Are condensers+advanced specialists(+crawlers) broken?

[Yitzi]

It occurred to me, in the hopefully-not-endless search for ways to make the game more balanced, that by the late midgame (which I'll define by Advanced Ecological Engineering), condensers become far superior to any other possible terraforming.  The reason is high-powered specialists.  Consider: A space with a condenser is probably rainy (put two condensers next to each other and it's guaranteed), and a condenser gives +50% to nutrients in its square, so with a farm and enricher you get (2+1+1)X1.5, or 6 nutrients.  Because it's producing only nutrients, it can be crawled, so you can support 3 specialists...say 2 thinkers and an engineer.  That means you get 2 psych, 8 labs, and 3 economy (13 FOP total) from a square; nothing else even comes close (the next best is probably a borehole, which produces 4 FOP but takes up a citizen that could be used to produce 4-5 FOP as a specialist.)

One option is to simply say that throughout the game specialists never produce more than 2 energy's worth.  But I don't really like nerfing specialists that much.

Now, one possible approach (with .exe modding) might be to reduce a condenser's bonus to +1 nutrients and also nerf engineers down to 3 econ/1 labs.  But even that isn't enough, as the tile will still support 2.5 specialists (since it doesn't need to be worked), which is 10 FOP; remember that the next best was boreholes at 12 FOP minus a specialist or 8 FOP.  That's still a pretty substantial discrepancy for two approaches that take the same terraforming time (and forests are only 4 FOP plus supporting themselves and half a specialist for 6 FOP total, which is still too much of a discrepancy.)  Thus, it seems to me that if condensers are to avoid being overpowered in the late game, it will be necessary to use at least three of the four changes listed below:

1. (requires .exe mod, as with all non-bug-fix .exe mods this would be activated or not depending on an entry in alpha(x).txt)
Condensers give a flat +1 nutrient bonus.
2. Condensers give no nutrient bonus at all.  They increase the surrounding raininess, but give no explicit bonus.  Alternatively (and this can be done with a house rule), condensers and enrichers cannot be built in the same tile.  (Whichever is picked, this counts as two changes, #1 and #2).
3. Engineers are reduced to 4 energy's worth of output.
4. Crawlers are banned.

Personally, I favor 1,2,3.  (I prefer the "no nutrient bonus at all" version of #2, but until someone gets around to modding it it's possible to just ban condensers and enrichers in the same tile.)

So...thoughts?  Are condensers indeed broken by the later portion of the game?  Are there any other solutions that I missed?

[t_ras]

I dont agree in this case. It is an option opened for any one reaching out for the tach, so it balance. If some player chose a diferent path it is his choise.
I not so good at PBEM, but agains AI many times I dont put that much effort to get spetialists. I just try to produce as many cheap atack units as I can untill I overwhelm the AI, and it works...

[Yitzi]

I dont agree in this case. It is an option opened for any one reaching out for the tach, so it balance. If some player chose a diferent path it is his choise.

Maybe you misunderstood what I mean by "balance".  I don't mean that it gives one side an unavoidable advantage; as you said, everybody's pretty equal there.  What I mean is that it makes one strategy far more effective than any of the alternatives, which tends to make for very not-interesting games.

I not so good at PBEM, but agains AI many times I dont put that much effort to get spetialists. I just try to produce as many cheap atack units as I can untill I overwhelm the AI, and it works...

Yeah, that strategy can work even in the earlier game, before this becomes an issue.

[t_ras]

Maybe you misunderstood what I mean by "balance".  I don't mean that it gives one side an unavoidable advantage; as you said, everybody's pretty equal there.  What I mean is that it makes one strategy far more effective than any of the alternatives, which tends to make for very not-interesting games.

Havnt thought about it that way. Statistically, what percent of MP games are finished by this advantage?

[Yitzi]

Don't know, but probably a lot more than will be if MMI is depowered.  With a properly balanced game, it should be feasible for the game to continue until the top of the tech tree when things are evenly matched enough.

