I get the impression your problem is rather with the trade mission than great people flood in general. Correct?
I would rather say that I have another issue with the trade mission; I experssed recently my thought that I the late game has a lot of energy and the trade missions add even more on the top. Regarding the number of GP after the discovery of PT, it is nothing specially related to Great Tycoons or the trade mission (they were just dominating in that game for some reason and served as example for the showing the numbers you get and the restricted options you have). You have a point though, that not all kinds of GP suffer as much from restricted options (e.g. Psych Chaplains "culture bomb" function is nearly always useful) .
In any case, I disagree it's overpowered. First, it all depends on how much you focus on specialists of course. Secondly, consider, using Nanite conversion rates, what you could do with the hammer equivalent of the Personality Transcription tech cost. Build 20 Nanoreplicators or so? If anything, my worry is the tech might be underpowered if you're not playing the Peacekeepers.
My intention wasn't to say that it is generally overpowered (but I have to admit that my solutions indicated that, so scrap them please
) - it is rather the feeling that the concept of rare, very useful Great Persons get replaced by masses of them at a point where the value of each one decreases significantly.
Maybe a solution lies within what you have said - don't mess with the generation process as I suggested, but make the tech more interesting by giving GPs stronger late game benefits (e.g. I remember that a kind of "redemption" for one terraformer in the late game was discussed - maybe Transcends could serve that role under special circumctances by offering a kind of "green trade mission"?)
The tactic you describe is intended by me.
That's one of the reasons why I love your mod - I still discover frequently new strategies when playing, which I consider then as exploits, when they lead me to victory
First thought: is this tactic really more powerful than a Terraformer using a similar number of ranged strike units to weaken the enemy before attacking? Native life units can't do that.
That's food for thought...perhaps, need to try in my next Terrraformer game. However, there is one difference - conventional units need to be specialized right from the start on in that direction (and sacrifice other special abilities in exchange), while NL units can be developed into that role even later.
Second consideration: in theory the downside of native life's powerful direct attack is that you need to get right next to the enemy for it to be useful. If an enemy base is defended by a Bunker, your stack may have been severely weakened by the time it gets next to the base. So my first priority would be to get the AI to build more ranged strike units. The next release will include some AI code which should make them more likely to pick the ranged promotions. Also perhaps this critique is an indication the AI should build more instead of less Bunkers.
Yes, the need to get close by is a weak spot for mindworms and spore launchers (not for Locusts, though!) More range promoted units for the AIs sound good.
Regarding bunkers...you are again right, they are a strong defense and I never disputed that. The thing is just... a map full with bunkers looks rather ugly and fighting them is a tedious business. Thermobaric missiles help, but you often need 2 to seriously damage a bunker... I don't know, but fighting vs. bunkers is just not fun. But maybe I haven't just found an "exploit" to kill bunkers yet
If extra ranged strike units aren't sufficient, I'd consider not allowing Psychic Terror for spore launchers as a next step. The thing with attacking air and naval units is a hole in code of mine which I have plugged now.
That should help already a good bit...plus the fact that my game was still played under rules, which allowed me to capture high-promoted Gaian SL despite having only a slightly positive Planet Attitude. That might have added to the feeling that they ripped through everything (Deidre had a faible for promoting them with Miasma promotions...)
Are you sure the FC didn't even change by one? I can't calculate what the effect should be without knowing how many native habitable plots your map has, but If my suspicion is correct, the problem may just be with my text message, and the real effect may be 100 times larger than what it says there.
I'm pretty sure that there was no FC drop at all. It dropped by one on the interturn before the resolution was put up to vote, but not in interturn before the voting result showed up - of course expanding fungus could have counteracted. I could try to find and upload a save, but I'm not sure if it is still useful for you, because it would be from my old game (last compatible patch for it was h) )
Lord Tirian said:
Some observations on the Interstellar Gate: It's pretty easy to achieve by bulbing/hurrying/rush buying. Almost too easy - due to Planetfall's OR-only tech tree, it's a lot easier to get to Singularity Mechanics than to get to the "win"-techs in SMAC or Civ4 - I think that tech could be a bit harder to get, since the tech is only for winning, it doesn't need to the usual design paradigm, I think. Or make the subspace generator a bit harder to build... or something similar. I just feel it's an easier builder victory than the space race in Civ4, whereas the other victories are a lot harder to get (of course, I'm a builder, so it's probably just the combination of my playstyle + Morgan).
EDIT: I also noticed that the UN council was a bit in a deadlock - second time I've observed that. Yang (because of the sequestered starting position, he gets a lot of bases easily and can get quite a bit of pop) and Lal (because of the double votes and because he usually builds the council) have quite a big impact on the council, since it's so population-dependant. And they often try diplomatic victory votes (which nobody wins) - instead of the various other things you can do with the council. No idea how this can be changed, but having a more dynamic council would be interesting. Or I just have bad luck with the council!
Yes, that was my observation, too. I won an Interstellar Gate victory on Immortal in my last game (playing Yang), while I was far away from any other victory condition. I'm not sure how focussed the AI is one that victory - several AIs already had the necessary techs, but somehow didn't manage to build enough portals soon enough (in the game before though - same difficulty, as Santiago - the University scored a IG victory in a few turns less.
Planet council victory votes are common in my games as well and only very rarely one side gets close to getting a sufficient majority of votes. I'm currently unsure, but is the needed share of the votes the same as in SMAX?
Lord Tirian said:
Furthermore, since University gets a good shot at the victory as well, it would be nice to have some indicator on the victory conditions screen - since only one generator is required, the victory screen shows nothing useful (like 3 of 7 etc.). The only way to get an idea of the enemy's state is counting dimensional gates on the world map... that's rather annoying.
Indeed, that would be extremly useful!
I'd prefer it not to look like casting a fireball or so though. If this is possible, something like the unit touching her temples with her hands, and then a wavefront animation would look less silly as a visual representation. Of course I guess to be really 'realistic', there should be no representation of psi energy at all.
