Special house rules

[Maniac]

In the beginning of the first democracy game I posted a poll concerning a few features/exploits about which there is no agreement in the SMAC community whether they should be allowed or not. At the start of the a new democracy game, it seems apt to repeat this poll. The exploits/features I'm talking about are explained below. The explanation shows my personal opinion about those features/exploits rather well, but whatever.

Perhaps an explanation of these "features" is required, for relative newbies and non-SMAC-owner(s) participating in this Democracy game.

Any SMAC owner knows that minerals not needed for the production of the current unit/facility/SP are transferred to the next project, with an upper limit of ten mins. The Stockpile Energy Bug means that, besides being kept for the next production, those excess minerals are also transferred to energy credits IF Stockpile Energy has been put in the build queue. For example, if a base produces 10 minerals per turn and is two minerals away from completing an impact rover, 8 minerals will be transferred to the next project, which is Stockpile Energy in the build queue. Stockpiling energy transfers these 8 minerals into 4 energy. When one changes production to a tree farm on the same turn the impact rover is complete, the 8 minerals are kept, but you have gained four free credits out of nowhere. This is an obvious bug and normal procedure would be to not exploit it.
However the problem is that, unless you put something in the build queue other than StEn, the production automatically switches to Stockpile Energy Bug after you have completed a facility or SP. IIRC this is not true for units, where the production of a second unit of the same type is started and thus no free credits are gained. This gives an unfair benefit for builders over warmongers, and therefore using the Stockpile Energy bug is allowed in any PBEM game I’ve played.

A second issue is retro-engineering. When a unit is probed, it appears in the Unit Workshop. This allows the unit components to be modified and used in other unit designs. No problem with that of course, unless the unit probed has an ability, armour, weapon etcetera you haven’t researched yourself. Discussion among players is whether it is allowed to use that unresearched component when designing and building other units.

Crawler upgrades. The designers of the game intended to prevent rushbuys of Secret Projects. This is obvious by the fact it takes four energy to get one mineral when rushing an SP, where it is 2 energy for a min when rushing a facility. Therefore it can be considered an exploit to use crawler upgrades. For example one can upgrade a simple 0-1-2*2 supply crawler to a version with high armour and special abilities, worth about 500 minerals, for just a few hundred credits. That way one can complete a SP in one turn. Normally rushbuying would take 2000 credits and SPs would take turns to complete and actually be a huge project.

Workshop upgrades. Upgrading a unit manually on the field costs its entire turn. However, one can avoid that by upgrading all units of that type in the workshop. That way they still keep all their movement points. This is a clear exploit, as it was obviously not intended by the game creators.

There are still many other obvious exploits, for example the demon boil bug, which aren’t allowed in PBEM and I suppose will neither be allowed here. About the above four however people may have a different opinion. We’ll see.

I would also like to propose to implement a little tweak to the alphax.txt, "invented" by Googlie:

add this line to your #UNITS list in alpha.txt and alphax.txt (and remember to increase the #units by one as well):

Foil Probe, Cruiser, Probe Team, Scout, 11, 0, 0, DocInit, -1, 00000000000000000000000000

You'll be amazed at the number of foil probes the AI builds.

I've lost techs to probes and bases to mind contol, even when I've had double probe defenses (the AI is good at sending two or three foil probes to your bases, the first one taking out your probe defense and the second and third stealing techs or energy/mind controlling/crippling research)

It should improve AI performance.

If there are any other exploits, features or rules tweaks you'd like to discuss, please mention them.

Edit: Three days time, five votes.

[Drogue]

Voted no to all, except stockpile energy bug, since that means a builder would have to put something in after a project. I think we shouldn't insert stockpile energy, but I think it's a lot of hassle for a minor cheat.

[Micha]

Yes to stockpile energy and upgrade with unit workshop. Everything else: no

[Jamski]

Yes to everything - if we all do it, then its fair. Although I've personally never used any of these, even against the 'puter.

-Jam

[Drogue]

Just because it's the same for everyone, doesn't make it fair. 100% water would be the same for everyone, but the Pirates would get a little advantage there

[moomin]

No to all the cheating, yes to the AI tweak. The AI needs every edge it can get.

[Method]

reverse engineering isnt' cheating is it? isn't that more of a feature than a bug?

[Main_Brain]

^To use the Unit-Design you probed yes.
but to use the Weapon/armor/whatever on other Designs imo no.

[Maniac]

TKG and Main_Brain sum up the discussion on that point pretty well.

Anyway, this is about the most close poll until now in this PBEMACDG!

[Archaic]

Yes to all. I see no problem with simply using the features of the game to ones advantage, especially when we know what they all are anyway.

[FlameFlash]

I love multi-choice polls... it means I can vote xenobanana along with everything I actually want.

[Alex]

No to everything but the stockpiling bug and Googlie's tweak.

[Hercules]

I suppose one of the more difficult bugs to quite understand (the how to) is the retro-engineering feature. Nevertheless having this included ( retro engineering) would open up some great RP discussion when the opportunity arises.

Abstained first time round but would vote for it this time.