4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[chuft]

Note Lal's quote about control of information refers to "the Americans" and Miriam is from "the Christian States of America" so I think it's clear his warning is about right wing censorship - book burning, removal of books from libraries, trying to shut down pornography etc.

And yet the only ones doing book burnings and removal of books from society (let alone libraries) today are leftwing cunts.

If you could think for yourself, you would realize that there is nothing liberal about SJWs, who are as self-righteous and intolerant as Miriam. The term "left" is pretty much meaningless now.

 

[Cael]

Note Lal's quote about control of information refers to "the Americans" and Miriam is from "the Christian States of America" so I think it's clear his warning is about right wing censorship - book burning, removal of books from libraries, trying to shut down pornography etc.

And yet the only ones doing book burnings and removal of books from society (let alone libraries) today are leftwing cunts.

If you could think for yourself, you would realize that there is nothing liberal about SJWs, who are as self-righteous and intolerant as Miriam. The term "left" is pretty much meaningless now.

And yet, you were the one who brought up the left/right spectrum.

 

[chuft]

Right still has meaning.

Polls have shown the majority of racial minorities in the US greatly dislike political correctness. SJWs are a small minority of Democrats and are overwhelmingly affluent young white males.

 

[Cael]

Right still has meaning.

Polls have shown the majority of racial minorities in the US greatly dislike political correctness. SJWs are a small minority of Democrats and are overwhelmingly affluent young white males.

Yes, yes, yes. You can't label my side because it has no meaning, but not-my-side, now that is deserving of vilification.

 

[chuft]

Well the censorship laws have all come from the right. The actions you are complaining about are by corporations. That isn't censorship. It's for-profit entities trying to maximize their profits by placating certain of their customers. Not the same as men with guns putting you in jail.

 

[Xamenos]

Well the censorship laws have all come from the right. The actions you are complaining about are by corporations. That isn't censorship. It's for-profit entities trying to maximize their profits by placating certain of their customers. Not the same as men with guns putting you in jail.

I am not surprised you are fine with privatized censorship. The ends justify the means, eh comrade?

 

[chuft]

The irony is how pro-business the right is, until they aren't. Annoying when those rich people you worship do things you don't like, isn't it. But you can't vote them out of office, because they're not government.

The reality is corporations have a lot more power than the government in most people's lives - not just as employers, but as controllers of what you can watch on TV or say on the Internet. The right made it so. My sympathies for the right are thus extremely limited when they complain about what corporations are doing. Where were you when they were polluting?

Personally I am annoyed by things like the treatment Gone With the Wind is getting, all the missing movies and episodes on Disney+ etc. It's somewhat surreal, corporations suppressing the entertainment products of other corporations, or even their past selves, because this one reflected distasteful attitudes in the past and that one had an actor who later fell from grace.

But calling it censorship is not accurate. Nobody is going to confiscate my DVD of Gone With the Wind and throw me in jail.

 

[Absinthe]

You two should probably take this shitty digression to the Politics forum.

Anyway, has anyone worked out how to predict Drill to Aquifer's path and effects? It's an underrated terraforming move imo, and I notice it can affect humidity sometimes, but if you can't predict which way your aquifer will go and whether or not it will irrigate certain tiles, that's obviously harder to utilize.

Worse still is when you have rivers run into each other, since you can completely divert an entire preexisting river that way.

 

[Xamenos]

The irony is how pro-business the right is, until they aren't. Annoying when those rich people you worship do things you don't like, isn't it. But you can't vote them out of office, because they're not government.

The reality is corporations have a lot more power than the government in most people's lives - not just as employers, but as controllers of what you can watch on TV or say on the Internet. The right made it so. My sympathies for the right are thus extremely limited when they complain about what corporations are doing. Where were you when they were polluting?

Personally I am annoyed by things like the treatment Gone With the Wind is getting, all the missing movies and episodes on Disney+ etc. It's somewhat surreal, corporations suppressing the entertainment products of other corporations, or even their past selves, because this one reflected distasteful attitudes in the past and that one had an actor who later fell from grace.

But calling it censorship is not accurate. Nobody is going to confiscate my DVD of Gone With the Wind and throw me in jail.

The irony is how anti-business the left is, until they aren't. How wonderful when those rich people you hate do things you like, isn't it?

