Negative Creativity

Given that creativity is part of a random number algorithm, it's most likely a division error.

It's most likley that Creativity is obviously only designed to be a positive attribute so is probably stored in an unsigned interger.

So when you set it to -1 it is actually treating it as a very high positive value due to loading a signed value into an unsigned integer.

It's obvious from the description that as implemented Creativity is supposed to be 0 or a positive number e.g. 25, 50, etc. Setting -1 in the file will set the value to
255, 65535, or 4294967295 depending on the size of the variable it's loaded into e.g. byte, halfword or word. Which obviously will cause it to come up all the time.

Why not set reseach to a negative number instead and just not give the race creativity.

I'm not sure if negative abilities are supported correctly. In DA at least, they weren't, but since the Arceans in TA get a -1 to speed there has to be some support.

The question is, if abilities that grant a simple bonus (speed, economy, production, range etc.) are treated differently than those that actually make something happen on their own (creativity).

Try modding negative values into these other areas and see if there are strange behaviours as well - my guess would be no (only creativity is an active ability, others are passive).

If this is true then in my book it's a bug.

I have modded the Abilities so for example from your 10 points you can select an option the gives you more points, such as Logistics - 3 give you 2 extra points or -10 PQ gives you 4 points, then you can spend your 16 points on say ecomonics, trade routes or research.

I think negative ability bonuses (penalties) should be allowed so long as you balance them.

It's not a 'bug' per se, as much as being counter to the intention of the ability. For example, if I ask you to rate a movie on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being 'worse than gigli' and 10 being "ZOMG, it's the best movie I ever saw" why would you say -1?

It's the same type of thing. The scale is from 0 to (say it was byte) 255. 0 is as bad as it gets.

Yes, the coding could be changed to accept negative numbers, but that would involve declaring the variable as a different type of variable, and could affect the results of an ungodly number of subroutines.

Harking back to my D&D days, and what happens when an ability score in D&D gets to 0, (Dex of 0, you don't even have the coordination to kneel, you just lay there) I'd say that a creativity of -1 would mean your people are SO uncreative that they cannot conceive of the hows and whys of research. NORESEARCHFORJU!

I have some basis for that thought. I work in an R&D lab, and most projects are pretty stymied without some out of the box thinking by someone in the lab, except for the projects that detail the properties of our product line.

I have to disagree, if the game was not intended to support negative Creativity then it's not a bug, the way creativity is implemented giving it a negative value wouldn't make sense anyway as it's the chance of discorvering something early isn't it?

If you have Creativity 0 then you would in effect always take the normal amount of research points to research something. I can see the argument for negative values in economics, soldiering, etc.

I assume you want -ve Creativity to be a chance it will take longer, that could be implemented but since supporting negative modifiers was not a feature of the game prior to TA.

They could add Negative Creativity support as an extra feature in TA although I think it would be easier to implement as a positive called Uncreative. Possibley allowing you to have both and thus much more random research times.

As a business software developer myself I have to say I don't see anyway it can be seen as a bug if a program doesn't support something it was never intended to support. Since clearly prior to TA no stock race had any negative modifiers of this sort they can't be said to have been supported as a feature. You could of course mod them in but since the game was not designed with this in mind the resoluts may or may not be what you wanted and if they're not it's not a bug.

By the way I agree that generally allowing negative modifiers would be good. I just don't agree it's a bug if they aren't you could of course request that stardoc add this feature.

All of the abilities are stored in an array of signed long integers in all versions of GalCiv, but we generally call a function GetAbility() and store the value of the ability in a local variable when using it in calculations.  In DL and DA, we specifically had code to prevent negative ability values.  For Twilight, I had to go through and change a lot of code to support negative ability values.  However, I'm still used to ability values being non-negative, so in my UseCreativeAbility function I stored the creative ability value in an unsigned long integer out of habit.  It wouldn't have been a problem in metaverse games because you would have had to take a cheater flag to get the negative creative ability, but we try to be mod friendly for non metaverse games, so I changed the local variable to a signed long integer. This will be in the next update.

I also changed it so that you don't get all the tech points for the total cost of the tech with creativity anymore, you only get what is left, so you won't get more than one free tech with creativity per turn, and I also made it so that you have to have research production to use the creative ability.

I doubt that we would implement penalties for negative creativity; its only function would be to drag down creativity ability granted by techs, the same way that you can't have a negative Approval from negative Morale ability.  It's still an obstacle, but it's not any worse than having 0 ability.

 

Excellent, thank you.



Both good changes. I had a game last long enough that I was worried I would win by Tech Victory just from Creativity.



Good enough for my purposes. Any chance on negative War Profiteering actually working, though?

I'll also see if there are any other abilities (besides Protected Trade Routes, of course) that might produce weird results if they have a negative value (Luck is the only one that comes to mind that might).

Oh, and I forgot, I made it so that you can't get any of the tech victory techs with Creativity.  You still have to research those.

 

So that if other races are at war, you get a hit to your economy? Not as currently implemented. We don't have any other categories of income that could potentially actually be an expense and if we had a negative income value on the economy screen that could be confusing.  Plus, how would you have a negative War Profiteering ability? It seems like it would be something that you're either good at or you're not.

