v11 feedback

[Maniac]

Why less than artillery? That doesn't make much sense in play terms. Artillery units can fire once a turn, every turn, in addition to being able to defend their tile. Missiles are completely used up after one attack, and they cost the same as a mass driver, I believe.

Disclaimer: I've never used a single missile in Civ4, so I'm not exactly an expert on the best use of missiles.
Anyway, the reason I added the Thermobaric Missiles was for a niche use: blowing up Fungal Towers, stacks of native life (on fungus), and perhaps Bunkers. (Making locusts extra vulnerable to them might also be a good idea given WarKirby's experiences) My fear is that if missiles are made a very powerful unit, they will, instead of niche, become standard equipment and be used every time to soften up a stack before moving in with the rest of the troops. I fear that might remove a lot of the combat tactics from Planetfall, and just make the victor whoever can throw the most missiles at his opponent from a safe distance. Again, I have no experience with missiles, so I don't know if those fears are grounded.

So I'd like to make thermobaric missiles worthwhile, but only for those couple niche uses mentioned.

Although on that subject, artillery bombardments are a bit too powerful, I think. Especially from bunkers.

In what context did you find this? That is, what did you strike at, or what units of yours did the AI strike? Just asking because there is more than one way to deal with this: weaken their damage, or improve the counters in quality or quantity, or improve the AI if they just don't use the available counters effectively.

Perhaps it could be tweaked so they'd be no more or less efficient than windmills in flat/rainy areas, to create a fun aesthetic choice between the two.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is etc etc..."
Having two things do exactly the same thing doesn't sound appealing to me.

1. Interceptors.

Do you feel there is something in Planetfall which makes air power more powerful here than in vanilla Civ4, or do you feel the problem exists there too?

Several possible solutions here too of course, depending on what exactly the problem is. Eg are air units too powerful, or does the AI just not use the available counters? = AAA and their own air units.

One option is to reduce the maximum damage they can do, at least for the first available air unit. Make them something like the vanilla Zeppelin.

I really don't think they should be able to instantly rebase across the world. I'd say there should be a limit on their range, based on their operational range.

I was actually planning this for some time, but then I reconsidered for the following reasons:

1) By the time you get air units, it also becomes possible to instantaneuosly transport artillery units with psi gates. So I wondered if air units' rebasing ability was really that unbalanced compared to other benefits of a similar tech level. Hell, because of psi gates, limiting the rebase range could make the slower than artillery!

2) Limiting their rebase range could make them too similar to artillery units. Now you have the difference "air units = very mobile, but do less damage than artillery; artillery: less mobile than air, but if you can get them on the right spot they can do much more damage."

 

[WarKirby]

Disclaimer: I've never used a single missile in Civ4, so I'm not exactly an expert on the best use of missiles.
Anyway, the reason I added the Thermobaric Missiles was for a niche use: blowing up Fungal Towers, stacks of native life (on fungus), and perhaps Bunkers. (Making locusts extra vulnerable to them might also be a good idea given WarKirby's experiences) My fear is that if missiles are made a very powerful unit, they will, instead of niche, become standard equipment and be used every time to soften up a stack before moving in with the rest of the troops. I fear that might remove a lot of the combat tactics from Planetfall, and just make the victor whoever can throw the most missiles at his opponent from a safe distance. Again, I have no experience with missiles, so I don't know if those fears are grounded.

So I'd like to make thermobaric missiles worthwhile, but only for those couple niche uses mentioned.

You could for a start, not make them invincible to counters. Make them much harder than planes to shoot down, but not impossible. Some other interesting tactical options might be nice, like a missile defense system facility, which makes a base near invincible to missiles, but can be sabotaged by probe teams. Tactics!

Possibly also, make probe teams able to directly target missiles in a stack, and sabotage them. Or rig them to selfdestruct.

