v6 feedback

[The_Coyote]

i have SMAC [lost my CD for AC so now i have only smac]. The SeaFormer will be possible, considering the alien lifeforms, must first look if i can mimik the Afterworld Entity effect. I didn´t done something like this so far, so no gurantee that i can get i working.

 

[Ahriman]

Am I missing something, or have roads been removed? This is really irritating....

Also, what is the justification for not allowing farms earlier? If you don't start near any food resources, you're basically left completely unable to grow. This makes both human and even more so AI performance far too dependent on start position.

 

[Maniac]

Am I missing something, or have roads been removed? This is really irritating....

In what way?

Also, what is the justification for not allowing farms earlier? If you don't start near any food resources, you're basically left completely unable to grow. This makes both human and even more so AI performance far too dependent on start position.

Are you aware of the Greenhouse improvement and the Enclosed Biosphere civic?

 

[Ahriman]

Well.... formers no longer seem to have the build road order, its just missing. So, no roads.

And Greenhouses seem unbuildable on anything with 2 food production (eg flat rainy), and Enclosed Biosphere civic only boosts tiles that produce 0 or 1 base food (flat arid, flat polar, ice).

So, the only tiles that can generate more than 2 food (which is what you need to grow) before farms are food bonus tiles.

Save attached.

I deleted my old Planetfall folder and did a clean install of the base version 6, and then the patch f.

Maybe there is something weird that happened from not also installing all the intermediate patches a through f?

 

[Shakiko]

Formers can't build roads anymore, thats true.
But there is no point anymore for roads, so why bother ? (except for the movement bonus, perhaps, but I think it's a nice feature for PF)


@greenhouses:
I can't build them on 2F tiles either.
But it never stopped my expansion, especially as big bases are not always that good in SMAC (planetvalue, having unhealth due to pop, etc,) and as you can get up to 75% food stored on growth, it's still fast in the midgame.
(you still get +2F each turn with "just" 2/1/1 greenhouse tiles.

 

[Maniac]

Well.... formers no longer seem to have the build road order, its just missing. So, no roads.

In case it wasn't clear, I meant, why exactly is the absence of roads irritating?

I removed them for two reasons:

1) They just add to the amount of repetitive actions you need to do during the game. The less of those, the better of course.

2) Having roads all over the place reduces the differences between terrains. If all units have high movement at the end of the game, stuff like some terrain costing two movement points to pass through has little meaning anymore. Reducing overall movement speed increases the value of bonuses which allow you to get somewhere faster. Like 'double movement in fungus' (native life), 'flat movement over all terrain' (chopper->hovertank->gravship), 'drop range' (drop troops), naval transporting.

Until now the focus of Planetfall has mainly been on economy and ecology. I'm just now again getting more into adding cool unit abilities and balancing the unit system. So the system no doubt has its shortcomings at the moment. But for now my response to your feedback would be that there is nothing inherently wrong with my design decision - you just haven't figured out how to adapt to it yet.

Also, if time would prove that the design decision to decrease overall mobility is a bad one, my response would not be to re-add roads, but rather increase the overall movement of units. That way the repetitive action of road building is still removed. At least from the early game, until mag tubes come along; but if you have already improved a plot, there's less need to go back there just to build a road.


Regarding food surplus. As Shakiko says, you start with a +2 food surplus. My personal experience is that food surplus is rarely a limit on my base size in the early game. Rather it are the happiness and health limits. So I don't really see how there could be problems in this department.

Vanilla indeed has more food in the early game, but my experience is there's almost always much more than you need, and slavery is used to get rid of it.

 

[Ahriman]

In case it wasn't clear, I meant, why exactly is the absence of roads irritating?

Because they massively slow the ability to move units around your empire, carry out wars, or generally do anything at all. They also mess with the effect where it is easier to fight in your own territory than enemy territory, because you can use your own roads, while your enemy cannot.
The lack of roads basically makes any kind of war infeasible in the early game, because it takes too long to be able to build a concentrated force.

The lack of roads cripples the AI in particular by making it really bad at responding to an invasion.

1) They just add to the amount of repetitive actions you need to do during the game. The less of those, the better of course.

Building roads isn't really that much effort. I've never seen anyone complain about road building in vanilla civ or any mod.

2) Having roads all over the place reduces the differences between terrains.

Even with roads you get this effect during invasions because you can't use terrain in enemy territory. And, on earth and any other planet, part of the *point* of roads is to reduce the difficulties of harsh terrains. Thats why we build roads; because we can move faster on-road than off-road.

