Modifications to the next ACDG game

[Hercules]

I think disabling the Empath Guild And the CBA would be sufficient, not setting them further back.

[Googlie]

Jamski - I couldn't disagree more.

having CMN'd around 100 games I can state with confidence that the Empath Guild is vastly overpowering, so much so that by agreement with the PBEM players in about half the games I have set up it's disabled from the beginning.

It's not so much that the CBA is a major gamebreaker, rendering the owner immune to Chop & Drop, (which tactics end roughly half of all PBEMs by 2250 or earlier) - it's more because of when it's available. It's MMI that is so overpowering, giving the first faction to get there:

Choppers;
Drop capability
The ability in 1 turn to build the Cloudbase Academy
The ability in 1 turn to build the Cyborg Factory
specialists become Thinkers

Taken together, if a militaristic faction gets there first, the turn after is just a production run of choppers and droppers (cf the Drones/Hive in the current game) - game over, essentially

Those PBEMs that go on to a transcendence win see the winner, usually a builder, being the player who got the CBA and thus immunity from drop units

This has given rise to a slew of PBEM specific tactics - such as:

> The game never reaches super tensile solids, so don't bother spacing bases anything more than 3 tiles apart

> navies really are useless (except probe foils and cruisers) 'coz they deflect precious minerals from building Aerospace Centers and producing AAA defenders and interceptors to deal with choppers and droppers

> it's a conquer 6 tech (out of 15 levels (if you count the Voice and Ascent as being on a different level), so much of the later game just gets ignored

> And the poor sods who lost out have to backtrack their research to Polysoft, Opticals and Adaptive Doctrine just to get AAA tracking capability

And a final thought - smac doesn't have it, so how revolutionary is it to remove it from smax?

G.

[Jamski]

True. Almost all my PBEMs are with SMAC, so the CBA issue never crops up.

The Empath Guild isn't so overpowered though. Its quite a deviation techwise if you want to get it first - and if it is so powerful it may even offer an alternative to the normal dull IA beeline.

CBA is pants though, one of the reasons I prefer SMAC.

-Jam

[Illuminatus]

I support only modification of this two elements, no further modifying of game.

[Enigma_Nova]

Put it in, I say.

At CentEmp, you need 5 techs to get there - same as IA.
While you're building the EG, you can tech to Eco Eng, -or- to Res6 lasers.

Once you get the EG, trade your tech in for IA.
The factions that have Eco Eng -and- IA get a decisive boost towards victory, while everyone else is still struggling to tech up to Eco Eng.

An alternative tactic to try:
If you know someone's getting the EG,
you can try something absurd like a tech dash to Cyberethics.
Get CentEco, Doc:Flex and Int:Int.
Before the EG goes up, trade for PlaNets.
Trade Cyberethics for a 'tech to fusion' treaty.

The EG guy gets PolySoft, you get AP.
Trade them.
The EG guy gets Optical comps, you get Adaptive Doctrine.
Get gifted Optical Comps.
The EG guy gets Superconductors,
you get AMA and Presentient Algorithms.
The EG guy researches Fusion, sends it to you.

It's a thought.

[Hydro]

I’d rather not make the ACDG more complicated than necessary. Personally, I agree that choppers and a few select SPs are unbalancing. I recommend simply stating that for this PBEM ACDG that they don’t exist and can’t be built. Consider this the ‘honor’ system, since it only requires the good will a minimal understanding of the people in the game. As long as the rules are clearly stated before the ACDG is begun then no one on the team now or in the future has cause for concern (or to whine and complain). Note that the ‘honor’ system does not require the alpha.txt to be modified, so separate installs of SMAC/X will not be necessary.

Projects: If the EG, CBA, or other SP are overpowered. I also don’t like cloning vats, but it falls rather late in the game and is not likely to be a problem

Units: Again, if choppers are a problem then here are two options that don’t require alpha.txt changes.
1) Say that for this PBEM they don’t exist and cannot be built. Period.
2) Assign them to some other tech further down the tech tree, so that even if you have MMI you can’t build choppers until (say) Biomachinery (or some other tech of choice)
3) There isn’t much you can do via this ‘honor’ method for restricting movement, although you could try to impose movement limitations.

Hydro

[Snowflake]

For choppers it will be too much if it is not allowed in the entire game. We will certainly lose a very interesting aspect. Assigning them to other tech without changing the alpha.txt file would mean lots of monitoring, which may not be a good idea either.

[johndmuller]

I have also seen representations to this effect elsewhere:

Originally posted by mart7x5
As far as I know, if the game is started as a scenario then a separate folder in folder scenarios in root directory should be ok - inside it the modifiy alphax.txt would be used each time when game save is loaded. Without swapping files around. I play one such game in SMAC, there is heavily modified alphax.txt. Game save should have path to the scenario folder in it - that's why it works. Am I missing some bugs here which make it impossible in SMAX?

Then there is this:

The second paragraph of text in Alphax.txt
; If you are building a scenario and need custom rules, copy this
; file into a subdirectory with your scenario file before editing.
; Files in the same subdirectory as a scenario file automatically
; take precedence over files in the main game directory.
;

Personally, I havn't been able to duplicate the desired effect: that stuff in the creator's version of Alphax.txt is somehow immortalized - as opposed to what seems to happen when I've tried it : that the version in the Sid M's AC directory of the player seems to override.

I am with Jam and the other luddites who think it ill advised to set up the game so that a special version of Alphax.txt is required to be active for each turn. While I may or may not agree in principle with any or all of the changes that have been discussed, I definitely disagree with anything that requiires a special Alphax.txt be used by all the turn players.

