Alpha Centauri 2

Community => Recreation Commons => Our researchers have made a breakthrough! => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on March 27, 2014, 10:22:00 pm

Title: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 27, 2014, 10:22:00 pm
Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
LiveScience.com
By Chad Brooks, Business News Daily Contributor  March 26, 2014 12:39 PM



Everyone wants their boss to play fair, but new research suggests that while doing so might make employees happy, it's not always so great for the boss.  Specifically, bosses who are fair make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but in the end may burn themselves out, according to a new study led by Michigan State University's Russell Johnson.

Researchers found that the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors both mentally and emotionally. Johnson, an assistant professor of management, said that managers face a double-edged sword in maintaining structured, rule-bound fairness, known as procedural justice.

"While beneficial for their employees and the organization, it's an especially draining activity for managers," he said. "In fact, we found it had negative effects for managers that spilled over to the next workday." [10 Warning Signs Your New Boss Is a Jerk]

As part of the study, researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and less socially engaging with other workers the next day.

"Managers who are mentally fatigued are more prone to making mistakes, and it is more difficult for them to control deviant or counterproductive impulses," Johnson said.

Procedural justice fatigues managers mentally because it requires them to conform to particular fairness rules, such as suppressing personal biases, being consistent over time and across subordinates, and allowing subordinates to voice their concerns, according to Johnson.

"Essentially, managers have to run around making sure their subordinates' perceptions remain positive, whether the threat to the atmosphere of the workplace is real or imagined," he said. "Dealing with all of this uncertainty and ambiguity is depleting."

Knowing this type of burnout can occur, Johnson said it's critical managers create situations in which they are better prepared to cope with fatigue. He suggests several tips, including getting sufficient sleep, taking short mental breaks during the workday, adhering to a healthy diet and detaching from work completely when outside of the office.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, was co-authored by Klodiana Lanaj, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, and Christopher Barnes, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. Both were former Michigan State doctoral students.


http://news.yahoo.com/why-good-bosses-often-unhappy-bosses-163922819.html (http://news.yahoo.com/why-good-bosses-often-unhappy-bosses-163922819.html)

...

Leaves out the benefits of establishing a corporate culture where such fairness problems arise less...  That's how I do it on an internet forum full of internet gaming nerdz...
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 02:07:35 am
Of course, even with a good corporate culture doing the job right would be fairly stressful...keeping bosses' workload low by having enough could help there, though.  (Of course, that requires finding enough people who won't go mad with power...)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 02:16:01 am
That's part of the secret, too, though.  We have Yitzi on the team.  Seriously - I don't know what we'd do without you and your contributions.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 02:49:07 am
You wouldn't have such a good unofficial patch?  It's not like I do much for the administration of this site...
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 03:13:59 am
You do a lot for activity by being active, leaving out the considerable star power of your patch.


-Speaking of which, let's put our heads together and write up a promotional news item for the Yitzi patch.  I can directly publish it to the front page at 'poly, and shouldn't have any trouble talking Petek into it at CFC; that's a lot of eyes to draw to your project, and why not now?  scient has taught us the folly of putting anything off...
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 04:48:20 am
So unless you feel inspired to write a draft, let's start with an interview.  It'll give me a big picture overview, and quotes to use.

...

What's the purpose of your .exec modding?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 01:34:47 pm
Firstly, it's .exe, not .exec.  And the main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 01:36:33 pm
What do you want people to know about your project?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 03:39:11 pm
It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

(Speaking of modding options, here's a fun scenario you might want to make: You play as the Usurpers, and have just PB'ed out everyone else, but now Planet is really mad, so you have to either summon the fleet or take over via Transcendence.  Map reflects PB use and you start with appropriate tech, conquest victory is disabled, Voice of Planet set to destroyed (so you can't build it but don't need it), centauri preserve unavailable, and set starting clean minerals to -10, -1 clean minerals per fungal pop, 0 per facility, 10 ecodamage per base, and all PLANET bonuses removed from social engineering.  No techs increase resource production in fungus.  Global warming rate set to 1/4.  Have fun...)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 03:44:02 pm
I like.

How did you get into .exe modding?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 03:47:28 pm
I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 03:52:55 pm
Now, if we let this turn into a puff piece about you, we'd want to talk about your faith, and your history with things geeky and the internet and all, especially SMACXwise...  Are you familiar with Dune and the other Frank Herbert works that influenced SMAC?  -We can skip all this, according to your inclination.