If you really want fewer roads, you can increase the build time for roads, so you can really only use them to link your settlements rather than roading every tile.

But for now my response to your feedback would be that there is nothing inherently wrong with my design decision - you just haven't figured out how to adapt to it yet.

Thats true to some extent, I'll try to give it a chance when I have time, but my main response is that I hate this change. I'll try it a bit more, but I suspect that this will be a deal-breaker; taking dozens of turns for my armies to get anywhere is incredibly boring, and means that the army is often obsolete by the time it gets anywhere.

Regarding food surplus. As Shakiko says, you start with a +2 food surplus. My personal experience is that food surplus is rarely a limit on my base size in the early game

I have had multiple games where I was unable to get my capital above size 2-3 in the early game, which *massively* slows the whole game. When this is happening to the player, it is also definitely happening to the AI. And the AI is much worse at figuring out how it needs to terraform intelligently.
It also means that any AI with a food resource gets a *huge* advantage over any other.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could build greenhouses on the 2 food tiles. I an mystified as to why this is disallowed.

 

[Maniac]

Question: on what map size do you play?

In case you play on large or huge maps, I can imagine it takes way too long to move an army somewhere.

It could also explain the different experience with starting positions. I assume the climate zones are much larger on huge though, so you'd be less likely to have at least a couple rainy or shelf plots in your radius. As, with the exception of the nutrient/mineral/energy boni, the frequency of resources doesn't adapt to map size (but only to the # of players), it could also cause there to be less resources in your starting radius.

In general, personally I don't recommend playing on larger than Standard. (That suggestion also counts for unmodded Civ4 btw )

 

[Ahriman]

Standard size maps, I've never tried anything larger. There are also enough code things going on in the background that this mod runs much slower than most others (probably flowering counter/fungus related I'm guessing), so anything over standard would also start to take a very long time between turns on my system (in addition to being too large to be playable with 7 factions).

Which generally means it takes infantry 15-20 turns on average to get to attack your neighbors, and 25-30+ turns to wage a war against anyone who isn't your neighbor.

Removing roads severely limits the ability of a defender to resist an invasion, because they no longer have a movement advantage over an attacker; they no longer have the ability to whittle down an invading stack through hit and run, to respond easily to pillager units (and farms take *hundreds* of turns to improve, so pillaging = death) or barbarians, or to move a defensive force to defend the city that the attacker chooses to target - because it takes the defender an equal amount of time to reinforce their own city as it takes for the attacker to get to it.

It is also making the AI players totally unable to cope with barbarian planet units pillaging; they can't kill them fast enough because they can't get to them, so all their improvements get pillaged, and their economies crash. In a mod where the yields from former improvements are so high, this is a big problem. Particularly so when the AI doesn't understand how Planet works, and so will get lots of native life uprisings.

This fails on both realism and gameplay measures, and makes the combat aspects of the game much less fun.

I don't care about roads connecting resources or not, but the movement issues are key.

 

[Ahriman]

Also,
Bug: Land units in sea bases don't actually defend the base, they're just treated as cargo. Surely this isn't intended?

And solar power transmitters are acting as fighter/bomber aicrcraft, and obsolete interceptors and penetrators. Intended??!?

 

[Maniac]

Bug: Land units in sea bases don't actually defend the base, they're just treated as cargo. Surely this isn't intended?

I haven't actually done many naval invasions yet, as that would require the AI to build many sea bases. :-s
I set up a situation in the worldbuilder though: a barbarian base with a couple defenders, and me attacking with a unit from land, and with a foil. In both cases the barbarians defended. So I can't repeat your findings. Can you give some more information as to where you encountered this, or what exactly happened?

And solar power transmitters are acting as fighter/bomber aicrcraft, and obsolete interceptors and penetrators. Intended??!?

Intended at the moment, but I will no doubt revisit the air unit line at some later point.

***

I noticed the APC special ability isn't working at the moment. This is fixed for version 7. With that SA, infantry can move as fast on flat terrain as they could on roads in their territory, and faster than ever before in enemy territory.
I may remove that special ability at some later point though.

Removing roads severely limits the ability of a defender to resist an invasion, because they no longer have a movement advantage over an attacker; they no longer have the ability to whittle down an invading stack through hit and run, to respond easily to pillager units (and farms take *hundreds* of turns to improve, so pillaging = death) or barbarians, or to move a defensive force to defend the city that the attacker chooses to target - because it takes the defender an equal amount of time to reinforce their own city as it takes for the attacker to get to it.

