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.

Ok this is going to be super quick and without pictures because I managed to overwrite all my save files after I finished playing  before I could go back and get pictures or review what had happened.

Here is a screenshot I just grabbed from the starting save to help with explanation.
   
I settled Obaca on the first turn and set about building up both worlds.  I opened early research to expand my range for future transports and settled in to await the coming of the AI at UR Thrax.  I left a scout in orbit without thinking about it with the result that an unescorted Psilon colony ship retreated because their initiative was higher than mine and I couldn’t withdraw in time.  The Alkari wound up grabbing it a couple years later in 2352 if memory serves.  I instantly sent transports along with a minimal force of laser fighters that I had built up and grabbed the world.  It turns out that an Ultra Rich size 45 world full of bears can build a missile base in two years even without any factories, so I was pretty safe.  From there I progressed on to take Tao from the Silicoids when Controlled Dead came in literally two years later, and then paused to build up my new holdings.

While that was going on the Silicoids were expanding east along the top of the map.  Once they were established at Radiated Celtsi I took Barren Anraq out from behind them and once they had reached Barren Crypto in the far east I bombed out Radiated Celtsi (which I could never settle) and then invaded Crypto which locked up the northeast corner.

Once that was done and I had a force of Nuke bombers to go along with my NPG fighters (I think I got NPGs from one of my early invasions, probably Tao) I pushed west into Silicoid space eventually exterminating them.  Curving around to the southwest I consumed the Mrrshan homeworld (their second planet was overrun by the Psilons earlier in the game) and exterminated both them and the Alkari, neither of whom ever amounted to anything.  By that time, it was ~2470 and I ran into a brick wall against the extremely advanced technology of the Psilons.  I think that I COULD have beaten them with enough buildup and effort to crack one of their worlds and snag some of their tech, but it would have been a bloody fight.  Instead my population (plus two votes from the Humans who I never met at all in this game) let me take a 2475 election victory.

Shadow Score: 2424        (2474 victory date – 50 for Domination)

As there are a lot of major changes this time, I'm posting it as a beta release.
Please report any problems, or balance issues, especially related to interacting with the other plane, the new Heroic Heart spell, the new Necromancy item power, and AI hostility reevaluations.
Download the file Caster54Beta.zip from the usual location.

Quote:5.4 Beta
-Removed spell : Move Fortress
-New/Returning spell : Plane Shift. Arcane Rare, has the same effect as old Life Uncommon.
-The AI will use Plane Shift more often on higher difficulty levels.
-Heroic Shout is now a Life Uncommon.
-Planar Travel is removed from the game.
-New Arcane spell : Heroic Heart. Costs 18 MP, 440 RP. Heals 3 damage on a hero.
This spell aims at making heroes more playable for non-Life wizards. It's strictly worse than Healing but everyone gets it.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common, Disenchant Area as an Uncommon, Plane Shift as a Rare in research order.
-Heroic Heart shows up as a common in treasure. Disjunction shows up in treasure as a Rare.
-Plane Shift, Summon Champion, do not show up in treasure. (Create Artifact was already disabled)
-AI prioritizes targeting heroes with healing spells over other units more.
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer was broken
-Fixed bug : Hostility reevaluation timer resetting to 0 when Spell of Mastery was broken for nonhuman wizards casting it
-Offering a tribute to a wizard will result in hostility reevaluation at the start of their next turn, if the wizard was hostile.
-Slightly moved up Blood Lust on the AI research order.
-The Plane Shift ability on units (Shadow Demons) can only be used if the other plane has been discovered by opening a tower or researching the Plane Shift spell.
-Removed item power : Planar Travel
-New item power : Necromancy. Cost 1000, required 5 Death books. At end of battle, dead nonhero friendly units raise as undead, up to 140 total cost per hero level. Note that already undead units cannot be raised again.
-Fixed Bug : Plane Shift allows movement onto a tile that contains an uncleared lair, node, or an ungarrisoned city.

I recently started listening to this, and I figured a bunch of RB people would be interested too: The Upper Memory Block (trigger warning: extreme Canadianity). Joe in the podcast takes on games from the DOS and Win95/98 eras and not only reviews them but does a deep and excellent delve into the development stories. He's not hit Civilization yet for fear of overwhelm reasons but he has hit other RB loves. It's a great nostalgia trip for me and I know you guys are in this demo too. After all, Civ4 is how old?

