Details Social Engineering choices in version 1.47 Social Engineering choices in version 1.47

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From the included readme_mod.txt:SMACX AI Growth modCopyright 2018, 2019, 2020 by Brandon Van EveryContact: bvanevery@gmail.com Version 1.47, September 15, 2020see CHANGELOG at end of this fileI began this mod in mid-April of 2018. Its design, and all the playtesting needed to improve it, have taken 1 PERSON YEAR of full time work to produce. It has been almost 2.5 years of psychological engagement. In some other universe where I made money, this could have been almost a year's salary. After many false starts, I've moved on to designing my own commercial game from scratch. The heavy lifting for this mod is over, but I still think of improvements.This mod aspires to professionalism, to be substantially better than the original game. I hope people will try and enjoy it, as that validates the effort spent. Please let me know if you find any bugs or omissions. Thanks to playtesters zoneplate, ih8regin, kaminiwa, Douglas, Rocky, Jade Dragon, Vidsek, and Esper for finding important bugs! And to modders Douglas, Nexii, Tim Nevolin, JNM444, vonbach, PvtHudson, and Mart for ideas borrowed from their own work.INSTALLATION- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with Alien Crossfire expansion is required.- This mod contains alphax.txt, the 14 faction *.txt files, and this readme_mod.txt- Unzip the files and drop them on top of your SMAC installation, overwriting ANY existing files that have the same name.COMPATIBILITY- ALWAYS use the alphax.txt and faction *.txt files I have provided. No one else's. You are not playing my mod if you are not using my files!- This mod will work with unofficial binary patches, if they do not REQUIRE changes to alphax.txt.- Some unofficial binary patches messed with alphax.txt and changed how various things are encoded. For instance, Yitzi's patch is broken in 3 places and one of them causes a crash.- Some unofficial binary patches did a good job NOT messing with alphax.txt. For instance, Scient's patch is known to work because all its changes to alphax.txt are optional. The PRACX graphics patch works fine, because it doesn't affect gameplay and doesn't use alphax.txt at all.- Some unofficial binary patches are in active development and what they will do is unknown. YMMV.- I SUPPORT and PLAYTEST the official game binary. I try to get the maximum I can out of it, without any unofficial patches at all. If you see my mod causing a problem in the official game binary, then I want to fix it.- I don't SUPPORT unofficial binary patches. Things may or may not work. It's not my job to make sure it works. Talk to the unofficial binary patch author if you have a probem specific to their patch. All of the things I do in the *.txt files work just fine with the official game binary. It's a very simple system, there's really nothing for me to break.- I do not PLAYTEST unofficial binary patches. I may have tried them out awhile ago, but it's not a habit, and I don't try to keep up with their development.- You can have many installations of SMAC on your computer. They're small and won't interfere with each other.- If you try out multiple combos of binary patches and various mods, I suggest you install the game separately for each of them, in distinctly named directories, to keep them all straight.DESIGN SUMMARY- I changed the faction research foci because they determine AI early game colonization.- I made Social Engineering choices that the AI actually likes, uses, and does well with.- I got the AI to stop overproducing defensive units by adding other predefined units.- Factions are better rounded, and most don't have penalties. This helps the AI.- Aliens are no longer overpowered. They are no better than normal factions.- The world generator is tweaked to give the AI factions more land to grow in.- Choosing 30%..50% land mass yields substantial continents, but still plenty of ocean for the Pirates.- This mod is designed for a Huge map with 30%..50% land mass.- Enormous 80x160 and Giant 128x256 maps are also defined.- On a Standard map, 2 factions on average will not have room to grow. That can be you!- Facilities, abilities, and units are assigned to Explore, Discover, Build, or Conquer according to what they actually do.- Techs, facilities, units, abilities, and Secret Projects are completely reordered to delay the game breakers.- Costs of overpowered units, facilities, and Secret Projects are greatly increased.- Clean Reactors are available at the beginning of the game. This helps the AI with SUPPORT.- No Secret Projects are available until Tech Tier 3, and they start at 300 minerals.- Armor has been strengthened to match weapons at the same tech level.- Sensors give more defense. Infantry isn't special against bases.- The Chopper chassis is not available for unit designs, as its multi-fire is overpowered.- Mind Control costs are substantially higher. The AI can no longer buy you for cheap.- The AI uses Foil and Cruiser Probe Teams now. Watch your sea bases!- Future Society choices become available in late midgame and are not overpowered.- Planet Busters and Conventional Missiles can hit anywhere on Planet.- Completing the entire tech tree is required to Transcend.LICENSEFiraxis made a statement in each of the modified *.txt files, that permission is granted to modify their work. So, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. That means, if you make substantial use of this work, you must credit me as the author. And you can't make money from it.DESIGN DETAILSSome people release complete, if trivial, commercial games in the time I've spent on this. