Nanocaust Invasion Changes

[BadgerBadger]

I'm thinking of having the Nanocaust invasion not be started at the beginning of the game (though the current behaviour would still be an option in the game lobby).

Instead an artifact with a strong Energy Suppression Field would be seeded in the galaxy. When you find it you can hack it for a bunch of science, but when you do it will start the Nanocaust invasion. The Nanocaust would get a bunch of extra units when they spawn (based on the AIP, so they will make up for lost time if the game has been going on for a while).

I think this would encourage more people to try the Nanocaust out, since it's an opt-in crisis rather than one that starts by default at the beginning of the game. Like the Fallen Spire from AIWC, you could just play the game normally, but if for some reason you needed a major distraction for the AI, you can always go for it.

What do people think of this idea?

[x4000]

You mentioned this in an email, and I had to really think about this a lot. 

My first instinct was that I love the idea -- for all the reasons you mention.  It's a way to make the game far more rich regardless of the lobby settings people choose, and it then plays into all the quick starts as a nice opt-in crisis, too.  So I'm a huge fan of that.

My second thought was "oh man, the performance could be really terrible if there are tons of fights in the background going on in potentially any and every campaign."  Essentially that someone might be playing along just fine, but then they get the nanocaust to come out and play and their performance tanks because of all the background activity that these cause.

Ultimately, thinking about this along with a linked report about someone with existing degraded performance made me come up with this: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=21429 (Performance Boost: Sim Step Bundling For Background Battles).  With that sort of thing in tow, that basically eliminates my reservations; the actual processing for the factions themselves is all in the long-term-planning threads, and thus doesn't impact the simulation performance even if it was slow for some reason.  Those are nonsim specifically so that they can be super-long-running (a few seconds, wow ), so the actual brains behind something like the nanocaust is not a problem.  It's the cosntant background fighting that could be an issue with any of the things that crop up in this regard.

But I certainly want for there to be more of a focus on discovering factions through gameplay, and of player-chosen brinkmanship later in the game, etc.  So it only makes natural sense to make those performance changes (which will be good in general, anyway), and then your idea here really fits perfectly.

TLDR: I think it's a great idea and I'd love to see that happen.

[BadgerBadger]

Well, much worse than the Nanocaust in terms of overall performance impact is Civil War mode, where the player can have lots of AIs constantly fighting eachother. I bet that's what's really driving the performance slowdown in 0021288, since that game has the AI in Civil War mode.

If there was some mechanism by which the player could choose intensity/colour (and possible allegiance? The key one is the colour, I could just have it use the default intensity and allegiance) of a minor faction while in game then I could have many of the minor factions available in every game as opt-ins. The problem is getting the colour right, since I can't use a default colour (given that the player might have set the AI to be that colour, for example). At the moment the player still needs to select the Nanocaust in the lobby and give it a colour.

Factions that could be easily included:
Devourer <=== definitely would be fun to let the player unleash
Zenith Trader
HRF        <=== Would be a good way to let an overmatched player still try to win a game they would otherwise lose
Marauders <=== Chaos!
Nanocaust <=== Chaos!
Macrophages <=== Chaos!

If that sounds like a worthwhile thing to include (given your limited time budget) then I can get everything set up to work and put in some CHRIS_TODO for where the GUI would go.

An alternative would be to prevent the player from being able to use the Default Colours of the in-game available minor factions for any other faction in the game.

[x4000]

Understood on the Civil War mode, and I figured that was what was going on in the other save, but it's something that can easily snowball as players add more stuff in general anyway.

For the intensity and color, those are things that we could make be galaxy options under a "Discoverable Factions" section or somesuch.  I'd have to make it so that these settings can then run some extra code to update the color in realtime, and make it so that they are assigned to the faction in question.

In general having the ability to tweak faction colors during gameplay would be useful, I think.  It would play well with multiplayer plans, for instance.

These might be good things for me to focus on during the polish period, but you could indeed just set up CHRIS_TODOs in the meantime to get the rest of it going.

[BadgerBadger]

This is still in progress, I've just been really busy lately.