367 replies to this topic

[Exoclyps]

That makes sense, I really hope it is what you're thinking. So the problem is rather that if the player then got say 2500 huge ships, then the Antaran will indeed send 25000 small ships. I wonder if increasing the chances of bigger ships will fix the issue?

 

Actually looking at the yaml you mentioned, I start to think that the Antarans actually are designed in a pretty decent way. Though, 50% win chance late game might be pretty rough for the player if they are spread out.

[Spud_Dastardly]

I finished making the resource buildings.  I made 7 in all.  I crammed them all in one tech node above between supergravity and advanced robotics.  They all work fine.  Give it a try and let me know what you think: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32174515/5X%20-%20The%20Ultimate%20Balance%20Mod%20v2.0.3.zip

 

This update doesn't contain any of the other changes we've discussed yet.

[Exoclyps]

Not at my desktop atm so can't try it out. But looking the files it seems cool. Maybe add a 5BC flat money bonus to the tourism infrastructure. And did you add the 3 upkeep to the gem and gold harvester on purpose or an oversight?

 

Also I'm unsure if not adding the tech to various different technodes would be more interesting. But I'll reserve judgment on that one until I've tried it out.

[Spud_Dastardly]

BC bonus for tourism sounds reasonable.  I did keep the 3 upkeep to gem and gold harvester on purpose.  Just because it makes everyone richer doesn't mean it doesn't cost money to run the thing.  Really it's just meant to temper the bonus slightly.  Do you think I should just go for 0 upkeep?

 

I don't know about doing different tech nodes.  I can't think of a satisfying way of splitting them up, and they all fit together well enough.  It does look a little odd having a tech node that gives 7 buildings though.

[Ghettobible]

Anyone having problems with the game refusing to finish turns?

[MasterOfOrionConquerTheS]

Hadn't tried your mod before since i was waiting for the reworks and antarans to come out.

Trying it and lovin it. 

Top stuff man!

[Ghettobible]

Seem to be having issues with turns with the Mrrshan getting stuck. So far I worked around this by reloading previous turn and putting on fast actions. I'm curious why in my games it's only the Mrrshan cause this issue.

[Exoclyps]

In all honesty, a +5% morale isn't gonna be worth much, especially not for that cost considering you have other cheaper buildings that does it better. So you really need to add something else to make the building worthwhile. And when I hear tourism, I hear money for the place the tourists go to, so I figured it made sense? And a flat bonus would be cool bonus for the building I think. Would make the building a worthwhile alternative to say Holo Simulator.

 

Well, all other money improvement buildings also cost money to run, the warehouse, the spaceport, all of them does in theory. Yet their upkeep is at 0. I kinda do get your point though. Then again, these planets are not that common, so a few extra BC empire-wide wouldn't be overpowered I'd say.

 

Edit:
Put it in my game now. Having 7 of them together doesn't look as bad as I feared. While I think it'd be more exciting getting them spread out it might confuse the players a bit since it can be easy to overlook the resource requirement. Bundling them together makes that point a bit more straightforward. For now I'll now bug more on that unless I got a good alternative.

 

Any specific reasoning behind the choices of building design (looks) btw? I think swaping the gem and gold harvester with artifacts research facility might look better. The latter looks more like some kind of mining facility than the former.

 

Edited by Exoclyps, 05 December 2016 - 01:09 AM.

[jasonwclark]

I think the idea behind the Antaran raids is to provide a temporary shock to the player. When they show up it disrupts whatever was going on at the target world for 3-6 turns, as you scramble to evacuate, and another few turns after that to re-establish yourself. 

 

I actually like that they use biological weapons since it makes the costs of the raid more manageable. You lose a minimum of 1 population (potentially more if you botch your evacuation or get caught with no cash on hand),  you lose the buyout cost of the civil transports, you lose whatever defensive structures you had in orbit. And of course you lose time.

 

It's also interesting in that this mechanic basically forces the player to make use of civil transports, at a point in the game when they might otherwise ignore them entirely. Usually I take the Antaran raid as an excuse to disperse population. 