It really is amazing. Corporations bad, but it's good that they're fucking the people you hate before they fuck you. This SHOULD have been the time for the collective left to go "I told you so" on the right and try to unite everyone against those fuckers, but no, you're happy to sit and laugh as they crush the little guy you dislike. You see the censorship around us, you claim you're annoyed by it, but you also claim those dastardly right wingers had it coming. You're willingly choosing the side of the corporations here. How did that old saying go? First they came for the right wingers, and I did not speak out because I was not a a right winger? Or something like that. I may be misremembering something.

As for your definition of censorship, it is laughable. Censorship is the suppression of free speech, full stop. The means by which it is done and the actor who is doing it is a completely meaningless distinction so you can justify your own hypocrisy.

 

[chuft]

Actually I detest Facebook, Twitter, the whole social media pile of garbage. I'd love to see it all burn. I use none of it. Trumpism couldn't exist without it. That's why he wants to start his own. Demagoguery requires a platform.

But Absinthe is right, this discussion has gone on long enough.

I do think Miriam is correct about AI and the need for valuing human life and human dignity. I think almost all points of view have some merits. SMAC did a great job of showing this.

 

[Nutria]

I can't remember how that specific action worked but I can tell you that the geology stuff in Alpha Centauri was really revolutionary and it's sad that it hasn't been ripped off. Like you could build a mountain to affect rainfall. This was absolutely brilliant and you could probably make a whole genre out of games just about geology.

 

[Nutria]

For example, fat continents usually end up as dustbowls in the middle, which is just like real life for the mast part - unless there's a lot of rainfall being geologically directed to those places. In my country, for example, the Amazon forest directs rainfall towards the center-west and southwest regions.

Yeah, like in Oregon on the coast there's extreme rainfall, you get across one short mountain range and there's high rainfall, and then you hit the real mountains and on the other side it's desert. And in one car trip you can go through this in maybe 2 hours. So I loved seeing something that reflected real life in that way.

As for Brazil, someone got me to watch Black God, White Devil and I was very surprised to find out that you actually have a desert there too, but I guess it makes sense.

 

[Cael]

You two should probably take this shitty digression to the Politics forum.

Anyway, has anyone worked out how to predict Drill to Aquifer's path and effects? It's an underrated terraforming move imo, and I notice it can affect humidity sometimes, but if you can't predict which way your aquifer will go and whether or not it will irrigate certain tiles, that's obviously harder to utilize.

Worse still is when you have rivers run into each other, since you can completely divert an entire preexisting river that way.

Look at the elevation of the squares. The river will try to run to the next square with the lowest elevation and so on. As to what happens after that, I am not sure, but I think the directions of two rivers has an effect of where the resulting merged river goes.

 

[Absinthe]

DUDE

Fuck.

I honestly have no idea how in the hell Drill to Aquifer's works. I am kind of reticent to use it since I have kind of screwed over some ol' reliable rivers because of it.

Rivers also get shifted by raising/lowering terrain and global warming. They also end on any tile with a thermal borehole (borehole tile still gets +1 energy though). I've done boreholes in PBEM to deliberately dam rivers so they cannot be used as invasion points.

Rivers are great though. Not only do they make for bonus energy but you also get easy transportation, extra nutrients, and a lot of energy from them. Sometimes I can plant a river that moves through my empire in a way that I get something like 12+ tiles giving +1 energy. I also use 'em to pump energy parks (esp. if it's the Supercollider base). Also, usually in the Garland Crater there is a way to get a river set up that gives you +1 energy to 8 tiles for your base in the middle. If you borehole it the rivers end though, but I think you can plant a lot of rivers from the edges then to try to get more energy tiles (this costs a ton of former-turns though, so only do this if you have too many formers sitting around and maybe a Weather Paradigm).

In addition to that harvesting fungal rivers is a popular strategy in PBEM to maximize energy gains. That reminds me, does anyone know the formula of how Planet rating affects regular fungus movement?

I can't remember how that specific action worked but I can tell you that the geology stuff in Alpha Centauri was really revolutionary and it's sad that it hasn't been ripped off.