In what context did you find this? That is, what did you strike at, or what units of yours did the AI strike? Just asking because there is more than one way to deal with this: weaken their damage, or improve the counters in quality or quantity, or improve the AI if they just don't use the available counters effectively.

In that I can reduce a stack defender to half health with one shot, and weaken everything else in the stack too. It just seems a bit much.

I'd say, reduce the number of units they hit with collateral. I think it's 6 just now, which seems like too much. Reduce their direct shot damage a bit, too. Although it'd be nice to see the damage limit raised so they could potentially kill stupid things that hang around near them too long.


"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is etc etc..."
Having two things do exactly the same thing doesn't sound appealing to me.

Do you feel there is something in Planetfall which makes air power more powerful here than in vanilla Civ4, or do you feel the problem exists there too?

Several possible solutions here too of course, depending on what exactly the problem is. Eg are air units too powerful, or does the AI just not use the available counters? = AAA and their own air units.

One option is to reduce the maximum damage they can do, at least for the first available air unit. Make them something like the vanilla Zeppelin.

I'm really not a fan of damage caps. They sacrifice too much realism for me. I'd rather see the damage caps removed entirely, so lethal damage is possible with enough firepower, but have other ways of countering it. I don't think a bombing strategy is bad, per se. It's realistic, and makes sense. But I think it should be harder. require more firepower.

Possible thoughts:

• Remove the one intercept per turn, for AAA tracking, etc. Lower the intercept chances a bit to compensate. OR even, make first intercept a high chance, and have the odds of success diminish a little after each attempt in a turn (successful or not).
  
• Change targeting. Rather than automatically attacking the stack defender, make air strikes more random. Since you generally don't get finegrained control when dropping bombs from thousands of metres up. Maybe just have the strike hit any random unit, rather than always the strongest. This would mean it wouldn't be so easy to soften up the strongest defender.
  
• Make bunkers provide defense. Perhaps as an override to the random targeting, if there's a bunker in the tile, then it would always take the hit, overriding random targeting. Also make bunkers have a high resistance, so they take less damage from strikes than normal.
  
• Give air strikes a chance to miss completely. Say the bombs just land in a vacant lot or somesuch, and hit nothing.
  
• Add some other possible effects aside from damage to military units. Like a bomb landing on the perimeter. Knocks of 8% base defense, but doesn't damage any of the units. Or similarly, a random facility gets damaged or destroyed. Or some population is lost due to a bomb landing in a residential sector.
  
• Add a cost to perform an airstrike. 5-20 energy credits, maybe. If you're doing a lot of airstrikes, the cost could add up. Those bombs aren;t just summoned out of mid air. Ammunition costs money!
  
• Make infantry and flamethrowers more resistant to air strikes. Or make tanks weaker. The point being, foot troops can take cover among the ruins. A tank is a big open target.
  
• Make AAA tracking available to infantry units.

1) By the time you get air units, it also becomes possible to instantaneuosly transport artillery units with psi gates. So I wondered if air units' rebasing ability was really that unbalanced compared to other benefits of a similar tech level. Hell, because of psi gates, limiting the rebase range could make the slower than artillery!

I don't have Psi gates yet in the game I mentioned. But I've had the ability to build air units for close to 100 turns now. That's not an inconsequential window of time. It's a matter of whether or not you actually take that path. If this is going to be used as an argument, then how about making rebasing only instantaneous if there's a psi gate at both ends. Otherwise it takes time. Also, don't psi gates have a limit on how many units can be transferred per turn? There's no limit on how many units can rebase between a given pair of bases per turn

2) Limiting their rebase range could make them too similar to artillery units. Now you have the difference "air units = very mobile, but do less damage than artillery; artillery: less mobile than air, but if you can get them on the right spot they can do much more damage."

They already have the massive local mobility, in that they can attack 4-6 squares around. And even if they could only travel that far per turn to rebase, it would still make them a lot faster than tanks. In fact, it would be quite logical to allow them to rebase up to double their operational range. Since the operational range isn't actually how far a unit can travel, but how far they can travel on half a fuel tank, so that they can make it back again.

