About beelining to Industrial Automation...

[Minute Mirage]

Here is the excel file. If you have problems with it let me know. I've included macros to facilitate inserting new technologies, but the worksheet should work even if they are disabled.


johndmuller:

I just made a test with the Morgans and the joker tech seems to be determined just like with all the others factions. Basically, the joker tech is always the first one of the available choices.

EDIT: Removed the file, there's a newer version available later in the thread.

[Kody]

Minute Mirage,

I have to say that is very very impressive work with the excel file.
Makes my attempts at using Excel look like preschooler stuff.

[Kody]

Minute Mirage,

While you have 1-7 for the slot numbers. I believe the actual effect on the forumla is 0-6. If that is true then your mod is +1 more than what it should be.

Can you double check my answer to see whether or not I made a mistake?

[Minute Mirage]

Originally posted by Kody
Minute Mirage,

While you have 1-7 for the slot numbers. I believe the actual effect on the forumla is 0-6. If that is true then your mod is +1 more than what it should be.

Can you double check my answer to see whether or not I made a mistake?

How have you numbered the tech positions in alphax.txt? I numbered them starting with 0 (Biogenetics), and this seems to work for me. If you start the numbering with 1 for Biogenetics, then you have to reduce 1 from the slot numbers, if I'm not mistaken.

Originally posted by Kody
Minute Mirage,

I have to say that is very very impressive work with the excel file.
Makes my attempts at using Excel look like preschooler stuff.

Thank you for the compliment. Nevertheless, I'm not very experienced in Excel, so there might be bugs left in the file and there's certainly bound to be room for improvement. So any comments are welcome.

[Kody]

Hrmm maybe we haven't solved it.....

It's got something to do with tech skipping or trading.
I'm trying to figure out what's causing the problem now.

Edit:
It appears the formula changes when you make your first tech trade.
I remember having to toggle one of the techs in the simulator to make it simulate the tech availability. I don't know why that never occurred to me when we were discussing it.

[Kody]

Well I figured it the last bit.

It crossed my mind that I could be a bastard and not tell anyone the final peice of the puzzle. However, if others had kept quiet I wouldn't have been able to get to where I currently am in understanding.

Basically I believe the starting tech adjustment only works until you do your first tech trade. After you have traded techs the starting tech adjustment is no longer used in the formula.

You need to do a Ctrl-F2 change tech to switch to remove the starting tech part of the formula.

[Kody]

Yep I think I've hit the head of the nail.

After you've traded techs the starting techs is no-longer part of the formula. I've tested it with the Hive and University, after toggling a tech it switched to a different formula. That formula didn't subtract the starting tech from the mod.

Sneaky. I think they specifically did that to stop people from figuring out how the tech availability was calculated.

[Minute Mirage]

Kody's explanation appears to be correct, at least in the scenario editor. I'd still like to test this in actual game play and I'm also wondering if it makes any difference whether the game is single- or multiplayer.

Anyway, I modified the file to take Kody's observation into account. There's now a "Traded technologies" Yes/No switch, which should provide the effect Kody described.

EDIT: Removed the file, there's a newer version available later in the thread.

[Snowflake]

Tested it out, works great. It may be better if instead of yes/no for traded tech, a combo box could be inserted where people can add traded tech there. I will also start some SP games and look at my pbem to see if it works right.

I have one question. Now everybody could edit alpha.txt, so if in a case a tech you desired is not available to you, wouldn't it be easy to solve if you simply edit the txt file and change the order of the techs? That would be a cheat though. Just wondering if this means that.

[Minute Mirage]

Originally posted by HongHu
Tested it out, works great. It may be better if instead of yes/no for traded tech, a combo box could be inserted where people can add traded tech there. I will also start some SP games and look at my pbem to see if it works right.

You can already add the traded techs in the "Add new technology box". The only time the "Traded technologies" switch needs to be changed is when you receive the first traded tech. I could of course edit the Add_Tech macro so that it changes this switch to "Yes" automatically when a tech is added with the "Add" button. However, I like to use the "Add" button for adding other than traded technologies too, e.g. Doctrine: Loyalty when I'm testing the Hive.

Originally posted by HongHu
I have one question. Now everybody could edit alpha.txt, so if in a case a tech you desired is not available to you, wouldn't it be easy to solve if you simply edit the txt file and change the order of the techs? That would be a cheat though. Just wondering if this means that.

I suppose so, assuming that changing the order doesn't break anything. It would indeed be a cheat, though.

[Snowflake]

I wonder if different orders of tech exist for a multiplayer game what kind of disruption could be brought about.

For the add tech stuff, what you have now a user has to type the tech in right? Also, what is the significance of Doc Loyalty? Couse in a game I was Hive and seems the formula needs to be changed be reducing 1, or something like that. Is that because of the level 2 pregiven tech?

[Minute Mirage]

Originally posted by HongHu

For the add tech stuff, what you have now a user has to type the tech in right? Also, what is the significance of Doc Loyalty? Couse in a game I was Hive and seems the formula needs to be changed be reducing 1, or something like that. Is that because of the level 2 pregiven tech?

No, you don't have to type in anything. When you select the "Add new technology" square (G20) or any of the squares in the "Researched technology" list (A3:A100) an arrow will appear to the right of the square. When you click that arrow a dropdown box will appear, where you can select the desired tech by clicking it.

The reason I mentioned Doctrine:Loyalty, is that it can't normally be researched at the beginning of the game before its prerequisites have been discovered. This means that I can't add the tech by clicking any of the "Research" buttons which is what I normally do.

