Social Engineering

[Gnool]

In my opinion, social engineering is one of the gnarliest aspects of SMAC, and (this may just be me & it may not be feasable but I'm going to say it anyway) I'd like to see much more social engineering choices. For example, more social values; "Nationalism" giving you a morale boost but a minus research value or "Perfection" (ie. selective breeding, or a hitler-style aryan race policy) giving you + "talents" but minus growth. Perhaps with all these extra choices more than one could be made (eg "Wealth" and "Perfection"). Personally I can't think of any new political or economic choices (apart from the ones already in SMAC), but perhaps a greater variety of these could be available. Another idea I had was that after the discovery of a certain tech, a negative aspect of a social choice could be 'watered down', for example after researching "Uber-Gnarly EnviroEconomics" a free market economy would do less damage to the environment. Like I said before these are just some ideas I had & may not be feasable, but I wanted to say them anyway

[DeathByTheSword]

gnool that is a cool idea i am for it all the way this give much more variarty and keeps you from taking always the same things and leaving others. in SMAC almost everone know which SE choices to use and which not if there would be more choises and the watering down idea. it bring in totally different tactics in the game

[CEO Aaron]

I certainly think that adding more depth to the available matrix of SE choices can only improve gameplay, as long as none of those choices are too unbalancing.

One additional improvement I'd like to see is some fleshing out or re-arrangement of the late-game tech tree, allowing future society choices to be made before the game is essentially over. I feel the same way about the more advanced reactor types, where once you have quantum power, singularity power is right around the corner, and transcendence is a short hop from there.

[DeathByTheSword]

i agree that the late-game in SMAC (and every other civgame (execpt maybe civII) are unbalanced it is like the lost interest in the game and finished it off.

[Blake]

One addition to the SE model will be ordinances, much like for Simcity 2000 (and prehaps later ones, but I havn't played them). An ordinance wont be a full SE setting and in particular you will be able to enact as many as you like at the same time... it is likely that each ordinance past the first is more expensive to mantain, ie
1st: 0$/turn total = 0/turn
2nd: 10$/turn total = 10/turn
3rd: 20$/turn total = 30/turn
4th: 30$/turn total = 60/turn

An ordinance might be something like "Secret Police" or "Nuclear Free Zone" or "Immigration Barriers" or "Iron Curtain", by itself it doesn't make an SE...

Another idea is under certain govemernts (primarly democracy) part of the SE bonus comes from elected parties, like there might be a "Hawk Party" that gives +1 Morale +1 Support and a "Green Party" that gives +1 Planet +1 Effeciency, every few years there would be an election and the current party would either by retained or replaced by another party, thus when running a Democracy you can never really be sure exactly what benefits you will be getting (altough overall the benefits will be slightly higher than other SE's to make up for the uncertainity...)

The major action to make the late game more enjoyable will be to reduce tedium, for example unlimited stack size armies so you can put your entire damn military in a single stack if you want (then rampage it through the enemy territory). This will act to keep the number of tokens you need to control way down and prevent the player being overwhelmed with the amount of micro (altough no promises that the player wont be overwhelmed by AI super-stacks of doooooom!)

[Gnool]

I like the idea of political parties & ordinances, and the future societies & reactors being around earlier, and I like every other suggestion. Iron curtain, muahahaha

Some other ideas I had (off topic but I've gotta put it somewhere ) was after you take over bases, instead of simply annexing the territory you could put a puppet government in place, for example the Warsaw pact countries of the cold war era. Civil wars would be cool too

[Rasbelin]

There's a thread about ordinance suggestions on FACF right now. Here's a few selected suggestions from it.

Posted by Vultur on FACF
State of Emergency
Can be used for:Faction, Base
Allow to use the whole population to build a specific facility/unity/terrain enhancement. Other types of production will be stopped. This ordinance don't provoke immidiatly unhappyness, but continued/stupid use will provoke serious problems in your foreign relationships.

Martial Law
Can be used for:Faction, Base
This ordinance provide a lot of power to your militar troops, autorize curfew, special tribunals and many nasty things. This ordinance will increase security, but the cost in happyness is seriusly high, more in less POLICE-oriented faction. Faction like Hive will have much less problems to use it.

Secrect Police
Can be used for:Faction, Base
Similar in many ways to Martial Law, this ordinance is more sly. Allow use of probe as police, provide more security against enemy infiltration, and generate unhappyness. POLICE rating influence less the use of this ordinance: also people under State of Police don't like Secrect Police.

Quarantine
Can be used for:Faction, Base
This ordinance can be used to stop viral infection and as side effect emigration. Very useful in case of necessity cost a serius reduction of base(s) efficiency and unhappiness (not a lot, but...)

[Pandemoniak]

Will the ordinances work like in the game : "Tropico"

[Vultur]

I desire to add that the great difference between Stella Polaris and SMAC/X will be radicated in SE:

In SMAC/X faction have bonuses "as it is", and if you want to raise your INDUSTRY setting you have only to switch to "Planned" or to "Wealth" and pay a little sum of money.

In StP the SE is considered as the sum of values that your faction teach to your people and provide a certain percentage of Talents (Industry Talents, Eonomy Talents, Research Talent, etc.) that work for you: if your bases don't have facilities to employ your people, they become unhappy and maybe dangerous.
This sistem, also if a bit complicated will give much more realism and prevent players to SE flip/flopping.

For more info look at this thread

[DeathByTheSword]

I like the idea (like everother one ) of the parties in DEMO. in Fundy you could choose your religon (from old earth ones like islam, hindu, christian, etcetc. to new ones like fungus believers or something like that) this could be done with ever SE choice some subchoises that would alter the effect a little. these sub-choices needs to be researched too probably. I donnu if factions will be a part of StP but with this system you wont need them and you can 'just' program the AI to choose between several combinations and stuff! that would eliminate factions totally. kind of anyways

[Blake]

To be quite honest I dont really see choosing your religion being at all realistic or useful (atleast while the game is being played - prehaps "religion" could be a part of race design though - and when you choose "Fundie" you let the religion take over... hmm)

[Rasbelin]

Well, actually I already had a working religion model for Civ IV, so we could try to use it for Stella.

[NeOmega]

"Another idea is under certain govemernts (primarly democracy) part of the SE bonus comes from elected parties, like there might be a "Hawk Party" that gives +1 Morale +1 Support and a "Green Party" that gives +1 Planet +1 Effeciency, every few years there would be an election and the current party would either by retained or replaced by another party, thus when running a Democracy you can never really be sure exactly what benefits you will be getting (altough overall the benefits will be slightly higher than other SE's to make up for the uncertainity...) "

Perhaps instead of being uncertain, it could be predictable, but out of your control..... say you are spending too much on defense and economic developement, next election you would be told resources are being diverted to schools and environmental protection....

[DeathByTheSword]

blake ofcourse just chosing you religon will be silly. but you could change them with penalties at first, or you choose one big religon in the beginning of the game (or faction with that religon) and then you can use sub-religons (like catholic, etc,etc)

[MattyBoy]

Vultur, that sounds to me like a clear improvement over SMAC.
Pande'k, congratulations on the avatar, but don't you have any more recent photos of yourself?