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**BlackCat** · November 6, 2005, 17:33

If you don't want to fiddle with the clean min limit, then why not see the pops as source for energy ? Or go green, catch them and send them against your enemies

**Blake** · November 6, 2005, 17:34

The clean mineral limit thing is glitchy.... but it's not clear what the "forcing a pop" thing is meant to do. Presumably tree farms etc ARE supposed to raise the clean mineral limit by 1.

The nice thing about heavy minerals with Ecodamage is you can harvest as much energy as you can use from Worms

.

I just go with forest/borehole (no mines except early game, they just get destroyed), force a pop ASAP, then build treefarms and hybrid forests normally. Typically I don't bother with building CP's+scraping them (it's a kinda dodgy feature) and just raise the limit further by harvesting worms. But then again build+scrap CP's does give my bases something to do (if you do decide to pursue this, the way to do it is to build CP's in a bored base, and when you get a bored base with a CP in it already, use mass-scrap on the CP'. I very rarely devote bases to cranking out CP's non-stop).

Note that heavy mineral strategies work better on larger maps, atleast if your goal is to not have ecodamage. For various reasons it's not really a smaller map strategy.

Also note you really don't need to get bases above 80 minerals (or 8x mineral row length). This is plenty to crank out nearly any reasonably designed unit in one turn. Usually most my bases are at 30 or 50 and a few will be at 80. Only the ones at 80 have ecodamage and they are fringe bases that work 6 boreholes, and may crawl food from the interior.

**Kataphraktoi** · November 6, 2005, 18:46

The clean mineral limit thing is glitchy.... but it's not clear what the "forcing a pop" thing is meant to do. Presumably tree farms etc ARE supposed to raise the clean mineral limit by 1.

after the pop 'clean' facilities can begin pushing back ecodamage. IE after pop1 every tree farm increases clean mins. this has the weird effect of industrial facs having less pollution than green ones,if they didnt force a pop.

thought you would know all that

**Kataphraktoi** · November 6, 2005, 19:00

heres what happans when your a ecowarrior with a sheep in your avatar

obvoiusly has no grip on the ecodamage formula

**smacksim** · November 6, 2005, 19:22

Originally posted by Cataphract887

after the pop 'clean' facilities can begin pushing back ecodamage. IE after pop1 every tree farm increases clean mins. this has the weird effect of industrial facs having less pollution than green ones,if they didnt force a pop.

thought you would know all that

It sounds like he means "What did the programmers mean to be happening with that feature?" as he clearly understands the actual in-game mechanisms.........but I thought you'd know-tice all that

Mineral heavy games against the AI are kind of a drag seeing as its pretty easy to sink entire empires with a few factories. I recently switched to wider base spacing (casual/ideal) and fewer bases to give the AI some sense of competition with me, and to my surprise I sank planet..........as Gaians! I wasn't even really trying, but with all that space for workers/crawlers I was 110mins in some cities with Genejacks and Planet reacted rather angrily.

One thing thats a little frustrating is that on some turns you'll get 'Sea Levels to rise X meters over the next 20 years!' messages along with nice fungal pops (those I do like), but if you reload the turn you might get one or the other.

Has anyone figured out what triggers sea-level rises above/beyond fungal pops? If we have, I've forgotten. My ED rating wasn't all that high but I was running Green, and as you suspect, Planet rating does affect ED, but not by huge amount.

But it got me thinking that if there's an ED range which produces fungal pops but no sea-level rises it would be good to maintain mineral damage in this range as one slowly ramps up. And if this is true I would hazard a guess that the range is a little narrower if one has a high planet rating........

**Kataphraktoi** · November 6, 2005, 19:33

Presumably tree farms etc ARE supposed to raise the clean mineral limit by 1.

regardless of his experiance or actuall knowledge(and yes im sure he could explain alot to me), the fact is his text clearly indicates a doubt that tree farms indeed change the clean mins

**Petek** · November 6, 2005, 20:23

You're correct that Blake's post could be interpreted as you say. However, Blake (along with Ned and Fitz) was one of the original discoverers of the correct ecodamage formula. No way you would know that since it happened back in 2001.

**Kataphraktoi** · November 6, 2005, 20:30

you sir,are making a vast assumption saying 'no way' as lately, ive been looking through the smac gen archives and i indeed knew that.

why did i reply thusly then? because the way he worded it put doubt into me as to my memories of skimming through that very thread (i had not remembered precisly the people who discovered it).

edit: just FYI i have backlogged from the archives beginnnig about 30-40 pages foreward,and about 7 back from the most recent post,along with a dozen in random chosen areas. i isolate posts as being interesting by number of views\posts

in fact heres that very thread IIRC

**smacksim** · November 6, 2005, 20:41

Originally posted by Cataphract887

regardless of his experiance or actuall knowledge(and yes im sure he could explain alot to me), the fact is his text clearly indicates a doubt that tree farms indeed change the clean mins

Weird.....its turned into the thread of misunderstandings.

Petek, I don't think Cata was quoting Blake, but rather the original poster.

