How would you improve SMAC or SMACX

[Blake]

If you've got good ideas go to the forums @ www.FreeAC.org and share them with us
If you havn't heard of it yet FreeAC is a project to make a sci-fi TBS game. It wont be a clone, but defintely is inspired by SMAC and will build on some of the strong areas of SMAC, in particular the "personality", while implementing a much improved MP system and generally increasing realism (climate, combat etc).
The team is mostly Apolyton'ers from AC-G/H/S.

We do have a very early stage graphics engine, so it's not all hot air:

The project is still in it's infancy, and ATM we are mostly just bouncing ideas around - if ideas are all you can contribute thats fine
If you just want to pop in, give a few suggestions, then leave then this thread is the place to do it.

edit: We also have a really laid back nonsense corner forum which can be a lot of fun

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Although I absolutely love the game. I would say the game breaks in the mid to late game upon advent of Choppers combined with Nerve gas.

A best weapon gas chopper is waaaaay over powered. Builders should have options to build facilities that negate nerve gas. Units should be able to equipped with a special ability that negates nerve gas.

I still think the divisional unit model and a combat subsystem would be a very welcome feature.

Blake,

I'll look around at your site a little later. But good luck on FreeAc.

Og

[Vlad Antlerkov]

1. Interplanetary settlement. Pholus and Nessus definitely, Eurytion maybe. Maybe there'd be resources available only on those worlds.

2. A more sophisticated trade system. Perhaps we could keep the commerce system, but add the resource system from Civ III (which I liked).

3. Each faction having a unique secret project that gives it a special bonus.

4. More complex diplomacy system. Keep the Council, but make the ballot secret (as Diplomat said).

5. More terraforming options.

6. Add more factions, and make more factions playable simultaneously. (A 14-faction game would be interesting.)

[Turnipshooter]

They would have to improve that Civ 3 resouce system alot. In Civ 3 it was very flawed...ughh maybe its just because i despised that game so much.

I agree choppers are to mean

We need better surface to air units..add maybe a range of 2 or 3 squares that for most cases just damage air units unless they come with in one square or attack the SAM they get dead...for earth and sea units

Air craft carriers and subs a bit earlyer in game but have a harder tech to get for the ability to launch missles

Jets, artilary,probe and missles only compatible units for biological weapons

A facility that can negate biological weapons in the base area, maybe a unit special ability as well...donesnt everyone on Chiron live in presurized domes and suits anyway?

All in this game is a masterpiece ...being the pessimist i am i dont think anyone could improve on it....they would just screw it all up.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

I think I got an idea.

Arty needs some beefing up. Opportunity fire. If units comes within 2 square range arty has opportunity fire capability.

Same holds true for SAM arty. Thus allowing a wounding/weakening of inbound air units.

Imagine a series of SAM ships pounding inbound choppers thus defending the homeland.

Og

If the idea were successful arty would become a much more useful unit. I'ld think then a special ability to increase range 1 square would then be a nice add.

[aaglo]

Disable nerve gas. It is way too powerfull, and it is a dubious ability...

Oh, and feel free to come to http://www.freeac.org , you'll find more of this...

[korn469]

First thing you have to determine what really makes SMAC great and improve those thing

to me the most enjoyable parts of SMAC are its atmosphere, its diplomacy, its factions, and social engineering...those are the areas that improvements would do the most for the game

other things like adding 100 new forms of terraforming wouldn't do much for the game except make it even more of a micromanagement hell

Atmosphere
*add in the centauri olympics
*add in feats of wonder ala CtP2 and with each feat of wonder have an excerpt from the book of planet
*implement something like civ3's culture, except don't make borders rely on it, make it so that a high culture would switch people to your faction and it would also determine assimilation rates along with your faction's reputation
*implement a faction leader unit, that as long as this unit is in a certain city it generates benefits
for example
Santiago all troops built in a city with Santiago would have better morale
Morgan would increase your cities energy output
Yang would increase police
etc.
*Make your faction's reputation more important, so that factions with a good reputation attacking a a faction with a bad reputation would be welcomed as liberators, while a bad with a bad reputation would meet massive resistance from the locals

Diplomacy
*Change the council votes to be the square root of your factions population (and then add bonuses on afterwards) so that a faction with 16 population would only have 4 votes (8 votes if it was Lal) while a coalition of four factions with 4 population each would have 8 votes, this could help balance out bigger is always better, and encourage diplomacy
*Have more council resolutions that could pass, like a ban of building units with chemical weapons, or Nuclear Weapons, or ODP, or have pollution agreements etc.
*Have Council peace keeper units that carried the flag of all of the factions that voted to send in peace keepers, they couldn't attack, they could move into any faction's city on the council and if attacked it would be like declaring war on the council
*Allow multifaction Military Pacts like NATO
*Allow multifaction trade pacts like NAFTA
*Improve the negotiation screen
*Improve the battlefield coordination screen
*Allow the Council Leader to call a temporary truce between warring factions