 

[edorazio]

Currently, the air field (forget the exact name) increases air capacity of the empire by 4. Why not change it so it increases only the local city capacity by 4, and each city can initially base 2 aircraft? Maybe even 1 initially + 3 for the air field...

 

[Lord Tirian]

I'm getting a repeatable CTD here (v11g, Windows XP), save attached. Just load it and hit "end turn", then it crashes (for me, at least).

On the new techtree... I like how it looks on the F6 screen so far - but have to play a bit more. Though I was a bit surprised about the laaaate recycling tanks!

Cheers, LT.

 

[Maniac]

You could for a start, not make them invincible to counters. Make them much harder than planes to shoot down, but not impossible. Some other interesting tactical options might be nice, like a missile defense system facility, which makes a base near invincible to missiles, but can be sabotaged by probe teams. Tactics!

Possibly also, make probe teams able to directly target missiles in a stack, and sabotage them. Or rig them to selfdestruct.

IIRC there's a building modifier to reduce air damage. I could give that to the Solar Power Transmitter?

Such probe team missions are beyond my skills though, and those of the AI to understand.

In that I can reduce a stack defender to half health with one shot, and weaken everything else in the stack too. It just seems a bit much.

So this means you are the attacker. Just asking because an AI bunker ripping your stack of locusts (native units) apart would be entirely intended.

Do you have concrete suggestions for what to change the values to? The relevant values are:
iAirCombat - currently always the same as iCombat
iCollateralDamage - percentage modifier of iAirCombat for collateral damage to the units not directly attacked
iCollateralDamageMaxUnits

I don't want to remove damage caps though. Even with increased counters I expect that would make ranged strikes insanely powerful.

Re air units, after reading your post I had the same idea as edorazio: reduce the air capacity of bases to 2. Or even 1, but then let the Space Elevator increase it by +1 for all bases.

I'm getting a repeatable CTD here (v11g, Windows XP), save attached. Just load it and hit "end turn", then it crashes (for me, at least)

Fixed in patch h.

 

[WarKirby]

IIRC there's a building modifier to reduce air damage. I could give that to the Solar Power Transmitter?

Why the power transmitter? It would most logically fit on bunkers and tachyon fields. Maybe also the maintenance bay/assembly hall, to reflect workers repairing damage as it happens.

Re air units, after reading your post I had the same idea as edorazio: reduce the air capacity of bases to 2. Or even 1, but then let the Space Elevator increase it by +1 for all bases.

That seems like a boring solution. Itwill just make industrial might count for less, and city spam count for more. Punishing those who go for a smaller, focused empire, and rewarding infinite city spam.

 

[WarKirby]

I'm having a CTD that I can't get past. File attached to this post. 100% reproducible crash before my next turn begins, sometime after pressing enter.

Also, the mod folder should be named "Planetfall v11g" since I started this game on patch G. I did install patch H though - by renaming it back to "Planetfall v11" installing the patch, and then changing the name again to how it is now.

 

[Maniac]

For some reason I can open your save with a normal DLL, but it crashes when I try to load it with a debug DLL. This makes it hard to find the cause for the crash.

As a test, could you please start a new game, just press enter for five turns or so, and attach the save? I'd like to test if I can load that save with a debug DLL.

 

[WarKirby]

understood. I have the last 19 autosaves or so from that game as well, backed up somewhere, if you want those

 

[Maniac]

I can load your testsave. Given this, yes, could you plese upload your autosaves? With some luck I could get an assert message which could indicate the cause of the crash.


I've just run a 200 run autoplay myself and 'unfortunately' I don't get any crashes.


For the record in case anyone notices is too: Aquaformers aren't invisible. I made a typo which currently only makes aquaformers invisible in blockaded rather than unblockaded territory.

