Author Topic: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod  (Read 161780 times)

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1800 on: February 17, 2022, 12:30:55 pm »
Chiming in about infinite expansion and whether new base is a single best thing to produce.

I don't really understand the point of arguments here. Taking things out of context and putting opponent claims to extreme doesn't really going to help finding common ground.

First of all, I strongly believe, everybody understand that founding new bases during war for survival is not the best option. I don't remember myself frantically expanding in such situations. Neither does AI nor most of the human players. On huge map populating the rest of it only happens after the game won militaristically. Otherwise, opponents will just take your best biggest bases while you are founding new empty ones. Anybody wants to argue with that?

Then, even in some imaginary pure economical competition, even in vanilla, founding new base brings diminishing return and becomes a liability at some point. Everybody may name different perception about when it happens. The exact number is not a key point here. The point is that even founding new base and do nothing with it leaving it rioting every turn does impact the rest of empire by increasing number of b-drones in other bases. On a standard map founding every new base beyond 24 generates 3 drones somewhere.

Vanilla allows player to expand more or less beneficial until global war breaks. That may create a perception that expanding is the best economical strategy ever trumped only by defense. WTP tilts the balance a little toward vertical growth. So the point of diminishing return appears somewhat earlier. Maybe even before the war. Thus the period of vertical growth becomes somewhat more pronounced than in vanilla. That is all.

Some people may argue that vanilla PTS makes expansion pay for itself infinitely. That is a false perception caused by massive faction power increase due to inflated population. Founding new bases with PTS let player win faster because they outnumber opponents in early-mid stage but further base founding beyond certain limit is still a liability.

« Last Edit: February 17, 2022, 04:30:58 pm by Alpha Centauri Bear »

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1801 on: February 17, 2022, 12:37:08 pm »
making his tech weights optional is like the first thing he made due to your feedback at the very beginning.

By "he" you mean Induktio and Thinker? I don't recall anything like that either. Besides, I don't see a point doing this programmatically as one can just simply equalize weights in txt.

Offline bvanevery

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1802 on: February 17, 2022, 04:14:34 pm »
I've never liked the PTS.  It's an invitation to do something, at a point in the game where I'd already settled and didn't want to do it.  Half the time, a citizen immediately dies because there isn't enough food where I want to settle.  Having to prepare a site with Formers before settlement to keep that from happening, isn't a benefit.  It's an impact on my gameplay.  So I always just let 'em starve if that's how it's gonna be.  The supposed happiness improvement for smaller bases, I've rarely seen any benefit in practice.  By the time I'm using the PTS, I've probably done something that makes people happier anyways.  Like set my budget 40-20-40, or raise my EFFIC / JUSTICE, or complete the HGP.

PTS is the 1 SP that I never worry about the AI getting it instead of me.  It's the absolute last priority, even less than the stock binary's Universal Translator.  BTW only recently did I clue into WTP's retooling of that and the TOE.  Good call, making those global benefits.

Offline dino

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1803 on: February 17, 2022, 07:56:50 pm »
There was no point in making it programmatically in the first place, but Inductio had a policy at this early stage for thinker to work with vanilla alphax.txt.
It was made optional through thinker.ini setting within weeks after bvanevery first complained about it over 3 years ago:

; Prioritize former/crawler/resource cap-lifting techs when selecting what to research.
tech_balance=1

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1804 on: February 17, 2022, 08:25:33 pm »
There was no point in making it programmatically in the first place, but Inductio had a policy at this early stage for thinker to work with vanilla alphax.txt.
It was made optional through thinker.ini setting within weeks after bvanevery first complained about it over 3 years ago:

; Prioritize former/crawler/resource cap-lifting techs when selecting what to research.
tech_balance=1

Ah. You qualified it some unusual way and confused other discussion participants.
😂

This "Prioritize former/crawler/resource cap-lifting techs" has nothing to do with tech weights. It explicitly overrides tech priority for just few of them. Tech weights are still used normal way for majority of tech. They are not optional.