The main reason for MP games to end early is that one side either gets an advantage and snowballs it to absurdly high levels, or one side gets things that "whoever gets them first has a large advantage".  Both of those make for less interesting and less balanced games.

[t_ras]

I think it is relevant then maybe for medium+ maps, where you race to get techs. In smaller maps if you try to race to tech too much you maybe overan by some other player. But you certainly opened my eyes here.
Maybe we should have an AC2 set of tech files to play with.
I will post a thread about it and maybe after you and Earthmichel (who opened a similar thread) could prepare a set of options to raise for vote to the public and when we reach some concensus we can create and publish a set of files acordingly.

[Yitzi]

I think it is relevant then maybe for medium+ maps, where you race to get techs. In smaller maps if you try to race to tech too much you maybe overan by some other player.

Yeah, small maps tend to be very momentum-focused, so you get a very different game.

But you certainly opened my eyes here.
Maybe we should have an AC2 set of tech files to play with.
I will post a thread about it and maybe after you and Earthmichel (who opened a similar thread) could prepare a set of options to raise for vote to the public and when we reach some concensus we can create and publish a set of files acordingly.

Thing is, the (potential or current) gameplay features that one person likes, another might be unable to tolerate.  It might be better to just have different "sets" of rules; anybody can propose a vision of how things should work (e.g. mine is that all options are roughly equal, eco-damage is a real concern and a strong argument for running more Planet-friendly social engineering, and various exploits (defined as anything that was clearly not intended in the design, even stuff like building cheap units and then upgrading them because upgrading is cheaper than hurrying) don't work), and each such vision would get a separate thread on how best to implement it.

[t_ras]

I think that keeping different sets of files for different games is too much of a headache.

[Yitzi]

I think that keeping different sets of files for different games is too much of a headache.

Otherwise, I don't think you'll find a set of rules that everybody's interested in playing.

[Impaler]

Would restrictions on adjacent placement of Condensers (similar to Boreholes) perhaps also alleviate some of their power?

[Yitzi]

Would restrictions on adjacent placement of Condensers (similar to Boreholes) perhaps also alleviate some of their power?

It would alleviate some, but not really by enough; it would prevent an all-condenser approach, but wouldn't prevent using as many as you could.  Furthermore, it would preclude the use of double condensers to raise arid terrain to rainy, which I'm not so sure is a good idea.

[Lord Avalon]

Furthermore, it would preclude the use of double condensers to raise arid terrain to rainy, which I'm not so sure is a good idea.

Why would it preclude that?  You could have condensers on (semi-)opposite sides of a square.  The overlap would be two or three squares.

[Yitzi]

Furthermore, it would preclude the use of double condensers to raise arid terrain to rainy, which I'm not so sure is a good idea.

Why would it preclude that?  You could have condensers on (semi-)opposite sides of a square.  The overlap would be two or three squares.

Well, you could raise most of the terrain to rainy, but the condensers themselves couldn't be boosted to more than moist, so if you had a large arid area (e.g. Unity crash site or Dunes), you wouldn't be able to get full non-forest productivity out of it with any amount of terraforming...which really isn't such a problem, I suppose.  The main problem with your suggestion is that you'd still end up with the optimal strategy being "build as many condensers as you can" rather than it being balanced between different options.

[magic9mushroom]

I know I'm super-late on this one, but Yitzi's back-ish and the issue hasn't gone away, so:

The interspersed arrangement with Farm+Soil Enricher+Solar Collector/Farm+Soil Enricher+Echelon Mirror/Farm+Soil Enricher+Condenser/bases + 3000m elevation is almost good enough to provide significant competition to the 25% boreholes/75% Farm+Soil Enricher+Condenser. Ironically, making the Condensers' rain production a bigger deal (e.g. +2 one tile away, +1 two tiles away stacking with other Condensers) would probably bring it up to competitiveness via needing less Condensers.

