Base Size and Pollution

[Ned]

Guys, I don't think I have enough data to propose a complete solution. I think the "base" formula is substantially correct for a given base if one considers the additions to "clean" minerals, which start at 16. The Datalinks adds "pops," but the game adds at least one clean mineral per "constructed" TF, HF and CP's, and adds two for Centauri Meditation. I suspect that Temples will also add to clean minerals. Perhaps Nanoreplicators as well. In addition, there are probably other techs that add a +2. Remember my chart. The x axis was number of bases, and the y axis was the ED limit. The graph was linear with a slope of 2.6 (reflecting the fact that I rarely built CP's and Temples) and a Y intercept at between 80 and 90. This latter figure obviously includes "pops." So reduce 0-base number to between 70 and 85 clean minerals. Why this is so much greater than 16 is caused by factors unknown except that we do know that researching Centauri Meditation adds 2.

Ned

[Ned]

Guys, I have to report that I could not repeat the results that indicated that researching Centauri Meditation or for that matter any of the other Centauri techs has anything to do with clean minerals. So, take that off our list as confirmed. I did see drops in ED at the bases I was monitoring on researching the tech, but these were due to other factors I now suspect.

However the data is consistent that Centauri Preserves, Tree Farms, Hybrid Forests and "pops" all add to the base 16 clean minerals.

I have yet to check the data on Temples and Nanoreplicators.

Ned

[johndmuller]

Fitz, sorry if I appeared too flip in my post, I was just a little non-plussed by the step 8 <-> step 9 switcheroo; little did I realize that it was all about atrocities (he says, putting on his gas mask on the way down to the fallout shelter). I don't have a feel for whether or not ED and Atrocities behave as one would expect according to the old formula. In any cases, dividing the atrocities by the (even augmented) GoodFacs would still result in some ED, just less - for example with 2 GoodFacs it would be 5 (atrocity) x 1/3 (GoodFacs) x 1/10 (DiffPlanetLifeOver300) x Tech, which equals #Atrocities times Techs/6 (I bellieve this is consistent with your example). So by this time in the game there would be enough tech to give you some red numbers.

I don't know if we have discussed whether step 7 and (more importantly) the sum of steps 7 and 5 is allowed to be negative. If it is allowed to go negative, then enough TFs and HFs, etc could offset the ED due to atrocities later in the formula, namely in step 8, whereever you put it. This presumably can be tested easier than whatever would have to be done to nail down our still uncertain formulation of the rest of the modifications. If you have atrocities and no ED, then it (step 7 + step 9) can go negative, if you have ED after the atrocity but not before, then it can't go negative (a good test would require that you had more than the bare minimum of TFs or whatever good things, otherwise you could get ambiguous results).

As to the issue of where to put the adjustments, I just thought if was less complex to modify that one term (step 7), Occam's razor and all that. The bottom line is that we seem to have overturned the conventional wisdom on this subject and established, however loosely, a new theory (or reestablished an old one); we should take a bow while we can.


[This message has been edited by johndmuller (edited May 04, 2001).]

[Ned]

Temples confirmed. Nanorep's not.

There is also something else, but I don't know what it is. It could be tech, but now I don't think so. Check this:

Crossover to ED is now at > 125. I have 27 CP, 26 TF, 22 HF's and 20 Temples. This totals to 95. Add the base 16 to get to 111. Add 6 pops that I know of, 117. We are 8 short.

Could this be trees per se?

BTW, at this point I have built the Singularity Inductor.

[Blake]

Ned, doing a little arithmitic on your new figures if HF's and ToP's are worth 25% more than there lesser counterparts it comes out to ~ 2 over.

If you assume (it may not be safe to make this assumption ) that HF's are worth 1.25 and ToP's 1.50 AND pops don't count after you have some TF's then it comes out to about 1 under.

Btw, a very usfull thing to test is whether you get the benefit of both #Pops and #TF's etc, or just the largest of the two.... and I just testing it, atleast on the short term you get the benefit of both pops and Treefarms, I built a TF and created a pop in the same turn, and got +2 clean limit.

Also, I did a couple of tests and built 1 new TF and 2 new HF's and got a clean increase of only 2. However one of my bases had changed hands, I built a TF in it, Miriam captured the base. I took it back and the treefarm was intact. Unfortunately I hadn't saved before the capturing (as I didn't know it was going to happen), however the clean mineral limit did not change when I captured the base, so I presume it is indeed Tree Farms built, rather than aquired in any other way.

I'm going to play a test game now, with no AI players at all. I'll try to save regulary and hopefully get some accurate figures for a zero pops zero base capture game.

