After nearly 20 iterations in slightly over a year, Yitzi's .exe patch for Sid Meier's Alien Crossfire, the Alpha Centauri expansion, has become a must-have for many SMACers.
Yitzi said the project, incorporating previous patching from scient and kyrub, arose from a desire to better balance AC gameplay.
"The main purpose is that the game has certain imbalances and design flaws, and is good enough for them to be worth fixing; some can be fixed via modding the attached text files, particularly alphax.txt, but some can't, so I'm making it so that they can by adding new variables that can be modded.
"It fixes some bugs and adds a lot of new modding options, and will add more in the future.
It's still technically in beta, so if you find a bug with it that isn't in previous patches just report it and it'll get fixed.
"As for why to try my patch: It fixes some bugs, gives increased modding options if you're into that sort of thing, and unless you like playing with bugs there's really no downside," he said.
He got involved for the same reasons all modders mod.
"I realized that what I wanted for SMAX wasn't going to happen without .exe modding, so I went to CGN to put in a request for Scient's patch when he resumed; Kilkakon invited me here, [AC2] and when I realized that Scient wasn't going to do it soon, I found out what program he used and started doing it myself," he said.
For a changelog of the patch:
http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/New_...itzi%27s_patch
Plans for the future of Yitzi's patch are extensive.
"Currently I'm in the middle of reorganizing my personal documentation to make it easier to use; that documentation is important, as it means once I learn something about how the game works I can refer to it and don't have to go through the same process again.
"After that, I plan to shift the internal storage of the alphax RULES variables, and possibly move them around a bit, in order to prepare for future variables added and still have natural groupings. The last time I did that sort of thing was for 2.0, and because I was changing the size as well to make room for more it took several months. This time will hopefully be substantially shorter.
"After that comes patch 2.6, which was originally planned for base-to-base crawling but I've decided to have it be a bunch of miscellaneous things instead:
"-Currently if the nearest base you own is producing any ecodamage, you cannot capture worms. My earliest work was on the ecodamage formula, with the aim of making it a smoother curve, so if you use the settings that I think make for a better game it will be nearly impossible to avoid any ecodamage. Therefore, I plan to make a "maximum ecodamage to not have any penalty to worm capture chance" and "ecodamage to completely prevent worm capture" variables, and there will be a percentage penalty to worm capture that scales linearly from one to the other. (So if you picked 2 and 5, if the nearest base was producing 3 ecodamage your capture chance would be decreased by 1/3.)
"-There is an old bug in which native spore launchers or artillery of the same faction might attack each other (I suspect it's the same bug for both, but am not sure); I intend to fix that in 2.6.
"-I plan to change the simple on/off system for retooling costs into 10 categories for percentage penalties: From each of the four categories of production (units, facilities, satellites, projects) to another of the same category, and between each pair of categories (units to facilities and facilities to units will have the same percentage penalty.)
"-I currently have five flags for various variant drone rules; I plan to add a six, allowing psych-boosting facilities to also increase Lal's bonus talents. As the game progresses, Lal's bonus talents become less and less valuable because it takes less energy to produce 2 psych; this will help remedy that.
"-Currently changing social engineering doesn't depend on your faction size; I plan to add a variable that, if nonzero, will cause the cost to be multiplied by your faction-wide population and then divided by that variable. If zero, it will use the current system.
"-Currently, a creche halves negative morale effects for units homed to that base, rounding the effect toward 0. I plan to create the option to have it halve rounding away from 0 (so that -1 MORALE will have an effect even if you have creches everywhere), or to have no effect on homed units at all.
"-I intend to add the ability to change the population cost of both colony pods (currently 1) and supply convoys ("crawlers") (currently 0).
"-I intend to give the ability to set the GROWTH needed to pop boom, as well as the GROWTH granted by Cloning Vats instead of causing pop boom (if Cloning Vats grants enough GROWTH to cause pop boom no matter what penalties there are, it will cause pop boom, of cours...
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Edit: Let me know what type of writeup you need for an article, e.g. length, coverage and I'll provide a draft. A link to a good existing article as a sample would be helpful.
-Martin