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a decidedly non-trivial game, one whose complexities have kept me occupied for nearly 20 years. So it takes much longer to mod it, in any substantive way. I am at times amazed, when various game developers do "game jams" and claim to produce quality in a short amount of time. It has never happened with any mod I've worked on. Adjusting all the variables of a complex wargame, requires LOTS of design iteration and playtesting. It has "long tail" effects, when you don't realize something is a problem until a playtester tells you 3 months later. And when you change something, like the narrowness or breadth of the tech tree, the AI behavior can change unexpectedly for the worse.This mod started as an attempt to model "realistic" growth in the social engineering choices. Unfortunately the "realism" didn't survive the cold, harsh reality of game mechanics, nor the AI's fixation on GROWTH as a choice. For instance Green used to have a GROWTH penalty, but the AI would not choose it, even in the original unmodded game! Only if the AI had learned how to make Locusts of Chiron would it finally accept the penalties of Green, and that was way too late in the game to be acceptable for an AI faction. To work around this, I made Green not have any penalties. To try to balance this "free lunch", I minimized the number of bonuses it gets."Explore" techs, I decided, are fundamentally misnamed. Internally, the game files actually talk about "colonization and growth". Consequently, anything that makes citizens happy, or raises population limits, or increases GROWTH rate, is now considered primarily an "Explore" tech. Secondarily they are Build techs, because more happy citizens means more squares worked, increasing minerals and energy. In my opinion the "Explore" category should really be called EXPAND. But if I could rename it, I wouldn't, as it's unnecessarily confusing to veteran SMAC players.The assignment of various techs to Explore, Discover, Build, or Conquer has been completely gutted, with no respect paid to the original divisions of the game. Weapons, armor, and military abilities are strictly for conquering, and they comprise the vast majority of techs in the tree. Firaxis actually wrote a game with a lot of conquering gewgaws, regardless of any narrative or marketing spin they put on top of it. Discover techs attempt to be "pure", awarding either new lab facilities, Secret Projects that double lab output in a city, or a free tech to the 1st discoverer. Build techs directly increase either energy or minerals output. Happiness and population increasing techs are considered primarily Explore, but they are given a secondary Build weight, since they indirectly result in more minerals and energy.Because Explore, Discover, Build, and Conquer now reflect the realities of what's actually in the tech tree, the research priorities of many factions have changed. The choice of Explore, Build, or Conquer also seems to change how the AI colonizes in the early game. Explore factions seem to spread out more, and Build factions seem to cluster in a tighter group. Conquer seems to allow for adequate early colonization, but Discover is not so good. Still, the relationship between these and the rest of the tech tree is not clear, and has shifted over time. It may be that certain techs also change AI colonization behavior, and I've never known which techs those actually are. Colonization seems to be working pretty much ok lately though, and factions have a lot more variety in their strategies than they used to. At some earlier point in my modding, an Explore Conquer focus seemed to be the only "good" choice. This is what the Believers have in the original game.The world generator options have been tweaked to produce large solid continents, not scattered archipelagos. Increasing the amount of land in the game, increases AI performance, because the AI is smarter at moving and fighting on land than at sea. I recommend Huge maps and playing with 30%..50% land mass. There's still tons of ocean for the Pirates. Small islands are not usually generated. They are terrible places to start, and making sure they don't exist, is another way AI performance is improved.1x1 islands are almost never generated on Huge maps. I also defined an Enormous map size of 80x160. This is the maximum size that doesn't have 1x1 islands, or other kinds of bad faction starts. I arrived at this size empirically, by trying many different map sizes until factions weren't starting stillborn. Past that size, the faction placement algorithm gets buggy and I can't change it. Strictly speaking, it's possible to have a 160x160 map, but it looks terrible in the minimap window.I also provide a Giant map size of 126x252. They are interesting to play on, but factions may get bad starts on 1x1 islands and may never be able to do anything. On a Giant map, if you look at an early game power graph and see a faction that has almost no rating, that's what happened to it. Time to restart the game. At least by looking at the power graph a few turns in, you don't have to reveal the map itself to know whether things are ok or not.Doctrine: Flexibility is now a Tier 1 tech with no prerequisites. I've played too many games getting stuck on a darned island, falling behind everyone else technologically as I struggle to free myself from the trap. There's nothing about