[Fitz]

quote: Originally posted by johndmuller on 05-03-2001 08:22 PM [Remember, the end of step 5 says "Set this number aside." That aside would be so that step 7 (which is where I think Ned's adjustment should go) can be divided by the GoodFacs; in your scheme the adjustment doesn't get divided by the GoodFacs.

You seem to be missing my point. Take step four. If step four is greater than step 5, then subtract step 5 from step four (set this number aside), and step seven is 0. If step five is greater than step four, step five is 0 (set this number aside) and step seven is equal to step five minus step four. To put it another way Step 5 and Step 7 use the same number as a basis! You just apply it to reducing Step four towards zero, and if any are left over, you apply it towards making clean minerals. Thus, you can put my changes directly in step five. The whole "clean minerals" references that Ned/Blake make are only the clean minerals # provided there is no terraforming eco-damage, which is always the case if you have TF/HF in the base. I personally would prefer to call it the "damage reduction" value or somesuch, because the number is not only clean minerals. But, I don't care as long as people are clear on the subject.

As I stated before, it may be possible that the TF/HF/CP addition to the damage reduction # is only applicable to step seven, but you would have to do a carefully staged test to discover that, and since you usually have TF/HF in many bases by the time you start having to add them to the damage reduction # anyway, lets just leave the damn thing in step five for now.

*Takes a deep breath to calm down*
I apologize if that sounds, um, irate

quote: I noticed you also moved step 9 in front of step 8 ; that would indeed make it moot where you made the adjustment, but in normal numeric order it does make a difference.

It makes a big difference. If you do not reverse the order, atrocity damage is not reduced by the "goodfacs" in old step 8. This means each atrocity is an automatic eco damage of at least (1/2 point*Technologies) on normal settings (Trans, normal life, 0 planet). If it gets reduced by goodfacts, then this is reduced to a fraction (1/2 with one goodfac, 1/3 with 2, 1/4 with 3 etc.)

quote: I am assuming that the "#s" in step 7 is the total number of "pops". Do we believe that is just for the one faction?

I added the s to the # symbol, because I wanted to indicate that is no longer 16 + # of pops, but instead 16 + # of pops + # of various other things.

And personally I believe yes, it is for your faction, but more accurately I'd have to say I don't know.

Ned, I will edit the formula to reflect your comment on the Centuri meditation tech. I will leave out Temple of Planet & Nanoreplicator from step five for now.
[This message has been edited by Fitz (edited May 04, 2001).]

[Ned]

Confirm: BUILDING a CP, TF, HF or TP is what adds to clean minerals. After I finished my lastest game, I gave five bases to Sven. My ED level remained the same, 280. Sven's "degree" of polution went down by an average of 5, but the cross-over point remained at ED 17-18.

Here are my last numbers of Goodfacs for a max 280 ED. (BTW, this is the best ED limit I have ever had. Even though I had only 15 main bases, I rush-built the good facilities in all captured cities - before giving them away. I suspect will become SOP.):

64 CPs, 69 TFs, 53 HFs, 44 TPs 6 Pops.

If one weights HF's at 1.5, the total is 1.5 short of 280 after adding the 16 base clean minerals. This 1.5 is close enough b/c tree farm effects seem to shade the ED limit up or down, depending on the base, by a small amount.

Blake, thanks for you help on this.

The overall base formula must look like this

ED = ((Minerals - Clean Minerals - Terraforming)/(1+GoodFAC))+5*MA)*(1 or 2 [the perihelion factor])* Diff * Techs * (3-Planet) * Life/300.

Where Clean Minerals = 16 + # of pops, Centauri Preserves, Tree Farms and Temples of Planet, and 1.5 times number of Hybrid Farms.

I set it forth this way because of the Datalinks, but others have said that the attrocities should also be divided by the GOODFACs.

Ned
[This message has been edited by Ned (edited May 05, 2001).]

[Blake]

Another weird thing.
Tree farms don't count UNTIL atleast one "pop" has happened. As in, only tree farms built after the first pop count. This perfectly explains one anomoly I had. I had just started my treefarm building initative when I got my first pop. Later doing the maths I was about 3 clean minerals short. Which would have been about as many TF's I had built before the pop.

Okay, here are my results from controlled testing:
First value is actual - second "should be" assuming every facility is worth 1

Base clean 17 - 17
Add 18 TF 35 - 35
Add 18 HF 53 - 53
Add 18 CP 72 - 71
Add 18 TP 91 - 89
Add 18 NR 91 - 89

Okay, this suggests that all facilities which increment "damages" do so by the same amount 1. The anomoly comes from ROUNDING ERRORS. I also tested this With a large clean mineral count (say 70+) find exactly the # of minerals where ED starts, then add 1 more, then another 1. Both ED figures will be EXACTLY THE SAME. This suggests the calculation does not have the required precision for large ED figures. Now try with about 100 minerals, chances are you'll get four or five in a row exactly the same. The error increases dramatically with # of clean minerals. (in this case from none at 53 to 1 at 71 to 3 at 89).