Also, what would you say to a SMACer about why to try your patch?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 07:07:49 pm
I have read Dune, but I was not aware that it had substantially influenced SMAC/X.

As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 07:15:53 pm
Can you give me some pointers on how you imagine an acceptable news item going?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 07:17:53 pm
No, as I have no idea of what constitutes an "acceptable news item", and am not that sure what really qualifies as a "news item" without the condition of acceptability.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 07:21:29 pm
Acceptable as in 'Yitzi approved'.  If you dashed off a few paragraphs -a first draft of sorts- it would give me a stronger starting point to work from.  I'm not having a top brain day today.

IS there anything I should have asked you that I haven't?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 07:57:37 pm
Acceptable as in 'Yitzi approved'.  If you dashed off a few paragraphs -a first draft of sorts- it would give me a stronger starting point to work from.  I'm not having a top brain day today.

I'm still not sure what constitutes a news item; I'd need a bit more of a starting point.

Quote
IS there anything I should have asked you that I haven't?

You could always ask about current plans for the future of the patch.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 08:06:29 pm
Consider it so asked.

The story would be something like "Yitzi's unofficial SMAX patch 2.5b released"  -Basically, tell the story of the patch in progress in something approximating journalistic style, with the most important bit going first, instead of in dramatic story-telling order.  News style is based on the days when stories got sent over telegraph lines, which failed a lot, instead of Aristotelian unities - so if half the copy got through before a failure, they had the best part to run with.

So some suggestions about informational priority would help.  I can write it, but my noodle's a little soft for organizing today.  I should go take a nap soon.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 28, 2014, 10:07:32 pm
Ok, future plans for the patch...
Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again.
After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings.  The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months.  This time will hopefully be substantially shorter.
After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead:
-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms.  My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage.  Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other.  (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.)
-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6.
-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.)
-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents.  As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that.
-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable.  If zero, it will use the current system.
-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0.  I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all.
-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0).
-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of course.)

For 2.7, I plan to deal with convoys, and in particular make base-to-base convoys viable.
-Firstly, I plan to make it possible to set the maximum amount convoyed.  It's currently at 1; if set higher, you'd be given a choice how much to transfer.
-I'm not sure, but I think that base-to-base convoys remove post-multiplier resources and grant pre-multiplier resources; this is of course a bug, and one that will be easily exploitable if base-to-base convoys are viable, so I plan to investigate, and if the bug exists fix it.
-If a base does not have enough resources, the first thing it sacrifices (before disbanding or, I think, starving) are convoys away from it.  However, if it's after the base being convoyed to in the listing of bases, I believe that this will cause the resource to be applied to both bases; this is a bug and I plan to fix it.
-I plan to give the option to limit how many convoys can benefit a particular base, as a numerator and denominator to be multiplied by the base's population; a denominator of 0 will mean that convoy use is unlimited.
-I plan to give the option of having a penalty (depending on EFFIC) to a base that convoys away most of its resources of a particular type; this will help discourage sending all your resources to a single base.

Then comes 3.1, in which I tackle resources and make the transcendence endgame more interesting:
-I plan to add a flag to give maglev+mine squares +1 minerals, +1 in rocky, and +1 with a mineral bonus or landmark, a flag to allow condensers to be treated like farms and enrichers for the purpose of combining enhancements in a single square (i.e. they can be combined with solar, mirror, or mine, but not forests, fungus, or boreholes), and a flag to cause monoliths to act as fungus where that would be better.
-I plan to allow you to change the production given by landmarks of each resource, by sea terraforming facilities (aquafarm etc.), by the tree farm and hybrid forest, and by the Manifold Harmonics for every value from +0 to +4 PLANET (more will count as +4).  I also plan to add the ability to set base energy from solar panels, in addition to 1 per elevation.
-I also plan to add the ability to set resources from Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet, acting as tree farm/hybrid forest for fungus, but only acting as such after the Voice of Planet is built, with the owner of the VoP using a separate entry (so he can be given extra resources from them.)
-Speaking of the Voice of Planet, I plan to give more options as to how it affects ecodamage.  Rather than the current simple "doubles ecodamage but prevents worms", it will have a multiplier and divisor to ecodamage chance depending on your relations with whoever owns the Voice of Planet (with different entries for when you own it, when it has been destroyed, and when you have a pact, treaty, truce (or no relations), or vendetta. 
-However, "ecodamage" here does not mean a fungal pop, but rather affects the chance of contributing for global warming.  The chance of a fungal pop will equal some factor (which you can set as numerator/denominator) times the chance of global warming plus some constant value (which can be negative), plus some constant value (presumably negative) per PLANET rating.  The two chances will be linked, in that if the lower-probability event occurs it will be with the higher-probability one (so if it's 10 of ecodamage and 5 of pop, it'll be a 5% chance of ecodamage with pop, 5% of ecodamage without pop, and 90% of nothing.)  The probability of worms with the pop will be set similarly, but worms cannot occur without a pop even if it has a higher probability.
-Finally, once the VoP has been built, fungal blooms will begin to occur at a rate per turn set in alphax (modified by map size).  To not use this feature, the rate can be set to 0.  Fungal blooms will work similarly to fungal pops, but rather than occurring near a high-production base they can occur anywhere on the map other than a base or a square that currently has fungus, and will never come with worms or cause global warming.  This should help create the "Planet awakening" feel that defines the endgame story.