human history that justifies ships coming AFTER land vehicles. Historically, ships came first, and so will you. Also important, mag tubes are available fairly early in the game. This is not Civilization II, these are spacefarers who already know how to build some kind of railroad. Hovertanks come earlier in the game, because it's annoying to wait so long for them. My hovertanks are based on Organic Superlubricant. They're GREASY, sliding a mere inch above the ground!Fundamentalist has been renamed to Theocratic, as the latter is slightly less negative. To an American audience, Fundamentalist automatically means Fundamentalist Christian, as that's a major political movement here. This certainty of association, I'd like to avoid. And although fundamentalism doesn't have to imply religion, in this game's diplomatic dialogue, it clearly does. It's very specifically about God and being saved by the Lord. This renders the dialogue of ungodly "but fundamentalist" factions completely nonsensical. For awhile I renamed it to Extremist, to be more inclusive, but it didn't solve the dialogue problem. So now I've made the name, exactly match the dialogue.The original Fundamentalist play mechanic was mainly about getting a MORALE bonus. In the interest of early game balance, that's gone now. The AI factions liked it way too much, so their RESEARCH would stagnate. The RESEARCH penalty is also gone, as it was way too harmful to AI performance. I also got rid of the PROBE team bonus, as religious people aren't any better at covert ops, and they're plenty capable of being brainwahed. Theocratic is instead about having lotsa followers! It gets a mild GROWTH bonus.Police State doesn't give a SUPPORT bonus anymore. Instead it gives a PROBE bonus and has very little penalty for choosing it, so that the AI will in fact choose it. The PROBE team bonus is deliberately minor, to make the early game predictable. None of the social engineering choices have probe penalties anymore, so there's no need for big PROBE bonuses. Thought Control is now the only choice that provides a major PROBE bonus.Free Market has been renamed to Capitalist, as the diplomatic dialogue has always referred to it that way. The POLICE penalty was egregious and didn't make any sense at all. For instance, consider that the USA has the highest number of incarcerated persons per capita of anywhere on Earth, and it has no problems whatsoever being the world's policeman with the world's largest military.POLICE penalties have been moved to Democratic, Knowledge, and Eudaimonic, where antipathy to police repression and anti-war sentiments are far more reasonable. Half of the ECONOMY bonus has been moved to Democratic as well, as modern industrial democracies do actually make more money than other governmental structures. I found in playtesting that once all the severe penalties were removed, Capitalist was giving way too much money for nothing.Planned has been renamed to Socialist. In addition, EFFICIENCY has been renamed to JUSTICE. Stopping corruption by building a Courthouse was the original play mechanic in Civ II, and that's what SMAC is based on. I dislike the term efficiency because it begs the question, efficient at what? Wage slavery? Automating jobs out of existence? Globilization and offshoring? Social welfare programs? Corporate welfare? Magically ending corruption in politics?The main player visible effect upon the game, is people becoming unhappy due to the Bureaucracy penalty as one's empire gets bigger. In addition to stopping graft, why not have this also be about social justice, about providing essentials for a burgeoning population? SMAC's Planned economy clearly refers to socialism in the diplomatic dialogues, but it insists on a kind of Revolutionary Socialism found in historical totalitarian Communist regimes, that is not allowed to work. It completely ignores the experience of Social Democracy in Western countries when a socialist party comes to power. I have modeled Socialist economy as something that doesn't give you anything 'except' more, happier people, and it costs money.The Values choices have all changed. They are mostly available with Tier 4 techs, which tend to appear in early midgame. Future Societies have changed some as well. They are available with Tier 6 techs, which tend to appear in the late midgame, and they are not overpowered. It is expected that players will play a lot of the game with 4 social engineering choices, not 3.Population booming generally requires a Children's Creche, Eudaimonia, and a Golden Age. These each give +2 GROWTH, for a total of +6 GROWTH, triggering a boom in the city. The exception is the Hive, as they have +1 GROWTH as a faction ability. A human playing them could choose Theocratic instead of Eudaimonia. Otherwise, players can wait until the late game to build the Cloning Vats.All factions have been adjusted to be better rounded, i.e. Morgan is no longer a crippled weakling runt. Factions previously considered weak, are plenty strong now. The Aliens have been stripped of various bonuses and don't get any free armor. They are no stronger than anyone else. To help the AI, faction penalties have been removed.A few factions have quite different social engineering compulsions. The Cult of Planet is now Eudaimonic, which has become the Planet-friendly endgame. The Pirates now want Wealth, because that's what pirates actually want. They have this enormous energy rich, minerals rich defensive moat around them called the ocean. They can do whatever they want in that, they don't