Will the Mind Control Center be fixed to do what it's suppose to?

I'd like to see it changed so all it did was flip planets quickly. The global econ bonus is way overpowered (and I generally love overpowered stuff). As it is it makes evil super powerful for all races; if it was changed it would only be really unbalanced with the Korath and their Dark Influence.

Either its function or its description need to be changed, I don't even care that much which one.

To answer the title of the thread in one simple word. Nope.

In over two years of updates and expansions it has never been touched, or been a point of topic as i recall. No reason to think they would do anything about it now.

One serious problem with changing it for the Twilight expansion is that every competitive Metaverse player would avoid Twlight like the plauge, since scores run so much higher with the MCC than without. I think Stardock would rather that the most experienced players made the move to Twilight. Seems like it would put something of a damper on enthusiasm for the expansion if the best players didn't use it. It would be nice if Neutral (PQ bonus?)and Good (no upkeep on all original colony buildings rather than just the five most populous nations?) got a compensating boost, but that doesn't look to be in the cards either.

I had read at one time that the flaw in the MCCs code is buried in the base game and was possibly written by someone who is no longer at SD. That means it would be a pretty significant ordeal for someone now to try to dig through that old code and fix it.

About the Veteran players and the Meta; It was already mentioned(I believe by Wyndstar) that the scoring potential for TA seems to be lower than either DA or DL, which in itself may hinder some moving to TA for Meta play. I'm sure it won't take long though for the vets to figure out how to get good scores with TA.

If its too hard to fix, yet an obvious case of severe game imbalance, isn't the simplest solution to just remove it from the xeno ethics branch entirely and/or replace it with something new?

And if I were going to guess how many competitive Metaverse players there are compared to customers who don't care about the Metaverse . . .

As I've said many times before, it makes no sense to cater to a miniscule minority, no matter how vocal or over-represented on forums they might be.

Ok, so even if they don't want to change it can't they just fix the description so it matches the ability? One way or the other would be nice.

Actually, the "easiest" fix would just be to change the wording. Any other move would have to result in coding changes, which could prove to be rather difficult and tedious, depending on what the actual problem is.

As to making evil races too powerful...

Actually a larger problem to me is the rarity that the AI researches Ethics at all, and even if they manage that, the rarity that they build any of the Ethics Wonders (except NLCs, go figure). The chances that an Evil AI would ever build the MCC in a game is so minuscule its not even worth worrying about. Its really just there for the benefit of the Player.

As for balance....its not actually overpowering. That's misrepresentation by players that are either for or against it. For the MCC, in its current form, to be actually useful you still need a strong empire base and economy. Doubling an income of 25BC isn't really going to do much for you if the Good Altarians control 3/4 of the map. The MCC itself doesn't imbalance the game, contrary to whatever one may like to think.

Also, that kind of coding change would probably result in every current Metaverse game to be cheat flagged as the game's core files would no longer match. I know for sure that would not go down very well with anyone.

In conclusion, the only "real" issue with the MCC, currently, is some poorly written text.

The great power of the MCC is mostly an issue for those who want to play the metaverse, with the idea that this is supposed to reflect some kind fo a balanced comparison of player's scores. I am on the verge of not playing the metaverse anymore, because I generally like to play "good," and the imbalance in the ethical alignments makes that a strong liability. As for saying that the MCC is "not actually overpowering" ... you would have to be pretty poor player for it to *not* be a tremendous boost. I, for one, love the incredible advantage the MCC gives, except that it kind of feels like cheating. Sort of like hitting CTL-N a gazillion times to get a bunch of bonus tiles on your homeworld. Plus, as I said, I would rather play "good." My solution: Stop playing the metaverse, and just remember that the MCC is acutally an uber-economy boost when I do happen to play evil, or have a chance to capture it from an evil empire that has built it.

Actually, that is the least of the problems with fixing MCC. Saved games rarely work over version updates, so anyone who would complain about this would finish a game in progress before updating, or abandon it as unfinishable.

I personally would love to see the econ boost nerfed and the function fixed. I play an extremely influence-heavy custom evil race, so I need to flip planets. I don't need 100% econ boost - as it is, I get a 0% boost, because I can't build the damn thing. It just sits in my building list and mocks me all game  

Just to clarify, because I did bring this up in a few threads. The scoring potential seems to be lower for the TOURNAMENT games, which is a new class of game only available to TA. Standard Metaverse games (what you played in DL and DA) using TA seem to be roughly on parity with previous iterations.

~ Wyndstar

Ahhh another member of the 100+ club.

Nice medals Wyndstar...Congrats.

You answered your own question about why the MCC probably hasn't been "fixed" already.

The 4 people who post on these boards because "the description doesn't match what it really does, and that bugs me" are indeed a miniscule minority, no matter how vocal or over-represented they are on these forums.

Actually, the 100% econ bonus is just a side effect.  The Ability type is not specified in the file, and the ID for the economics ability is 0, so it's obviously defaulting to that.

However, the comments in the code that uses the mind control center seem to indicate that the code is intended to make it LESS likely to flip planets as opposed to the description, which says that it makes alien planets MORE likely to flip.  So I'll have to ask Brad about what it's really supposed to be doing.