 

All that is just to say, I'm not sure how much of a real threat the Antarans are meant to pose. The feel more like a sideshow, and challenge that the player is supposed to face more at their  own discretion. 

 

I guess I wouldn't mind conventional bombs, the situation would still be similar, you'd just have to scrap all your structures while buying out civil transports. 

 

I think if the goal was to make it truly a  nightmare raid, the Antaran target needs to be totally randomized, rather than going after the system closest to the players largest fleet. If the player can coax them into appearing at weak systems, then they can metagame the raid to minimize the damage. 

 

Again though, I'm not sure if the Antarans are really meant to take center stage like that. They'd be pretty frustrating, at the current doubling ship scale, if the raid happened at your homeworld and destroyed all your advanced infrastructure etc.

 

 

 

 

[Exoclyps]

I think the scale of their Raids would have to be scaled down. Last game with my Terrans being the target, I noticed that their fleet had like 8k attack and 18k defence. 3 times my fleet, which of course means the Terrans also got that I suppose.

That said, their fleet was on their way back, so they had been over there and made some terror and left.

[Exoclyps]

Oh, btw Spud, are you working on a pollution processor based on size? Not sure if you where. Anyways, if you was, I had this idea of creating a "dummy" processor as the Structure that is showed in the tech tree. This dummy would not have the pollution reduction feature attached to it and then the description would explain the reduction. Not optimal, but a though.

[Ghettobible]

Exoclyps, on 05 December 2016 - 01:16 AM, said:

I think the scale of their Raids would have to be scaled down. Last game with my Terrans being the target, I noticed that their fleet had like 8k attack and 18k defence. 3 times my fleet, which of course means the Terrans also got that I suppose.

That said, their fleet was on their way back, so they had been over there and made some terror and left.

 

The Mrrshan in my game beat every single one of the attacks done by them. Sadly had to give up the game as a turn I'm on won't finish no matter what I do.

[Spud_Dastardly]

jasonwclark, on 05 December 2016 - 09:11 AM, said:

I think the idea behind the Antaran raids is to provide a temporary shock to the player. When they show up it disrupts whatever was going on at the target world for 3-6 turns, as you scramble to evacuate, and another few turns after that to re-establish yourself. 

 

I actually like that they use biological weapons since it makes the costs of the raid more manageable. You lose a minimum of 1 population (potentially more if you botch your evacuation or get caught with no cash on hand),  you lose the buyout cost of the civil transports, you lose whatever defensive structures you had in orbit. And of course you lose time.

 

It's also interesting in that this mechanic basically forces the player to make use of civil transports, at a point in the game when they might otherwise ignore them entirely. Usually I take the Antaran raid as an excuse to disperse population. 

 

All that is just to say, I'm not sure how much of a real threat the Antarans are meant to pose. The feel more like a sideshow, and challenge that the player is supposed to face more at their  own discretion. 

 

I guess I wouldn't mind conventional bombs, the situation would still be similar, you'd just have to scrap all your structures while buying out civil transports. 

 

I think if the goal was to make it truly a  nightmare raid, the Antaran target needs to be totally randomized, rather than going after the system closest to the players largest fleet. If the player can coax them into appearing at weak systems, then they can metagame the raid to minimize the damage. 

 

Again though, I'm not sure if the Antarans are really meant to take center stage like that. They'd be pretty frustrating, at the current doubling ship scale, if the raid happened at your homeworld and destroyed all your advanced infrastructure etc.

The Antarans are supposed to be like the blue shell in Mario Kart.  They go after the strongest player and inflict either heavy losses on their fleet or destroy (or nearly destroy) one of their planets.  Right now you can get away with very minimal losses on your colony.  Having to rebuild your structures is a much bigger penalty.  I would point out that with conventional bombs if you scrap out your structures and buy civil transports to evacuate when they get there, you're going to lose the colony entirely as they bomb it out of existence.  Maybe their attacks should be randomized so you can't just keep a 1 population useless colony around for them to blow up every time.  I do want to see if I can scale down those raiding parties though.