After that comes 3.2, with a bunch more miscellaneous additions:
-Probe teams will have several flags available: One causes infiltration to cost energy, and another does the same for techsteal (both with a cost proportional to distance from HQ, so you'll have to choose between targeting an outlying base with weak security and a high cost, or a central base or HQ with lower cost but that's harder to get at), another allows a probe team to subvert an entire stack of units (though at the cost of subverting them all individually), and another changes the effect of units in bases on mind control cost to just add the cost of subverting the unit.  There'll also be the option to set the duration of infiltration, though this will be modified by the target's PROBE rating; if it's not infinite, the Empath Guild will double the duration as well as infiltrating every faction when it is built, but will not grant permanent infiltration.
-A new facility, the Spaceport.  This will take over the satellite-related effects of the aerospace complex, and the aerospace complex can be set to either lose these effects, keep them, or keep them when built but lose them when gained from the Cloudbase Academy.
-Base population is capped at 99; I would like to raise that to at least 127, and maybe even 255.
-Currently there is no way to have multiple players in a PBEM game have different difficulty levels, or have an AI with harder-difficulty mechanics but lower-difficulty aggression.  I plan to change both of those.

After that comes 4.1, which adds a new way for convoys to work; rather than granting a certain amount per turn, they'll load up, make their way to the target base, and unload there, so a strong transportation network and security will be essential for effective use.

After that is somewhat fluid (actually, it's all somewhat fluid, but after 4.1 in particular), though I also plan to sometime fix the graphics bug that occurs when playing scenarios, and add new rules for how alien factions interact with the Voice of Planet and its effects on the Ascent to Transcendence and ecodamage.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 28, 2014, 10:09:49 pm
Okay, okay, okay; this is the meat of it.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 12:02:34 am
Okay, I spoke to Aeson at 'poly last night - all clear for there.  I'm about to start writing.  I'll try to post a draft in an hour or so, and hope you swing by shortly thereafter - you get veto power, if so.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 12:57:09 am
There didn't seem to be a lot left to say once I organized the quotes...
...

Yitzi's Unofficial SMAX Patch Up to v.2.5b -and Counting


After nearly 20 iterations in slightly over a year, Yitzi's .exe patch for Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, the Alpha Centauri expansion, has become a must-have for many SMACers.

Yitzi said the project, incorporating previous patching from scient and kyrub, arose from a desire to better balance AC gameplay.
Quote from: Yitzi
The main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.

It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside.

He got involved for the same reasons all modders mod.
Quote from: Yitzi
I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, [AC2] and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself.

Plans for the future of the patch are extensive.
Quote from: Yitzi
Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again.
After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings.  The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months.  This time will hopefully be substantially shorter.
After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead:
-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms.  My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage.  Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other.  (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.)
-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6.
-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.)
-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents.  As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that.
-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable.  If zero, it will use the current system.
-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0.  I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all.
-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0).
-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of course.)

For 2.7, I plan to deal with convoys, and in particular make base-to-base convoys viable.
-Firstly, I plan to make it possible to set the maximum amount convoyed.  It's currently at 1; if set higher, you'd be given a choice how much to transfer.
-I'm not sure, but I think that base-to-base convoys remove post-multiplier resources and grant pre-multiplier resources; this is of course a bug, and one that will be easily exploitable if base-to-base convoys are viable, so I plan to investigate, and if the bug exists fix it.
-If a base does not have enough resources, the first thing it sacrifices (before disbanding or, I think, starving) are convoys away from it.  However, if it's after the base being convoyed to in the listing of bases, I believe that this will cause the resource to be applied to both bases; this is a bug and I plan to fix it.
-I plan to give the option to limit how many convoys can benefit a particular base, as a numerator and denominator to be multiplied by the base's population; a denominator of 0 will mean that convoy use is unlimited.
-I plan to give the option of having a penalty (depending on EFFIC) to a base that convoys away most of its resources of a particular type; this will help discourage sending all your resources to a single base.

