Popular SP balance mod?

[ExitJudas]

Hi there.

Im new to the forums here, but just reinstalled SMAX. Its still brilliant. However I think (and I can see thats a normal thing that people agree on) that aircraft, choppers and droppods are - among other things - overpowered in the game, leading to this being the only viable option often.

So I was wondering. Is there any popular and well tested balance mods out there that many people use?

cheers!

[Senethro]

I'm not sure theres anything that can be done to balance SP except turning the game into Civ3.

With players winning with a single city against 6 factions on Transcend what more can you do?

[Dis]

there are plenty of mods which alter choppers and aircraft in some way. Not sure about drop pods though. Sorry to say, I don't know of any good ones though. I prefer unmodded games.

[Zoetrope]

Air units occur and become dominant too early, so that the naval phase is too brief.

Proposal 1: Defer air technologies so that naval warfare has 100 to 150 turns to entertain us.

Naval warfare isn't entertaining enough, however, because:

(a) Unlike ground units, ships lose all movement points immediately they initiate an attack (including capturing) an empty sea base), even if they would otherwise have enough movement to attack several more times (or capture 1 or 2 more sea bases).

(b) The AI totally cheats re visibility. It knows exactly where all of our units (including submarines) are all the time, whereas we can't see any of their navy beyond a 2 square radius; thus the AI sneaks up on our ships all the time, but we can never surprise the AI's in that way;

(c) As afflicts all forces (land, sea and air), ships don't cooperate: fleets don't exist. This is exacerbated by SMAC being (mostly) alternate-turn based.

Proposal 2: Edit ships so that they lose only one movement point per attack.

Proposal 3: Either blind the AI (would be best if only the game, and therefore the AI, had a concept of massed assault), or provide us human players with long radar on our (selectively designed) ships.

Difficulty (c) is a core problem with SMAC (and Civ 1, 2 and 3), so there's certainly no quick fix, but I'll propose a notion of a solution in case a true SMAC2 happens:

Proposal 4: A combined force of aircraft carriers, cruisers, submarines, and sea probes, should be able to respond to an encroaching threat and engage it. Therefore, an assault on any vessel in a fleet should result in one or more of the others that are within range of assailant(s) immediately opening fire and/or launching bomber aircraft against enemy ships and fighters against enemy aircraft.

The trouble is, how to do that properly within a TBS. But we have something approaching that with artillery engagements (on land and at sea) and with fighter aircraft defending a base. Defending a fellow member of a fleet (or army) should be also be a rapid response.

[Dis]

one good way, I'm not sure if it's possible with the game engine, is to simply restrict the strength of a weapon you can put on an aircraft. This is easily justifiable as you can't put big heavy weapons on a craft that flies through the atmosphere.

I would restrict the weapons to missile launchers (6). As missiles seems to be an appropiate weapon for an aircraft. Chaos guns sound large to me. So anything Chaos or larger could not be placed upon an aircraft. You'd still have to move them back slightly though. As even missile needlejets can be quite devastating to synthmetal or even plasma defenders.

This would make aircraft largely useless by the end of the game. But that's cool. As it sounds more appropiate to phase aircraft out in favour of gravships.


And do we have any proof that the enemy AI can see our units? I've always heard this, but have never seen any proof. I have long suspected it, but have never known for sure.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Senethro
I'm not sure theres anything that can be done to balance SP except turning the game into Civ3.

What you can do is modify the alpha.txt file for SMAC (or alphax.txt file for SMAX) to limit the number of moves the units have per turn (especially choppers), to include the number of squares drop pods can reach. You can also increase the cost for the various chassis via these files as well, making it more difficult (but easier for an AI) to mass produce these units.
Tutorial on how to edit the alpha(x).txt file is located here .


D

[ExitJudas]

thanx for the replies. Any suggestions to new movement values for choppers and planes?

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by ExitJudas
thanx for the replies. Any suggestions to new movement values for choppers and planes?

needlejets are pretty much balanced. Say change choppers and drop pods to 6 movement points.

D

[ExitJudas]

another question. I heard someone talk about SMAX being bugged. Are those bugs game breaking? Do you guys like SMAC more than SMAX because of those bugs?

[Sikander]

SMAX is better, and the latest patches even repair some of the left over bugs from SMAC.

[Dis]

SMAX doesn't have any bugs that I know of. Somethings might be overpowering like the planetary energy grid and the cloudbase academy. The original game was slightly more balanced.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Dis
SMAX doesn't have any bugs that I know of. Somethings might be overpowering like the planetary energy grid and the cloudbase academy. The original game was slightly more balanced.

Surely you jest

Probe rollover bug anyone?

[Chaos Theory]

Originally posted by Dis
SMAX doesn't have any bugs that I know of.

[Kataphraktoi]

LOL i find new bugs everytime i play-minor and often graphical and errors on info reporting on f4 screens etc but occiasianly big bugs as well...

theres about a zillion bugs

[Petek]

Originally posted by Dis
SMAX doesn't have any bugs that I know of.

See

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7063

and

http://www.civgaming.net/smac/acad_buglist.shtml

for lists of bugs. Some of these were fixed in subsequent patches, but many were not.