During the initial discussion of the concept for this Imperium, I posted:

(June 26th, 2018, 20:23)haphazard1 Wrote: I think the starting colony ship would be needed, or else the start rolled needs to have a close neighbor or two so conquest can begin early. An isolated start would mean the player is stuck at one (or two) planets for some time while the AIs expand out to mulitple worlds; not sure that big a starting deficit could be overcome on impossible.

I recently got sucked into a "Long Turn" game, which is basically FreeCiv's answer to PitBoss games, but with their own homebrew ruleset.

Initially I went on the FreeCiv forums hoping to find a utility that could convert some of Civ2's old scenarios to be playable in FreeCiv.  I had had an urge to play them but was bothered by my knowledge of how fundamentally broken Civ2's AI is, so I thought I'd see if their AI could provide some improvement.  I failed in this quest, but in discussion on the forums, I got invited to join one of their "LongTurn" games that was just starting up.

LongTurn is a "Turn-a-day" multiplayer game using the highly flexible FreeCiv client.  Whatever FreeCiv lacks in approachability or aesthetics, it more than makes up for in it's modularity and flexibility.  Entire rulesets can be swapped out and replaced with the flick of a wrist.  And that's what LongTurn uses.  Over the years they've refined a ruleset that is a bastard offspring of Civilization 2 and 3, and adjusted to for multiplayer.  It was quite interesting to try to learn the game all over again.

Everybody started with 5 Settlers, 5 Workers, and 2 Explorers, and all movement points were Tripled.  Explorers ran around the map at 9 squares per turn seeing with a 3 square radius.  Settlers founded cities that encompassed 45 tiles (7x7 with corners missing, as produced by a sqrt(13) radius), workers worked at 3x normal speed (as befitted the accelerated pace), and cities were founded with a "Free Granary" effect that lasted until size 5.  This was a ruleset designed to skip the bullshit and get straight to the action.

For this game they were attempting a Two-Team game, and if you know anything about the snowballing nature of Civ, it is not surprising that this ended up being its undoing.  But I was oblivious to any imbalances at first, since there wasn't a lot of communication between Blue and Red teams.  Besides, what did I care?  We had a whole world to explore!  182x182 squares on an X/Y wrapping world.  Two stripes of 18 players each across a weird snaky continent.

Also, I ended up making my own set of terrain graphics, because the existing ones either showed too little of the map (tiles too big), distorted the view (isometric perspective on a rectangular map? Maybe that works out fine with X/Y wrapping, but I didn't want to wrap my head around it), or were just too ugly.  So I took an ugly tileset, and made it 43% less ugly!
Here's are Before/After pictures:

Here you can see the lands of the Hanseatic League (get it?) with the LT ruleset's large city-radii and my workers wandering about the countryside making improvements.  You can also witness my smoother, more distinct terrain, and the pip-based tile yield graphics.  Your retinas will appreciate the reduced visual clutter.

Bronswiek is displaying enhanced tile-yields, because it was where I built the Pyramids(+1 production/tile) and Colossus(+1 trade/tile), both of which are Small Wonders that are available for each nation.  Pyramids also lift the penalty to tile yields of 3+ for the governments of both Despotism and Tribalism, basically launching you into an early Monarchy (but without the reduced corruption)  Did I mention this is a custom ruleset? 

So, for the last month and a half, I've been playing away at this game, one turn a day (technically a 23 hour clock so as not to show time-zone favoritism), and enjoying chatting with my team on our own Discord server.  Arguing over research policies, discussing city placement patterns, coordinating military efforts on our 3 fronts (Russian Front, Foothold, and Panama), and delegating control of nations when players have to go on vacation.  As happens in any large long-term commitment, a number of players dropped out, and we ended up with about 20 players controlling 36 nations.  I'm currently controlling the Hansa, the Kashmiri (neighbors to the NE), and the Ottomans (who control a strategically vital isthmus).

It was only last week though that I realized "Hey, this is the sort of thing that the PitBoss players on the RB forums are interested in.  Wait a minute, I joined a PitBoss game without realizing it!", so I thought I'd come share some of my adventures with another strange and different Civ-Playing community.  If anybody has accused RealmsBeyond of being stuck in the past, they've got nothing on the FreeCiv people!

FreeCiv: Still trying to answer the question "What if Civilization 2 had a sequel?"