Then comes 3.1, in which I tackle resources and make the transcendence endgame more interesting:
-I plan to add a flag to give maglev+mine squares +1 minerals, +1 in rocky, and +1 with a mineral bonus or landmark, a flag to allow condensers to be treated like farms and enrichers for the purpose of combining enhancements in a single square (i.e. they can be combined with solar, mirror, or mine, but not forests, fungus, or boreholes), and a flag to cause monoliths to act as fungus where that would be better.
-I plan to allow you to change the production given by landmarks of each resource, by sea terraforming facilities (aquafarm etc.), by the tree farm and hybrid forest, and by the Manifold Harmonics for every value from +0 to +4 PLANET (more will count as +4).  I also plan to add the ability to set base energy from solar panels, in addition to 1 per elevation.
-I also plan to add the ability to set resources from Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet, acting as tree farm/hybrid forest for fungus, but only acting as such after the Voice of Planet is built, with the owner of the VoP using a separate entry (so he can be given extra resources from them.)
-Speaking of the Voice of Planet, I plan to give more options as to how it affects ecodamage.  Rather than the current simple "doubles ecodamage but prevents worms", it will have a multiplier and divisor to ecodamage chance depending on your relations with whoever owns the Voice of Planet (with different entries for when you own it, when it has been destroyed, and when you have a pact, treaty, truce (or no relations), or vendetta. 
-However, "ecodamage" here does not mean a fungal pop, but rather affects the chance of contributing for global warming.  The chance of a fungal pop will equal some factor (which you can set as numerator/denominator) times the chance of global warming plus some constant value (which can be negative), plus some constant value (presumably negative) per PLANET rating.  The two chances will be linked, in that if the lower-probability event occurs it will be with the higher-probability one (so if it's 10 of ecodamage and 5 of pop, it'll be a 5% chance of ecodamage with pop, 5% of ecodamage without pop, and 90% of nothing.)  The probability of worms with the pop will be set similarly, but worms cannot occur without a pop even if it has a higher probability.
-Finally, once the VoP has been built, fungal blooms will begin to occur at a rate per turn set in alphax (modified by map size).  To not use this feature, the rate can be set to 0.  Fungal blooms will work similarly to fungal pops, but rather than occurring near a high-production base they can occur anywhere on the map other than a base or a square that currently has fungus, and will never come with worms or cause global warming.  This should help create the "Planet awakening" feel that defines the endgame story.

After that comes 3.2, with a bunch more miscellaneous additions:
-Probe teams will have several flags available: One causes infiltration to cost energy, and another does the same for techsteal (both with a cost proportional to distance from HQ, so you'll have to choose between targeting an outlying base with weak security and a high cost, or a central base or HQ with lower cost but that's harder to get at), another allows a probe team to subvert an entire stack of units (though at the cost of subverting them all individually), and another changes the effect of units in bases on mind control cost to just add the cost of subverting the unit.  There'll also be the option to set the duration of infiltration, though this will be modified by the target's PROBE rating; if it's not infinite, the Empath Guild will double the duration as well as infiltrating every faction when it is built, but will not grant permanent infiltration.
-A new facility, the Spaceport.  This will take over the satellite-related effects of the aerospace complex, and the aerospace complex can be set to either lose these effects, keep them, or keep them when built but lose them when gained from the Cloudbase Academy.
-Base population is capped at 99; I would like to raise that to at least 127, and maybe even 255.
-Currently there is no way to have multiple players in a PBEM game have different difficulty levels, or have an AI with harder-difficulty mechanics but lower-difficulty aggression.  I plan to change both of those.

After that comes 4.1, which adds a new way for convoys to work; rather than granting a certain amount per turn, they'll load up, make their way to the target base, and unload there, so a strong transportation network and security will be essential for effective use.

After that is somewhat fluid (actually, it's all somewhat fluid, but after 4.1 in particular), though I also plan to sometime fix the graphics bug that occurs when playing scenarios, and add new rules for how alien factions interact with the Voice of Planet and its effects on the Ascent to Transcendence and ecodamage.