Now given that the scenario-folder claim is made right in the game, and from time to time reiterated by otherwise respectable players, it would seem that there could very well be some truth to it; perhaps there is a way to make it work. I'm wondering if there is some extra fine print that has not been spelled out yet - like perhaps the game file remembers the Complete Path to the creator's Scenario folder and one must duplicate that location in one's environment in order for the Alphax.txt file from the scenario to rule, or whatever.

It is easy enough to test this out to see whether or not the stuff you are interested in has been picked up in the game despite the standard being in your main AC directory (and I have -unsuccessfully- done so on several occasions when trying to get it to enshrine some non-standard stuff in scenarios I've made).

So far, I have only been able to get it to incorporate certain aspects of Alphax.txt (like the #Units list) so that users don't need to do anything special when they play it and the determining factor there seems to be that selected parts of the creator's Alphax.txt file when the game is created in the Scenario Editor seem to be bound into the game. Making a new subdirectory in the Scenario folder with the desired stuff in it has never been the determining factor in my tests. In other words, if I had a "Clown" unit defined in my Alphax.txt file when making the scenario, that Clown would be in the game, no matter what the Alphax.txt file currently in the AC directory said.

Another factor seems to be that not everything from the .txt files sems eligible to be bound into the game, for example I haven't been able to enable those offshore sensors (bouys or lighthouses or whatever you want to call them) in a way that would override an Alphax.txt that didn't otherwise have it enabled.

I would really like to know exactly what one needs to do to get this scenario folder thing to work as advertised - I'd also be quite happy even to see an authoritative list of what can and cannot be bound into the game file independent of the users environment.

[GeoModder]

In essence we are already using a modified version of the alphax.txt. Googlie's Probe Cruiser, Submersible and XX missiles are included, and won't apply if the turnplayer doesn't paste it in the root folder. Don't tell me that every newbie hitting the DG automaticly takes these extra units for granted without question.

So, when the turnplayer already has to use a modified file, what's wrong with doing some agreed upon extra's?

Originally posted by johndmuller
I would really like to know exactly what one needs to do to get this scenario folder thing to work as advertised - I'd also be quite happy even to see an authoritative list of what can and cannot be bound into the game file independent of the users environment.

Johnmuller, have you tried putting all your scenario .txt and .pcx files in the root folder before you started to assemble your scenario in the editor? AFAIK that should do the trick. I know it's quite some extra work (copying all base unmodified files in a separate folder first, and repasting every time you play a common game).

[Jamski]

In essence we are already using a modified version of the alphax.txt. Googlie's Probe Cruiser, Submersible and XX missiles are included, and won't apply if the turnplayer doesn't paste it in the root folder.

Whoops I never did that.

-Jam

[Illuminatus]

Some people really cannot follow anything

[Impaler[WrG]]

I think we should use a modified Alphax that all turn players will need to use. Their are going to be only a hand full of turn players in the whole game and I trust that all of them are going to be competent and capable of using these modified Alphax's

The changes to SP can be done by the honor system as secret projects are Ironicaly the least secret thing in the game.

Chopper movment needs to be in the Alphax though as its going to be very hard to remember that every single time a chopper needs moving. Better to put it in the alpha I think.

[Kody]

During the course of the Hive game there was.

Rokossovky
Voltaire
Mead
Dacole
Kody
HongHu
Rubin
Jamski
Enigma

These are people that actually played the turns, not just opened it up to look. That's hardly a handful.

Edit:
Idea, if people agree to the alphax.txt changing why not provide a .bat script that copies the nessacary file, runs the game, and replaces the old file afterwards.

[Maniac]

Originally posted by johndmuller
I'm wondering if there is some extra fine print that has not been spelled out yet - like perhaps the game file remembers the Complete Path to the creator's Scenario folder and one must duplicate that location in one's environment in order for the Alphax.txt file from the scenario to rule, or whatever.

That could indeed have something to do with it. When opening the MarsSurvivors.SC file in Wordpad a while back, I noticed the complete directory to which the scenario was saved initially could be seen uncoded. IIRC similar with save files of that scenario.

Originally posted by GeoModder
In essence we are already using a modified version of the alphax.txt. Googlie's Probe Cruiser, Submersible and XX missiles are included, and won't apply if the turnplayer doesn't paste it in the root folder.

AFAIK #UNITS is in fact the only part of alphax.txt stored in the save file, so those extra units should appear, with or without the modified alphax.txt in the basic SMAC folder.

Johnmuller, have you tried putting all your scenario .txt and .pcx files in the root folder before you started to assemble your scenario in the editor? AFAIK that should do the trick. I know it's quite some extra work (copying all base unmodified files in a separate folder first, and repasting every time you play a common game).

IIRC that's not necessary. To incorporate alphax.txt changes into the scenario, at the time of the scenario saving, the edited alphax.txt needs to be in the same folder as the one you will save the scenario file into. So you can't just make and save a scenario in some folder and afterwards put an edited alphax.txt into that folder.
IIRC I at least noticed this when testing out how to reduce chopper movement points in a scenario a week back or so. But in the meanwhile I could already have confused or forgotten things so to be sure, better also check it out for yourself.

Originally posted by Kody
During the course of the Hive game there was.

That's only because the Hive is pure chaos. j/k
Anyway, IIRC in the Consciousness Drogue, me, GeoModder, obstructor and also Corellion for one year have played turns.

Idea, if people agree to the alphax.txt changing why not provide a .bat script that copies the nessacary file, runs the game, and replaces the old file afterwards.

Because I don't know how to do that. Are you volunteering though?

[Snowflake]

Looks like I will not be playing the turns for any part of the next coming game. It may actually finally cure my addiction. Which is good.