Could you explain more closely the situation where the formula didn't work? Since you were the Hive, you had probably selected the number of starting techs as 1? Was the slot number correct as well as the "Traded technologies" switch? According to my experience the level of the starting tech shouldn't matter (and it's not specified in alphax.txt either).

[johndmuller]

Minute Mirage: Very impressive spreadsheet indeed.

Haven't had a chance to do much with it, but just wanted to give you the requisite kudos for the extremely professional looking job.

Regarding differences between SP and MP - I think that you may find some differences between games started by a Scenario versus games started by the regular game process. Tech offerings in the ACDG PBEM were definitely a little different (for the Pirates at least) than with a non-scenario PBEN with the same cast in the same turn order (same slots). There is a bit of a discussion in our Death to the Unauthorized Viewer confidential forum, and maybe somewhere else also. Generating a scenario with the same cast as in the ACDG seemed to create the same tech choices (although with only a half dozen tests or so).

In a task force similar to this one which did the definitive analysis leading to the current understanding of ecodamage and the remedial effects of various GoodFacs etc, the initial barrier we faced was massive skepticism based on prior extensive testing using the Scenario Editor, which showed no benefits. It turns out that GoodFacs placed by the Scenario Editor do not have the beneficial effects that GoodFacs actually Built in-game (apparently the game engine juggles some counters that the Scenario Editor does not).

That is not to say that the Scenario Editor is not accurate in this case, I only mention that to suggest caution in generalizing results based on the ScenEd. In order for them to always track in lockstep, they would both have to be updated whenever a game tweak were made and that would require a level of professionalism like that of Minute Mirage's spreadsheet, which would be expecting a lot and no doubt more than even Firaxis themselves would want to claim in their puffiest marketing fluff.

The difference between Scenario'd games and regular ones may quite well be just a matter of the tech counter not being updated when techs are added by the Scenario Editor when the CMN sets up the game (t seems that a Scenario starts with no techs in any faction and thus all are added manually by the creator) while the counter may be upated by the game itself when it initializes the factions. For openers, there would be a difference of 1 tech in the count of techs (2 for those factions which start out with 2 techs); I imagine that just that difference (let alone the 2 tech faction thing) would effect a shift in the beelines.

Other subtle things may occur also; like the SP's that give you new techs may not update the counter - there may be some dumb omissions like not counting techs that the Borg get if they conquer a base, or ones that come from pods - who knows. I can't say that I have experienced any odd stuff with one faction versus another, but I haven't really tried to keep track of the jokers or even the beelines (a probable flaw in my game), I've only been dealing with the rotation of the unavailable group among the three groups of techs and to my knowledge, have been one of the few people interested in even that until now.

Anyway, I would expect some difference with games started using the Scenario Editor, and it could be either a 2nd set of beelines due to having the starting counter off by 1, or it could be several different sets based on how many starting techs a faction has. BTW, in a regular game the Uni's second tech is given out by the game and I think that most CMN's if not all, request Uni's 2nd tech from the player in advance and plug it in with the Scenario editor, either because it has to be done that way, or because the CMN needs to play out a turn to set passwords and timker with the AI's first turn manually by running it in the ScenEd.

[Kody]

They request the 2nd tech from the university in advance mainly because they need to set the passwords and you can't delay choosing the 1 free tech for a turn.

Whether the starting techs have an effect depends on whether the CMN has tinkered with the techs using the ctrl-F12 method. If the CMN used ctrl-F12 to adjust the techs, that seems to anull the effect of the starting techs from the equation as if the faction had already traded techs.

I'm guessing there are really only two different ways the techs are added to a faction. Either via normal research, this would probably include researching normalying, bonus techs that the player gets to choose and shift-F12 in the scenerio editor. Then there would be specifically added techs which aren't choosen through the normal research screen. These would include tech steal, probe tech steal, pod popping techs, AA techs, tech trading, and ctrl-F12 in the scenerio editor.

I haven't tested the possibilities, but I'm guessing the game has two different ways to add techs. The way which adds specific techs forces a recalculate of the tech counter. While the way that researchs techs via the research screen doesn't recalcualte the tech counter just adds one. Which is why the tech counter seem to start at 0 not counting the starting techs and then updates to the correct number of techs when you do your first trade.

Of course this is all theory until someone attempts to apply the formula and finds a discrepency. However, it looks like we've covered many of the possibilities. When I complained about the formula being wrong back in this post (http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...34#post2336034). It was because I was double checking the forumla in two PBEM games I have access to. One which Googlie set up (but didn't get very far), and another I setup (seems stalled too).

So that's 2 PBEM games where the forumla appears to work. HongHu asked me to double check one of her PBEM games, and it appeared to apply there too. The cases where there may still be problems would be in the case of techs via probes and CyCon tech steal. However I'm fairly certain those would work the same as tech trading.

[Minute Mirage]

The only exception I've found to Kody's theory is with the University in the democracy game. I don't want to bore you with unnecessary details about the technologies we have researched, but the choices are off by 1 regardless of whether I assume that Googlie has used CTRL+F2 or SHIFT+F2. That means that the choices are incorrect both when I set "Traded technologies" to "Yes" and when I set it to "No". If I want the choices to be correct I have to change the slot number away from "2".

This would suggest that there's still something that changes the numbering of techs and I'm trying to do some additional testing to find out what it could be.