Offline Induktio

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1805 on: February 17, 2022, 08:37:29 pm »
There was no point in making it programmatically in the first place, but Inductio had a policy at this early stage for thinker to work with vanilla alphax.txt.
It was made optional through thinker.ini setting within weeks after bvanevery first complained about it over 3 years ago:

There's some inaccuracies here unfortunately. Tech balance has always been an option, and there wasn't any later point in time where it would have been "made optional", because it was already listed as thinker.ini option. This did not change after any "complaints". I did later change the calculation multiple times but that is another matter. Anyway the intention was always that the feature would remain optional.

And this kind of feature is still very necessary for the AI if the players use some other alphax.txt mods that haven't adjusted their tech weights. For players it's not viable to expect them to edit this stuff in alphax.txt files manually in each case. In this case tech_balance feature ensures the AI uses sane research priorities in the early game. There would be an argument that the same could be done for player factions, but this is not that important since players can adjust their research priorities anyway, even while using blind research, which essentially results in directed research if you micromanage the weights enough. AIs would not have this ability. Not to mention humans can trade techs very easily. That's all I got to say about this thing once more.
« Last Edit: February 17, 2022, 10:15:28 pm by Induktio »

Offline bvanevery

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1806 on: February 17, 2022, 08:43:13 pm »
I remember that setting now.  I still object to that setting being "opt out" instead of "opt in".  When you ship a game, you're conditioning the vast majority of the player base to use your defaults.  Very few people will aggressively tweak settings until they come up with an actual "perfect or better" way to do things.  The default, was for the game to cheat.

It became pretty clear to me then, that we weren't going to agree on how the game should be implemented / respected / standardized.  That we weren't going to have any real compatibility between our works.  So I stopped caring and had no interest in it, as happens in open source.  Concentrated on making my own work good, which is something I have full control over.

That was then, this is now.  But oh good grief, now I see that option is still in Thinker.ini !  I missed it because it's been a long time and the exact verbiage / framing was not on my mind.  Well for better or for worse, I'm currently playing with that option set, as per default.  We will see if there's a noticeable empirical impact.  I don't know if there's going to be yet another game after the current one, because I have no way of knowing what might derail the current game.  But at least now I'm duly informed / reminded.

Even now, if we have some kind of detente, I don't see myself suddenly supporting my mod "with Thinker".  I put my work under CC-BY-NC license for a reason, to let someone else be responsible for sort of thing, if they so choose.  They can go grab the limelight for that and become "The Great Integrator".  Taking all the bows and lumps for such an effort.  I don't want responsibility for what they concoct.  It would at least double my testing load, and I have already put tons of time into my own QA.

It doesn't actually profit me, as a game designer and developer, to share the stage with Induktio in any way.  Whether people buy commercial titles from me in the future, depends on whether they think I am responsible for the work.  If I share that with someone else, particularly someone who has done a "very heavy" project of their own, then people have no way of knowing all the work I actually did.

This is true for Tim as well, unfortunately.  Not gonna suddenly combine my mod with WTP.  Plus, in that case we have really different tech trees and SE tables.  There's not even a clear way to combine.  Influence, sure.  We've had that happen anyways, without any kind of formal credit sharing.  Combine, no.

The niche I've carved out, is "here's what you can do with the stock binary."  You could always have done what I've done, at any point in the past 20+ years.  No illegal binary modding heroics required.  Just an awful lot of elbow grease, and taking the low hanging fruit.  Until it hurts.

I go back and forth about the legality of binary modding.  I'm happy to avoid any entanglement in that regard.  As I try to get my own commercial title out there, I don't need EA gunning for me.

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1807 on: February 17, 2022, 09:16:35 pm »
And this kind of feature is still is very necessary for the AI if the players use some other alphax.txt mods that haven't adjusted their tech weights.

Who would that have ever been?  Wouldn't ever have been me.  Wasn't Tim later.  Wouldn't / shouldn't have been you.  So what is the concern, some "lesser known / more random / abandoned" alphax.txt that is floating around out there somewhere, from the stone ages?  I'm not familiar with more developed and ongoing work, such as Binary Dawn.  I would expect an author that is still persisting in such effort, would know how [power tech wealth growth] actually work.