A lot of it gets wasted under the tendency of mines to reduce a tile's nutrient yield by 1, at which point you stare at a rolling and moist tile and go "I could burn 12 former-turns planting a farm+mine for a 1 nutrient 2 mineral tile, or I could burn 4 former-turns and plant a forest for 1 nutrient 2 mineral 1 energy and negative ecodamage." I recommend undoing that for a deeper terraforming game so 2 nutrient 2 mineral tiles matter again (set "Nutrient effect in mine square" under "#RULES" to "0" in alpha.txt, or alphax.txt if playing the expansion). Normally I only make farm+mine on a rolling and rainy tile for 2 nutrient and 2 minerals but that's only advantageous until you lift resource caps.

As a result of that shit you don't care too much about rainfall patterns because forests deliver consistent nutrient yields everywhere. It's only when you're building Condensers or energy parks that you care again but those condensers supply their own rainfall and energy parks are all about max elevation or they're just aquatic cities in SMAX that crank out fat stacks of energy.

Like you could build a mountain to affect rainfall. This was absolutely brilliant and you could probably make a whole genre out of games just about geology.

Yeah, you even get alerts for ecological warfare if it would starve a neighboring faction's tiles. I get the feeling Frank Herbert's fascination with geology and ecology rubbed off on the game designers when they made SMAC. Was a very good touch.

Yeah, its so insanely cool when you think about it. Terrain and geology literally altering on the fly. No other 4X game ever did this. Elevation being something natural and inherent to each square is far better and cooler than "here's hill/mountain terrain". The voxel-based terrain making the elevation evident.

Careful about that though. Voxels can lie about elevation. The real elevation numbers are more complicated and sometimes the voxels are dragging a tile upwards when it's the actual elevation numbers are momentarily dipping downwards, and vice-versa.

Tinker a bit with the map editor, its fantastic how it holds up. For example, fat continents usually end up as dustbowls in the middle, which is just like real life for the mast part - unless there's a lot of rainfall being geologically directed to those places. In my country, for example, the Amazon forest directs rainfall towards the center-west and southwest regions.

I wonder if you get ecological warfare warnings for making supercontinents through land bridges. I guess you would since it involves raising terrain?

I could see a lot more being done with modern technology. For example, using temperature as a factor as well. More diverse types of weather. I'm merely scratching here.

Also varying water currents and temperatures, maybe seasons and winds also.

(one thing I would love is non-accessible coast, it would really make the naval game more strategic)

Right now the closest you can get is a coastal tile that has annoying units on it. Forest+Bunker+Sensor Array makes a pretty strong defensive tile and you can't land transports until you've cleared out the coast. If you stick artillery units there then they can't get cleared out with long-range fire from boats either since that would provoke artillery duels (and sea units have a -50% penalty to artillery duels vs land units, even before counting the bunker, iirc), which means they have to either land adjacent tiles (if possible) or start using Amphibious Pod units to assault the bunkers, which can get very obnoxious considering the defensive bonuses that pile up when you have bunker+array+forest on a single tile (for non-coastal tiles you can even add high elevation for a fourth bonus).

Modern 4X games still playing with their silly tiles/hexes with fixed tile types look infantile in comparison.

Yeah, there's a lot of unexplored potential there.

Look at the elevation of the squares. The river will try to run to the next square with the lowest elevation and so on. As to what happens after that, I am not sure, but I think the directions of two rivers has an effect of where the resulting merged river goes.

Yeah the elevation bit is obvious, but sometimes the river will run a different way even when all the elevations are the same. There is some advanced geology code under the hood I don't get, because it also shifts rainfall patterns and sometimes makes moist terrain dry and even as it makes dry terrain moist.

 

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Guys,
Whoever plays multiplayer games here, can you post your house rules you follow to avoid certain exploits and such?

One of such rule I remember is to not move units this turn if they were upgraded in design workshop to avoid functional inconsistency between workshop and individual unit upgrades. That inconsistency I have fixed in recent WTP version.
Are there other? While in a mood I may fix them too.

 

[Cael]

Guys,
Whoever plays multiplayer games here, can you post your house rules you follow to avoid certain exploits and such?

One of such rule I remember is to not move units this turn if they were upgraded in design workshop to avoid functional inconsistency between workshop and individual unit upgrades. That inconsistency I have fixed in recent WTP version.
Are there other? While in a mood I may fix them too.

One of the biggest exploits is the supply crawler. Eliminating it from the game would be rather good.

 

[Absinthe]

Guys,
Whoever plays multiplayer games here, can you post your house rules you follow to avoid certain exploits and such?