That is in fact all intended.
Civ4 tried to add some Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) to combat, but IMO that failed miserably. Reason is RPS becomes pointless if you can have Rock, Paper AND Scissors all at the same time at the same place. Then you just get stack-of-doom warfare without any tactics, and the one with the biggest army wins. What fun.

Reducing mobility means it's harder to have Rock, Paper and Scissors always present at every spot. So stuff like scouting, preparing ahead, harrassment of weak spots, opportunism, positional warfare can become more important. That's at least the goal I'd like to eventually achieve.

Regarding pillaging. I *want* to make that a bigger part of war strategy. Note that no one is forcing you to build farms and boreholes. They have a higher yield, but they also carry with them more risk: being pillaged. That's their design: high reward, but high risk. So in areas which you are unable to defend well, you can always stick to greenhouses, mines and windmills. Less big of a deal if they get pillaged.

How to deal with an invading stack of doom?
You can always try to slow down the invaders, giving you more time to reinforce.
Build Perimeter Defenses for instance, forcing the invader to spend some turns reducing base defenses, unless he wants to lose lots of units taking the base right away.
Or build some static defenses, ie bunkers. Not a good idea for your enemy to leave those around, unless they like being bombarded constantly. Destroying those takes time and health.
I also hope to eventually add a limited number of special ability 'spells'. Stasis Generator for instance could immobilze a stack or some units for some time, again buying you extra time.

Also note that in unmodded Civ4, 33% of a city's buildings are destroyed upon conquest. In Planetfall this is reduced to 5%. I might even make it 0%. I also plan to disable razing cities.
This means that in unmodded Civ4, losing a city is a disaster, lots of buildings permanently lost. In Planetfall however, losing a base doesn't have to a big deal, if it is only temporarily. You can get it back in pretty much the exact shape you left it.
So an invading stack of doom doesn't have to mean disaster. Instead of trying to counter the stack of doom directly, you could send some harrassment/pillaging forces in HIS territory, while his forces are concentrated elsewhere. Or you could let the invading stack capture the target base, and then wait him out. If he moves his stack of doom to a second base, the first base captured is less defended, so you can run around his back and recapture it. If he splits his stack in two, so that he can keep protecting his first captured base, well, two smaller stacks are easier to defeat for you than one big one.

If I can add a limited spell system (ie remove all the for me useless stuff of the FfH spell system), I also plan to re-add supply crawlers. I would give them spells which allow them to create units for a gold cost (justification: they're built with nanites). So you'd have mobile production centers which you can move closer to where the actual combat is happening.

It is also making the AI players totally unable to cope with barbarian planet units pillaging; they can't kill them fast enough because they can't get to them, so all their improvements get pillaged, and their economies crash. In a mod where the yields from former improvements are so high, this is a big problem. Particularly so when the AI doesn't understand how Planet works, and so will get lots of native life uprisings.

I'll watch out for this.

 

[Ahriman]

So I can't repeat your findings. Can you give some more information as to where you encountered this, or what exactly happened?

I had an ocean city next to a coast tile, with two plasma shards with a ton of city defender promotions, a transport foil and a sea lurk.
I was attacked by 3-4 gun foils, and they fought the sea lurk and transport foil and eventually won, and captured the base, without fighting the plasma shards.
Possibly the issue was that somehow the plasma shard has ended up loaded onto the transport foil, (even though I'm 90% certain that I manually unloaded them) and so were just treated as cargo.

But I'm still really really hating the lack of roads, it just takes too long to get anywhere even within my own empire.

Another thought: this mod really needs a Strength 5 2 moves Armor unit (that armor can upgrade to) in the midgame.

I'll watch out for this.

The AI regularly gets ~-10 planet rating for a base, which triggers native life uprisings very often. These then kill their formers (especially from locusts), pillage their stuff, and often even capture their cities.

Another thought; the religious specific buildings (Voice of planet, etc.) should probably require that you have adopted the appropriate state religion; I don't think it really makes sense that you can spread all the religions and get the benefits from all of them.
The different religions represent very different lifetyles and social value systems; many of them really aren't compatible.

I may remove that special ability at some later point though.

I like the idea of the APC ability, I'd keep it.

That is in fact all intended.

Well, then I hate your design intention
I can understand disliking the civ engine's RPS mechanic (since it makes all specialization favor the defender, who gets to defend with the strongest unit), but I don't think this is a good solution.