Factions
*allow faction specific buildings
*allow faction specific special unit abilities
*allow more ways to customize factions

Social Engineering
*give each type of social engineering a ordinance it could pass, for example as a police state you could choose between martial law and secret police, if you choose martial law all military units would act like they had the non leathal methods special ability, and if you choose secret police all probe teams would count as police units
*make each type of social engineering have the possibility of giving specific benefits that would differentiate them...for example planned economics could mean that all of your bases calculate inefficiency at a flat distance rate, instead of distance from your captial, or power values would mean that no matter what the relative reputations of two factions were, some of your population would always turn into guerrilla type units

General Improvements
*Replace the current air unit system with Civ3's air missions
*add in M.A.D. for nuclear weapons
*add in HQ units that allow for stacks to engage in combat
*add in leaders from Civ3, except change them so that they work either as leader units mentioned above, or you can make them into generals and attach them to HQ units and give all units under their command a bonus
*add in small wonders
*add in mobilization
*as alluded to above, add in guerrilla units like civ2 but base them on reputation and other traits like SE
*add in war weariness
*add in better micromanagement commands
*improve the AI
*add in a flag for when aliens and certain factions appear...like the aliens won't appear to you discover fusion power if they are going to be in the game
*add in the ability to have more factions in a game than in normal SMAC
*add in the ability for bases to break off and form new factions
*add in the ability for two factions to peacefully merge
*add in golden ages, and dark ages (like a negative golden age)
*add in nuclear winter for massive nuclear wars
*global unit support
*flat rate food boxes
*military support by either city levels in civ3 or by population, or by a combination of population and number of cities, so that ten size 1 cities wouldn't mean you have 10 times the support as one size 10 city
*different units require different amounts of support

that's about all for now

[Earwicker]

Make certain technologies more or less expensive to research for a given faction - based on overall faction tendencies, not SE. For instance, Gaians would research "Centauri X" technologies 20% faster, but research weapons techs 0% slower. Vice versa for Miriam.

Base facilities that had slightly different effects for different factions. Morgan gets +60% from Energy Banks because his faction really knows how to make a better energy banks than, say, Yang.

Have faction bases look more different as they get bigger - and have some variation among the bases themselves, instead of a bunch of clones of a size 9 base.

[optimus2861]

Rework the covert-operations part of the game entirely. A 30-mineral probe team, as SMAC/X stands now, is possibly the best investment of the entire game. He can net you technologies that other factions took many turns to research, destroy facilities that cost way more than 30 minerals to build, buy armies and cities outright, and grant you infinite knowledge of what your opponent is doing in his bases for the entire game.

I really liked MOO2's covert game in this respect. You built your spy unit, then on a separate screen assigned him to spy or sabotage on a rival. Spying might net you new technology, or it might not, but it would take time and you could be discovered. Sabotage might destroy something of an enemy's, or it might not, but it would take time and more likely your spy would be caught & executed. Alternately, you kept your spy home and he became an enemy-spy-hunter.

So I'd follow MOO2's lead, with a few modifications. You build your probe team, then he becomes a unit on this separate screen. The available missions would be espionage, sabotage, propoganda, and counter-espionage. Espionage could provide you with new technology, or partial information on an enemy's activites and disposition of forces. Propoganda would attempt to sway units/cities to your beliefs; this could manifest as a couple of citizens of an enemy city defecting to your closest city, or an element of an attacking army switching sides. Sabotage, of course, blows something up . Occasionally, your spy could request funds to continue his activites or to expedite a certain action. More spies would not necessarily be better! Inserting too many agents into an enemy's holdings could alert their security forces, and a large portion could then be caught and expelled/executed.

The idea of a spy turning into a double agent would be cool, too, but I think that ends up sabotaging the whole concept (you'd never be able to trust the info coming back to you from your spies after it had happened to you once).

[Grail Quest]

I've only been playing the game for about two weeks, but here's my two cents:

More basic technologies
They had spaceflight, but they have to re-figure out how to build a boat? C'mon! Sheesh. Allow simple harbors and airports, military naval yards and air bases with military unit production capability. Technological advances improve the "basic chassis" instead of making them available. For instance, tanks could be bigger and later anthropomorphic. Jets could fly faster, or be trans-atmospheric.