The main impact of bad Build decisions in the stock binary, is the Spartans wouldn't build a darned road or turn any soil, for a long time.  They'd get to it eventually, but they really really did a bad job, early on.

The fix for this problem is both conceptually trivial, and trivial to implement.  Formers are a technology of Conquest.  When you lay down roads to your enemy, they die faster.  Drilling a road straight into the enemy's heart, is standard operating procedure against "nearby" AIs that you want dead.  You can also defend your own empire better with an internal road system.

So you set power=1 in Centauri Ecology, instead of the 0 it has in the vanilla alphax.txt.  This means a pure Conquer faction like the Spartans will get around to making Formers.

This kind of solution is generally true of any "hangup" early tech.  Such as Information Networks and Network Nodes.  Stock AI can get into serious tech stagnation not ever building these, because various factions never learn Information Networks.  I've often put a "bread crumb" =1 in its weights, to make sure that the stock AI doesn't get hung up forever by that.

The important implementation detail is "=0" is a hard barrier.  That should be understood by the alphax.txt designer, and used judiciously.  It should not be softened by a game binary.  The designer should either use the barrier because they intended it, or not have it.

Yes I think people should actually learn how to use the data driven design of alphax.txt and not have the binary doing magic things behind their back.  I suppose it gets into a broader philosophy of what modders "should be doing".  I'm not really understanding the concept of a "casual" modder, for something as complicated as 4X TBS or an alphax.txt file.  I wonder if the historical evidence in that regard, is for or against me.  It's definitely for me now, in 2022, with the people we actually still have doing major work.  But the last 20 years?  I have no idea.  I was asleep about all matters social and multiplayer, with this game.

Rather than trying to "save people from their ignorance" and implementing special things in binaries, players can be educated about what they should do with an alphax.txt, using a comment.  I'm pretty sparing about those in my alphax.txt, but I do have a few.  Because there are some really important and picky things I've discovered in the course of my work, like:
Code: [Select]
; Bunkers are disabled because the AI builds way too many of them,
; which simply gives a human player an easy way to invade.

Code: [Select]
; A predefined unit cannot be upgraded to.  That's an unfortunate limitation of the original game.
;
; We can work around this problem making our predefined units, seem different than the designs
; the player comes up with in the Workshop.  The 30th and 31st ability bits are not used, so we
; can turn one of them on to make it seem like a different unit design.  Unfortunately this messes
; with the display of unit abilities and their cost, but there's no other way.
;
; We do not need to create a seemingly different unit design, if one cannot ever upgrade to it.
; For instance, you can't upgrade to a mindworm.  Nor to a Scout, Former, Sea Former, Probe Team,
; Foil Probe Team, or Supply Crawler, because they have no abilities and the lowest possible armor settings.

Code: [Select]
;   TECHSHARE   = Gain any technology known to # other players that have been infiltrated
;                 (by probe, Empath Guild, Governor, or Pact).

That seems to be it.  Maybe I'm not doing the best job educating.   ;lol  I have not tried to advance the cause of greater [power tech wealth growth] awareness using my mod at all.  Didn't think of pedagogy.  Thought an alphax.txt modder should know what they're doing, by reading the thing until it hurts.

Like how are you going to mod predefined units, if you don't "get in there" and figure out it's an array that you add entries to?  I've had very, very noob modders ask how you do that sort of thing.  I answer nicely, but the meta answer is "you open up a .txt file and read wtf is going on".  That's how you mod.  If you don't get something, you scratch your head real hard until you do.  Like, surely the original devs bothered for some reason?

I grew up PEEKing and POKEing memory locations on an Atari 800.  I taught myself how to do that, reading a small number of books and magazines.  There was no internet and nobody had a clue back then.  Maybe I'm a fossil.  Well, if I am a fossil, so were the original SMAC devs.  Like look at the binary flag tables.  Surely if you're going to mod binary flag tables, you can figure out [power tech wealth growth].

Offline bvanevery

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1808 on: February 17, 2022, 10:01:28 pm »
Tech weights are still used normal way for majority of tech. They are not optional.
And probably, back at the beginning, I saw "not following standard way to implement / solve" as far more of a big deal, with far more invasive scope, than it may have ever been at the time, or turned out to be over the long haul.  Like I see this guy changing weights that I've spent a year 4 full time person months working on... well, empirically, now, am I even going to notice in my test game?

