The really big multiplier effect seems to be the pop booming. Everything else helps, some of it helps a lot. But the pop boom is the key. As T-hawk said, growing for 2 food instead of 40 or 60 or 80 is just massive. And then you have all that extra pop so much sooner, working more tiles and becoming specialists so much sooner. Immense leveraging effect.
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T-hawk Plays Alpha Centauri
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 (June 26th, 2018, 00:08)Kofiman Wrote: For me it was that HoMM 3 felt slow and a little bit souless. The factions felt more similar, the troop types seemed to matter less, getting small edges seemed mostly pointless, and different runs of the same scenario felt largely the same. That's the same thing I'm saying, in subjective terms, while I'm looking for what objective differences account for that. HOMM 3 feels slow because the troops scale up from 2 but the income doesn't, and because you need to build up more rather than leveraging AI weaknesses to beat them when you have far less real strength.* There aren't as many small edges to be had in tactical maneuvering against the AI, the spread in power level of troops (both enemy AI and wild on the map) is less which makes playthroughs feel the same, and the factions are also much more level (they all have multiple good shooters and a big top-end unit). All of that adds up to less of a skill differential in HOMM 3 than 2. *Colonel Santiago should have found her home in HOMM, not SMAC.  That's where she'd be right about quality troops beating many more lesser ones.Heck, Miriam too, the angels of HOMM 3 are where she'd find her divine support that never shows up in SMAC.  (June 26th, 2018, 03:17)Modo Wrote: "Pasargadae starts building an obelisk... then five turns later its borders automatically expand thanks to the Creative civ trait. Riiight." Man, how much have you been stalking around my site.  For the record, I was invited to Civ 4 playtesting but I didn't participate, both because my PC at the time wasn't good enough for it and because I was playing something else instead (man I've been meaning to go back and clean out and sell out that Magic the Gathering Online account forever.)But yeah, I was a newbie once too. Reminds me of another HOMM story. I didn't know how to split a stack of troops (very useful in HOMM 2 to split off one shooter unit as bait that the AI would attack first.) There was this code of silence online (on Usenet, this was before web forums) that nobody would say how to do it. At most, someone would say to read the manual. Of course, we were all playing pirated copies (this was long before Steam) and didn't have that manual, which is exactly what the non-answerers knew. The day I finally found out how to split stacks (shift-click on an empty slot) was the most amazing of my then-short life. (June 26th, 2018, 04:09)haphazard1 Wrote: The really big multiplier effect seems to be the pop booming. Everything else helps, some of it helps a lot. But the pop boom is the key. As T-hawk said, growing for 2 food instead of 40 or 60 or 80 is just massive. And then you have all that extra pop so much sooner, working more tiles and becoming specialists so much sooner. Immense leveraging effect. Yes. The guides will all say that population booming is the result of +6 Growth, and what modifiers can get you to +6 Growth, but they really don't tell you that it's the most important multiplier in the game and that everything else should be bent to make it happen. That's why I'm here. Another category is the morality. The quotes and theming do a good job of scaring you away from some stuff... that happens to be the strongest in mechanical terms. Genejacks top that list, of course. Players run to Democratic because it feels good morally but Police State is considerably stronger for much longer than you think. Boreholes are amazing, ignore Planet's tortured cries. Eco-damage is great if you're prepared to clean up the worms. +Planet is a weak modifier despite eco-harmony feeling good; the 3:2 psi attacker advantage is enough without any +Planet. Most of the ecological facilities (Centauri Preserve etc) besides tree farms are junk. Nerve stapling is great if you can get the charter repealed; it just wasn't necessary in this game as Police State Hive had plenty of drone control anyway.  (June 26th, 2018, 09:47)T-hawk Wrote: [quote pid='678989' dateline='1529989713'] [/quote] Not enough, let me tell you. I regularly go back to your site along with Sirian's and Sulla's to reinforce some (read that many) things that I've learned but still don't use to the same extent as you guys. It's like chess, everyone can see candidate moves but the one that is able to calculate variatons for even a move longer has more info to judge how to move now. It's this ability to decide now based on where you project you'll end up that makes your snowball more snowbally than the rest of us so obviouly I want that too...basically, less farting is more healty or someting like that
Hmm.. do you know of any way to multiplayer HoMM 2, T-hawk? The scenario editor and days taken system may call for a few Adventures or the equivalent.
I do generally put questions such as 'why do I like this' into more subjective terms, because I'm not sure filtering it down to stuff like "I want to make X% of a difference by being skilled" may not be the complete story.. there are other games where I'm pefectly happy despite not making a huge difference.
