1.9.5 Feedback

I'm wrapping up the worker AI work (which is 100% better) and have finished AI tech value balancing for at least the first half of the tech tree. The result is an AI that is doing a better job of building it's early economy, growing cities, that kind of thing. I'm going to add the little stuff we've discussed here that I haven't addressed yet and expect to release a beta late this week. :)
 
expect to release a beta late this week
Sweet. I better hurry and at least finish playing DU 3 (more than half way done) so I can try the new beta. :D
 
I'm going to miss it for a while; I'm about to be off for ~3 weeks. Keep the spice flowing!
 
Well, I've got a CTD I've been trying to track the source of for two days without any luck. I'm going to have to go back to my 1.9.5 source code and add changes back in piece by piece and test it, so the beta will be delayed a bit. This sucks :cry::lol:
 
I'm making good progress with locating the CTD cause, but wanted to come back to the polar terraforming issue. Running my auto-run games while bug checking this is several examples of what the polar region ends up looking like with improvements available on Polar and Polar Sink terrain:







The way that it's just completely covered over in solar farms is something I don't particularly like. While I could sit here and come up with all kinds of theoretical arguments for why it shouldn't look like this, it really comes down to it looking, just, "wrong" to me. It should be more pristine, much more sparse.

Something else I'd rather do is give ice extractors and melting lenses considerable commerce yields (which makes sense since water is a big trade commodity) so that setting up polar cities with multiple ice and other resources gives you a very attractive spot. But leave the sinks unimprovable as before (without terraforming).

I guess in my mind it's like the Polar terrain on the outskirts is moderately livable, but the interior should largely be just too cold for general 'industry' and town developement (outside of the 'major settlements', e.i. the actual city, unless there is a real incentive (ice, ore) to develop there.

I do realize there is a bit of a logical issue with comparing it to similar areas on earth (Siberia, Northern Canada) for justifying that it should be sparsely inhabited since the desert areas could just as well be compared to areas that are pretty exclusively sparsely populated on earth as well, but the books do support that the major settlements all are outside of the polar cap (or more aptly that none are on/in it).

I also still support that the main reason for settling (or conquering) the polar cap should be access to the resources there, chiefly ice of course. Shifting the economic strength of these settlements to the resources there in particular helps to further that ideal, and should easily make them profitable if there are at least two ice resources in their city radius to work, and quite lucrative with more (see the fremen city above with 5 ;)). Combined with fairly cheap polar water shippers, I think we can achieve that goal nicely. I don't think we need a carpet of solar farms to make the polar region valuable however.
 
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