A few miscellenous questions

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Re: A few miscellaneous questions

Originally posted by Mansooj

o) What's the deal with worms on adjacent squares to one killed by one of my units getting an instant morale/lifecycle boost?

-Mansooj

Presumably planets worms when attacked are not entirely destroyed but a portion is scattered and portion is destroyed (yielding planet pearls). Firaxis when developing the game decided to include this effect as a feature thus allowing the remnants of worms scattered to add a life cycle bonus to adjacent worms. Think of it as stragglers that join up with the other worm groups (since planet worms are portrayed as a collection of mind worms acting jointly in a swarm sometimes controlled by collective intelligence of planet, sometimes by a human/alien handler).

Note this has huge benefits if you set up a worm trap (polluter base) pick off a lone worm and give a life cycle increase to a stack of worms in another square and then attack the main square for big EC's in the form of pearls.

Og

[MariOne]

Re: Re: A few miscellaneous questions

Originally posted by knowhow2
flat+mineral bonus+mine = 4
rocky+mineral bonus+mine+road=7

'gzactly, and I'd add to match your observation:
rocky+mineral bonus+mine=5 WITHOUT the road.
The road is indeed *necessary* to trigger both the rocky bonus and the MinSpecial bonus for a mine.

[Adalbertus]

Where we are talking about worms and controlled by the intelligence of Planet:
Has anyone a clue what means the message (roughly) "These specific Mindworms seem to be controlled by a higher instance"?
Usually I tend to find quite a lot more of mindworms than usually.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Adalbertus
Where we are talking about worms and controlled by the intelligence of Planet:
Has anyone a clue what means the message (roughly) "These specific Mindworms seem to be controlled by a higher instance"?
Usually I tend to find quite a lot more of mindworms than usually.

IIRC this usually refers to worms spawned via ecodamage and at certain points in the game where dialogues are on screen. Perhelionof Hercules??

But I may be mistaken.

Og

[Mansooj]

Originally posted by Mongoose

Still waiting on Mansooj to report on whether the originally discussed tile has a road.

I replied a few posts up, but also replied to another poster that I made a mistake and the square is flat/rainy. It doesn't have a road yet, but I'll put one there and see if anything changes.

Err...I also neglected to mention that I am using a slightly modified alpha.txt where bonus squares yield +3 rather than +2 (for a game with a friend, but I forgot to reset the vanilla values).

Now, let's see what happens when that road is tossed down....

Well, lo and behold I am now getting 5 minerals (no black shadow) off this square. I didn't know a road on such a square would yield anything extra since the manual says very specifically that "roads do not provide a bonus to mines in flat or rolling terrain" (page 55, footnote 9). Can't really get much more clear than that, eh? I also read through all the patch notes and nothing was mentioned about a change related to this.

-Mansooj

[Mansooj]

Re: Re: A few miscellaneous questions

Th AI-worms don't get moral boost from winning battles. The get it from either the way you mentioned or by Hercules moving closer triggering active native life.

Admittedly, I didn't actually keep track of where Hercules was at the time, but IIRC I notice this EVERY time I kill a worm with another worm in an adjacent square. I don't, however, recall for certain if this happens when worms of different vectors are involved, but I think so. In any event, as was noted elsewhere, the extra loot from this process is fair compensation (usually).

flat+mineral bonus+mine = 4

As I noted a bit late, I am currently using an alpha.txt that sets all bonus resources at +3, rather than +2. Therefore, the max would be 5, rather than 4. Either way, though, it was shadowing the "4" for some reason until I dropped the road on the square. This wasn't necessary to get the max 5 from other flat/rainy squares with mineral bonuses (in the same game).

-Mansooj

[Mansooj]

Mansooj: How did you get your Planet rating up to 6 without the expansion?! You should get 1 for the Gaians, 2 for Green, and 2 for Cybernetic. Where did you pick up the other 1 Planet from?

While Verrucosus is correct, it's not applicable to my case since my claimed "+6" planet rating was under v1.0i. This was a mistake on my part. What I meant to say was that I was striving to get the maximum planet rating to get the 75% maximum capture rate.

Pardon my sloppiness -- the original observation was written down during playing my very first game and I was a bit confused on the various scales for SE settings.

-Mansooj

[Mansooj]

Re: Re: A few miscellaneous questions

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe

Note this has huge benefits if you set up a worm trap (polluter base) pick off a lone worm and give a life cycle increase to a stack of worms in another square and then attack the main square for big EC's in the form of pearls.

Heh, I picked up on worm farming in my first game playing the Gaians. I generally got rid of fungus because I wasn't yet aware how nice it gets in late game, but I did set aside a worm refuge where I sent a handful of properly geared units to run around in circles with one space between each unit. The obvious goal was to scare up worms to abuse for EC's, and the odd chance to build up my own worm troops.

It really helps to make worms that pop up when you DON'T want them to a lot more tolerable when you consider how generous they're being with their pearls in other cases.

-Mansooj

[Adalbertus]

Originally posted by Yxklyx:
Mansooj: How did you get your Planet rating up to 6 without the expansion?! You should get 1 for the Gaians, 2 for Green, and 2 for Cybernetic. Where did you pick up the other 1 Planet from?

Mansooj mentioned to play with SMAC 4.0, which newly indroduced the Manifold Nexus. This could give the additional +1 Planet, netting you +6.

[MariOne]

Originally posted by Mansooj

Err...I also neglected to mention that I am using a slightly modified alpha.txt ...

you .... neglected????

EEEK!! ROLLEYES!!!!!

To all: see what I mean when I say I'm in general against mods?
have fun with them, but frankly I fail to see the interest in delving into detailed figure discussion when those figures are totally influenced by the personal way you personally tinkered with your personal alpha.txt...

Could be a nice issue for a discussion about the flexibility and versatility of the customisations tools and options the game offers to us, like when in another forum (on on both?) someone altered the artillery parameters to reflect the manual-stated behavior, and put up a pbem to test it soundly....

but goddammit, it should be the first thing you type when you open a thread about it, and you... "negelcted" it!!!!!
Talk about wasting someone else's time...

[Mongoose]

Easy there, MariOne. It didn't totally devalue the discussion...just modified it slightly.

[Mansooj]

Originally posted by MariOne

you .... neglected????

EEEK!! ROLLEYES!!!!!

[...]

but goddammit, it should be the first thing you type when you open a thread about it, and you... "negelcted" it!!!!!
Talk about wasting someone else's time...

With all due respect, MariOne, while I *should* have mentioned this initially, *I* wasn't aware of it either because I *forgot* the alpha.txt had been changed until *after* (I caught a sale on asterisks) I had posed the questions.

Only one of my questions involved the sole alpha.txt change of +2->+3 in bonus tile effect, and when reverting to a vanilla alpha.txt, the question remains valid since the only effect of switching back to the original alpha.txt was a shadowed "3" mineral and an unshadowed "4" after laying down the road on the flat/rainy/mineral bonus tile, instead of a shadowed "4" mineral and an unshadowed "5" when laying down the road.

Nobody's time was wasted. Except perhaps a bit from your taking time to rant, and my taking time to reply.

-Mansooj