Social Engineering for BE

Triggering on "offense" is one way of designing away from the possibility to not be used.
Some things that you have become rattlesnakes in the multiplayer format. They say, "don't come over here", they discourage an attack, and so the impact it has on the game is that they -don't- do anything.

This can still be proper balance. The thing is to notice that tools can change the game in a whole bunch of ways, make sure they tilt towards what you actually want. And 'Crusade' being at all for a moment applicable without, y'know, taking the crusade to the infidel's land is not an appropriate form of such a policy. Of course some of your titles aren't serious.

Triggering in enemy territory means this will not happen on defense and it will not at all have any use or relevance to someone who is not pressing to activate it.

MasterEcabob said:

I've been a huge fan of your Unity mod, because of how game changing the various abilities and downsides are. I'm seeing the same thing here with the Brute Squad policy! Like, wow that will be insanely good for early game. Here are some of my thoughts and suggestions:

If you change trees, will freebies like the marines or the colonists stay or will they be abandoned?

I like that the Fundamentalist tree gets a wonder boost, and is more culture focused since the penalty is so harsh.

I think you could probably replace the lowered science penalty from cities, as that doesn't really fit the overall theme. I would replace it with Tradition's opener from Civ5, in this case giving free Relics in your first four cities instead of monuments. The interesting thing about this policy is you can gamble on not building a Relic and get the culture for the policy from resource pods instead.

I really like the bonus yields from pop virtue, as this goes great with the Believer's massive growth boost at the start of the game.

As for pluralist, I would like to see more focus on the specialists, perhaps one of the first virtues giving a free Artist, Scientist, and Engineer in the capital and the second virtue giving the health boost as well as a flat +1 yields boosts to all specialists to compliment the Peacekeeper's playstyle.

Moving on to police state, I think the spy virtues could definitely use a boost. I think the first policy should reduce the cost of researching computing, to make ARC's Spy Agency rush strategy even sweeter. As for the second virtue, you could have webs promote up to 3 spies for free.

Finally, given the huge health boosts already in the tree, I'd replace the +health from military virtue with a bonus movement point for marines virtue just to make brute squad even more useful.


Let me know what you think of these ideas, as I'm not a modder and have no idea how feasible implementing them would be. I've also been giving some thought to the other trees, and have some thoughts about shortcomings for the Economic virtue trees. Looking forward to the completed project!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback! I'm loving it. To answer some of your questions, freebies stay when you abandon a tree but you don't get a new set when you readopt. My rationale has always been that freebie policies don't scale well with other policies and that has always been part of the inherent "tradeoff" when selecting them. By making them one of the few policies that keep their effect even when switching, it makes the dynamic a little more interesting.

I'll try out the free Old Earth Relics to help make the tree more appealing early game. It sounds like a good way. I'm not sure how the original Civ5 code has aged since then and I've been wary of having any policies that add free buildings due to the whole switching debacle. But mechanically I like what you said and the gambling for pods by putting it at the second level rather than the root is a neat aspect.

The Pluralist tree is especially intended to focus on city building and growing and the specialist policy is put there as some token policy that has its benefits focused on the late game, since city construction and growth is far more an early game deal (though in BE this is more debatable than Civ5 due to how health scales in this game). I don't know if it's enough of a late game incentive as I said, and maybe it bears well to replace one with something, but I have many of the other specialist focused virtues under the values tree. You could probably guess that this one on health and food was very much a Lal inspired virtue.

Switching around the Spy based virtues in Police State could be a good call. Military Police I'm fairly stubborn about. It's been a user scenario from the beginning for players to have the option of taking Military Police and in a time of health crisis, enacting the Brute Squad to help ebb it a little. I wish I could make computing research faster. I could with some hacky solutions. I can also make the spy agency build faster which could be a fun choice. But a serious design consideration with the Police State so far was hitting on the "secret police" themes I have going on, but not in a way so that it's really tempting for the Data Angels to adopt the tree.

Either way, I will revisit those trees with your feedback soon. But at the moment, I'm actually gunning for a weekend release to get some testing and actual gameplay feedback going. I just finished the Economic trees and Values trees tonight and would share them if I didn't have only two days to finish the Diplomacy trees, which have been the hardest to come up with ideas for by far.

Horseshoe_Hermi said:

Triggering on "offense" is one way of designing away from the possibility to not be used.
Some things that you have become rattlesnakes in the multiplayer format. They say, "don't come over here", they discourage an attack, and so the impact it has on the game is that they -don't- do anything.

This can still be proper balance. The thing is to notice that tools can change the game in a whole bunch of ways, make sure they tilt towards what you actually want. And 'Crusade' being at all for a moment applicable without, y'know, taking the crusade to the infidel's land is not an appropriate form of such a policy. Of course some of your titles aren't serious.

Triggering in enemy territory means this will not happen on defense and it will not at all have any use or relevance to someone who is not pressing to activate it.

Click to expand...

This sounds pretty good. Multiplayer argument not withstanding as it will be impossible to play this in multiplayer, in its current format at least (I still hope someone adapts that hotseat mod from Civ5 somehow). But you're right, forcing the player on the offense to take advantage of the policy isn't a bad thing and definitely fits the name of the policy much better, which is definitely what I had in mind.

For Pluralist, maybe you could implement more yields in each city or some kind of global effect based on the number of cities you have. Reinforcing the idea of power coming from multiple parties. Alternatively, maybe an effect to help build infrastructure.

Edit: I'm trying to come up with some ideas for the other 9 areas. The concepts are there, but I'm having a hard time putting them into game terms, much less word them.

Infrastructure is more a Planned economy thing (not that it doesn't appear elsewhere) at the moment. If you're having trouble putting your thoughts into words, I would recommend you wait until this weekend when I release the first version. It might help you with your thoughts and feedback.

I merely suggested the infrastructure part to help with building up a means of continuing the city building. Also, I looked up the SMAC option and figured it would be a descent mirror.

Regardless, I look forward to seeing what you have in store.

Ah, I see what you mean with brute squad helping your health with that virtue. Quite ingenious! And thank you for looking into those suggestions. Can't wait to try out the mod.

By multiplayer I mean the fact that this game is the conflict of multiple rivals. It's a multiplayer environment.

Amazing work! Going to install BE again just for this
Quick note: I hope every SE tree has a nagative effect, to make it less just benefits.

Fyi: It's out. You can see all of the gameplay contents here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=13842861

And yes, there are shortcomings to each tree.

This is great stuff, bringing SMACX to BERT.
Any plans do develop further SMACX mods?