 

@Exoclyps I think I have pollution pretty well balanced at this point, so I'm not going to worry about it.  I'll take a second look at the models I chose for the resource buildings.

[Exoclyps]

Yeah, pollution is pretty fine atm I do have to agree. Even if I think the Recyclotron should be somewhere inbetween the Toxic Processor and Pollution Processor, but that's just a personal preference really.

 

On another note, you know how invasionInclination works? It bothers me that the AI just seems to bomb the colonies of their enemies all the time, makes it harder for them to stay competitive long term vs the player.

[jasonwclark]

Haha that's hilarious, I was just playing Mario Kart a couple hours ago, with our 6 year old, on the emulator by the light of the tree. An apt comparison for sure!

 

Conventional bombs would probably do the trick then. It would increase the cost per raid by a pretty sizeable amount, and it would also necessitate the actual colony ship to repopulate the raided planet. Right now the biobombs leave the colony under your control. So you'd have the cost of the Colony ship too, and an additional turn to build it, since you can't stack it in the same turn/buy as the civil transports. Pretty expensive even if the raid occurs at a more peripheral system.

[Exoclyps]

So on my end I tried and edited AntaranSettings.yaml slightly to see if I could fine-tune things.

 

Perhaps I should have waited with fine-tuning until I actually had to fight them once first, but yeah.

Edited the victory chance to 35 and also reduced their inclination towards frigates (from 15 to 10) and destroyers (from 10 to 8).

 

And now they finally attacked!

My fleet of 3 battleships and 4 cruisers is to face off vs a fleet of 8 frigates, 5 destroyers, 3 cruisers and 3 battleships. With the wind slightly in my favor since I got my full armada ready to defend the planet.

[Spud_Dastardly]

The only thing I haven't addressed with pollution is the fact that races with a bonus to production have their bonus hindered by the excess pollution they generate.  I'm thinking of bundling each + Production trait with a unique building that gives extra pollution cleanup to those races.  For example, +25% production starts with a building that adds an extra 10 cleanup, and +50% starts with a building that adds an extra 20 cleanup.  I'm thinking 1 BC maintenance and 100 industry to build for the +25% one and 150 cost for the +50% one.  That should take care of the last major gripe I have with the pollution system.  

 

I'll start working on the Antarans in a bit.  I'm not sure exactly how invasionInclination works.  I haven't messed with it.  Maybe I'll crank it up for some races and see what happens.

[Exoclyps]

Personally I'm content without that extra pollution cleanup bonus since to me the basic idea is that it makes the poorer colonies more effective.

 

I kinda liked the result I managed to get with the Antarans at 35 victory chance and 10 and 8 on the frigates and destroyers. Might want to tune-down those even further, but I enjoyed my first attack.

 

Also, dunno about you! But the fact that when you bundled a few troop transport together with your awesome looking titan you'd get the troop transport icon on the map.

So I looked around in the yaml files and actually found a solution to that issue! "flagPriority" in the ShipHullTypes.yaml file seems to decide what gets priority.

Changing the support ships to a higher number made sure that my awesome titan got the screen time it deserves!

Edited by Exoclyps, 05 December 2016 - 06:04 AM.

[Spud_Dastardly]

Neat.  I'll have to mess with the flag priority.

[jasonwclark]

This may be a bit left field, but I'm curious, do we know if turning off a victory condition alters the way the AI behaves?

 

For example say you turn off all Victory conditions except Tech Victory, does the AI adapt it's playstyle to focus on research? Or if all Victories are off, does the computer play any differently towards conquest than it would otherwise? 

 

I'very heard people say that turning off the Antaran victory effectively removes them from the game.

 

I wonder if there might be a way to tweak the game so that instead of defaulting to a pure Conquest scenario after victory is achieved, it defaulted to Antaran victory instead? I think the entertainment value would be a bit more interesting there. Like if you could go for Diplomatic, Economic, or Tech Victory, and still face the Antarans afterwards. Right now I think if you select "continue playing with all Victory conditions disabled" the ability to enter the pocket plane disappears as well, along with Antaran victory, which is a little unfortunate. Since it would be fun to take a victory lap to Antares.