The latest version of the patch can be found here:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 02:07:31 am
Oh poo - I had to go and do this on the Sabbath.

Well, I respect you and your feelings about being represented accurately enough to wait until after sundown where you are, or however long it takes.  Let me know what you think, and suggestions/rewrites/whatever are welcome.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 02:13:47 am
Looks good to me, though you might also want to link to the list of changes on our wiki, and mention that the "fluid" part will likely include requests from other people.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 02:26:02 am
Quote
(actually, it's all somewhat fluid, especially since I consider incorporating user requests, but after 4.1 in particular)
?

What's that link?  Include changlog link at the end before the link to the patch?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 03:32:10 am
Sounds good.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 03:46:35 am
Did I find the right link?

.............................



Yitzi's Unofficial SMAX Patch Up to v.2.5b -and Counting


After nearly 20 iterations in slightly over a year, Yitzi's .exe patch for Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, the Alpha Centauri expansion, has become a must-have for many SMACers.

Yitzi said the project, incorporating previous patching from scient and kyrub, arose from a desire to better balance AC gameplay.
Quote from: Yitzi
The main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.

It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside.

He got involved for the same reasons all modders mod.
Quote from: Yitzi
I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, [AC2] and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself.

Plans for the future of the patch are extensive.
Quote from: Yitzi
Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again.
After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings.  The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months.  This time will hopefully be substantially shorter.
After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead:
-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms.  My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage.  Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other.  (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.)
-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6.
-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.)
-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents.  As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that.
-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable.  If zero, it will use the current system.
-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0.  I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all.
-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0).
-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of course.)

For 2.7, I plan to deal with convoys, and in particular make base-to-base convoys viable.
-Firstly, I plan to make it possible to set the maximum amount convoyed.  It's currently at 1; if set higher, you'd be given a choice how much to transfer.
-I'm not sure, but I think that base-to-base convoys remove post-multiplier resources and grant pre-multiplier resources; this is of course a bug, and one that will be easily exploitable if base-to-base convoys are viable, so I plan to investigate, and if the bug exists fix it.
-If a base does not have enough resources, the first thing it sacrifices (before disbanding or, I think, starving) are convoys away from it.  However, if it's after the base being convoyed to in the listing of bases, I believe that this will cause the resource to be applied to both bases; this is a bug and I plan to fix it.
-I plan to give the option to limit how many convoys can benefit a particular base, as a numerator and denominator to be multiplied by the base's population; a denominator of 0 will mean that convoy use is unlimited.
-I plan to give the option of having a penalty (depending on EFFIC) to a base that convoys away most of its resources of a particular type; this will help discourage sending all your resources to a single base.

Then comes 3.1, in which I tackle resources and make the transcendence endgame more interesting:
-I plan to add a flag to give maglev+mine squares +1 minerals, +1 in rocky, and +1 with a mineral bonus or landmark, a flag to allow condensers to be treated like farms and enrichers for the purpose of combining enhancements in a single square (i.e. they can be combined with solar, mirror, or mine, but not forests, fungus, or boreholes), and a flag to cause monoliths to act as fungus where that would be better.
-I plan to allow you to change the production given by landmarks of each resource, by sea terraforming facilities (aquafarm etc.), by the tree farm and hybrid forest, and by the Manifold Harmonics for every value from +0 to +4 PLANET (more will count as +4).  I also plan to add the ability to set base energy from solar panels, in addition to 1 per elevation.
-I also plan to add the ability to set resources from Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet, acting as tree farm/hybrid forest for fungus, but only acting as such after the Voice of Planet is built, with the owner of the VoP using a separate entry (so he can be given extra resources from them.)
-Speaking of the Voice of Planet, I plan to give more options as to how it affects ecodamage.  Rather than the current simple "doubles ecodamage but prevents worms", it will have a multiplier and divisor to ecodamage chance depending on your relations with whoever owns the Voice of Planet (with different entries for when you own it, when it has been destroyed, and when you have a pact, treaty, truce (or no relations), or vendetta. 
-However, "ecodamage" here does not mean a fungal pop, but rather affects the chance of contributing for global warming.  The chance of a fungal pop will equal some factor (which you can set as numerator/denominator) times the chance of global warming plus some constant value (which can be negative), plus some constant value (presumably negative) per PLANET rating.  The two chances will be linked, in that if the lower-probability event occurs it will be with the higher-probability one (so if it's 10 of ecodamage and 5 of pop, it'll be a 5% chance of ecodamage with pop, 5% of ecodamage without pop, and 90% of nothing.)  The probability of worms with the pop will be set similarly, but worms cannot occur without a pop even if it has a higher probability.
-Finally, once the VoP has been built, fungal blooms will begin to occur at a rate per turn set in alphax (modified by map size).  To not use this feature, the rate can be set to 0.  Fungal blooms will work similarly to fungal pops, but rather than occurring near a high-production base they can occur anywhere on the map other than a base or a square that currently has fungus, and will never come with worms or cause global warming.  This should help create the "Planet awakening" feel that defines the endgame story.

