Strategist83
King
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2005
- Messages
- 625
Now, I should begin with saying I haven't played any multiplayer games. Having only played the AI - a weak opponent that doesn't present an adequate challenge - one can at best have a vague theoretical idea of what game balance *really* is like. I suspect this may be affecting my judgement here which is why I'm looking for feedback.
With that said, there are a few things I find questionable about the game balance. Namely, I seem to run into three problems, all of which are intertwined:
1) There is no/little incentive to ever attack an opponent. It is always better to instead peacefully expand by building up more bases yourself. Logically, this means warmonger factions are inherently weaker than builders.
2) The late-game research costs are way too inexpensive, meaning you'll blast through them. Early game there's some turns between each tech but in the end you'll be developing new technologies every few turns if not every turn. The cost simply doesn't scale with how fast your empire will grow.
3) A side effect of both issues 1) and 2): Because the endgame research rate is so fast there's no time for cities to grow to a large enough size to warrant building the majority of the buildings in the game(!) - you'll have ascended to transcendence long before it would ever be viable to use them.
Now, to elaborate and reason on these points:
1) In most civ games, expansion is a costly and dangerous affair. You can take the recentmost Civ5 as an example: Settlers are heinously expensive while soldiers are comparatively inexpensive. This logically creates the balance that if you expand (settlers/colony pods), some opponent who instead invested his hammers/minerals into army will be able to flatten you. Ie, overexpanding without adequate military support will get you killed. Conclusion: A sound game mechanism that forces a balanced expansion model so you don't lose the expensive settler investment. It means all units must be brought into play and you can't just use settlers/colony pods alone.
This is apparently different in SMAC(X): Colony pods are not more expensive than miltary units(sic!). Well, yes, a pod costs more than a laser infantry, but the pod instantly gives you a large mineral boost the moment you settle it, meaning the cost is the same. What does this mean? It means the usual incentive to develop a military - a tool to secure land through conquest - is gone. Why bother risking building a large military (military units are dead weight unless you actually use them) to conquer puny bases when you can, for the same cost and with much less risk, simply build a base yourself? Consequently, if the military is thus redundant it means factions that make better builders (Morgans) will always be better off than warmongers (Spartans). Also, by building bases yourself rather than conquering you skip the whole hassle of having to deal with a) captured base drone penalty and b) efficiency due to distance from headquarters penalty. In short, a win-win situation for the builder. Unfortunately, it apparently also means just spamming pods inside your local territory is optimal play. Even when you 'run out of space' it's not problem, because sea bases are so useful. In other civ games, sea tiles are of marginal use, but in SMACX they're just as good, sometimes better, than land tiles, yielding massive amounts of both food and energy. Coupled with the fact that very powerful specialists become available early in the game it means that sea bases are great, converting all that sea food == science/econ through use of specialists if not simply by the excellent tidal harness improvement. Thus, where you'd normally look to warfare to expand your empire when you run out out space, in SMACX you simply continue into the waters with even more colony pods. Go figure.
Even more important in this whole colony-spamming regard is that the metagame logic further suggests that it is always better to build yourself than to harm an opponent, making building an army even less attractive: Because you are faced with six, not one opponent, it is always comparatively more important to strengthen yourself than to weaken somebody else. Had the game been played between just two factions, harming the opponent would be just as important as growing yourself. But, because there are more than one enemy you must focus on growing lest somebody else out-develop you somewhere else on Planet. This creates further incentive to 'play nice' and stay peaceful so you can trade techs with neighbours in order not to fall behind in the race. If you spend your time warring with someone you'll fall behind. Conquest is only useful if it lets you grow faster than you could by simply expanding using pods yourself and, as discussed, this seems to be rarely/never the case.
2) Because you thus due to 1) spend the whole game building up economy with little or no setbacks, your tech rate will continue to grow at an ever-increasing exponential rate throughout the game. Furthermore, because of the great incentives to stay at peace with everybody in order to trade techs, this trend is further bolstered.
3) With colony pods being so useful and inexpensive you'll want to build a lot of them. Screw infrastructure - go more pods! Pods, pods and more pods - they have no real drawbacks, anyway, even on the highest difficulty levels. The pod-spamming is supposed to be counteracted with drones, but drones are easily suppressed with very inexpensive and highly effective infrastructure (Rec Commons), the early-available police ability upgrade and, just slightly later, conversion into the highly useful specialists. Colony pods can even solve your drone problems by keeping bases small! Also, because of the strong incentives not to go to war, you'll want to be running society models that boost economy and research, which typically means high efficiency ratings, allowing for tons of bases before drone problems get serious. What happens, then, as a result of this unlimited ICS-style pod-spam? Lots and lots of smaller bases happen - bases that are too small to make use of the expensive (both in terms of mineral cost and energy upkeep) infrastructure. Your giant number of size 7-14 bases will never have enough income of any type to warrant any infrastructure costing more than in the ~120 minerals range. That means in terms of infrastructure, Tree Farms and Genejack Factories is about as high up the tech tree as you'll go. You'll never build a single Nanoreplicator or anything else because the game will be over long before that - or, it'll be more interesting to build yet another colony pod, anyway. Thus, a good 70% of buildings will never be built.
. Now, the point has been made that it is necessary to have at least some large production cities capable of working on expensive unit prototyping - but I'd contest that you can overcome this problem nicely using your puny ICS-bases simply through the use of crawlers. Crawlers seem to be an inherent part of this ICS-madness in that they precisely negate the need for infrastructure.