The conclusion from my test is:

Every facility which gives more clean minerals does so by the same amount, 1.
Building these facilities doesn't count until you get the first ED pop (this is first Book of Planet ED warning)
There is a rounding(?) error which kicks in at about 60 minerals.
Regardless of this error you should always be able to produce ATLEAST as many clean minerals as 16 + #Pops + # TF, HF, CP, TP

Also, CP's DO NOT reduce terraforming ED. But this is a relativly minor issue (btw, has anyone done a test to confirm that CP's reduce atrocity ED?)

Isn't it ironical that the MOST important part of the formula is what the "damages" term represents, and they completely omitted an explantion of it.

I think that we now have enough information to make an accurate ED formula. Then this chapter can be closed.

The important information for casual players is simply how to increase clean minerals, and the simple answer is "For every Tree Farm, Hybrid Forest, Centuari Preserve, Temple of Planet built in your faction you can produce 1 more clean mineral at every base. Also for every "pop" you can produce 1 more clean mineral." (that should be reworderd probably)
(Now, why couldn't that have been included in the Datalinks?)

A few things still to test are:
The size of the error in several cases, ideally it would be good to have approximate error for every 50 minerals up to about 300 (people who can produce more minerals than that should get a life)
Also atrocities: remember that if you commit a bunch of atrocities then after a while you do get back down to 0 ecodamage. I *think* that each major atrocity simply acts as +5 minerals per base for ED purposes (so building 5 tree farms would counter 1 Planetbuster, ditto for 5 pops).
Also I *suspect* that once you breach the UN charter by commiting heaps of minor atrocities (ie other factions declare war) that counts the same as a major atrocity.
Something else to test is whether you can scrap your old CP's and build new ones to get the benefit again. (the ultimate use for "bored" bases?)
...
Guess what? (couldn't be bothered waiting for others to test). The answer to the last one if Yes, you can build and scrap CP's to gain a higher clean mineral limit.
ALSO. Very strangely it seems that the error is INCREASED by the presence of a CP and ToP. Also it seems
CP's allow 1 extra clean mineral to the base they are currentley in, ToP's another 1
I don't have a save game with an extreme ED, so I cant easily test this further.

Also I just learnt about this thing called "sleep" Apparentely this is something "normal" people do during the early hours of the morning instead of playing SMAC. I might do some testing on this "sleep" thing.

[Ned]

Blake, I don't understand how there can be a rounding error without multi-plication or division. Since we do seem to be seeing this, however, where do we see multiplication and division errors in the ED calculation? We see them in multipling terraforming damage by 1/2 for tree farms and by 0 for Hybrid Farms, and by dividing minerals by the number of CP's TPs and Nanoreps.

Your examples suggest the rounding errors are introduced when updating CPs and TPs. So, lets focus on only those facilities.

If the update is base by base, which it seems to be, the Base Clean Mineral counter has an initial count going in to "base update" (from between turns) of a particular base, and an updated count coming out. Assume this formula is

New Clean Minerals = Old Clean Minerals + BASE DAMAGE.

BASE DAMAGE = Old BASE DAMAGE + (# pops + # of new TF,HF,CP,TP) * FACTOR.

But what could be the factor?

Ned


[This message has been edited by Ned (edited May 05, 2001).]

[Blake]

Don't ask me how they did it, but I'm sure a rounding error is present in the ED calculation.

This is because as you get high mineral production ED can be the same for several different values of mineral production. This should never be the case when using real numbers, but obviously for much of the calculation integers are used.

My guess is the rounding happens in step 8, and possibly the final step too. What must happen is a value which was "close" to zero gets rounded to 0.

Ned, I'm not *exactly* sure what you are saying. But you should assume the simplist explanation is the correct one.

As the number of clean minerals you can produce increases dramatically, and it is quite hard to keep up your mineral production I don't think the programmers/testers would have seen the need to have even higher increases in clean minerals with higher numbers of ecology facilties. Therfore my guess is that it is a bug, but seeing no-one will get hurt by it, and no-one will really benefit from it, and heck, no-one will even notice it ( ) the programmers just figured they would leave in the rounding errors.

Btw, need some values from games with a high clean mineral limit, also get the clean limit when ToP and then CP have been scraped. Very important to know is the presence of the Mutagen or Inductor.

[Ned]

Blake, I believe step 8 essentially is a calculation of "amount" of ED, not whether. If I understand the formula correctly, one first determines "net" minerals using,

Non orbital Minerals - Clean Minerals - Terraforming,

then performs other mulitiplications or divisions on the net. (Assuming no attrocities.) If I understand you correctly, any value less than .5 would round to zero, leaving a range of minerals where there will be a zero ED amount.

