Drone Revolt feature on SMAC...

[Flubber]

Re: Drone revolt

Originally posted by drlaryp
Happened recently to me in a threeman game. I was letting the govenor handle it but the city flipped to the Gaians (another human player). Believe me, I didn't have to try hard. We hadn't even had contact yet being relatively early in the game. I used the opportunity to probe some techs but I'm not sure that was "legal". (Judging by the above post, its not) Does anyone know a standard accepted way of handling this situation? Another reason I hate drones....

When people have dealt with it in PBEMs, they have made rules that allow the recipient of the base time to starve it out of existence before probe actions against it are permitted. The recipeint has the choice of keeping the base and using that time to build defenses OR eliminating the base.

If there is an AI in the game, it ciould also be useful to gift the base to them ( if they are behind in tech)


IT is incredibly easy to have a base revolt and a person with tech superiority has absolutely no way to defend themselves. If this were an accepted tactic, a tech lead would never have any relevance at all

[drlaryp]

Drone revolt

In the face of human controlled factions, Is the faction that the base revolts to aware that they have a new base when it occurs and do they then have control over the base functions and units? If so the situation must not be as advantageous as you make it out to be. 1. You can't predict who a base will revolt to. 2. The accepting faction could have H-S algorithm. 3. The new base can make its own probe units for offense or defense.Or does the computer control the base and units?

Why does the computer ask if you want to decare Vendetta basically asking if you want the opposing player to ignore your probe? Is this just a total bug?

[Flubber]

Re: Drone revolt

Originally posted by drlaryp
In the face of human controlled factions, Is the faction that the base revolts to aware that they have a new base when it occurs and do they then have control over the base functions and units?

IN a PBEM a player will see the new base as being theirs on the next turn

Originally posted by drlaryp
If so the situation must not be as advantageous as you make it out to be. 1. You can't predict who a base will revolt to. 2. The accepting faction could have H-S algorithm. 3. The new base can make its own probe units for offense or defense.Or does the computer control the base and units?

Bases generally revolt to the nearest faction. If you permit probing a revolting base, here is what I would do.

1. Create a crappy size 2 base with no mineral capacity.
2. Allow it to revolt when it is surrounded by a dozen probes-- The defender can only build one probe defender per turn
3. probe the crap out of the base and then recapture it
4. Allow it or a sparate nearby crappy base to revolt on the next turn

Only HSA can prevent this tactic and even the HSA is useless if you have "steal tech when capturing base" ON. Then you allow bases to revolt to recapture them

Originally posted by drlaryp


Why does the computer ask if you want to decare Vendetta basically asking if you want the opposing player to ignore your probe? Is this just a total bug?

Its a total bug in PBEMS in two respects

1. There seems to be a zero chance of probing undetected against a human.

2. The pop-up SHOULD appear to the victim of the probe action on their turn. But it doesn't so the bad guy is obligated under PBEM rules to select declare vendetta UNLESS they have a prior agreement otherwise

[Leon Trotsky]

Re: Re: Drone revolt

1. There seems to be a zero chance of probing undetected against a human.

2. The pop-up SHOULD appear to the victim of the probe action on their turn. But it doesn't so the bad guy is obligated under PBEM rules to select declare vendetta UNLESS they have a prior agreement otherwise

I only knew of #2. Does that mean that the popup will always appear? How do you people playing PBEMs handle probe team operations then? Do you roll a dice? Use a separate little program to determine that for you?

[drlaryp]

Bases generally revolt to the nearest faction. If you permit probing a revolting base, here is what I would do.

1. Create a crappy size 2 base with no mineral capacity.
2. Allow it to revolt when it is surrounded by a dozen probes-- The defender can only build one probe defender per turn
3. probe the crap out of the base and then recapture it
4. Allow it or a sparate nearby crappy base to revolt on the next turn

Only HSA can prevent this tactic and even the HSA is useless if you have "steal tech when capturing base" ON. Then you allow bases to revolt to recapture them

In my game it was early on (but time warped) and I knew of no other player locations, my size 5 base flipped (Entirely through the govenors mismangement). After the 1st probe the city developed a "high security interlock" which dropped chances of a sucessful probe to 50% (supposedly). I've asked around and there seem to be almost as many ways of dealing with the situation as there are players. It must be less unusual then I thought.

Why the mandatory Vendetta? Why not let the offended faction (a human) declare the vendetta next turn if he wants?

[Zoetrope]

For the benefit of future game developers here are two comments on the design of SMAC/X causing this issue:

(1) Bases immediately receive all their owner's technology. This is unfortunate. It would be more sensible for frontier bases to be backward, with no useful information to be probed for.

A simple way to implement that would be for their Datalinks to take say 10 turns to be functional. For captured and drone-defection bases, that might take 50 turns, the same time it takes for the shape of the base to reflect its new owner.

(2) The anomalies in PBEM smell :q like yet another consequence of the fundamentally unequal (indeed, corrupt) treatment of human and AI factions. The arbitration part of this (and every) game engine needs to be separate from the faction AI. Justice must be blind to status.

I said "corrupt" because that's the effect on the game's design: it becomes horribly complicated because of special favors and special rules. The consequent messy design makes it significantly more difficult to adapt the game to different modes of play, such as PBEM.

Whereas a clean design that treats all participants equally would enable most PBEM and network errors to be caught during testing and in single-player.

If an AI needs a boost, then that must be done inside the AI routine, with NO assistance from the game engine.

In summary, the game's transaction engine should only know what action is requested. It should NOT know or care about the real location of the entity that is requesting the action.