Column#175: SMACX ECO-DAMAGE FORMULA REVISED!

[Ned]

Have you ever wondered why the number of minerals a base could produce seemed to rise as the game went on or was greater the more bases you had? There is a good reason for this, but it is not explained in either the Datalinks or the manuals. Ned, Blake and Fitz have discovered that each time you 'build' (not acquire) a Tree Farm, a Hybrid Forest, a Centauri Preserve or a Temple of the Planet, the number of minerals you can produce before eco-damage begins at all increases by one. The effect is not limited to the base in which you build the facility. It applies for every base in your faction!

The effect is permanent. You can sell these facilities, give them away, have them captured or destroyed, but the number of 'clean minerals' each of your bases can produce never goes down. You can even rebuild the facilities you just sold and the number of 'cleans minerals' still increases.

The effect only begins after your faction (not others) experiences its first fungal bloom, aka, 'pop.' From a strategy point of view, they suggest, it is therefore very important that you force a pop before you begin construction any of these 'clean mineral'-enhancing facilities. Many of us have tried to avoid pops as long as possible. However, this strategy can severely backfire if you end up building a significant number of the 'clean mineral'-enhancing facilities before experiencing that first pop. So force the pop.
In fact, you may want to force several pops before you acquire the technology for Tree Farms or Centauri Preserves. Each pop also increases the number 'clean minerals.'
Ned, Blake and Fitz have also determined that neither the number of techs, the planet rating nor the construction of Nanoreplicators, the Pholus Mutagen or the Singularity Inductor have any effect on the number of 'clean minerals.' Instead, these have an affect the degree of eco-damage when present. However, eco-damage is not present at all until the combination of terraforming damage and mineral production in a base exceeds the 'clean mineral' limit of a faction. Eco-damage increases from this point for each mineral produced over the limit. It is then multiplied by a number related to the level of difficulty and native life setting from custom start that is adjusted, up or down, by each of these factors.

The entire revised eco-damage formula is set out below.

Strategy suggestions:

As soon as practically possible force a fungal bloom in one of your bases. This means that once you start building Tree Farms and/or Centauri Preserve’s they will increase your clean mineral threshold.

The number of 'clean minerals' begins at 16. However, eco-damage unusually begins when a base is producing 12-14 minerals. The reason for this is that until you build Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests in a base, terraforming damage caused by roads, farms, mines, etc., subtracts from the number of 'clean minerals' available for that base.

So, when begin to see eco-damage, rather than moving workers to less mineral intensive tiles to avoid it, just let the base stay 'in the red.' Sooner or later, you will experience a pop.
Your 'clean mineral' limit has now increased to 17. A base that once was creating eco-damage at 12 minerals may now be 'clean.' Its limit has moved to 13.

But what do you do now? Do you act to reduce eco-damage at your bases or do you leave them alone to continue polluting? After all, each pop itself adds one to the 'clean mineral' limit.
The answer is that you should keep your bases polluting until you experience your second pop. That one, as with the first one, is worm free. It increases your 'clean mineral' limit by another 1, to 18.

From this point on, pops will have worms. In addition, too many pops in successive years may bring on Global Warming. Caution and control are both required.

A controlled method to continue to increase your 'clean mineral' threshold via pops is to create a "polluter base." This base should be geared towards killing the mindworms that appear. Both empath artillery and empath rovers would be desirable. An eco-damage of ~ 40 should create a pop almost every other turn. This frequency should allow some healing time for the worm killers and also not cause global warming. Not only would this strategy increase your 'clean mineral' threshold, it would increase your cash from the harvested planetpearls.

Centauri Preserves have three useful functions: 1) their constructions adds to 'clean minerals,' 2) they reduce eco-damage if present, and 3) the add 1 to the lifecycle of native life produced by a base. The also cost 2 energy credits to maintain.

If you keep your 'clean mineral' limit above your maximum mineral production, a Centauri Preserve’s second function will never be used. If have no need to produce native life at this base, neither will its third function. It is best then to simply scrap the Centauri Preserve as soon as you build it. You can then pocket 50 energy credits.

You might then consider the following strategy, which is especially recommended in small empires that will produce only a limited number of Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests. Set aside a number of bases that primarily do nothing more than build, sell and rebuild Centauri Preserves. This will continuously increase your 'clean mineral' limit and generate a source of revenue.

