Disabling Sea Colony Pods?

[Andrew Miller]

I'm just re-installing SMAC after a while, and am trying to tweak it a bit before beginning play. I would enjoy the game more if no sea colonies were allowed, forcing all factions to either colonize islands or increase the size of their own territories by raising land out of the sea.

Does anyone know how to tweak the game to disallow sea colony pods? I can't figure it out for myself.

--Andrew

[Blake]

A tricky and untested way, but should be effective

- Set Colony Pod equipment pre-req tech to "unresearchable" (whatever name is used for cant be built... same as "slow")
- Set Colony Pod equipment cost to 99 to discourage reverse engineering.
- Set colony pod unit cost to '3'
- In pre designed units section, create any other colony pod units you may want, like a drop colony pod and a fusion rover colony pod and put them at appropriate techs and at appropriate costs.

With any luck this will have the effect you want, if you try it please report back here and say if it worked

[Adalbertus]

I'm not experienced in tweaking the game. But isn't it possible to simply forbid mounting a colony pod to a seagoing chassis, the same way as you can't mount a probe equipment to an aircraft?

[Markus The Mighty]

Originally posted by Adalbertus
I'm not experienced in tweaking the game. But isn't it possible to simply forbid mounting a colony pod to a seagoing chassis, the same way as you can't mount a probe equipment to an aircraft?

AFAIK, no, you can't. There is no way in the alpha(x).txt you can prevent mounting weapons/equipment on different chassis.
I don't know about the thing with jet-probe teams, never tried that one. If you can't create one, it may be hardcoded, but I can't find anything about it in the text files.

[Urban Ranger]

You can't put probe team equipment on any air frames including chopper and gravship.

[Andrew Miller]

Blake, your list of tweaks did the job. Thank you.

Incidentally, the reason I wanted to disable sea colony pods is because I find they make the late game tedious-- your opponents declare Vendetta, but their seagoing empire is vast, and putting them out of commission so their needlejets don't continually strafe your territory practically requires you to build huge forces of Locusts, the only unit which can both fly and capture bases. This experience resonate with anybody?

[Straybow]

You don't have to wait for Locusts. Sea bases, unlike coastal bases, can be captured by ships. I try hard to get MCC so I can take advantage of the AI's prediliction for sea bases.

I just don't like how the AI is allowed to build sea bases in deep ocean tiles. I play with the limitation that I have to disband them after capture (a real pain for larger bases). Correcting that AI cheat would be a hack I'd like to see.

[Mongoose]

Originally posted by Straybow
Correcting that AI cheat would be a hack I'd like to see.

Why is this an AI cheat? You can build seabases in deep ocean also.

[Blake]

Yes thats true... in fact I prefer to found sea bases in deep sea, because deep sea tiles can't be improved, you get one more workable tile that way (this is only when I dont care about having the base adjacant to land...).

I'm pleased to hear my suggestion worked, the issue has come up before but no-one knew how to fix it... incidentey I first saw that workaround used in a mod to remove the crawler upgrading exploit, by doing a simialler thing. It's not strictly nessecary to increase the component cost to 99, it just makes it less worthwhile to reverse engineer...

[moomin]

I play all my SP smac games w/out sea bases (the AI squanders all it's resources on building worthless pop-2 bases... sigh), air power (the AI can't use it worth damn) and on preseeded worlds where the AIs all get very favourable starting positions. With all this, the AI can occasionally stay competitive up to the cloning vats on trancend.

[Straybow]

I would do this just to bump up the cost of Sea Colony. A Sea Colony automatically has a Pressure Dome, which in turn includes Recycling Tanks. It makes sense to me to add the Pressure Dome cost (8 rows) to the Sea Colony unit cost. That alone might discourage AI fixation on sea colonies.

Q: When predesigning units, does the game assume that the most advanced reactor meeting the preq is included? What happens when the next power plant becomes available?

For example, a fission colony speeder costs 8 but a fusion colony speeder costs 4. I can specifiy a "Colony Wagon," preq Mobile and cost 8, then "Colony Rig," preq Mobile, Fusion and cost 4, assuming that the latter will have fusion reactor.

Naturally, this means that every chassis and ability you wish to allow for would either have a cost that doesn't drop with advanced power plants, or you need to include a cost calculated predesigned type for each power plant (ugh).

[The Vagabond]

I played a few games with Sea Colony Pod disabled. [I disabled Colony Pod equipment in alphax.txt, but the land Colony Pod was listed among the units.] It went nice at first. I was very content to have all available sea squares for my coastal bases, without those pesky and useless AI sea bases suddenly emerging nearby. Only on the third game did I pay attention to the fact that the AI didn't improve sea squares at all. I checked out their unit list and discovered that there was not a single Sea Former in AI possession. Very, very strange. It turns out that if Sea Colony Pod is disabled, the AI doesn't build Sea Formers.

As for increasing the cost of Sea Colony Pod, I don't like the idea. The AI will be building them anyway, only it will longer. Thus this would cripple AI even more.

[Straybow]

It is listed as "*Sea Formers" and preq is listed as "Disable" in the alpha.txt file. I wonder if that asterisk might be the reason why AI ignores it w/o sea colonies. I assume the "disable" preq means something different here than for AA and Unity goodies, since normally the player is able to design and build sea formers.

I wonder what would happen if you gave a sea former to a faction. Would they start building them once they are seen as useful?

As for tacking the Pressure Dome cost onto sea colony cost, I would think the AI takes cost into account when deciding what kind of colony to build. You might want to try it before dismissing the idea outright. (I'm still waiting to see if anyone can confirm the speculative answer to my question.)

[Clear Skies]

I always thought sea colony pods were expensive enough without adding yet more cost to them. In the early game they're prohibitively expensive...
I do agree with the gist of this thread, though. It would be nice, just for once, to play a game without sea colonies - the AI rally overdoes them, especially those annoying little ones that pop up right next to your coastline, so you have to spend hard-earned credits on an Isle of the Deep to eat them up..

[grayrest]

practically requires you to build huge forces of Locusts, the only unit which can both fly and capture bases.

I have a completely unpatched SMAC, but I take sea bases with gravships.