One of such rule I remember is to not move units this turn if they were upgraded in design workshop to avoid functional inconsistency between workshop and individual unit upgrades. That inconsistency I have fixed in recent WTP version.
Are there other? While in a mood I may fix them too.

We actually permit workshop upgrades for combat purposes in our games. Some people tend to oppose combat terraforming by having a terraformer boat, say, sink terrain until there's 1 turn left on the action and then stop, only to run over to another tile and finish sinking terrain in 1 turn (usually sinking a city if possible). Minor atrocities like nerve gas pods contributing to ecodamage and global warming is something that we prefer to mod out as well. Self-destruct sequences are also banned in our games because of their potential to inflict extreme damage. Punishment Sphere rehoming is usually also banned to avoid making it effortlessly easy to wage war in Free Market by having all your units homed to a psphere base that cannot riot. It would also be good to make it so that reaching a negative POLICE score in a base (bear in mind Brood Pit can give a base +2 POLICE) cancels all nerve stapling prematurely, as pre-stapling for Free Market is a popular stunt in our games.

There's also a question of perhaps making probe teams and supply crawlers (crawlers are banned in our games) cost maintenance and/or be unable to have real armor.

One thing I'd like to mod is to lift psych caps on bases. That shit annoys me and makes it impossible to keep a base in a golden age past a certain population value. It'd also be tempting to have MORALE scores actually matter when your units are already elite. One of Santiago's fall-offs comes from the fact that once you have Bioenhancement Centers and regular morale facility plus a monolith you're getting your elites without even caring about MORALE score, so long as it isn't negative anyway.

That said, your mod has some weird stuff going on, to be honest, and I don't think we'd use it. Your methods of pumping up unit armor are pretty much madness from our viewpoint since we already have people wage defensive wars very effectively in our PBEM games simply by stacking up defensive modifiers like crazy, often ensuring invasions include artillery strikes or overwhelming numbers to soften up a target before going in as well as using nerve gas pods, which makes UN votes very important.

Guys,
Whoever plays multiplayer games here, can you post your house rules you follow to avoid certain exploits and such?

One of such rule I remember is to not move units this turn if they were upgraded in design workshop to avoid functional inconsistency between workshop and individual unit upgrades. That inconsistency I have fixed in recent WTP version.
Are there other? While in a mood I may fix them too.

One of the biggest exploits is the supply crawler. Eliminating it from the game would be rather good.

That's an easy fix. You disable the prereq for Supply Transport and remove the Supply Crawler predesign from alpha.txt/alphax.txt and there are no more crawlers in game.

 

[Induktio]

Anyway, has anyone worked out how to predict Drill to Aquifer's path and effects? It's an underrated terraforming move imo, and I notice it can affect humidity sometimes, but if you can't predict which way your aquifer will go and whether or not it will irrigate certain tiles, that's obviously harder to utilize.

Worse still is when you have rivers run into each other, since you can completely divert an entire preexisting river that way.

Whenever some terraforming effect changes the climate, the game calls world_climate which in turn calls world_rivers. It's quite a complex function but essentially the RNG is seeded with some new constant values until the landscape is changed again. The river flow looks like to be heavily randomized based on that value so there's no simple way to predict it unless you know the RNG details exactly. That function has not been reversed in detail yet but that's the summary for it.

 

[Induktio]

I recently momentarily opened Civ3 to compare some things, and it made me realize the terrain graphics look more blurry and worse there than in SMAC. It didn't help that the game forces you on 1024x768 resolution where in SMAC it easily runs on native desktop resolution.

Anyway the game had an interesting map generator where you could actually select the landmass type: pangaea/continents/archipelago. What do you think of SMAC's map generator? I think the main problem there is that the landmasses don't have any real definition and the map either has one huge landmass or a group of random islands.

It might be useful to have options that guarantee there's a certain number of distinct continents on the map. Also it might look better if the landmasses cluster more on the equator which currently is not the case. So that would mean rewriting the map generator but that's something I've been looking at for a while. OpenSMACX has reversed more of the map related content which might help there. So that's something that might be implemented in the future.

 

[Nutria]

the terrain graphics look more blurry and worse there than in SMAC

I haven't played Civ3 since just after it came out, but my memory from the time is that it looked really good (for the time) in some places, especially deserts. SMAC had the issue that they went with this red & green color palette, which was definitely a great choice because it makes Planet look truly alien, but let's face it, she's kind of an uggo.