 

[WarKirby]

Autosaves: http://www.mediafire.com/?l4fmfyol2mq

 

[Maniac]

Thanks. The first autosave does load with the debug DLL, so that gives some hope for pinpointing the problem.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Equal numbers of mind worms and spore launchers should spawn. I suspect the problem is simply that, because all factions start close nearby, there just isn't all that much fog of war terrain for native life to spawn nearby.

I have in fact recently been thinking to place some mindworms on the map right from the start, but give everyone on all difficulty levels one or two free kills against barbarians - it's a simple XML change. That way there's no negative effect on gameplay (nobody will get killed in the first couple turns of the game), but you do get the story element.

Maybe this could be solved by bringing back the "loaded" IoD's from SMAC? I remember that a part of the Mindworms danger there came from those landed on your shores. Often this happened close to your cities, sometimes even a boarded Sporelauncher bombarded your terrain improvements. This could really spice up things in PF - currently you are pretty save from native life on land (unless of course you have direct fungal blooms there), even if the native life raids constantly your coastal waters. There are also no native locusts, as it seems...? (I remember having seem them occasionally in SMAC, though you had to hurt planet really bad to make it happen). I think this would reduce the number of naval native units a bit...if we should go that route, it might be necessary though to increase somehow the transport capacities of IoDs. 1 without any promotion increasing it could be too small - I would suggest to add +1 capacity to one or two of strength promotions, but that would bite with the Sealurks which are not intended to have a transport function.

 

[Maniac]

Maybe this could be solved by bringing back the "loaded" IoD's from SMAC?

It's somewhere deep on the to-do list.

IoDs would indeed need some way to increase their transport capacity. In SMAC that was increased by morale/lifecycle. Which is cool. But to get the same in Planetfall, I'd need to add a seperate promotion line. Seems a bit hack-ish; would create clutter in the promotion list in the Datalinks etc.

***

A question:

Spartan hidden nationality units still have the Spartan promotion. Kinda silly if you see such units attacking you. As a solution I figured I could make the Spartan promotion pickable for all Hidden Nationality units. It should probably be renamed then.

Given the promotion effects, I think Commando would be a nice name. Also fits as the name for a promo that Hidden Nat units have. Of course there's already a Combat promotion called Commando.

So I was wondering, do you guys still like the combat promotions being called Disciplined - Hardened - Veteran...?

Some time ago these promotions were called Combat I/II/III... but they were renamed to get some more of the SMAC atmosphere. Having played with these named for a while now, I must say I don't really like them after all. Reason is: in SMAC each morale level gave a 12% bonus. In Planetfall it's 10%. So the immediate intuition of for instance 'Veteran = +25%" is lost anyway. So I was thinking for clarity's sake it may be best to rename these promotions back to Combat I/II/III. How do you guys feel?

 

[WarKirby]

It's somewhere deep on the to-do list.

IoDs would indeed need some way to increase their transport capacity. In SMAC that was increased by morale/lifecycle. Which is cool. But to get the same in Planetfall, I'd need to add a seperate promotion line. Seems a bit hack-ish; would create clutter in the promotion list in the Datalinks etc.

The lifecycle effects are the "combat" promotions now. Just stick a +1 cargo capacity on each of those. Or would that cause issues with normal mindworms too?

Some time ago these promotions were called Combat I/II/III... but they were renamed to get some more of the SMAC atmosphere. Having played with these named for a while now, I must say I don't really like them after all. Reason is: in SMAC each morale level gave a 12% bonus. In Planetfall it's 10%. So the immediate intuition of for instance 'Veteran = +25%" is lost anyway. So I was thinking for clarity's sake it may be best to rename these promotions back to Combat I/II/III. How do you guys feel?

I like them how they are. Don't change it back.
Maybe they need new buttons though

 

[Lord Tirian]

Given the promotion effects, I think Commando would be a nice name. Also fits as the name for a promo that Hidden Nat units have. Of course there's already a Combat promotion called Commando.

Commando sounds cool and fitting, I'd say go with it.