After that comes 3.2, with a bunch more miscellaneous additions:
-Probe teams will have several flags available: One causes infiltration to cost energy, and another does the same for techsteal (both with a cost proportional to distance from HQ, so you'll have to choose between targeting an outlying base with weak security and a high cost, or a central base or HQ with lower cost but that's harder to get at), another allows a probe team to subvert an entire stack of units (though at the cost of subverting them all individually), and another changes the effect of units in bases on mind control cost to just add the cost of subverting the unit.  There'll also be the option to set the duration of infiltration, though this will be modified by the target's PROBE rating; if it's not infinite, the Empath Guild will double the duration as well as infiltrating every faction when it is built, but will not grant permanent infiltration.
-A new facility, the Spaceport.  This will take over the satellite-related effects of the aerospace complex, and the aerospace complex can be set to either lose these effects, keep them, or keep them when built but lose them when gained from the Cloudbase Academy.
-Base population is capped at 99; I would like to raise that to at least 127, and maybe even 255.
-Currently there is no way to have multiple players in a PBEM game have different difficulty levels, or have an AI with harder-difficulty mechanics but lower-difficulty aggression.  I plan to change both of those.

After that comes 4.1, which adds a new way for convoys to work; rather than granting a certain amount per turn, they'll load up, make their way to the target base, and unload there, so a strong transportation network and security will be essential for effective use.

After that is somewhat fluid (actually, it's all somewhat fluid, especially since I consider incorporating user requests, but after 4.1 in particular), though I also plan to sometime fix the graphics bug that occurs when playing scenarios, and add new rules for how alien factions interact with the Voice of Planet and its effects on the Ascent to Transcendence and ecodamage.


For a changelog of the patch: http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_alphax_variables_in_Yitzi%27s_patch (http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_alphax_variables_in_Yitzi%27s_patch)

The latest version of the patch can be dowloaded here:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 04:52:54 am
You might want to put "what I've already done" before "what I'm planning to do".
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 04:54:15 am
Beg pardon?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 04:58:58 am
The changelog is what's already been done, so it probably should be linked before the list of plans for the future.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 05:00:32 am
Yitzi's Unofficial SMAX Patch Up to v.2.5b -and Counting


After nearly 20 iterations in slightly over a year, Yitzi's .exe patch for Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, the Alpha Centauri expansion, has become a must-have for many SMACers.

Yitzi said the project, incorporating previous patching from scient and kyrub, arose from a desire to better balance AC gameplay.
Quote from: Yitzi
The main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.

It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.

As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside.

He got involved for the same reasons all modders mod.
Quote from: Yitzi
I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, [AC2] and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself.

For a changelog of the patch: http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_alphax_variables_in_Yitzi%27s_patch (http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_alphax_variables_in_Yitzi%27s_patch)

Plans for the future of Yitzi's patch are extensive.
Quote from: Yitzi
Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again.
After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings.  The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months.  This time will hopefully be substantially shorter.
After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead:
-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms.  My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage.  Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other.  (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.)
-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6.
-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.)
-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents.  As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that.
-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable.  If zero, it will use the current system.
-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0.  I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all.
-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0).
-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of course.)