I think this post is quite long enough now and I'm sure you get the idea - if not, I suppose it could be summarized as simply stating that ICS in this game is way too powerful and blows any other strategy out of the water. Now, go ahead and explain to me how I'm completely wrong!
With that said, there are a few things I find questionable about the game balance. Namely, I seem to run into three problems, all of which are intertwined:
1) There is no/little incentive to ever attack an opponent. It is always better to instead peacefully expand by building up more bases yourself. Logically, this means warmonger factions are inherently weaker than builders.
2) The late-game research costs are way too inexpensive, meaning you'll blast through them. Early game there's some turns between each tech but in the end you'll be developing new technologies every few turns if not every turn. The cost simply doesn't scale with how fast your empire will grow.
3) A side effect of both issues 1) and 2): Because the endgame research rate is so fast there's no time for cities to grow to a large enough size to warrant building the majority of the buildings in the game(!) - you'll have ascended to transcendence long before it would ever be viable to use them.
Now, to elaborate and reason on these points:
1) In most civ games, expansion is a costly and dangerous affair. You can take the recentmost Civ5 as an example: Settlers are heinously expensive while soldiers are comparatively inexpensive. This logically creates the balance that if you expand (settlers/colony pods), some opponent who instead invested his hammers/minerals into army will be able to flatten you. Ie, overexpanding without adequate military support will get you killed. Conclusion: A sound game mechanism that forces a balanced expansion model so you don't lose the expensive settler investment. It means all units must be brought into play and you can't just use settlers/colony pods alone.
This is apparently different in SMAC(X): Colony pods are not more expensive than miltary units(sic!). Well, yes, a pod costs more than a laser infantry, but the pod instantly gives you a large mineral boost the moment you settle it, meaning the cost is the same. What does this mean? It means the usual incentive to develop a military - a tool to secure land through conquest - is gone. Why bother risking building a large military (military units are dead weight unless you actually use them) to conquer puny bases when you can, for the same cost and with much less risk, simply build a base yourself? Consequently, if the military is thus redundant it means factions that make better builders (Morgans) will always be better off than warmongers (Spartans). Also, by building bases yourself rather than conquering you skip the whole hassle of having to deal with a) captured base drone penalty and b) efficiency due to distance from headquarters penalty. In short, a win-win situation for the builder. Unfortunately, it apparently also means just spamming pods inside your local territory is optimal play. Even when you 'run out of space' it's not problem, because sea bases are so useful. In other civ games, sea tiles are of marginal use, but in SMACX they're just as good, sometimes better, than land tiles, yielding massive amounts of both food and energy. Coupled with the fact that very powerful specialists become available early in the game it means that sea bases are great, converting all that sea food == science/econ through use of specialists if not simply by the excellent tidal harness improvement. Thus, where you'd normally look to warfare to expand your empire when you run out out space, in SMACX you simply continue into the waters with even more colony pods. Go figure.
Even more important in this whole colony-spamming regard is that the metagame logic further suggests that it is always better to build yourself than to harm an opponent, making building an army even less attractive: Because you are faced with six, not one opponent, it is always comparatively more important to strengthen yourself than to weaken somebody else. Had the game been played between just two factions, harming the opponent would be just as important as growing yourself. But, because there are more than one enemy you must focus on growing lest somebody else out-develop you somewhere else on Planet. This creates further incentive to 'play nice' and stay peaceful so you can trade techs with neighbours in order not to fall behind in the race. If you spend your time warring with someone you'll fall behind. Conquest is only useful if it lets you grow faster than you could by simply expanding using pods yourself and, as discussed, this seems to be rarely/never the case.
2) Because you thus due to 1) spend the whole game building up economy with little or no setbacks, your tech rate will continue to grow at an ever-increasing exponential rate throughout the game. Furthermore, because of the great incentives to stay at peace with everybody in order to trade techs, this trend is further bolstered.
3) With colony pods being so useful and inexpensive you'll want to build a lot of them. Screw infrastructure - go more pods! Pods, pods and more pods - they have no real drawbacks, anyway, even on the highest difficulty levels. The pod-spamming is supposed to be counteracted with drones, but drones are easily suppressed with very inexpensive and highly effective infrastructure (Rec Commons), the early-available police ability upgrade and, just slightly later, conversion into the highly useful specialists. Colony pods can even solve your drone problems by keeping bases small! Also, because of the strong incentives not to go to war, you'll want to be running society models that boost economy and research, which typically means high efficiency ratings, allowing for tons of bases before drone problems get serious. What happens, then, as a result of this unlimited ICS-style pod-spam? Lots and lots of smaller bases happen - bases that are too small to make use of the expensive (both in terms of mineral cost and energy upkeep) infrastructure. Your giant number of size 7-14 bases will never have enough income of any type to warrant any infrastructure costing more than in the ~120 minerals range. That means in terms of infrastructure, Tree Farms and Genejack Factories is about as high up the tech tree as you'll go. You'll never build a single Nanoreplicator or anything else because the game will be over long before that - or, it'll be more interesting to build yet another colony pod, anyway. Thus, a good 70% of buildings will never be built.
. Now, the point has been made that it is necessary to have at least some large production cities capable of working on expensive unit prototyping - but I'd contest that you can overcome this problem nicely using your puny ICS-bases simply through the use of crawlers. Crawlers seem to be an inherent part of this ICS-madness in that they precisely negate the need for infrastructure.I think this post is quite long enough now and I'm sure you get the idea - if not, I suppose it could be summarized as simply stating that ICS in this game is way too powerful and blows any other strategy out of the water. Now, go ahead and explain to me how I'm completely wrong!
