Creating a new Tech and using it as a prerequisite.
Well I suppose I opened a can of worms over in strategy by suggesting that a person do this to help with their custom faction. Their question was along the lines of 'How would I give Punishment Spheres to my custom faction?' I suggested just giving it as a free facility, but if you wanted to, you could create a 'Tiny-tech-tree' just for that faction and punishment spheres, allowing them to be built by that faction and no other. Or some varieties of either plan....
A. Giving a faction a free facility
1. Open Alpha.txt
2. Find the list of facilities
3. Count down to the one you'd like to give free: in this case it's # 23, punishment spheres
4. Open your custom faction file...Big Brother
5. Look down to the line that, in another faction perhaps, would give benefits like FUNGNUTRIENT, 1, or SOCIAL, ++POLICE.
6. ADD to that line 'FACILITY, 23' IF, and only IF that makes 8 or less 'Specials' for that faction. Any abilities over 8 will be ignored
B. Creating a mini-tech-tree for a custom faction (see notes for smax, this is for smac):
1. Open Alpha.txt
2. Find the section on Facilities..find Punishment Spheres..what tech prerequisite does it need?
3. Ah, 'MilAlg' is the shorthand for Advanced Military Algorithms
4. Change that to read 'Brother', the name of your new tech
5. At this point, Punishment spheres are eliminated from the game..no tech to reach them!
6. Head up to the 'Tech' section of Alpha.txt
7. Replace one of the lines : User Technology 0 ...etc...with your new tech, making sure to call it 'Brother' in the Shorthand section.
8. Might look like :
Big Brother Watches, Brother, 2,2,2,2, BBpreq, none, 000000000
9. Great! now add another tech:
Big Brother Begins, BBpreq, 2,2,2,2, Thresh, none, 000000000
10. Go back to your faction and give them an additional starting tech on the special abilities line as above...'Tech, BBpreq' make sure you use commas and capitals identically in all cases.
11. Now, only Big Brother can make punishment spheres, but he has to study 'Big Brother Watches' to get them...no other faction can study this until Transcendence (that's why I used 'Thresh' as a prerequisite for your custom tech.
Some comments: I used 'Thresh' because if you simply put 'none, none' it's available to everyone. If you put 'disable, disable' it is eliminated from the game entirely (supposedly).
Since this is here to encourage you to fool around with the .txt files, I'll add a few pointers.
1. Changing the prerequisite techs can be used to change access to: SP's, other Techs, Units: from abilities to chassis, restrictions on terraforming or FOPs, just about anything.
2. Be sure to think about any techs that might rest on the tech you are changing: if you take lasers away from the laser tech and put them on a custom tech or add them to say 'Industrial base' to give 2 armor and 2 weapon with the same tech, be SURE to go back and see what other techs look to Lasers (Physic) as their prerequisite. Should Non-linear mathmatics now depend on industrial base? In other words, you need to look up and down the tech tree when making changes.
3. the nine 000000000 work as described at the top of the Tech section. You can add these abilities to your techs by substituting a '1' in the correct position.
4. the 2,2,2,2 section of a tech is for the AI. By tweaking these numbers you can influence the AI to study or ignore the tech as long as possible. In other words, if you look at a faction interested in 'Conquer', say Miriam [0, **1**, 0,0,1], she'll love to study a tech with [50,0,0,0] as it's AI - Influencer. Builder AI factions [-1, 0, 0, 1, 0] would try to avoid, well, just wouldn't be interested in that tech. There are many things you can use this for to influence thet AI's studies and techs...play!
Well, this was supposed to be brief for you asking over on the strategies forum, so I'll leave it here for now...I'll probably come back and edit this later as surely I got Something wrong
-Smack