But the AI is really designed to use the vanilla civ mechanics. It can't really handle a world without roads. All the AI knows how to do is build a stack of doom and advance with it. It defends its cities and a small surrounding area; it doesn't do recon, or even start to respond to threats until it is too late.
If you start advancing on an AI city across land, the AI won't even realise it is under threat and start reinforcing it until you're within the fat cross. With roads and railroads, this isn't such a problem, because in 2-3 turns, units can travel a fair distance and the city can be reinforced. Without roads, the AI doesn't respond until it is too late.

Also, normally, you take an enemy city and end up with a bunch of damaged units. Using roads, the AI can then normally attempt to retake the city immediately, attacking your units while they are still damaged. Without roads, you are able to fully heal your troops before they can get enough units in to be able to recapture the city.

So, stack of dooms still work here for the human, its just that the AI is even less able to deal with them.

There are a lot of great things in this mod (I love how you've made it so that bigger cities aren't always better), but the lack of roads just doesn't work IMO.

 

[Maniac]

Something else: I plan to make factions start close each other if the 'Scattered Landing Pods' option is off, so that will reduce travel time to another faction.

I had an ocean city next to a coast tile, with two plasma shards with a ton of city defender promotions, a transport foil and a sea lurk.
I was attacked by 3-4 gun foils, and they fought the sea lurk and transport foil and eventually won, and captured the base, without fighting the plasma shards.
Possibly the issue was that somehow the plasma shard has ended up loaded onto the transport foil, (even though I'm 90% certain that I manually unloaded them) and so were just treated as cargo.

Fixed for next version.

Another thought: this mod really needs a Strength 5 2 moves Armor unit (that armor can upgrade to) in the midgame.

Done for next version.

Another thought; the religious specific buildings (Voice of planet, etc.) should probably require that you have adopted the appropriate state religion; I don't think it really makes sense that you can spread all the religions and get the benefits from all of them.
The different religions represent very different lifetyles and social value systems; many of them really aren't compatible.

Those religious bonus facilities have been removed in the next version, though religions now give an inherent similar bonus (eg Voice of Planet gives +1 Planet). Every non-state religion gives -1 Happy though, so the boni and penalties kinda even out.

But the AI is really designed to use the vanilla civ mechanics.

AI can and will be changed.

 

[Pfeffersack]

I runned into a strange situation when I recaptured a base lost to Native Lifeforms a few turns before...the city suddenly had an ultra-high upkeep (or is that something similar like damaged fromers repairing?) See pic and save (to make it happen, just attack Gaia's Landing with the hoover tank, go then inside the city and look at the maintenance figure):

 

[Pfeffersack]

A few turns later, the display showed a strange "ultraponics maintenance"...maybe it has to do with the lack of foods and the number of drones in that city? But what about the -25%...they somehow don't seem to get figured in correctly - the upkeep seems to grow by that percentage.


Another strange thing is that you can promote Transport Cruisers with Accuracy - what does the +10% Bombardment damage them good?

 

[Maniac]

When a base has a food shortage and you have no more food reserves, instead of reducing in size, you pay +2 'ultraponics' maintenance for every food needed. The natives no doubt had foos shortages.

This prevents starvation when you capture a base which subsequently gets surrounded by foreign culture. (I hate that)

Have you already tried going forward to the next turn? Without having looked at the save yet, I'd expect the number would get normal again then. I'd have to investigate if I can get the number tp update right away.

Edit: Oh, it seems the problem persists, reading your next post.

Another strange thing is that you can promote Transport Cruisers with Accuracy - what does the +10% Bombardment damage them good?

Hmm, I can probably put a restriction in the SDK, preventing OnlyDefensive units from getting that promotion.

 

[Maniac]

A few turns later, the display showed a strange "ultraponics maintenance"...maybe it has to do with the lack of foods and the number of drones in that city? But what about the -25%...they somehow don't seem to get figured in correctly - the upkeep seems to grow by that percentage.

I can't replicate these findings. The first turn I too get that high maintenance, but as expected the calculations return to how they should be the turn after, including the -25%.

 

[Pfeffersack]

I can't replicate these findings. The first turn I too get that high maintenance, but as expected the calculations return to how they should be the turn after, including the -25%.

It was a few turns later, but I didn't manage it to happen again as well.Will have an eye on it and post a save, if I should see again a maintenance calculation I don't understand.

