So while discussion retorts, we ended up with two ideas for minor changes to the book system.


Idea 1 :
Limit the number of starting retorts at 4 instead of 6. Finding retorts still allowed up to 6.
Explanation : The game is really meant to be played with books, not all retorts. Notice how none of the original default wizards had more than one retort. Retorts represent knowledge you obtained before the start of the game while books represent knowledge you obtain during the game. Thus, retorts are inherently better if chosen wisely, as they offer something you can right away, over something you obtain later. It also makes no sense from an RPG perspective to have a character start with already maxed out knowledge.
Actual uses of more than 4 retorts generally mean one of the following :
-Stacking cumulative retorts for multiplying the benefit
-Gambling on getting good spells from the very few available books, if not, losing the game
-Playing without spells entirely relying on normal troops and military/economic advantages provided by the retorts.
-Trying to design a "worst wizard" by wasting picks on useless retorts.

I don't think either of these are making the game any better at all.

Idea 2 :
Book 4 will contain 1 more very rare but 1 fewer uncommon, book 8 contains 1 more uncommon but no very rare. However this change does not apply to found books - finding your 8th book still gives you a very rare, instead the additional very rare will be missing from the 10th book.
Optional : reduce RP cost of Stream of Life. Possible swap the RP cost of a few other spells as well.
Explanation : It's much harder to find very rare spells from treasure now, and the AI is smarter at trading them, so the advantage of dual realms to obtain more spells from those sources is less relevant, thus they might need an additional very rare they can research. The 8th book offers the ability to guaranteed early research of a relevant powerful uncommon, which is a game changer, making the pick worth it even without an additional very rare, as well as jumping up from 6 to all 10 uncommons in one go. This pick thus allows early Werewolves, Giant Spiders, Gargoyles, and Aura of Majesty. Unfortunately Life has no such desirable early research as their low RP cost spells are not particularly useful for early game. So swapping RP costs a little might be desirable, in fact we might want to make it so that each realm gets two "useful early and low RP" uncommons, the second in the 640 RP slot.
Since guaranteed uncommons is not a thing for found spellbooks, those would remain unchanged and still provide the very rare earlier - finding a 8th book would be too weak otherwise. The 10th book can afford losing one of its 3 very rares, especially as it also provides bonus research and cost reduction.
This would mean the following table of book effects :
Book 01 : 3/1/0/0, 0/0/0/0, Find/Trade common
Book 02 : 3/2/1/0, 1/0/0/0, Find/Trade Uncommon
Book 03 : 4/3/2/1, 2/0/0/0, Find/Trade Rare
Book 04 : 5/3/3/3, 3/0/0/0, Find/Trade Very Rare
Book 05 : 6/4/4/4, 4/1/0/0,
Book 06 : 7/5/5/5, 5/1/0/1,
Book 07 : 10/6/6/6, 5/2/0/1,
Book 08 : 10/10/7/6, 5/0/2/1,
Book 09 : 10/10/10/7, 5/0/2/0, +8% research, -5% casting cost
Book 10 : 10/10/10/10, 5/0/2/0, +16% research, -10% casting cost

Has anybody else tried this?  A few friends talked me into playing it recently.  It's a roguelike with D&D inspirations that's free to play online.

In running it for ~20 hours or so I have to say I'm very impressed.  Probably more challenging than FTL though my experience in the latter might cause me to be biased.  Lots of possible encounters/different things to account depending on gear/race you play/etc, very punishing mistakes, yet the best players are able to pull off win streaks.

If you can get past the graphics the replay value seems to be incredible.

Granted, stuff like wraith form or flying already makes it possible.
But, in the early game that's quite expensive. How about allowing ships to go back into port?

The biggest advantage would be the possibility to place a city strategically to let two separate seas communicate with each other, shortening considerably ship logistics.

I don't think that there are big drawbacks. If there were big drawbacks then there would be already the same drawbacks for the spells I mentioned above or air walking and anything similar. But as these are acceptable then any drawbacks should be acceptable too.

The folks at Extra Credits did an analysis about games on steam and found something interesting about Civilization (At 2:47):

If you patrol the units on floating island then you can move the units after the floating island moves...  But if you do not put the units into patrol then the movement points of the units on the floating island will be consumed on the moving of floating island...  Can you make it so that moving floating islands and ships will not consumed movement points of the units on them as default???  Thanks in advance...