Another way to increase your 'clean mineral' threshold without requiring more bases is building Tree Farms (and maybe Centauri Preserves and Hybrid Forests) in captured bases before giving them to submissives. You get the clean mineral benefit, your submissives benefit from the improved infrastructure in the base, and finally, you benefit from the increased commerce the base produces with Tree Farms or Hybrid Forests.

Before using Planet Busters or Techtonic Missiles (both effectively reduced the 'clean mineral' limit by 5) prepare your faction by building 5 more Centauri Preserves for every Planet Buster or Techtonic Missile you intend to launch. If you have 20 bases and build+scrap a Centauri Preserve in each of them, you can launch 4 Planet Busters or Techtonic Missiles without requiring you to lower your bases mineral production. You may still have to deal with 'other' consequences of course.

Free Market becomes a viable SE choice even when combined with very high mineral production. Even though Free Market lowers the Planet Rating, a lower Planet Rating only operates to increase any eco-damage that is present. If none is present because you keep the 'clean mineral' limit above the number of minerals your bases produce, Free Market causes no damage at all.

Once you have the technology to build both Tree Farms and Centauri Preserves and know to keep building them as your mineral production mounts, you may build as many boreholes as space allows without fear of eco-damage. Rocky areas that cannot be bored can be mined, roaded and crawled. Other base squares could be converted to condensers/farms/enrichers and crawled. In time, all your workers could be working boreholes, sea squares or be assigned specialist duties. Such a base, combined with either FM, Wealth plus Golden Age, or in the case of Morgan, Wealth alone or Knowledge + Golden Age to produce a +2 economy, will produce 'extreme' amounts of eco-damage-free minerals, raw energy, commerce, and specialist-produced energy credits and labs.
The 'Clean Mineral' strategy!

Ned, Blake and Fitz present a revised eco-formula below.

Eco-Damage = (DamageFactor * Perihelion * Techs * Life * Difficulty * Planet) / 300
Planet = PLANET Social Engineering -3, to a minimum of 1.
Difficulty = 3 on Librarian and lower, 5 on Thinker and Transcend
Life = 1, 2 or 3 for Rare, Normal or Abundant native life
Techs = # of techs discovered by your faction
Perihelion = 1 or 2 depending on whether Alpha Centauri is in perihelion

DamageFactor = Int{ [Terraforming - Cleanmins1] + [(Minerals - Cleanmins2 + 5*Atrocities) / (1+Goodfacs)] }
Terraforming = [(2*# worked (not crawled) improvements other than kelp farms)+(# of unworked improvements) + 8*Boreholes + 6*Echelon Mirrors + 4*Condensors +1 if a Seabase -#of Forests]/8.
Divide by 2 for presence of a Tree Farm and reduce to 0 for presence of a Hybrid Forest.

Improvements include Roads, Mag Tubes, Farms, Mines, Solar Collectors, Soil Enrichers, Boreholes, Echelon Mirrors, Kelp Farms, Tidal Harnesses, Offshore Platforms and Condensors.
Cleanmins = 16 + # Fungal Blooms + # Tree Farms, Hybrid Forests, Centauri Preserves and Temples of Planet constructed by your faction since the first Fungal Bloom.
Cleanmins1 = Cleanmins or Terraforming, whichever is less. If Terraforming is negative, Cleanmins1 = 0.
Cleanmins2 = Cleanmins - Cleanmins1.

Minerals = Total minerals produced by this base after multiplying by facilities - total minerals received by this base from orbit.

Goodfacs = 1 each for the presence of Centauri Preserve, Temples of Planet and Nanoreplicator in this base, + 1 each for possessing the Pholus Mutagen and Singularity Inductor.

Atrocities = Number of Major Atrocities committed by your faction. These include the use of planetbusters or techtonic missiles, but do not include the use of fungal missiles.

[Avenoct]

Just wanted to say thanks to Ned, Blake and Fitz for this great research! It really amazes me how long it's taken the SMAC community to figure this one out, and slowly but surely the pieces have been coming together on the forums for quite some time. This article is the coup de grace and cap on the LONGstanding ecodamage discussion. Whew! Finally! I for one really appreciate the article and think it's especially well written.

-Smack

[Ned]

Smack, Thanks for the response. I think I should write one up on the Bureaucracy Drone formula as well.

The eco-damage analysis truly was a cooperative effort among the Blake, Fitz and I. I was the one who noticed the pandemic effect of tree farms. Blake is the one who suggested that "building" them, rather than possessing them, was critical. He also discovered the initial pop condition. He also suggested that variances could be explained by rounding errors. Fitz was critical in debugging the math, particularly the "integer" rounding at a critical portion of the formula.