need to conquer anybody. The Usurpers now want Power. They are conquerors, it's what they should be doing, and why should their social engineering choices agree with the Caretakers in any way? The Data Angels want Thought Control. This is a darker version of Datajack Roze. Absolute power to hack into someone's brain, corrupts absolutely.The theme that "Christians are zealots who can't do research" has been removed from the game. Frankly, Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, and at least one strongly Christian playtester pointed out the various cartoonish, anti-Christian biases of the game. The Believers now suffer no inherent research penalty at all, and references in their dialogue to extremism and fanaticism have been removed. Their -1 PLANET penalty was removed as well, as there's no other part of the story that talks about Miriam being hostile to Planet or deluded about its nature. Frankly I think in general, the faction dialogues read as an "early draft" of SMAC's story, with a lot of cartoonishness and one dimensionality about factions and leaders. The technology quotes and Secret Project videos are the excellent narratives of the game, not the faction descriptions and dialogues.The Believers can now pursue Knowledge just fine, but they can't go Cybernetic. This is true to the lore of the game, where Miriam complains endlessly about cyborgs and nanorobots.The tech tree has been majorly reshuffled. Any given technology or facility, you cannot count on it being where you expect, or following a sequence you're used to. I tried to make various guns come later, in sequence, and not be so pointless. I packed the tree quite densely, so that a Tier N+1 technology is always preceded by two Tier N technologies. All technologies lead to another technology, and completing the entire tree is required to Transcend.You can count on more powerful units being much more expensive than you're used to, and taking longer to get. You won't be getting factories, supply crawlers, thermal boreholes, or Fusion Power anytime soon either. Be careful about building expensive units, because they may not be worth it. Mindworms and a high PLANET rating, might be your best weapons. Alternately, legalize chemical warfare and commit atrocities early and often!Clean Reactors are now available from the beginning of the game. The AI has a horrible habit of building way too many defensive garrison units and running itself out of SUPPORT. To mitigate this, several Clean garrison units are defined, as well as Clean Former units and Clean Scouts. The AI still builds many units that cost SUPPORT, and having more SUPPORT is still valuable, because most Clean units take longer to build than regular units. The exceptions are Colony Pods and Sea Colony Pods, which get their Clean Reactors for free. This helps the AI with SUPPORT at the beginning of the game.Early Secret Projects now cost 300 minerals to build and they are all moved later in the tech tree. Some projects that some people consider overpowered, like the Empath Guild, The Planetary Energy Grid, and the Cloudbase Academy, are moved substantially later. Most projects are more expensive, in accord with the great benefits they give. Many projects are so expensive, that you will really have to choose which ones you want, and which ones you're willing to forego. The AI is going to build the ones you don't. For instance if you build the Hunter-Seeker Algorithm, in the real world someone else will probably build the Planetary Energy Grid. They both cost that much. Nobody starts the game with the ability to build a Secret Project. Most factions don't start with bonus technologies either. This is to discourage early and rapid tech trading between the factions.In the original game, probe teams were overpowered. A single team could take over an entire base, for very little money, no matter how many units were in it! And every unit in the base's radius would be taken over too. You'd be invading an AI faction, and it would be all but dead, but it would still take bases back from you this way. This is unrealistic and completely ridiculous. I've rage quit SMAC more times because of this one issue than any other thing I can think of!So, Mind Control now costs 2x as much as in the original game. For factions with an inherent +1 PROBE ability or higher, it costs 1.5x as much. This stops the nonsense in the early game. You can still get your bases taken over in the mid to late game, but it will cost a lot more money, which is how it should be.The AI gains the use of Foil Probe Teams. It's never been fair that I can grief the AI by sea, and it can't return the favor. Expect the AI to probe your sea bases a lot. It really likes to use these things, even crossing Enormous maps just to bother you.Missiles can now hit anywhere on Planet, even on a Giant map. There is no safety from a Planet Buster in the early days of orbital spaceflight. Anti-missile technologies come earlier, but it's hard to obtain them quickly, because so many other Conquer techs are available. Energy and minerals satellites come much later, as these are extensive orbital and logistical facilities compared to shooting down a missile. Conventional Missiles can also hit anywhere on Planet, and so their cost increases accordingly. Unfortunately there's no way to add a new Chassis type to create missiles with different ranges. The AI can't spam them now though, because they cost too much, and frankly that's a relief.If you made it this far in my design notes, I hope it helps!- Brandon Van Every