We talked about Spellweaver being the main culprit behind retort stacking/rush strategies being too powerful.
Are we still ok with it as is, or do we want a change?
With cheaper summoning, it's no longer important to have this effect, or keep it this powerful.

Looking at the math, Archmage is +50% SP for both combat and overland. Adding that together it's 100%.
Spellweaver is +50% skill on overland only, but that is the equivalent of 225% SP, so +125%. There is also a 25% bonus on power income, in best case if all power is spent on skill, that brings up the total to +181%. However it costs two picks so being almost twice as effective would be still ok.
Except, there are two small but important details. One, overland skill is usually more powerful than combat skill, because it is always useful while combat skill only during wars, and only when fighting an enemy with higher skill.
The other, Spellweaker does work on Amplifying Towers. Assuming you have 200 skill out of which 70 are towers, you have 16901 SP. With Spellweaver you have 300 skill out of which 70 are still towers, so it's the equivalent of 52901 SP. That's more than 200% higher and this is without considering the effect of the power bonus which raises that to 275%. And that is way better than Archmage even without considering whether combat or overland skill is more useful.

Hello, new forum user here.  I followed induktio here.  He's not the only one working on major SMAC mods, but my approach is different / more traditional.  Just changing alphax.txt and the faction.txt files.  You can do a lot with that.  Since you have some active SMAC players, thought y'all should know.

SMACX AI Growth mod
Copyright 2018 by Brandon Van Every
Version 1.15, July 30, 2018



The design of this mod, and all the playtesting needed to improve it, have taken 3 PERSON MONTHS of full time work to produce.  In some other universe where I made money, this could have been a quarter of a year's salary.  Some people release complete, if trivial, commercial games in that kind of timeframe.  Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a decidedly non-trivial game, one whose complexities have kept me occupied for nearly 20 years.  So it takes much longer to mod it, in any substantive way.  I am at times amazed, when various game developers do "game jams" and claim to produce quality in a short amount of time.  It has never happened with any mod I've worked on.  Perhaps changing the rules of wargames, simply invites time to disappear. 

This mod aspires to professionalism, to be substantially better than the original game.  I hope people will try and enjoy it, as that validates the effort spent.  Please let me know if you find any bugs or omissions.

INSTALLATION

- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with Alien Crossfire expansion is required.
- This mod is for the OFFICIAL game.  Unofficial patches that change the alphax.txt file, like the Yitzi 3.5d patch, will not work!
- I suggest installing the OFFICIAL game in a custom directory using custom installation options, and then this mod.
- You can have many installations of SMAC on your computer.  They're small and won't interfere with each other.
- This mod contains alphax.txt, the 14 faction *.txt files, and this readme_mod.txt
- Drop the files on top of your SMAC installation, overwriting the existing files.

DESIGN SUMMARY

- I've tried to make the AI play better.  That's really important.
- The AI uses Foil Probe Teams now.  Watch your sea bases!
- Factions are better rounded, and most don't have penalties.  This helps the AI.
- Aliens are no longer overpowered.  They are no better than normal factions.
- The world generator is tweaked to give the AI factions more land to grow in.
- Enormous 80x160 and Giant 128x256 maps are defined.
- Choosing 30%..50% land mass yields substantial continents, but still plenty of ocean for the Pirates.
- I test gameplay on an Enormous map with 30%..50% land mass.  That's my benchmark for "correct experience".
- Techs, facilities, units, and abilities are completely reordered, for what I consider to be good pacing.
- Secret Projects come later in the game and cost at least 300 minerals.
- Overpowered Secret Projects come MUCH later.
- Social Engineering choices are gradualist and incremental, to facilitate mixing and matching.
- Future Society choices become available in late midgame and are not overpowered.
- Completing the entire tech tree is required to Transcend.
- Facilities, abilities, and units are assigned to Explore, Discover, Build, or Conquer according to what they actually do.
- "Explore" really means "colonization and growth" to the AI.  It doesn't mean exploring.
- Planet Busters can hit anywhere on Planet.
- Armor has been strengthened to match weapons at the same tech level.