Our efforts also disproved several other commonly held beliefs. One of these was that increasing tech actually reduced ED when the opposite is the case.

In the end, the new eco-damage formula is just filled with new discoveries and data useful not only for understanding ED, but also for planning your empire.

Ned

[Fitz]

Thanks for the mention Ned, but I feel like my primary contribution was keeping things on track, and maybe a little mathmatical "wordsmithing" at the end. You and Blake certainly did all the slogwork and brainstorming.

You should definately do a beauracracy drone one as well. If I get the time, I'll see if I can express your discoveries in that area as a mathematical formula too, but I think it would be hard. Certainly, as I said in that thread, even a simple set of base limit tables is difficult, as it would be a three axis table.

[death_head]

In my opinion there is nothing better than a game with equations. Looks good.

[Ned]

Fitz, I really welcome your help on describing b-drones in mathematical terms. I was able to express the bureaucracy formula in words, but writing it down in terms of symbols is just a little bit beyond me.

Since discovering both the ED formula and the BD formula's, my game has altered somewhat. I now stop expanding right at the first B-warning and begin developing infrastructure. At this point, there are no b-drones, and maintaining rapid growth is easy. One can convert to Demo/(Green or Planned)/Wealth and GA right after Research Hospitals. I continue to build and crawl farms/condensors, work/crawl forests, crawl roaded mines, and work boreholes and sea improvements, with the rest specialists. Mineral production mounts to 50-60 without factories, and around 90 with Genejacks. Repeatly building and selling Centauri Preserves is the trick to very high mineral production with a smal, but amazingly productive, empire.

I limit the number of bases to keep the b-drones down so that I can easily stay in GA at all bases. This initial limitation in number of bases also accommodate adding bases by conquest without undue b-drones. The more b-drones you have, the more difficult it is to stay in GA, which is the real trick to keeping income high.

[Jokka das Trevas]

But I still have a doubt.

I'm pretty sure by now that nerve gas somehow causes pollution, but I didn't saw it in the collumn

But it is still great =)

[Qilue]

Excellant column, especially since I now understand what exactly was happening in those games where I pushed eco-damage at some bases to 4 digits.

[Fitz]

Jokka, Nerve Gas does cause eco-damage, but I'm not sure how much. It could be the same as a planet buster (equivelent of 5 minerals) or some lesser value. But that is one thing we forgot to test.

It does not cause eco-damage when used against aliens though.

[Avenoct]

When you say aliens, do you mean alien factions or planet (worms, etc.)? I wouldn't know about the alien factions, being a Mac Smac'er

-Smack

[Fitz]

Well seing as you can't use Nerve Gas against Native lifeforms ...


Just kidding. Yeah, I mean't the Alien factions in Alien Crossfire.

[Avenoct]

Ah no wonder! I'm not x-fire capable, being a Steve Jobs flunkie.

[Black Sunrise]

Well, I know about how much eco-damage nerve gas uses, but not exactly:
In short, a LOT, and I like using PB's, so when I mean a lot, I mean LOTS.
It's because it is usually used with choppers, so you get 20-100 uses in one turn.
In a game I'm in, I started with 10 nerve gas choppers 3 turns ago. I launched a first strike (Hi Stuntman!). Everything is WAY out of control, with sea levels estimated at rising 1266 meters in the next 20 years, we had a volcano, and there are 10-20 mindworm pops in my land alone every turn.
Of course, it's getting worse, as I have to keep escalating to remain alive, but be careful using nerve gas in late games.

Right now, I'm actually guessing I can survive Planet better than the other two players (I'm Sven, so I already have pressure domes, and because of my projects every unit is commando), so I may just keep pushing planet and see who survives.

Waterworld, here we come!
Indra

[Ned]

Actually, sinking the world as Sven just might be a plan. Ned

[Sindai]

Heck, it does make a pretty good plan. I remember on the old boards someone made a whole thread about this nifty new "Gas and Drown" strat he'd discovered.

[Bob Morane]

Well, thanx a lot for this formula, i wondered for a long time how to avoid those stupid eco-damages.
You said you found the drone formula, where can i find it.
Oh, and by the way, the see rise technique with Pirates is good, i already used it.

Smack, Alien x-fire does exist for macintosh now.

[Ned]

Bob, I have yet to write a complete article on b-drones. However there is a thread on Bureaucracy warning help that contain a lot of useful information. I will paste one note in that thread here. Since I wrote this note, I have discovered that giving away bases, at least with Dr. Z, reduces your b-drone problem. There is a thread on that topic as well. Finally there is another thread on Talent Creation. This thread begins the discussion of how to get to GA in the face of b-drones.