For 2.7, I plan to deal with convoys, and in particular make base-to-base convoys viable.
-Firstly, I plan to make it possible to set the maximum amount convoyed.  It's currently at 1; if set higher, you'd be given a choice how much to transfer.
-I'm not sure, but I think that base-to-base convoys remove post-multiplier resources and grant pre-multiplier resources; this is of course a bug, and one that will be easily exploitable if base-to-base convoys are viable, so I plan to investigate, and if the bug exists fix it.
-If a base does not have enough resources, the first thing it sacrifices (before disbanding or, I think, starving) are convoys away from it.  However, if it's after the base being convoyed to in the listing of bases, I believe that this will cause the resource to be applied to both bases; this is a bug and I plan to fix it.
-I plan to give the option to limit how many convoys can benefit a particular base, as a numerator and denominator to be multiplied by the base's population; a denominator of 0 will mean that convoy use is unlimited.
-I plan to give the option of having a penalty (depending on EFFIC) to a base that convoys away most of its resources of a particular type; this will help discourage sending all your resources to a single base.

Then comes 3.1, in which I tackle resources and make the transcendence endgame more interesting:
-I plan to add a flag to give maglev+mine squares +1 minerals, +1 in rocky, and +1 with a mineral bonus or landmark, a flag to allow condensers to be treated like farms and enrichers for the purpose of combining enhancements in a single square (i.e. they can be combined with solar, mirror, or mine, but not forests, fungus, or boreholes), and a flag to cause monoliths to act as fungus where that would be better.
-I plan to allow you to change the production given by landmarks of each resource, by sea terraforming facilities (aquafarm etc.), by the tree farm and hybrid forest, and by the Manifold Harmonics for every value from +0 to +4 PLANET (more will count as +4).  I also plan to add the ability to set base energy from solar panels, in addition to 1 per elevation.
-I also plan to add the ability to set resources from Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet, acting as tree farm/hybrid forest for fungus, but only acting as such after the Voice of Planet is built, with the owner of the VoP using a separate entry (so he can be given extra resources from them.)
-Speaking of the Voice of Planet, I plan to give more options as to how it affects ecodamage.  Rather than the current simple "doubles ecodamage but prevents worms", it will have a multiplier and divisor to ecodamage chance depending on your relations with whoever owns the Voice of Planet (with different entries for when you own it, when it has been destroyed, and when you have a pact, treaty, truce (or no relations), or vendetta. 
-However, "ecodamage" here does not mean a fungal pop, but rather affects the chance of contributing for global warming.  The chance of a fungal pop will equal some factor (which you can set as numerator/denominator) times the chance of global warming plus some constant value (which can be negative), plus some constant value (presumably negative) per PLANET rating.  The two chances will be linked, in that if the lower-probability event occurs it will be with the higher-probability one (so if it's 10 of ecodamage and 5 of pop, it'll be a 5% chance of ecodamage with pop, 5% of ecodamage without pop, and 90% of nothing.)  The probability of worms with the pop will be set similarly, but worms cannot occur without a pop even if it has a higher probability.
-Finally, once the VoP has been built, fungal blooms will begin to occur at a rate per turn set in alphax (modified by map size).  To not use this feature, the rate can be set to 0.  Fungal blooms will work similarly to fungal pops, but rather than occurring near a high-production base they can occur anywhere on the map other than a base or a square that currently has fungus, and will never come with worms or cause global warming.  This should help create the "Planet awakening" feel that defines the endgame story.

After that comes 3.2, with a bunch more miscellaneous additions:
-Probe teams will have several flags available: One causes infiltration to cost energy, and another does the same for techsteal (both with a cost proportional to distance from HQ, so you'll have to choose between targeting an outlying base with weak security and a high cost, or a central base or HQ with lower cost but that's harder to get at), another allows a probe team to subvert an entire stack of units (though at the cost of subverting them all individually), and another changes the effect of units in bases on mind control cost to just add the cost of subverting the unit.  There'll also be the option to set the duration of infiltration, though this will be modified by the target's PROBE rating; if it's not infinite, the Empath Guild will double the duration as well as infiltrating every faction when it is built, but will not grant permanent infiltration.
-A new facility, the Spaceport.  This will take over the satellite-related effects of the aerospace complex, and the aerospace complex can be set to either lose these effects, keep them, or keep them when built but lose them when gained from the Cloudbase Academy.
-Base population is capped at 99; I would like to raise that to at least 127, and maybe even 255.
-Currently there is no way to have multiple players in a PBEM game have different difficulty levels, or have an AI with harder-difficulty mechanics but lower-difficulty aggression.  I plan to change both of those.

After that comes 4.1, which adds a new way for convoys to work; rather than granting a certain amount per turn, they'll load up, make their way to the target base, and unload there, so a strong transportation network and security will be essential for effective use.

