New to site and have questions!

[Stryker]

Hello everyone!

I'm new as it said.

I have a question and please redirect me if it's the wrong place.

I searched and found nothing about this in mods that I saw.


I have never liked how the combat worked in SMAC/X. Has anyone ever fiddled with making combat a combination of weapon+armor vs weapon+armor? Rather than weapon vs armor?

[Stryker]

I could see giving weapons a +10% bonus during offense and armor a +10% during defense as well if need be. On a balance it wouldn't change anything but for units with disparate values it could make a net difference.

[Mart]

Some of exe modders could comment on this.
My thoughts are, that this would be more like civ4 style strength, which was significant change from civ3 units. However, civ4 introduced this mechanism of "rock-paper-scisors" which makes combat more complex. Combining offense and defense reduced complexity. In SMACX, that seems like a lot to introduce. We have something like differentiating between unit types, but this is quite "hardcoded" e.g. air superiority against land units gets some penalty. Probe team against probe team fight, which uses morale similar to psi. Then psi vs. classic weapons difference, I mean these are different kinds of combat.
Before civ4 release, they announced this new system for units, and I remember, I was thinking "Can this still be complex system?" It turned out, it works very good, at least for me. Civ3 is made on SMACX game engine, so civ3 has similarity to SMACX.

In SMACX, we still have possibility to combine weapons and armor, however in standard cost formula, these are very expensive. Recently Yitzi works on unit cost formula. So some solution would be to declare something, that is cheaper when offense and defense are equal, and units would be more expensive having larger differences of these factors. But then again, without "rock-paper-scisors" mechanism, this would most likely decrease combat complexity.

[Nexii]

I think weapon on attack and armor on defense was a fine system in terms of combat mechanics and tech choices.  Both are important.  Maybe not the most logical though - armor probably should have determined unit HP or given a scaling reduction to damage taken.  Reactors then would just determine movement speeds.

The problem was the devs thought that unit cost = weapon + (armor * movement) was a good idea when it really wasn't.  It meant that armor was overcosted on all units.  So typically you would just run units with your best weapon and no armor.  But with Yitzi's cost formula changes you can mod armor to be less expensive in many ways.

[Yitzi]

Hello everyone!

I'm new as it said.

I have a question and please redirect me if it's the wrong place.

I searched and found nothing about this in mods that I saw.


I have never liked how the combat worked in SMAC/X. Has anyone ever fiddled with making combat a combination of weapon+armor vs weapon+armor? Rather than weapon vs armor?

Some approaches of that sort have been considered, not yet implemented.  The one I personally favor (at least at the moment) is where each unit does damage to the other equal to its weapon minus the other's armor plus a random factor, as part of a complete armor rework.

[Nexii]

Subtracting W - A would make tech gaps even more impactful than they are now.  Granted, it would make armor a lot more relevant.  Even where I mod such that unit cost = chassis (i.e. weapon and armor cost are not a factor), weapon techs still have the edge because it's all about initiative.  Generally you won't attack (with weapon) if the defender has a high chance of winning (with armor).

DMG = W * (1 / A) would make them about equal in 'power' and would give a smoother curve.  But may again make A not strong enough so A may need a constant multiplier applied.

[Yitzi]

Subtracting W - A would make tech gaps even more impactful than they are now.

Definitely, which is why it's intended to go along with a change in weapon and armor stats so that weapon and armor power increase linearly with tech while their costs increase exponentially (with armor cost growing significantly faster than weapon cost), and remove reactors' effect of decreasing unit cost, and have the projectile weapon vs. energy armor/vice versa bonus give a bonus to W, and have Nerve Gas Pods give a small bonus to damage which ignores armor...and even then, large tech gaps would be a serious concern.

DMG = W * (1 / A) would make them about equal in 'power' and would give a smoother curve.  But may again make A not strong enough so A may need a constant multiplier applied.

It would also make for less interesting unit design choices, because a 50% increase in armor has the same effect no matter what you're fighting.  I could add both options if both are wanted enough, but I think the W-A method, if balanced for the consequences on tech gaps and relative importance of weapon and armor, will make for a much richer game.

[Nexii]

Yea though the problem with very high unit costs is that native life doesn't scale up the same way.  In the late game then what happens is native life beats all, or you're disincentivized to use your best weapon/armor.  The system should encourage always using your best weapons and armor, even if the cost does rise a bit. 

Or, native life is just useless with default cost
Scout Patrol = 10 minerals,
Mindworm - 50 minerals
Late game 'super unit' - 150 minerals
So A counters B - B counters C - C counters A - but it's kind of nonsensical to make troops late game with primitive weapons.  A handful make native life useless and it's even more unit clutter.