Offline dino

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1809 on: February 17, 2022, 11:34:35 pm »
> There's some inaccuracies here unfortunately. Tech balance has always been an option.

I couldn't imagine this discussion would be a thing if it was optional, so I've just assumed it wasn't initially.
I'm sorry that I've just contributed to digging it up, lets just burry it again please.

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1810 on: February 21, 2022, 06:24:52 pm »
I was testing it recently and got mixed feelings about aquatic faction and sea bases in general. Theoretically, their nutrient and energy excess allows them to grow fast, collect large energy intake and rush production with it effectively compensating lack of minerals. In practice, though, the problem is not in production but in support. Base needs some minimal mineral surplus to even support minimal set of units (defenders, formers, explorers, colonies). When sea base manages to secure mineral bonus it is doing fine. However, when it is not, it absolutely cripples it as mere 1 mineral from base square is incapable to support minimal number of peaceful units. I observed cases when bases without mineral bonus grew to the size of 6-7, constructing themselves Recreation Commons and Habitation Complex to support that growth but weren't able to produce extra former or even a colony for the first 50 turns! So yes, generally production wise they may be OK but their support is just nonexistent. They cannot possibly operate even on the lowest level.

Building mining platforms all around does not solve the problem. The platform produces 1 mineral for the cost of -1 nutrient and -3 energy. This is huge price that nullify all above talks about sea bases fast growth and extra cash flow. Surrounding sea bases with platforms turn them into inferior version of land bases that still eats more minerals to support more formers for building these platforms.

I am thinking to return Pressure dome bonus to aid to sea bases especially with +1 mineral aquatic bonus removed. Moreover, I think it would be more viable to give +2 minerals instead of +1/+1/+1 as in vanilla. That is not exceptionally huge bonus but it'll at least let sea bases to maintain some minimal fleet of useful units including transports those are actually very much needed for ocean based factions. I also think it should be allowed for land bases to build this as well and receive same exactly bonus: +2 minerals/turn for 80 minerals invested. It is relatively average deal and won't be an OP.

Thoughts?

Offline bvanevery

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1811 on: February 21, 2022, 07:20:49 pm »
Worth trying.  Fighting Thinker, it's pretty clear I need to develop minerals first.  In a previous game I was also surprised how long I could keep people happy with just a Rec Commons and a Hologram Theater.  I don't think I even had a PSYCH budget yet, I think I was doing 50-0-50.  Smaller bases don't seem to need energy if you have a few facilities.

Offline EmpathCrawler

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1812 on: February 21, 2022, 10:10:49 pm »
If you're taking away the Pirates' extra minerals, you probably need to give them SUPPORT as compensation.

They do get an advantage in former turns even though their formers are more expensive. They have far fewer improvements to build, and their primary source of food will grow on its own.

A lot of the Pirate advantages aren't ones the AI can exploit very effectively, like time, flexibility, pod popping. They aren't bright enough to seek out and secure the two sea landmarks that they know

I don't play with SMAX factions so my primary experience with sea bases is what I call "sea exile". It's when you or the AI successfully eject an annoying faction from land and then have to put up with their sad, ineffectual attacks and bombardments from the sea because they hate you forever. I'd be nice if the AI knew when it got beat and cut its losses rather than becoming 10 annoying Taiwans.

Offline bvanevery

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Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1813 on: February 22, 2022, 12:25:05 am »
Ten Taiwans.  Sounds like a punk band.   ;lol

 ;banjo :hammer: ;rockon ;rockon ;rockon

Offline Hagen0

Re: SMAX - The Will to Power - mod
« Reply #1814 on: February 22, 2022, 08:55:23 am »
The correct way to play an aquatic faction in vanilla is to find some land to settle, unfortunately. Getting food, energy from the water is fine but you need somewhere to put boreholes (and forest earlier) for production. Even more importantly, early on, the extra cost of sea formers and colony pods is unsustainable. Going back into the water by mid game is perhaps viable.

 

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