I beleive I have seen such a range, but only before HF's are built in a base. After that, I see a hard limit, the same at every base. So, there is no rounding error during ED calculation when one is looking for the ED limit. This is to be expected from the above formula. If terraforming is zero due to HF's, then net minerals is a simple subtraction. There should be no rounding error.

Think back to your example. You have exactly +1 for CP's and +1 for TP's. This suggests to me what I initially thought: Researching the techs that enable one to construct CP's and TP's by its lonesome is sufficient to add +1.

In a game I just e-mailed you, the number of pops was 6, the number of "facilities" was 230, and the ED limit was 280. There are a whopping 280 - 230 - 6 -16 = 28 "clean" minerals not accounted for. Again, this is roughly 50% of the number of HF's, 53 * .5 = 26.5.

But perhaps you are right. We don't have to have a complete solution. If we don't know why it is, but if the offset in repeated games remains 50% of the HF's, then that is a good enough explanation.

[johndmuller]

I tried to run a test to see if a surplus of "good" elements carried forward to counteract atrocities or whether the ED was MIN'ed at zero prior to adding the atrocities term. Hovever, my test was inconclusive. Not yet having bothered to build any planetbusters, I settled for Obliterating all my captured bases. It said in a warning that it was a "major" atrocity, but I am not convinced it is "major" in the terms of the ED formula. In any event, while I got plenty of sanctions, I couldn't get any discernable ED without investing more time messing around than I had at hand. Nobody declared vendetta either, including the previous owner of the bases (probably because he had surrendered), but I did get more drones. I wasn't sure where that camd from, but I nerve stapled them and continued to do that for several more turns - picking up a lot of sanctions, but still no ED. There is a theory that multiple minor atrocities = major atrocity, but apparently it takes 10 or more.....

There is also the possibility that there is enough (carried forward) eco-good in my large collection of TFs and CPs, etc that I have yet to overcome my accululated good stuff.

Attempting to be more definitive, I went back to my ongoing instance of this game and started a PB build, but I have a fairly laid back industry and it will take a while before I'm close enough to rush it and have time for another test. The test here would be to see if I get positive ED with just one atrocity, given a surplus of "good" ED elements - if I do, it will mean that you can't prepay for atrocities with GoodFacs. If I get anything in the way of results before this thread fizzles out, I'll report it.

On the question of rounding errors, unexplained good effects, or whatever you're calling it: I believe that Ned has been working with the concept of "clean" minerals, whereas the (seemingly bogus) formula from the datalinks, .txt files or wherever is actually more convoluted, using the "16" base in its first 2 major terms, which I would call the "terraforming" term and the "mins" term. Insofar as the "terraforming" term is zero due to the TF/HF benefit, it can be disregarded, but not all bases may have both and so some "terreforming" ED may have to be offset. In that case, the question of whether the new "adjustments" apply equally to each term should be considered; given what was seemingly a last minute change in the game's algorithm, anything goes. If the TFs and/or HFs are worth 1 in one term and 2 in the other term, you might get some interesting results. There may be a "dis"similar treatment involving the GoodFac adjustment and other factors, like the atrocities and/or the rest of the "FACTOR". I don't know; I'd probably be betting on us getting tired of this issue before we get a perfect formula unless we somehow get inside information or someone (but not me) gets really fixated on it.

[Ned]

John, If I understand the formula correct, it can be simplified as follows:

ED = ((Minerals - Clean Minerals - Terraforming)/(1+GoodFAC))+5*MA)* X.

Terraforming usually max's out at 2-3 and is apparently eliminated after a HF is built. Assume, now, for the sake of analysis that (1+GoodFAC) and X are both 1. The formula now is

ED = Minerals - Clean Minerals + 5 * MA.

I think what Blake meant is that one can pay for MA's by building enough CPs, TFs, HFs and TPs so that Minerals - Cleans Minerals is at least -5.

However, if you are at the ED limit on some of your bases and you commit a MA, you can recover simply by building five more of these facilities.

Also, since you can quickly check the F3 screen to see how many of these facilities you've built, and if you keep track of pops, you can quickly determine Clean Minerals. If this at least 5 greater than your max base's Mineral production, you can use a PB without incurring ED.

Ned

[WhiteElephants]

Where the hell are you guys at with this?! Sorry, I can't bring myself to the read the whole post. I don't suppose you'd like to post a summary of all this when you get to the bottom of it for those of us who are post challenged, would you?

Good Luck all, and happy hunting.

[Fitz]

WE, see the third post on this page. I think this sums up what we have discovered so far.

Ned & Blake, still seeing good work by you guys, but I'm not sure any of it is new.

Ned, were you saying the Singularity Inducator apparently has no affect?