There is other information elsewhere. As I said, I would like to put it all in one posting. Maybe next week.

Ned

Below are data for four different B/W's. One can see the pattern, so I did not finish the table with B/W = 18. The first b-drone is either at 2 or 1 + the b/w - 6. Other b-drones begin at offsets of multiples of the b/w from the first. They fill in as bases are added towards the first base. Finally, at the last base before the next b/w, the home base gets an additional b-drone.

Thus, at the end of each b/w sequence, i.e., just before the next b/w, all bases have the number of drones equal to the times one has passed a b/w.

I think we are done.


code:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bases B/W=6
0-6 0
7 2
8 2, 7-8
9 2, 6-8
10 2, 5-8
11 2, 4-8, 10-11
12 1-12
13 1-13, 2, 8
14 1-14, 2. 7-8. 14-15
15 1-15, 2, 6-8, 12-14
16 1-16, 2. 5-8, 11-14
17 1-17, 2, 4-8, 10-14, 16-17
18 1-18 (2)
19 1-19(2), 2, 8, 14
20 1-20(2), 2, 7-8, 13-14, 19-20
21 1-21(2), 2, 6-8, 12-14, 18-20
22 1-22(2), 2, 5-8, 11-14, 17-20
23 1-23(2), 2, 4-8, 10-14, 16-20, 22-23
24 1-24(3)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


code:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B/W =9
10 4
11 3, 4
12 2- 4, 11, 12
13 2-4, 10-13
14 2-4, 9-13
15 2-4, 8-13
16 2-4,7-13, 16
17 2-4, 6-13, 15-17
18 1-18
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



code:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B/W=12
13 7
14 6-7
15 5-7
16 4-7, 16
17 3-7, 15-17
18 2-7, 14-18
19 2-7, 13-18
20 2-7, 12-19
21 2-7, 11-19
22 2-7, 10-19, 22
23 2-7,9-19, 21-23
24 1-24
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



code:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B/W=18
19 13
20 12-13
21 11-13
22 10-13
23 9-13
24 8-13
25 7-13, 25
26 6-13, 24-26
27 5-13, 23-27
28 4-13, 22-28
29 3-13, 21-29
30 2-13, 20-30
31 2-13, 19-31
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Last edited by Ned on 23-06-2001 at 23:28

[Blake]

Egads, this isn't right.
*BUMP*

[Avenoct]

Smack, Alien x-fire does exist for macintosh now.

You're right...damn..no more excuses!
This thread needs to stay TOP-ED, along with a handy dictionary for words like 'VW' and 'SP' for the newbies. A link to Vel's guide should be Top-ed as well, not merely a discussion about it. Or perhaps we need a Forum Favorites option? I suggest a little pull-down menu at the top of each forum. For example, on MP list: How to play MP, Forum Wars, MP ettiquite, etc..

-Smack

[Blake]

Smack, your right. Have you seen the Civ2 forum? They have a "Great libary" top-ed thread. A great idea!

I think AC G/H/S needs a "Datalinks" top-ed thread, with a link to Vel's strategy guide, ED column, abbreviations, good strategy threads, etc.etc. Basically like the Civ2 one, but Datalinky

Any volunteers? I'm much too busy at the moment

(hey, check out the "gaggle of smilies" html I cooked up)






Unfortunately I'm busy procrastinating
- Blake

[Flubber]

bumped for the Y guy

[MariOne]

Originally posted by Flubber
bumped for the Y guy

and again!
Ykes Klicks, bookmark it!

[Yxklyx]

What is "B/W"?

[Fitz]

I believe Ned used it for Beraucracy warning. This is the number of bases that you must exceed to start recieving extra drones due to number of bases.

It is determined by the formula:

Max bases without extra drones (B/W) = (8-Diff)*(4+Eff)*maproot/2

Where Diff is 0-5 (citizen = 0, transcend=5 etc).
Eff is factions Efficiency rating from Social Engineering.
Maproot is 1 for standard, 1.6 for Huge.

I have heard said, but not perrsonally confirmed, that the Eff factor is 0 if the factions Efficiency rating is negative.

Someone else will have to provide the maproots for the other planet sizes, as I am doing this all by memory.

[Petek]

bumped

[chuft]

I should add that I investigated the nerve gas (and other atrocities) thing and I think pretty much figured out how they affect clean minerals, here, at least for smacx. Smac appears to use a different formula.