 

[Induktio]

Yeah it's true on smaller maps half of the terrain is landmarks. Really dunno what where they thinking there when implementing it. The map generator should definitely reduce the subset of landmarks deployed on smaller maps based on random choice I guess. Having multiple jungles is a certainly a good idea, it would make a lot more sense that way. My main goal would be to make those large+ size maps have more realistic looking landmasses. It probably still requires investaging what possible details there might be in the map binary format to avoid bugs.

One other possibility that might become viable is to implement new buildings or secret projects. The main limitation before was that the building effects were hardcoded but that limitation can be defeated by writing relatively small amounts of code now. I have not tried anything there yet since it basically requires creating some new lore and the game already has quite a lot stuff so we'll see.

 

[Absinthe]

Whenever some terraforming effect changes the climate, the game calls world_climate which in turn calls world_rivers. It's quite a complex function but essentially the RNG is seeded with some new constant values until the landscape is changed again. The river flow looks like to be heavily randomized based on that value so there's no simple way to predict it unless you know the RNG details exactly. That function has not been reversed in detail yet but that's the summary for it.

In my experience based on the terrain it's fairly predictable as there aren't too many ways an aquifer's path can vary. I've had multiplayer games where I predicted an aquifer's path just by opening up the original map file and fiddling with placing and removing river tiles in certain locations in order to get a read on how the rivers would develop and based on that I would drill for a river in-game and score maybe 10 energy tiles and improve a few arid tiles while making transportation easier. I noticed there was an RNG component to it too, but the amount of variations was typically small and generally weighted heavily towards specific outcomes.

 

[Induktio]

In my experience based on the terrain it's fairly predictable as there aren't too many ways an aquifer's path can vary.

Perhaps I should rephrase it a little bit. In some situations the terrain elevation constrains river paths to valleys or similar "downhill" routes. So in those cases the rivers can't make many variations. But on flat terrain the path becomes a lot more unpredictable. It can be seen most easily on map editor if you create completely flat terrain and place some rivers on it. One addition can change half a dozen rivers etc.

 

[Kalin]

Can't pretend I even begin to understand river vs river calculation, but my most memorable drill to aquifer move last game was to create the fungal river worm farm pictured above, the means of which were secured by mega-rushing the Paradigm with disbanded formers (second most memorable was drilling a river just to get a "free road" during the invasion of Gaia). For the first time, because I'm still pretty nooby at terraforming, I calculated the flow direction based on adjacent tile height and got a real juicy sweet spot between the base radi. Sending elite scout patrols (free support lol, well we removed those now) up and down the man-made river I triggered a ridiculous amount of squirmy pearl-fodder boils to fund my constant need to upgrade units and rush production (and while running dem-green-power I got quite a number of free worms as well). Anyway I'm drunk and wanted to share. Felt good men.

 

[Absinthe]

Yeah, fungal river harvests are great. We all took serious advantage of those clean Scout Patrols from the PBEM mod to just harvest tons of worms. Those clean scout patrols also did a lot for Morgan (with his SUPPORT malus) and Spartans with their +POLICE, especially in Police State (3 clean scout patrols = 6 drones suppressed for free).

Anyway, while we're on the subject of modding multiplayer, the following issues came up for us:

• Aquatic pods have an abnormally high chance of spawning alien artifacts, making the water race a big part of how much of a tech lead you will get on others.
• We need extra slots for custom settings in faction files.
• It seems multiplayer scenarios do not let you properly set the difficulty for every player. Are we the only ones to use scenarios in multiplayer?
• Land transports can enter a water transport's tile if there is space in the boat, but do not move with boat and instead stay in place, floating on water.

I'd also be curious about a way to reverse or reduce the effects of infiltration (like getting infiltration on a city rather than a whole faction), modding MORALE so it does something if you already have elites maybe, or modding POLICE so it does something if you have more than 3 POLICE.

Perhaps I should rephrase it a little bit. In some situations the terrain elevation constrains river paths to valleys or similar "downhill" routes. So in those cases the rivers can't make many variations. But on flat terrain the path becomes a lot more unpredictable. It can be seen most easily on map editor if you create completely flat terrain and place some rivers on it. One addition can change half a dozen rivers etc.

True, but there usually isn't perfectly flat terrain. Even if the terrain seems flat there are usually elevation differences within the same band that I believe constrain river flows.