Production Queue pre-fab lists
Allow pre-setting a base production queue for when the governor is turned off. That way, if I have a dozen base facilities, I can put them in a pre-fab queue as default for every new base I start. It can show up in the queue as "DEFAULT" or something like that, so that it can be pushed up or down for inserting something that needs to be produced before that queue continues.

Ability to designate unit support base without having to go to the base first

Faction Goal Oriented Research
As a research option, allow a Faction to choose a one of the highest technologies as a research goal. Research then heads toward that. This, IMO, reinforces Faction Agendas and gives Factions more flavor.

More social engineering options
Don't know what yet, but it's a sufficiently interesting part of the game that I like to see it expanded

More Faction abilities and limitations
I feel that the more detailed a Faction can be made, the more interesting it is.

Improved Base Terrain Development
Provide a summary screen for a base, showing what squares have what bonuses. From there, select what to terraform.

More fauna and flora

[GeneralTacticus]

More basic technologies
They had spaceflight, but they have to re-figure out how to build a boat? C'mon! Sheesh. Allow simple harbors and airports, military naval yards and air bases with military unit production capability. Technological advances improve the "basic chassis" instead of making them available. For instance, tanks could be bigger and later anthropomorphic. Jets could fly faster, or be trans-atmospheric.

I think the reason you need to 'discover' boat-building is simply that you don't just need theory, you need the infrastructure. It's no good me having the designs for even a speed-boat on my computer if I don't have the materials to make it...

Anyway, how I would improve SMACX:

1) more editor capablities (let us edit the functions of the facilities and SPs, and create new ones).

2) A longer end-game.

3) Pre-defined and editable tech costs.

4) An expanded commerce system, where you can actually shoose to export and import stuff to and from the other factions.

5) Expanded diplomacy (but not to the extent of the Civ 3 diplomacy, where it revolved around the bargaining table and foreign advisor).

6) A more realistic world generator.

[Grail Quest]

Originally posted by GeneralTacticus

I think the reason you need to 'discover' boat-building is simply that you don't just need theory, you need the infrastructure. It's no good me having the designs for even a speed-boat on my computer if I don't have the materials to make it...

Yes, but does it have to be a speed boat? The thing with a lot of sci-fi world-building games (disclaimer: I've only played Deadlock and SMACX) is that they often discount primitive technologies.
You don't necessarily need high-tech craft to travel the seas. How about just a longboat, or a galley, or even a raft?

I'm not saying that they would be viable units in combat, but at least they would allow slow exploration around your base and colonization far off.

An alternative to having them as units might be a 1-square radius auto-map reveal around your base for every new colonist you build in the base.
For instance, bases normally start at 1 colonist and have a 2-square radius. When your base grows to 2 colonists, you automatically reveal (if not yet explored already) all squares in a 3-square radius.
This is to represent colonists moving about and poking around. You don't actually explore any unity pods or monuments or the like (you send an expedition of quasi-professionals involving an actual unit), but I think it's reasonable that every colony starts looking outward at its environment.

Under the present mechanics, it is theoretically possible for two factions to be side by side for years, just 1 or 2 squares away, without ever interacting with anyone.

[GeneralTacticus]

Yes, but does it have to be a speed boat? The thing with a lot of sci-fi world-building games (disclaimer: I've only played Deadlock and SMACX) is that they often discount primitive technologies. You don't necessarily need high-tech craft to travel the seas. How about just a longboat, or a galley, or even a raft?

I'm not saying that they would be viable units in combat, but at least they would allow slow exploration around your base and colonization far off.

An alternative to having them as units might be a 1-square radius auto-map reveal around your base for every new colonist you build in the base.
For instance, bases normally start at 1 colonist and have a 2-square radius. When your base grows to 2 colonists, you automatically reveal (if not yet explored already) all squares in a 3-square radius.
This is to represent colonists moving about and poking around. You don't actually explore any unity pods or monuments or the like (you send an expedition of quasi-professionals involving an actual unit), but I think it's reasonable that every colony starts looking outward at its environment.

Under the present mechanics, it is theoretically possible for two factions to be side by side for years, just 1 or 2 squares away, without ever interacting with anyone.

True Enough.

[Blake]

I feel a strange urge to flame you for quoting an entire post to put a two word reply.

There could very well have been many technical challenges to building ships on Chiron, some include:
Sea fungus which eats hulls.
Extreme storms (due to faster rotation and higher gravity)
A lack of fuel.

Challenges to aircraft:
Higher gravity.
Lower atmospheric O2 (Combustion engines less effective)
Locusts?
And the whole fuel issue.

[GeneralTacticus]

Well, I do think that you should need to research aircraft (due to the fuel issue), but there has never been any mention of the fungus being corrosive. Nor have there been mentions of a lot of storms - and a skimship would surely be pretty vulnerable to storms as well.