Planetfall PBEM 2

[Maniac]

What would be better for the PBEM is if the Civilopedia was clear

I can certainly agree with that. Of course, that's too late for the misunderstandings that have already happened.

[Sareln]

Oh hey. Good thing I still pop in here from time to time. I'm fine with calling it if the remaining players want to. Or we can keep playing. Doesn't really make a difference to me.

[Maniac]

I'm glad you're all having so much fun...

[Sareln]

I'm glad you're all having so much fun...

I am having fun, but it's fun that rolls around once every 48 hours if we're lucky

[Maniac]

Isn't that the best you can expect from a PBEM, especially one that's at an advanced stage that involves moving more than a few units?

[Sareln]

RB has ruined my standards for what makes a slow PBEM. With proper time-zone staggering and conscientious play a group of players can definitely keep a game at 24 hrs / turn through completion. Takes good habits though. I know I don't have them yet.

[Iskender]

What action would according to you be to the benefit of the PBEM? Would it be better for the PBEM if trenches got boosted, if invisible submarines could pillage you with impunity, if multiple formers could build bunkers, if Iskender could bomb you with collateral interceptors, etcetera?

Or, say, your probe teams could expose enemy probe teams so you can kill them with regular units, move on with your own probes and i.e. liberate enemy bases? Which is exactly what you have patched in for yourself, and which is exactly what just happened.

Meanwhile, i.e., this gets dismissed as intended behaviour:


Everybody be cool, we've prevented four dangerous fungal blooms!

I don't mind a challenge every now and then, but at the very least I expect unbiased rules. This is obviously not the case, so yeah, I'm out.

[Mardoc]

Maniac, I do think the whole Fungal Bloom thing is exceedingly opaque. If I understand it correctly now, there's no point to having culture beyond what you need for borders, you have to keep an anti-worm force on hand at all times? Culture does nothing whatsoever unless you're in that Terraforming civic, and even then it does nothing that Formers can't do? That's certainly not how I interpreted 'prevents fungal bloom'

[Maniac]

On probe teams:

In vanilla probe teams can move around freely. In Planetfall probe teams can spot other probe teams. This had as a consequence AI probe teams sometimes merrily walked into your sight, making them an easy kill. To prevent that, rather than code some revolutionary probablistic decision making AI, I let the AI cheat by increasing the pathing cost to tiles to which probe teams are visible on. Result: they'd walk around your probe teams.

In this game I'm playing the Angels, so obviously I'm more likely to discover bugs involving probe teams. I noticed that I was unable to move to a plot which I knew was near one of Mardoc's probe teams in Sareln's territory. I knew Mardoc had a probe team there, because my probe team had seen it two turns earlier or so while my probe team was still on the transport that was shipping it to its drop off point. I had not considered that human players would also be affected by a pathing cost change, so I released a patch.

Iskender is claiming now that probe teams not able to reveal other probe teams inside someone else's territory is the intended behaviour, that I deliberately changed that rule for this game, and that I abused it in the process of capturing University Base by killing the probe team that could have spotted my Spectres. Above I've explained the history behind the probe team movement issue. Regarding capturing University Base: Iskender ended his probe team's turn inside his territory and inside my probe team's line of sight which was stationed in Academy Park. I did not move my probe team to reveal Iskender's probe team. In other words, I would have been able to spot and kill Iskender's probe team regardless of the code change in that patch. Iskender can't blame the loss of University Base on the patch. It's his own fault for not building more probe teams, or covering his probe team with a military unit.


Regarding fungal blooms:

The original reason for adding a cultural fungal bloom buffer was to reduce the boring and repetitive action of removing fungus with your formers. It was never intended as a full stop on native life spawning. Don't make the mistake now of dismissing the cultural buffer as worthless. If Iskender didn't have a cultural buffer, he would now besides the native life also be dealing with:
- four more xenofungus plots (+50% defense for the native)
- a spawning spot NW-NW of Fort Superiority (yet another +50% defense, and -2 Planet making follow-up fungal blooms even more likely)
- a fungal tower on that spawning spot (able to kill the bunker in Fort Survivalist, and with a bonus against Iskender's interceptors)
- another worm on that spawning spot blockading the surrounding plots

In short, native life spawns are much MUCH easier to deal with if they're not accompanied with fungal growth.

If you still don't believe fungal blooms are working as intended, go check the code yourself in CvCity::doFungalBloom()
You'll note that specific code is written dealing with the situation when you are and when you aren't protected by culture. We're not dealing here with some obscure bug which I refuse to patch because it's causing Iskender problems. :rolleyes:

I agree the tooltip can lead to a misunderstanding for people who have never played Planetfall before. HOWEVER I'd like to point out that Fort Superiority has 900+ culture. That results in 18 fungal bloom "diminishings". Before Iskender's unlucky streak of fungal blooms happened, Fort Superiority could only prevent IIRC 10 or 11 fungal blooms. That means Iskender has already had to deal with 7 fungal blooms before. He should have been fully aware by now that his culture isn't completely preventing native life spawns. So to start acting all surprised NOW, and using the native life spawns as an excuse to quit a game he's losing, is rather convenient in my opinion.

[Sareln]

So, I guess the game is over then? If it is, thanks for playing guys. I'd like confirmation before diving into spoiler threads naturally.

-Sareln-