Maybe it would make more sense to implement a big hit to tourism during wartime.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

You have killed my Thalan Tech Victory idea.

If it's already been changed (being changed?) so that you actually have to have research production for it to proc, then why take the tech victory techs off of the table?

Because winning the game with a tech victory based of your creative ability is cheezy.   

That still means that with 1% research you can 'proc' the creative ability.

This seems like a good time to submit the following thought to you two:

- Base creativity off of how much you're investing into research. Perhaps 100% research will be 100% of your x% creativity, whereas 50% research will only use half your race's creativity. This would eliminate just using 1%, 2%, or other ridiculously low near-zero cost measures while still getting the benefit. This could reflect the fact that with 100% funding you have loads of scientists, so obviously the odds of getting a creative tech is higher. Sounds fair to me, at least. Remember, creativity is immensely powerful, at least in my eyes. It's extremely cheap and gives you the possibility of major gains.

However, not really anyone runs at 100% funding and 100% research for very long, so perhaps the point at which you will get 100% benefit of creativity could be lowered to 66% investment of your income to research? I don't know. Just some sort of tie between the two sounds necessary to me.

- The other factor should be how much time a tech requires. This might sound dumb at first, but it's actually rather necessary. On Very Slow tech games (assuming tech speed gets adjusted to be less broken and hyperspeed), it's a major balance factor on how fast you get techs. When it takes dozens of weeks to get basic weapon techs, getting creativity (as it'll take you more weeks to research, therefore there's more a chance of finishing any given tech early) will give you a SIGNIFICANT advantage.

On the other hand, very fast tech speed with 10 MILLION research labs, creativity isn't really worth anything at all.

I was thinking of it as automatic humanitarian aid.

*sigh*

I agree...

I just wanted the TA Thalans to be good at -something-.

And it really would have been humorous to have, say, a tenth turn tech victory...though, I can see why not having it is a good thing.

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The only problem with your second idea is your first idea, Uranium. Less research funding equals more time to complete a tech. One way around that might be to use the base cost of the tech instead of the actual time, but then again, I'm not really for creativity making BHEs more easy to achieve than, say, warp drive.

One other thing while we're on the subject of creativity-the description (I'm a sucker for flavor text...) says "gives a chance of making groundbreaking discoveries traditionally unavailable." Is there any way to code it (based around the current system, anyway) so creativity has a (low, low) chance of giving you...a random tech? Seems like a tech you're not currently researching fits the category of "traditionally unavailable" pretty well. Alternatively, creativity could, well, CREATE (i.e. generate) new techs, which had minimal positive side effects and only lasted for that game, but...I'll just keep dreaming about that, I guess.

Just a thought or two I had...

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10 million labs? At a max of 99 per planet, with class 100 planets (yeah right), that gives...101,000 planets, give or take. Even if every single tile is a Precursor Library, and you're only counting "virtual" labs, that's still ~12,600 planets.

I wasn't aware we had galaxies QUITE that large yet.

Well it's probably misleading to think of it too literally as negative war profiteering. I think of it as a peaceful race that feels compelled to spend money to send peace envoys and humanitarian aid to civilizations at war. Strategically this would make for an interesting penalty, because it would force a civilization to spend some effort settling wars instead of instigating wars.

I'm not saying your other points aren't valid, but personally when the idea was posted it made me want to mod a hippy race with such a disadvantage just because it would change the value of different strategic choices in the game.

There hasn't even been a balance patch since they were implemented. This isn't the release candidate. I mean, jeez, problems with what is the first release of a product in a beta?

Yep, that's exactly how I was wanting to use negative War Profiteering. I actually half-expected the Altarians to have something like that, given their peaceful, benevolent nature. Plus, it would further divide them from the Drath. The Drath profit from wars, the Altarian would be better off without them.

I was trying to sarcastically jump on the "Thalan nerf" bandwagon.

I guess it didn't work.

Not that I don't believe they're not balanced as is, I'm just waiting to see what happens.

Still, +50 creativity would be scary to watch.

Yeah, I was implying the base time, not how much time you have left.

And it's opposite what you're thinking. Creativity is cheap and easy, and the amount of power it gives you at end-game techs outweighs the entry-level techs. I'm not saying it should be obsolete, but having the same chance of getting Universal Translator for free as the same as the aforementioned BHEs...

Creativity's power is based on how much time you save. Proccing (ugh, I hate that word) an end-game tech means it is infinitely more valuable than an entry-level tech. I'd personally just like to see the value of the tech remain the same throughout the game, which means reduced chances of that proc (ugh) happening at the ultra-mega techs.

Even with so much wrong with the Thalans, I've found them interesting enough to play them through several games. So perversely, they will probably seem far too powerful if/when their shortcomings are addressed.

Negative creativity. I can just see the pop ups now.

"Your civilization has lost 5 weeks of research due to the new fad belief that 2+2=5."

As a cutscene, it should play the scene from Family Guy where the Irish scientist invents whiskey.

Anyone watch Idiocracy? That movie is rife with quotes and scenes that would fit well into negative creativity.

Cool sound like a good change. So I was partly right as to what the issue was.