DESIGN DETAILS

[etc.]  Go to my mod's homepage to get it, or to read more about it.  I'm happy to answer questions here too if you have any.

Solar Settlers is a game by BrainGoodGames. They're making "competitive single-player" strategy games: You don't compete against other players (unless you feel like grinding the ladder), but the game ranks you based on the number of games won and lost, and adjusts its difficulty to keep you challenged.

Its about colonizing a solar system. To win, you must settle a sufficient number of colonists in habitats in a certain number of turns, and these numbers go up and down respectively as you rank up. It's all very abstract, in a kind of Euro-board-game style. You start on the center of a small map with three colonists. The map is split into sectors, with most being unexplored. After moving a colonist to an explored sector, you can explore an adjacent one. The sectors can contain open space, or various different planets. Your colonists can obtain different resources from planets:

• Hydrogen: Is expended whenever you move. There are no other limitations: You can move a colonist over the entire map in one turn if you have enough.
  
• Oxygen: Every colonist not settled in a habitat consumes one unit at the end of turn.
  
• Iron: The main resource for building improvements, but you'll need the other resources too.
  
• Cards: You draw a random card that represents a possible upgrade to a planet (or a star base that you can plop down in empty space). Apart from a few exceptions, those cards are the only way to construct habitats, so they're very important.
  
• More colonists
  

Baby arrived early. Details for takeover here. 

Boudica (AGG/CHM!!), civ not wrecked yet, not hopelessly out of the game but no pressure to win. You know you want to...

I've done the hard part just getting this leader to this point without being at the bottom of the leaderboard. Take this fancy car for a spin. Live a little. Wreck something. It'll be fun. I'll stick around to give input if you want me too.

Thanks!

So, I played this scenario (EDIT: I should clarify: Imperium 46!) like two weeks ago and obtained an extermination victory in 2488.  Really don't have time or energy to write a full report with pictures at the moment (although I did take some screenshots).  Will finish this report later.  

Main highlights:

Mrrshans attacked my second planet with 4 large warships early in game (7 heavy lasers apiece).  Took several missile bases and some ships to fight off.  Had to rushbuild at the last minute due to DSS not popping early enough to get scanning range to detect it earlier.  

Edit: After reading other reports, I guess I should mention that I was lucky enough to have the Mrrshans colonize that world (forget the name) that was the logical 3rd planet to get, due west of the starting 2 core worlds. I didn't really hear from the Psilons until well into the 2400s, and the Humans I didn't meet until the very end of the game.

In my game, the Mrrshan capital of Fierias went rich.  Didn't really matter except by allowing the cats to hang around a bit longer before I was able to finish them off in the late game.  

2395:  I bombed Tao.  It only had 9 Hyper-V missile bases.  Hard difficulty sure isn't hard compared to impossible!

2401:  Captured Tao.  Got inertial stabilizer and II-9.  

I took a bunch of Silicoid worlds around this time (the ones they colonized around my starting core two worlds.  I was able to capture them basically right after their colonization).  

The Silicoids had some huge ships that were just awful to fight, including some with auto repair if I recall correctly.  

2425:  Captured Vulcan.  ECM1, Class4 shields, Range6, Graviton beam, NPGs, ISS.  

2430:  Cryslon taken.  Class X Planetary taken.  (Thankfully I had already bombed out missile bases a few turns earlier before Silicoids could build the planetary shield).  

2451:  Fierias bombed.  Super-cheap nuke bombers still working on their class II shields.  Planet captured shortly thereafter, cleaning out all of their obsolete techs. From this point on, I was untouchable by the AI (even the Psilons), but it would still take quite a while before I could successfully attack any of the Psilon worlds with their class 22 shielding, Mark IV battle computers, ECM6, and scatterpack VIIs.

2480:  Xudax (Psilon world) bombed out using mediums sporting Omega-V bombs, plus supporting ships.  I had several big stacks of hundreds of speed-4 medium bombers by this point, so I could bait them into firing on one stack that danced around while the other one went in for the kill, taking almost no losses from battle to battle.  From this point on, it was just a question of how quickly I could bomb out Psilon worlds to reach an extermination victory since I had been 1 vote shy of getting a council victory in the 2475 election.  

Extermination victory in 2488.