If native life somehow got stronger and costed more as the game went on, that'd work.  It gets outscaled badly by the time conventional units get expensive, due to slow movement and no abilities. It would have to fight with HP as though it had reactors, or perhaps get extra movement/intrinsic abilities with tech to be something actually usable.  All of which would be a big project.  But I would say that the game really didn't have the balanced interesting unit choice that they claimed...there was about 3 units you'd ever use (rover, jet, copter) all with X/1 in a default settings game.

I do think higher late game unit costs are preferable (to reduce insane micromanaging) - I just see a lot of problems remaining if good units are super expensive.

[Stryker]

Wow. Great discussion.

Still, just simple weapon + armor seems the most realistic and simplest to impliment rather than the more complex overhauls.

From a military standpoint no matter how good your armor, if your peashooter can't beat their armor then you won't win.

Armor 8 offense 1 shouldn't win vs an enemy coming with offense 6 defense 6 all others being equal in my book.

[Yitzi]

Yea though the problem with very high unit costs is that native life doesn't scale up the same way.  In the late game then what happens is native life beats all, or you're disincentivized to use your best weapon/armor.  The system should encourage always using your best weapons and armor, even if the cost does rise a bit.

Should it?  I think it might be more interesting if it doesn't, as that means more viable options and that means more strategy.  If using the best available unit is always the best choice, deciding army composition isn't interesting.

The other thing is that production rises significantly as the game goes on, so so should unit costs.

Or, native life is just useless with default cost
Scout Patrol = 10 minerals,
Mindworm - 50 minerals
Late game 'super unit' - 150 minerals
So A counters B - B counters C - C counters A - but it's kind of nonsensical to make troops late game with primitive weapons.  A handful make native life useless and it's even more unit clutter.

A handful of lower-cost troops wouldn't make native life useless, as enough native life could kill them (psi combat should be set up so that throwing enough native life at any target will break it)...the inability to use anything other than native life would be a significant disadvantage, though.

Unit clutter is a bigger concern, and some sort of "moving large numbers of units together" method would be absolutely necessary to make this work.

If native life somehow got stronger and costed more as the game went on, that'd work.  It gets outscaled badly by the time conventional units get expensive, due to slow movement and no abilities. It would have to fight with HP as though it had reactors, or perhaps get extra movement/intrinsic abilities with tech to be something actually usable.  All of which would be a big project.

Actually, what I was planning on doing is making it even more morale-dependent than it already is, plus giving psi combat units some ability to temporarily (i.e. recovers over several turns) drain the morale of their opponents.  Add in an effect where PLANET rating affects your ability to increase your troops' lifecycle and an ability to increase recruitment rate, and a native-life-heavy combat could be fairly viable (though .

But I would say that the game really didn't have the balanced interesting unit choice that they claimed...there was about 3 units you'd ever use (rover, jet, copter) all with X/1 in a default settings game.

Yeah, changing that is a large part of the goal of a combat rework.

I do think higher late game unit costs are preferable (to reduce insane micromanaging) - I just see a lot of problems remaining if good units are super expensive.

I think those problems can be solved, though the solution will likely involve large quantities of "in a war, knowing what types of troops your opponent has so you can counter them is really important".

[Nexii]

A straight lifecycle boost (+1/+2/+3) at positive PLANET ratings might work.  Or giving PLANET a defensive PSI bonus.
I've felt that PSI combat should follow the same 2:1 ratio the problem then becomes it always loses on defense, because it has no defensive modifiers.  I suppose you can pair it with conventional troops.

Well in all practical wars, native life is useless.  When you can make a clean trance scout for like 10 minerals, and it beats a 50 mineral mindworm, no one will ever produce the mindworm.

Agree it's tricky to balance.  At a certain breaking point native life will dominate.  I had MWs at 20 minerals and they tended to crush most things.

Maybe PSI artillery should do what you've described.  Rather than damage units it could reduce morale for a time.

[Yitzi]

A straight lifecycle boost (+1/+2/+3) at positive PLANET ratings might work.  Or giving PLANET a defensive PSI bonus.

The latter will become available in the next patch; as for a lifecycle boost, I was actually thinking of making it more dependent on facilities where you build it and so on (in particular, my plan was that each lifecycle-increasing facility gives +2 to lifecycle instead of +1, but each lifecycle increase, whether from facilities or combat or monolith, has a (5-PLANET)*10% chance of not happening.)

I've felt that PSI combat should follow the same 2:1 ratio the problem then becomes it always loses on defense, because it has no defensive modifiers.  I suppose you can pair it with conventional troops.