After that is somewhat fluid (actually, it's all somewhat fluid, especially since I consider incorporating user requests, but after 4.1 in particular), though I also plan to sometime fix the graphics bug that occurs when playing scenarios, and add new rules for how alien factions interact with the Voice of Planet and its effects on the Ascent to Transcendence and ecodamage.


The latest version of the patch can be dowloaded here:
http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160 (http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=160)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 05:01:25 am
Looks good.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 05:02:51 am
I'm going to go start posting it, then.  Would you like to do the honors in Chiron News Network and/or CFC?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on March 30, 2014, 05:15:06 am
Nah, you can.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 05:28:42 am
http://apolyton.net/content.php/1154-Yitzi-s-Unofficial-SMAX-Patch-Up-to-v-2-5b-and-Counting (http://apolyton.net/content.php/1154-Yitzi-s-Unofficial-SMAX-Patch-Up-to-v-2-5b-and-Counting)

Okydoke.  I'm still fiddling with how the quotes display on the front page...
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on March 30, 2014, 06:10:49 am
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=523526 (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=523526)

Submitted for the front page.  The forum posting linked above already got nine views in 15 minutes -around 1am on the US east coast.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 02, 2014, 02:45:53 am
Yitzi, the front page at CFC ain't gonna happen, for (stupidly typical) CFC reasons, alas.  Some of the admins are twitchy about .exe patches.  The Civcentration Camp is, unfathomably, where ten times more 4x strategy gamers than us, 'poly and WPC combined are to be found (most of them have SMACX), so boo.

However, we can update the OP and bump the thread whenever you release updates, so the people most likely to benefit will still see...

I'm posting here because I like to avoid PMs when I can, and CFC people probably won't look here.  Don't want to cause Petek trouble.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on April 02, 2014, 03:26:35 am
When I finish my (ever-growing) to-do list, I have plans for a balance/design mod (which will make heavy use of the variables I'm adding), so at that point you could provide news there about the mod, with a link to here.  (And if the mod requires a .exe patch...hopefully that'll be distant enough not to pose a problem.)
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 02, 2014, 03:35:51 am
Absolutely.  That's a definite new news story/thread.  ;b;
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 03, 2014, 01:57:22 am
Bad words.  Bad words, bad words, bad words.  Never release publicity near the end/beginning of the month, because that's when one of the SpammyCasts always comes out.  -Also about every week-and-a-half in between; I'm not exaggerating.  I'm SO glad DanQ hasn't discovered AC2 yet.  I only have to see his promo spam topped in all the slow subforums at other sites.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on April 03, 2014, 02:13:39 am
Bad words.  Bad words, bad words, bad words.  Never release publicity near the end/beginning of the month, because that's when one of the SpammyCasts always comes out.  -Also about every week-and-a-half in between; I'm not exaggerating.  I'm SO glad DanQ hasn't discovered AC2 yet.  I only have to see his promo spam topped in all the slow subforums at other sites.

What's he promoting?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 03, 2014, 02:27:46 am
It's a group of related podcasts.  PolyCast, TurnCast, Revcast, ModCast, and a new sort've a sitcom, "One More Turn", which is what he's currently flacking.  I think that's all of them. 

Half of my annoyance is just irritation that his promotions crowd out MY promotions - but I seriously think he does a struggling forum harm by making the slower subforums look even deader filling them up with his only marginally-related promo threads.  And there's always too much of that junk showing in the root directory, even at CFC.

I was on an episode of ModCast about four years ago.  The things I do to promote...
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on April 03, 2014, 02:43:53 am
If he does show up, we could probably just give him his own subforum of Chiron News Network, and that way it won't clutter up everything else.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 03, 2014, 02:49:34 am
Mmmaybe.  I wouldn't want to allow that stuff squeezing all the air out of the front page at all.

I turned down an invitation to be a ModCast co-host about a year ago; (or rather, didn't respond, because it was a WPC PM).  I was funny on the one I did.
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Yitzi on April 03, 2014, 02:54:52 am
Mmmaybe.  I wouldn't want to allow that stuff squeezing all the air out of the front page at all.

I turned down an invitation to be a ModCast co-host about a year ago; (or rather, didn't respond, because it was a WPC PM).  I was funny on the one I did.

What does it being a WPC PM have to do with that you didn't respond rather than turning it down?
Title: Re: Why Good Bosses Are Often Unhappy Bosses
Post by: Buster's Uncle on April 03, 2014, 03:02:34 am
Not important enough to log in there over.  Long story.  I read the email notification, and wasn't moved to act.
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