Cata, Even still, your reply above is (as you are wont to say) clearly not true. If his text were clearly indicating this, either of us is clearly stupid, which I think is not the case. His text doesn't clearly indicate one way or another if he's using a turn of phrase to question the designers or is actually wondering if Treefarms are working the way he thinks they should work (etc..). However, in the context of his post style one expects a subtle phrasing here and there...... I'm sure he'll come back and let us know what he meant

Mineral-heavy strategy = fun, but terminal

Anyways!

**Blake** · November 6, 2005, 20:42

Sorry I'm feeling rather non-lucid atm. I'll rephrase it...

By "supposed to" I'm talking about whether it conforms or deviates from the designers intentions. So what I believe:
Treefarms ARE intended to raise the clean mineral limit.
The forcing a pop bit may or may not be working as intented.
The ability to destroy treefarm's and keep the CLM raise is likely to be not working as intended.

But NONE of this is documented anywhere.

It's unclear what "forcing a pop" is supposed to represent, why it is nessecary to start raising the clean mineral limit. Is it supposed to add some dynamic to gameplay? Is it meant to be realistic? Is it simply a bizzare coding bug? My guess is it's a concept that got half implemented.

Here is my theory on what happened during game design/coding:

[After some play testing]
Desinger: Okay guys, the ecodamage is pretty nasty. Oh? so it goes down with each pop but I think we need some more proactive ways for players to reduce ecodamage.

Programmer: Well how about we make treefarms and related facilities reduce ecodamage the same way as pops.

Designer: Sounds good, but players shouldn't be able to play without suffering any pops at all, then the book of planet wouldn't make sense.

Programmer: Hmmm. Well I'll just make it so that a pop needs to happen before the effect from treefarms kicks in.

Designer: Make it so.

The programmer then does the following (bear in mind the programmer is on time constraints and being a programmer is also lazy):
Well **** this code is a mess, I'll just go to the "facility complete" event, and increase previous_damages by 1 if the facility_type equals treefarm,hybridforest,cp or ToP... oh the first pop thing... I know I'll just check that previous_damages != 0. Kickass that was like 3 lines of code. Oh hmm this could use some improvement, I'll add a comment...
//Fixme: Refund players for treefarms built before the first pop, deduct from previous_damages when a facility is destroyed. <--- never gets done.

Documentation guy: What? I quit last week!
Manager: Get the game out NOW.

Yes, the entire thing with first pop and treefarms etc could be implemented with like 3 lines of code on top of the code for the ecodamage formula as stated in the Datalinks.

Code:

if ((previous_damages != 0) && 
   (fac==FAC_TREEFARM || fac==FAC_HYBRIDFOREST || fac==FAC_PRESERVE || fac==FAC_TEMPLE))
{
    previous_damages[owner] += 1;
}

Making it work correctly (like defund for destruction) would require many more lines of code

.

**Kataphraktoi** · November 6, 2005, 20:44

Cata, Even still, your reply above is (as you are wont to say) clearly not true. If his text were clearly indicating this, either of us is clearly stupid, which I think is not the case. His text doesn't clearly indicate one way or another if he's using a turn of phrase to question the designers or is actually wondering if Treefarms are working the way he thinks they should work (etc..). However, in the context of his post style one expects a subtle phrasing here and there.

now im

i really mentioned the ecodamage and tree farms because blake indicated sort of he wasnt sure so i was just covering the bases,along with my aforementioned reason of memory

edit: last post clears up any confusion i think.

**Blake** · November 6, 2005, 20:48

I'd hope it clears up any confusion! that or confuses people into submission! hah!

**smacksim** · November 6, 2005, 23:12

Thats exactly how I've thought of it Blake: A coding mishap. For certainly they wouldn't count on players either waiting to build treefarms or never building them seeing as how differently people can play the game. Its a coding snafu that happens to still be playable if people know how to (if !pop buildminerals) else (if pop build treefarms)......etc..

Back to the original post: Yes, a lot of players do focus much more on energy than minerals and yes a bit of both seems to be the best. My observation is that although tech is important, and having ECs is nice, there's nothing like having some serious mineral production. After all, tech without building something with it is useless (mostly), and rush-buying is much more effective if you can build most things on raw minerals alone in one go.

A few players do actually go after ecodamage with gusto, simply to reap the windfall from worms. This is a radical strategy and is very effective but most do focus more on energy throughout the game.

**Zoetrope** · November 7, 2005, 01:50

Industry improves ecology.

E.g. Domai's Free Drones can produce more/faster using the same mineral input. So in situations when eco-damage is undesirable they can scale back mineral consumption to pollute less while still producing more than other factions.

Ironic, isn't it?

There are many ways to defend against native life. Going on the attack is the most profitable, but creating your own worm sentries to block approach vectors is another.

I enjoy the late game, when fungus produces mucho minerals, so every pop intensifies the situation. EXCEPT that a base surrounded 3 squares deep by fungus is saturated so it cannot produce a fungal pop!

Then I often have bases consuming hundreds of minerals, with eco-damage in the stratosphere, but immune to all ill-effects except the rising sea levels. At that stage, gravships and locusts make sea level a moot issue.

Of course, if one is playing as Svensgard, the more sea the better.

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