However, some more issues:

- Anyone else having trouble with very long development times for farms/outposts? There is something weird going on when the game progresses, the numbers seem to increase exponentially sometimes...my current record is an outpost taking 3280 turns to develop into a settlement. I haven't used the Terraform civic in that game ever, so this likely has no impact. I can't see a pattern why some tiles have that problem and some not, but observing one of the tiles for a few turns showed that those strong increase does not happen linear, there must be certain times, when the numbers "jump". Also, such tiles don't "lose turns" if they get worked.

- Native life can produce normal human units like Plasmathrowers, when they manage to capture a base and hold it long enough to get past resistance. Doesn't feel very realistic.

- I noticed a Spore Launcher intercepting a Drop Trooper while using its drop ability...is that intended?

- AIs seem to have great trouble in the later game to get their research going...I have now played almost 300 turns and the research times of the AIs are getting longer and longer. I suspect that they pay a lot of unit support, some bases are just crammed with often obsoleted units (the pictures show such a troop concentration at a Morgan base...and 10% research!) ...OTOH the AIs need the units to defend, because they seem to have no understanding of how to avoid big minusses regarding planet value in their bases.

- I think that the Hybrid Civic is overpowered in the late game...you save lots of maintenance plus it is probably the best way to deal with the ever-increasing flowering counter and its consequences (at least that is something the AIs understand - within a couple of turns they all switched from EB to Hybrid) Compared to original SMAC, defending yourself vs. the Planet is a much bigger challenge (with the current AI, most of the time the challenge at all, as you are hardly attacked) and you don't seem to have much more choices then to build tons of units (fighting native life means often sacrificing a unit first, to kill then with a second one). I haven't tried a pure green strategy yet, but given that is becomes easier that way...doesn't that penalize the terraforming, not-planet-hugging-way too much? In my game the FC has now reached 50 and I'm busy with fighting against waves of native life...

 

[Maniac]

- Anyone else having trouble with very long development times for farms/outposts?

Farm upgrade speed is affected by the Flowering Counter. Unless you're running Terraformed, upgrading ceases completely when the Flowering Counter is 50 or higher. I assume that's what you're seeing. I'll see about changing the mouseover txt to provide this info.

Native life can produce normal human units like Plasmathrowers, when they manage to capture a base and hold it long enough to get past resistance. Doesn't feel very realistic.

Yeah I'm aware of that, but didn't consider solving this a priority. I'll move it up the priority list now you mentioned it.

noticed a Spore Launcher intercepting a Drop Trooper while using its drop ability...is that intended?

Might you mean the Fungal Tower? That one has air interception, and unfortunately uses the same graphic as the spore launcher at the moment.
Regardless, spore launchers having some air interception (with some promotion perhaps) might not be a bad idea. People who go full native could still use some mobile anti-air.

AIs seem to have great trouble in the later game to get their research going[/B]...I have now played almost 300 turns and the research times of the AIs are getting longer and longer. I suspect that they pay a lot of unit support, some bases are just crammed with often obsoleted units (the pictures show such a troop concentration at a Morgan base...and 10% research!) ...OTOH the AIs need the units to defend, because they seem to have no understanding of how to avoid big minusses regarding planet value in their bases.

Not completely sure, but I think the cause for all those scout patrols might be the same as why FfH suffered from AI warrior spam earlier in its development: the AI is crap at determining what are good city defense units, and build scout patrols. I've changed some line of code so that the AI will consider more unittypes as valid city defenders. Let's see if that improves things.


Regarding the threat level of Planet, and a hybrid/terraformer strategy, I think the concept is good, but it obviously still needs a lot of balancing. For now I've changed it so locusts can't appear from fungal blooms before Flowering Counter 50. Let's see if that helps with AI defenses.

(fighting native life means often sacrificing a unit first, to kill then with a second one)

I'll re-add some ranged bombardment units at some later point. Will be useful to bombard native life stack and reduce your own casualties.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Farm upgrade speed is affected by the Flowering Counter. Unless you're running Terraformed, upgrading ceases completely when the Flowering Counter is 50 or higher. I assume that's what you're seeing. I'll see about changing the mouseover txt to provide this info.

Ah, okay its good to know that. However, to make that work it would mean you have to work with the Flowering counter - and thats something I seem not get to work. Reading an older design document I understand that I can fight the FC by removing fungus tiles in the world. I do that frequently, but since it is a dangerous business I'm occupied with improving my own territory. Outisde and in the AIs lands, it probably rather the case that fungus expands.
The Counter starts always around 25 or so and I have never manage it to get down, which makes farms a no-go. I'm missing something?