So I was thinking for clarity's sake it may be best to rename these promotions back to Combat I/II/III. How do you guys feel?

Agree with that, their progression isn't very intuitive. It's easy to mix them up and they are not in the right order in the Datalinks, that makes it a bit confusing. Don't like the name "Combat" though. Perhaps name it Morale I/II/III etc.? After all, it was called Morale in SMAC as well. Same for the lifecycle promos - Lifecycle I/II/III etc.?

If it doesn't look too odd, maybe "Morale I - Disciplined" and so on? But I'm afraid that's way too long.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Pfeffersack]

It's somewhere deep on the to-do list.

That's good to know

IoDs would indeed need some way to increase their transport capacity. In SMAC that was increased by morale/lifecycle. Which is cool. But to get the same in Planetfall, I'd need to add a seperate promotion line. Seems a bit hack-ish; would create clutter in the promotion list in the Datalinks etc.

Hmm, the lifecycle thing is really the most intuitve thing. But I can't think of an elegant way to get round the hassle it causes for the native life units, which aren't supposed to have transport capacity. Maybe just a single promotion adding +2 space or just always 3 capacity, as long as something better is found....so that issue wouldn't block a quicker implementation.

Spartan hidden nationality units still have the Spartan promotion. Kinda silly if you see such units attacking you. As a solution I figured I could make the Spartan promotion pickable for all Hidden Nationality units. It should probably be renamed then.

Given the promotion effects, I think Commando would be a nice name. Also fits as the name for a promo that Hidden Nat units have. Of course there's already a Combat promotion called Commando.

I like that idea, though I'm not sure if it really helps vs. the described problem - yes, in theory it could be anyone...but how often does the AI create hidden nationality units and if they do, will they sufficiently enough choose Commando as well?

So I was wondering, do you guys still like the combat promotions being called Disciplined - Hardened - Veteran...?

I'm with WarKirby on this. It creates atmosphere and the terms are clear enough to give you an idea who experienced a unit is - a quick glance on the number of stars will tell you exactly.

 

[Keeper_GFA]

IoDs would indeed need some way to increase their transport capacity. In SMAC that was increased by morale/lifecycle. Which is cool. But to get the same in Planetfall, I'd need to add a seperate promotion line. Seems a bit hack-ish; would create clutter in the promotion list in the Datalinks etc.

Would it be feasible to make each lifecycle level a new unit, that can be upgraded to (for free) at each experience level or after a victorious combat.

Spartan hidden nationality units still have the Spartan promotion. Kinda silly if you see such units attacking you. As a solution I figured I could make the Spartan promotion pickable for all Hidden Nationality units. It should probably be renamed then.

I was thinking about this as well, and I thought that it would be better for hidden nationality to cause you to lose your faction promotion ... the price you pay for being able to war without being at war. But this problem also exists for the Hive, and losing their faction promotion would actually be a bonus. Is it possible to make the faction promotion icon not visible, but still effective?

So I was wondering, do you guys still like the combat promotions being called Disciplined - Hardened - Veteran...?

I say leave them the way they are now. The new icons make it quite clear what "level" of combat promotions a unit has learned, so I don't think confusion should be an issue.

 

[WarKirby]

3:2 in favour of keeping the SMAC names so far.

Something I'd suggest copying over from FF, if the functionality isn't already here. Effectpromotions. Quite simply, promotions that are entirely invisible.

Actually, you should copy over the autoaquire mechanic too. FF has such wonderful tools for that. How we'd solve the HN problem, is to create effect versions of the special faction promos. And have them be auto aquired when you have the visible one, and hidden nationality. Also make them overwrite the visible ones so you don't get the effect doubled.

 

[Keeper_GFA]

Another thought I've had regarding the Spartan promotion is that it's too good. The bonuses aren't too big, but there are several of them. How about giving spartan units a free promotion (ala Mages from FfH) and maybe a free unit when a new unit type is available.