If it's changed to W-A, though, then the ratio between attackers and defenders will be much closer in most cases.

Well in all practical wars, native life is useless.  When you can make a clean trance scout for like 10 minerals, and it beats a 50 mineral mindworm, no one will ever produce the mindworm.

A clean trance scout costs 20 minerals.  And a combat rework would probably involve making it so that while enough worms can break any defense, low-morale units will have trouble beating high-lifecycle worms even with a large numbers advantage.  Even so, if you're going native life you'll want to mix in things like artillery and low-weapon/high-armor units to counter those clean trance scouts.

Agree it's tricky to balance.  At a certain breaking point native life will dominate.  I had MWs at 20 minerals and they tended to crush most things.

Maybe PSI artillery should do what you've described.  Rather than damage units it could reduce morale for a time.

That's an idea...but the morale penalty is still necessary as a way to make it so that huge numbers of mind worms (i.e. what you get if you completely ignore ecodamage later in the game) are a serious concern even for  .

[Vishniac]

A straight lifecycle boost (+1/+2/+3) at positive PLANET ratings might work.  Or giving PLANET a defensive PSI bonus.

The latter will become available in the next patch; as for a lifecycle boost, I was actually thinking of making it more dependent on facilities where you build it and so on (in particular, my plan was that each lifecycle-increasing facility gives +2 to lifecycle instead of +1, but each lifecycle increase, whether from facilities or combat or monolith, has a (5-PLANET)*10% chance of not happening.)

I'd like to say that patches should merely correct known bugs.
If you begin to change mechanisms, it should become a mod.

Otherwise I fear it could end like with the Dominions series where a few hardcore gamers who dominated the forums totally changed some factions and some ways the game plays to make it more balanced, more cool or whatever. And of course once they started they could never reach the right spot so every 4-6 months people had to download and use a new mod with a new set of rules, new tables for creatures and artifacts... It never ends.
If we are to agree that copters/Empath Guild/Cloudbase Academy are too powerful (to take a used exemple here), we have to do it at the start of each MP or GotM game but the less we change the better for me.

Concerning native life, though not an expert, I can't see how one would deem them useless.
In SP I use them in some nice and nasty strategies. They have some properties other units don't have until very late if ever (repairing out of base / no refuel locusts / oblivious to enemy reactor /...).

[Yitzi]

A straight lifecycle boost (+1/+2/+3) at positive PLANET ratings might work.  Or giving PLANET a defensive PSI bonus.

The latter will become available in the next patch; as for a lifecycle boost, I was actually thinking of making it more dependent on facilities where you build it and so on (in particular, my plan was that each lifecycle-increasing facility gives +2 to lifecycle instead of +1, but each lifecycle increase, whether from facilities or combat or monolith, has a (5-PLANET)*10% chance of not happening.)

I'd like to say that patches should merely correct known bugs.
If you begin to change mechanisms, it should become a mod.

Otherwise I fear it could end like with the Dominions series where a few hardcore gamers who dominated the forums totally changed some factions and some ways the game plays to make it more balanced, more cool or whatever. And of course once they started they could never reach the right spot so every 4-6 months people had to download and use a new mod with a new set of rules, new tables for creatures and artifacts... It never ends.
If we are to agree that copters/Empath Guild/Cloudbase Academy are too powerful (to take a used exemple here), we have to do it at the start of each MP or GotM game but the less we change the better for me.

Agreed; when I say "available" I mean "can be modded into existence".  The only not-a-bug that I'm making into a default change is playing the original game's intro instead of the expansion's (just because it's so much better), and even that can be disabled as a mod.

[Nexii]

Native life is decent vs the AI because the AI doesn't use mobile units all that well.  Mostly it just spams infantry and attacks in bad patterns.  Also the AI doesn't build many trance/empath units...not like a human player would if you tried to use native life.  Also, a human player will counter hit native life a lot more.  Against the AI you can attack a base, then retreat to heal up.  That doesn't work so well against a human player.  There's also that it easily gets blasted down to 1 HP by later game artillery...just so many counters.

Copters I would argue aren't that overpowering if you play with cheaper armor costs on units.  It's rare you can take out much more than 1 or 2 units in a turn then anyways.  Everyone says EG is so strong...perhaps in an FFA MP game I don't know.  I'd say that a lot of the time you might end up pacting which gives intel or just using probe foils which cost about the same.  CBA is definitely undercosted though compared to Airport Complexes (and the huge factor of being indestructable on defense).  I play with CBA at around 60 rows to buy.   But yea all mods, all subjective really.  SPs should be good though as they're the main incentive to tech ahead of others.