The Manifold Harmonics is also competitive with condenser/borehole - the problem there of course is that it's too late to usually matter (both in terms of the MH itself being late, and in terms of the fungus-resource techs also mostly being clustered toward the end of the tech tree), plus being part of the expansion which is not really a good starting point for balance. Put it into the standard tech tree (at maybe Centauri Genetics?) and front-load the fungus resources a little more (move all the resource gains from Meditation onward to one earlier, closing the gap at Empathy?), and it becomes something that'll actually see play.

[magic9mushroom]

Okay, some numbers on various uses for land in lategame i.e. with AdvEcoEng/Nessus Mining Stations/Hab Domes (talking about ideals in early game is a mistake, and midgame is full of things which drastically change what's optimal). I'm assuming 50% boost from commerce, and quoting minerals/energy before multiplier buildings but otherwise final including 6 per Transcend since the Psych is always massively surplus to requirements (slashed numbers for energy are +0/+2 econ).

1) 50+ crawled condensers per base, nothing else. In spherical cow world this is amazing, with (assuming 54 squares per base for the sake of argument and a river through the base) 5.963 mins/square and 44.528/44.556 energy/square. In real game world the 1 thing/turn limit makes your minerals useless and the 1,000 sats and 300 turns needed for bases that huge are absurd. Scaling down to 1/15 of squares being bases, though, gets 5.867 mins/square and 43.3/43.4 energy/square, and this has similar base sizes to the rest.

2) 14 crawled soil enricher/condensers + 5 boreholes per base, no-waste OCP. Assuming rivers in all the boreholes (but not in base squares), I get 5.9 mins/square and 33.525/33.975 energy/square.

3) Inhabited energy park (16/45 soil enricher/solar + 16/45 soil enricher/echelon + 2/9 crawled soil enricher/condenser + 1/15 base not in the condenser rows, all at max elevation - I think this is the optimal layout, although I could be missing something). Assuming rivers in half the squares and 6/10 or 7/11 of the worked squares being rolling, I get 4.889 mins/square and 35.217/36.383 energy/square (with all rolling, via tectonic missile use, it gets to 5.156 mins/square).

4) Gaians with Manifold Harmonics, all fungus, no-waste OCP. Assuming a river in the base, +3 PLANET and all the fungus techs, I get 7.8 mins/square and 30.9/30.975 energy/square (rivers and +2 econ don't do anything to fungus).

#1 seems the strongest and also very boring and unnatural. #3 and #4 are intended schemes, but are a fair amount behind; they're fairly balanced against #2, but not #1. I suppose they're somewhat less vulnerable to sat-sniping or Nessus Prime asteroid, though (#1/#2/#3/#4 respectively have 97.7%/72.9%/83.6%/50% of minerals coming from orbit).


More abstractly, it's definitely the 6 food (as opposed to 5) and the interaction of that with sats that breaks lategame condensers. Without sats they're not especially superior to other high-powered options: a crawled condenser = 3 specialists = 18 energy with Transcendi, but a borehole/river is 6 mins + 7/8 raw energy - 1 specialist = 6 mins + 4.5/6 energy with a 50% commerce boost, the average square from that inhabited-energy-park setup is something like 4-1-6.5/7.5 so 1 min + 6.5/7.5 raw energy + 1 specialist = 1 min + 15.75/17.25 energy, and a Gaian+MH fungus square is 4 mins + 5 raw energy + 1 specialist = 4 mins + 13.5 energy; with a valuation of minerals higher than energy these all seem pretty close together with the Gaian one looking like it's somewhat in front. But you throw satellites into the mix and suddenly instead of 2 nutrients = 1 specialist, you've got 2 nutrients = 2 mins + 2 raw energy + 2 specialists; at 5 food for condenser/soil enrichers that'd still not be that big an issue (5 mins + 37.5 energy to the energy park's 5 mins + 33.75/35.25 energy and the GMH's 8 mins + 32.5 energy, though boreholes drop out of the race) but at 6 the condenser pulls ahead with 6 mins + 45 energy.