Where has the food gone?

[Raaf]

Hello everyone.

I played this game a few times some years ago and now I started it up again (kind of in between Age of Wonders III and Planetfall)

Immediately I came upon this little puzzle, after discovering that mine + farm on river rolling moist was a bit of a waste - although it is one of those orders in the menu.

But my question here is the farm on river rainy rolling terrain (SE of the base).

The PRACX screen shows what I expect: 3/1/1


But the city screen shows only 2/1/1, consistent with the total resources gathered by the base


Is there a tile production limit of 2 for all resources (except for bonus tiles) until you unlock some new tech?

I searched everywhere for these restrictions, but could not find a good reference.

This is GOG SMAC with a 3 year old Scient patch plus PRACX (I think, the install is years old).

[bvanevery]

Two possibilities.  One is that it's an update display bug.  I've occasionally noticed city screens that have wrong readouts for squares.  I don't remember any particular pattern as to what was wrong about them, nor do I remember where I've posted about it.  But rest assured, errors in the city readout are possible.

Second possibility has to do with nutrient restriction.  You've got the black circle around the "2", which means you haven't yet discovered the technology that allows 3+ nutrients on a normal square, i.e. not a resource special.  In the stock game that tech is Gene Splicing.  Maybe PRACX failed to take the nutrient restriction into account?

[Raaf]

Yes, thank you. I found the restriction finally on some forum. Strange that I could not find it in the manual or the datalinks.

Pracx indeed doesn't seem to take that into account, but it is not a terrain feature, but a faction feature, so one should take that info as a replacement for the base management screen. It makes sense, in a way.

I had another question: I would like to play with the harsher rules for drone management, like in the harder difficulty settings, but I don't want the AI factions getting overwhelming while I am learning. However, by playing on the easier setting, I don't learn proper drone management while I can afford to make errors.

Is there a way to mod these settings: hard but without the AI bonusses?

[bvanevery]

I don't think it's accurate to say that the nutrient restriction has to do with your faction.  It has to do with your tech level.  No Gene Splicing, no nutrients for you!

There's nothing in alphax.txt or any of the faction.txt files that would allow you to mod the AI's difficult settings in any way.  You'd need to see if any of the various binary patches did something in that regard.

I cannot honestly recommend Thinker Mod to anyone just learning the game, as it'll simply kill you.  Heck it'll simply kill me because of all the buffs the AI has gotten.  Absent all the counter-nerfing I've done in my own mod to end as much of the abuse as I reasonably could.  Couldn't do any more than I did, as there's more to the world than Thinker Mod.

The other binary patches, I'm really not sure if they do anything about AI difficulty, because I never use them.

I think in your shoes I'd just "graduate" faster.

[Raaf]

I don't think it's accurate to say that the nutrient restriction has to do with your faction.  It has to do with your tech level.  No Gene Splicing, no nutrients for you!

Yes, I took a short cut, but I meant it depends on the current state of the controlling faction.

As PRACX is a hook in the user interface of the game, I suspect the module has good data on the map, as these are needed to draw the overlays, but to take owner faction technology into account would require a whole new level of reverse engineering of the game mechanics.

So I can live with the fact that PRACX only shows the properties of the terrain itself.

[bvanevery]

I'm a bit surprised if indeed it doesn't.  The patch has been around a long time and I would have thought it would have addressed that sort of thing by now.  But then, I don't use it, so I have no clue.

[Vidsek]

   The Yitzi patch (latest version is 35d) adds extensive alphax.txt options to modify drone behavior, both the bureaucratic and pacifist types.  You can set them to result in almost any situation from no drones to total planet-wide chaos.

  At the request of community members, Yitzi also added in a lot of other alphax options for fungus/worm pops, ecodamage, unit costs, switching production costs, upgrade costs, and various other parameters.
  All that can be heaven for control freaks and setting up scenarios with unique conditions, but is confusing to learn.

  I'd be happy to share what I've figured out with you, and there are other folks here that probably have an even better understanding of Yitzi's work.   Sadly, Yitzi himself is currently incommunicado off in RL/work.

  In my personal games, I set most of them to match or closely approximate the original game defaults or those of whichever mod I'm using/trying (currently bvanevery's AI Growth Mod).  In a few cases you can disable/set-to-zero the additions, for others you have to choose.  However, there isn't a list of which settings will accomplish that so I've had to study the options closely and make my own decisions.
The tricky part is that the original game's internal mechanics are very poorly documented so while you may understand what Yitzi's patch is doing, you may not have a clear idea of how the basic, original game calculates them.

[Induktio]

Is there a tile production limit of 2 for all resources (except for bonus tiles) until you unlock some new tech?

I searched everywhere for these restrictions, but could not find a good reference.

This is GOG SMAC with a 3 year old Scient patch plus PRACX (I think, the install is years old).

Yeah, probably you already found it, but each of the resources produced is capped at 2 unless the faction in question has these "technology to allow 3 nutrients in a square" which are specified in alphax.txt. There's also one exception to this rule: squares with bonus resources always lift the production cap for the bonus resource (but not the other two).

About Thinker mod, the AI production bonuses are highly configurable for each of the difficulty levels with cost_factor option. Transcend level with the default cost factor is much more difficult though, but that's the purpose of the mod. It just doesn't make any sense to say it wouldn't be usable at all for non-experienced players. Even the advanced AI features can be disabled from all factions by setting factions_enabled=0 so you can play against the vanilla AIs if so desired. Probably you should play a couple of games against the vanilla AI first and then decide if you want more challenge. Nevertheless Thinker mod includes Scient's patches and many features to tune the random map generator.

[bvanevery]

It just doesn't make any sense to say it wouldn't be usable at all for non-experienced players.

It makes plenty of sense if talking about what it's like to play out of the box, untweaked, with default settings.  The AI is going to abuse Infinite City Sprawl, Condensers, Thermal Boreholes, Supply Crawlers, and Eco-Damage and completely stomp you.  I'd even predict that if the Thinker AI is allowed to be active, it will stomp any player at any difficulty level they were looking for.  Meaning, a beginner chooses some kind of beginner setting and gets stomped, because it is still relatively speaking, very abusive.  If I sound bitter about it, it's because I've playtested 14 games recently, wrote them all up, and think I know what I'm talking about.  I think you've written the kind of AI where the AI is having all the fun, not the player.

Now, if you turn the Thinker AI completely off, maybe you're right.  Maybe it can be configured into something that works well for a beginner.  It's definitely not a design goal of your Thinker Mod though, and that's pretty much a repurposing of your work.  I might even call it a life hack.  It's not what I'd call a noob friendly experience, needing to get into that to make it work somehow.  Any settings arrived at could use some playtesting; maybe the OP will be the 1st to figure out what's "best".

I'm not sure what the best "beginner's mod" is.  People can have their thoughts.  I'm going to stand by my original advice though: "graduate faster".  It's the path of least resistance.

[DrazharLn]

Yeah, PRACX doesn't know what technologies the player has or which technologies handle nutrient restriction, so it doesn't take that into account.

It could be patched to do so fairly easily because Scient has already done the hard work of reversing the info on what technologies a faction has. I'm not going to do it, but scient's decompilation results are in the downloads section if anyone wants to look into it.