugged or is after the "stop rioting" check.
Far as the mineral bit, see attached
One more thing to check for Drones. I'm finding that with the "1" flag on for Drones rules code {1 to 31} (pacifism drones can be quelled by facilities) that pacifism is still calculated last.
Gotcha. Yea this seems to work correctly - the order in Psych screen is off but they are (effectively) calculated before facilities and drone-controlling SPs. I assume that's one of the side effects - the +TALENT SPs have to be last?
Cool. Something else you may discover when examining the rush cost code is that the exemption amount is also used as the double cost rush threshold for facilities. For SPs it seems to always be 4 rows of minerals. I can see how these sort of relate but may also want to consider breaking out rush thresholds for both.