T-hawk, since you snowball this fast would it be worth it to rush a couple of crawlers instead of upgrading one for rushing secret projects purposes. I stumbled on the below article and was curious to see how the numbers would work in your case
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/c...ng.362581/
The real culprit is the Stockpile bug that is mentioned in the quote. He's intentionally invoking that by adding Stockpile to the build queue after each crawler. With that on the table, getting triggered for each crawler, yes it could work out better to rush-buy many crawlers rather than upgrade one big one.
He says later on that the Stockpile bug isn't necessary. The culprit then is the industry rating, depending on your faction and current SE. They mention the Drones and Hive, and I know Apolyton was pretty obsessed with those factions back in the day. Industry rating works against you for upgrades: each mineral row costs 10 credits even if it's really only 9 or 8 or 7 minerals, so upgrading could get as little as 70% of its nominal value, which could end up worse than rush-buying. They miss this last step of reasoning though, since they're only focused on the SP and not on the overall picture. If you're going to build rather than upgrade crawlers, then whether to rush-buy those crawlers or other things instead (formers, pods) is independent of whether those crawlers are going into a secret project. It's more of a snowball to partial-rush things that are near completion and give faster payback. In other words, the question isn't crawler-upgrade vs crawler-rush, it's crawler-upgrade vs anything-rush. And that's exactly what I did in this game for the earliest projects. I intuitively knew without running the numbers that crawler upgrading wasn't efficient enough yet for the earliest projects, without yet access to components to design expensive crawlers. So then the best snowball was to build the crawlers for the projects while rushing whatever was most efficient anywhere.
T-hawk, how would you adjust your strategy if boreholes weren't in the game? To my Civ4 eyes they look like a mature cottaged iron mine so obviously way to strong despite the eco damage.
Would you rely more on crawlers to compensate for both minerals and energy? Pop booming is also strong but the food requirements are also high so this is on par (maybe better in SMAC since you can't pop boom constantly). I guess my gripe is that in a game where you have more ways to improve tiles than in any other in the franchise you don't really need many of the other improvments or they are situational at best. EDIT: Just realized another thing. The AI is always dumb with workers / formers (how few they build, what improvment they build etc.) and several other areas that are common among all Civ games but pop booming is a high skill cap feature, is this the reason the AI doesn't pose a problem even on Transcend? It's kind of eerie that SMAC and Civ6 both meet at this same place, cool and inovative mechanics that involve the player but are too hard for the AI to use so you almost play these games as a sandbox (Civ4 AI at least can use slavery for example).
If boreholes weren't in the game, I would have developed my strategies without them for the last 18 years and be able to give you a better answer than I can in just a few minutes of speculation.
Regular rocky mines could provide most of the minerals, and yes that's the most optimal kind of tile to crawl (produces a single type of resource). Not sure if I'd build more crawlers or just reassign the same amount from forests to mines instead. The energy from boreholes is hard or impossible to replace. Solars don't really do it since there's only so much high-altitude terrain and raising more takes a lot of former turns. Best guess is that I'd do the energy-park with solars and mirrors at one base to go into all the multiplier facilities. There's also the Drill Aquifer option to create a river. I used it a couple times in this game, but the limiting factor is all the boreholes that terminate a river flowing into its tile, but without the boreholes then you could get some long and productive rivers. Finally, probably the biggest overall shift without boreholes is that Free Market would become nearly mandatory as the only other way to get large quantities of energy. (FM was the one thing I didn't get to show off in this game.) Boreholes are actually the one significant pull away from ICS besides pop-booming. The minerals build multiplier facilities and the energy is worth multiplying. Without boreholes, it probably would be optimal to go maximum-ICS everywhere except one science multiplier base. Pop-booming makes it easy to outdo the AI on Transcend, but if you're good enough to set up everything for pop-booming, you're good enough to outdo the AI anyway. I don't think booming was intended as a high skill cap game-driving feature. It was thrown in to replicate WLTKD in Civ 1 and 2, which is the same effect of growing every turn, but wasn't quite so dominant without crawlers and condensors and tree farms. And there the effect hard-requires maintaining the 50% happy (which itself was much harder without SMAC's wide array of police units and psych/luxury multipliers and specialists) instead of just the SE settings and a creche.
Hey, thanks for the trip down memory lane with this playthrough. I had a lot of fun with this game when I was much younger and much less sophisticated a player. I remember having the fun of the feeling of the technological explosion at the end even if you don't play anywhere near this optimal.
Many of the things that you passed up late game still have incredible potential if you aren't going to finish the game before they pay off. I remember playing a variant game where I disallowed pop booming, secret projects, and placing cities with overlap. The high food cost to grow population doesn't feel so high when every pop is working a three food forest tile and is supported by an orbital satellite. It still felt nuts to see it all unfold at the end, and as you say it is so satisfying when you get access to transcend specialists. There is too much micromanagement for my tastes to replay this nowadays, so I really appreciated getting to experience it again vicariously. |