T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri

[TheHumanHydra]

Man, I hate bureaucracy drones, especially the (apparent?) randomness. Looking forward to this pop-boom stage.

[Modo]

T-hawk, how would you evaluate the existance of supply transports in SMAC versus basically any other game? I don't think I've seen a similar concept aside from maybe trade routes in Civ5 and 6 but in SMAC you seem to have even more power because of them?
To me they look similar to using UR planets in MOO1 to fuel reserve spending and bring less powerfull planets up to speed. And even in MOO1 UR planets are not all that common and they also take a while to power up.

[rho21]

Civ 2's caravans offered the ability to transfer production between bases (and so rush wonders). And was it Civ 3 that had worker colonies that let you claim a resource outside your borders?

But I don't recall any other games with the ability to grab the yield of a tile and transfer it to a city's production.

[T-hawk]

Bureaucracy drones aren't random, they are deterministic, although in a way that you may not be able to get the information to predict.

Bureaucracy drones depend on the global base list, the list of all bases for all factions in the order they were founded.  For a bureaucracy limit of N bases, if a faction exceeds the limit by X bases, every (N-X+1)th through Nth base in the global base list receives one drone if that base belongs to that faction.

At a bureaucracy limit of 6, that first overlimit base gives the 6th, 12th, 18th, etc bases each a b-drone.
If you build another base, to 2 past the limit, then the 5th, 11th, 17th, etc bases also get a b-drone.
If you build another base, to 3 past the limit, then the 4th, 10th, 16th, etc bases also get a b-drone.
If you build another base, to 4 past the limit, then the 3rd, 9th, 15th, etc bases also get a b-drone.
If you build another base, to 5 past the limit, then the 2nd, 8th, 14th, etc bases also get a b-drone.
If you build another base, to 6 past the limit, then the 1st, 7th, 13th, etc bases also get a b-drone.

Now all bases have one b-drone.  Then the cycle repeats with a second b-drone per base.  If you exceed double the bureaucracy limit, then the 6th, 12th, 18th bases in the global list get a second b-drone.  The next base gives one to the 5th, 11th, 17th, and so on again.

Practically speaking, this is uncontrollable enough to be effectively random.  Although you do know that the b-drones appear first in the same places for each trip through the bureaucracy-limit cycle.  And here's one specific crack to take advantage of: if you play the first faction slot in turn order (Gaia in SMAC, whatever you choose for the first slot in SMAX) and found your HQ on turn 1, you know it is first in the global base list, and won't receive a b-drone until the last possible slot.

Destroying a base leaves a hole in the global base list that is replaced by the next base founded, rather than shifting the index of all existing bases. So b-drones never move by a change in the list of bases, only by a change in the b-limit by changing your Efficiency.

Source: a thread on Apolyton fifteen years ago, though they've switched forum software multiple times and the bookmark to the thread is long dead.

[TheHumanHydra]

You have to wonder how the designers think up these systems! Thanks for the info.

[Modo]

Class...dismissed
In fact, you just reminded me about the merchant / scientist  article for Civ4, gotta get ready for the quizz.

EDIT: "There will be a quiz on this tomorrow. Class dismissed. "
what the heck, are we all Gene Wilder wannabees? )

[T-hawk]

Supply crawlers: I never played MOO so can't compare there. One comparison that comes to mind is Heroes of Might & Magic, where some map locations accumulate resources periodically and if you want them you have to send a hero periodically to go get them.

Supply crawlers are fundamentally the same thing as anything else like recycling tanks or Civ 5 trade routes or whatever else. Each item costs a certain amount to build and gives a certain amount of payback. That's true regardless of whether that payback is abstracted off the map or dependent on it.

Supply crawlers are so distinctive because there's no practical limit on them, like one recycling tank per base or Civ 5's global limit on trade route slots. They are only limited by your map and terraforming reach. They are also quite fast in terms of payback horizon, 15 turns by crawling forest or less with a good industry discount, and also flexible to switch which type of resource you want to crawl at any moment. So they are rarely a wrong move and often come out superior to many other build options with little or no downside or tradeoff. But none of that fundamentally depends on the map squares; all of that could be true if they gave production abstractly. The tedious heavy micromanagement to optimize them does depend on the map, and that's really where the criticism comes from.

[Modo]

Good point. By the way, in HOMM you actually have to go those places and you have a weekly time limit until they reset so there's tedium in that too and you can't really automate it.
Gonna have to see if crawlers can be automated to any extent.

[haphazard1]

Very interesting stuff, T-hawk, thanks!

I agree with TheHumanHydra: how did the designers come up with that system? Why place the drones based on the global base list, rather than the player's base list? Not seeing any logic for a connection to the global list at all.

Also, now I am reminded that I have HoMM3 complete installed on this machine and have not played in a while. If I stop posting for a couple days, you will know what happened.

[Mardoc]

You have to wonder how the designers think up these systems! Thanks for the info.

Heh, that one sounds like it was chosen to minimize programming work.  If you're already keeping track of all the bases in the world on one list, it's a lot easier to set up something like T-Hawk described than to rewrite everything to keep track of bases separately by faction.