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Re: Proportions....
I suppose, to get the fleet training, although bases already get to-hit bonuses from mounts (or fire control centers, in Proportions), and currently you can retain the old base resupply technique, if you like it, by changing settings.txt to allow fleeting with bases. If bases worked the same way as fighters do now, and it wasn't optional, then it would be impossible to do that.
PvK |
Re: Proportions....
So then it appears to be a bug, because ship supplies are extremely effected (in 1.78) by a combinated fleet with fighter.
In my testing scenarios, the ship supplies have been cutted by 50% ! |
Re: Proportions....
Weird - maybe it splits supplies, but the fighters don't get their share? Sigh.
Has anyone tested this in 1.84 yet? [ January 30, 2003, 06:29: Message edited by: PvK ] |
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I have not yet updated, but there is another issue (well, two things, but one of them would be just an exploit bug for non-simultaneous games) I have seen with 1.78 and fighter supplies. I have moved several fighter stacks from a WP to a resupply depot, and they are not resupplied correctly. One of the fighter stacks (the bottom one) has been as low as before.
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Re: Proportions....
Quote:
PvK</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Oops my bad http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif Now that 1.84 is out, I'll upgrade both main game and Proportions as soon as you get the next Version out, I promise! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Steve. |
Re: Proportions....
I just started a new Proportions with the 2.5.3 Beta, and I chose the 80% capacity option.
My home planet has a population number of 4000M/3200M. Is this a Proportions bug or a SEIV bug? |
Re: Proportions....
It's the way SE4 works, with no way to change it (except not including a disadvantage like that) and I don't particularly think it's a problem. It's just some compensation for that otherwise very large disadvantage.
A thing I dislike more is that you won't be able to build any facilities on a Tiny domed colony (if you have that disadvantage). But, it's not disastrous. I've played a couple of successful games using that disadvantage. PvK |
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Make the domed planets have more slots then. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
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Yeah, I think I will, for 3.0 but not for 2.x.
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PVK: Has anyone tested this in 1.84 yet?
I don't like the way the AI sends Pop Transports to the CLOSEST planet (Domed or not) now in v1.84 that fills the Population to 300m Plus befor moving on. Not consedering any longer is it breathable. At least befor, the Breathable planets had priority and they would benefit more from the pop bonus with the added facility slots. Too bad there could not be more logic since Population is a important equation for increased production and construction. Even if they only droped of 100m then moved on. Better if the AI could be programed to treat breathables with a seperate logic then domed all togeather. JLS [ January 31, 2003, 13:39: Message edited by: NAV ] |
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Does proportions work with 1.84?
Is it usable for single player? Thanks, Ken |
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Oleg: Yes, indeed it is an undocumented 1.84 feature http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif Well, it could a good thing if there would be a way to mod how many people minister moves before shifting to another planet. Now AI in proportions is royally screwed.
--------------------------------------------- It was better in 1.78 when the AI only sent them to breathables. It could be better for se4 base and most Mods if the AI would fill the planet to 100m and then fill the next to 100m. Etc. [ February 01, 2003, 18:55: Message edited by: NAV ] |
Re: Proportions....
Very good points NAV. Better might be a setting in the AI files, so different AI's could fill to different levels. Or, the AI could look at the population brackets in settings.txt to determine which planets could benefit from moving population...
PvK |
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It is possible to get around this nuissance, but it will require a major work by PvK: We can restore population mass and reproduction check to default SE values and scale up population modifiers AND planetary capacity by 10 times. Basically we will have the same Proportions but population unit will be 10 times smaller. Now, it will take reasonable amount of time before AI decides to switch from one planet to another.
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Hi,
i have a small question about the proportions mod. Does it change the AI too like TDM? |
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I found the site of the mod so i found the answer to my question.
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Am I misundestanding your suggestion, Oleg? It seems to me this won't do what you say.
For one thing, Proportions population mass is 200 times greater than in the standard game, not 10 times. For another, if you divide mass by the same amount you multiply capacity, it's not going to have much effect at all on the time it takes to fill up a planet, which I guess is what the AI is now trying to do? (Note the AI stopping at 100 is just a player suggestion - I thought people were saying the 1.84 behavior is to try to fill planets completely. No?) Also, reproduction rate and mass are two different things. I don't see why making every planet generate population ten times as quickly (more, considering compound effects) would make any more sense. Sure it would mean planets would fully populate more quickly, but it would also mean going back to unrealistic reproduction rates. Quote:
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AI is trying to fill planet till it gets 300 population units, AFAIK. my idea is to make 300 pop. units a small amount. I suggest to increase pop. capacity of all planets 10 times, decrease pop. mass 10 times and scale up all population modifiers 10 times in settings.txt. Pop. check should stay same - I made a mistake. Basically it will be the same game, but 1 pop.unit will represent 10 times less people. It is of course remains to be seen how population minister will behave.
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Hurra !! It works ! I increased planet population 10 times (Earth will have 20 billion instead of 2), scaled up population modifiers and decreased pop. mass. Now, SE IV ships 500 (not 300) to a planet than shifts to another ! New 500 is exactly 50 in "unmodded" Proportions. Funny thing happens in Planet with moons. After filling planet, SE ships 500 million people to a moon before going to another planet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif . Anyway, it works and works much better than in 1.78 IMHO.
I can post modded data files if you like. |
Re: Proportions....
[quote]Originally posted by PvK:
[QB] (Note the AI stopping at 100 is just a player suggestion - I thought people were saying the 1.84 behavior is to try to fill planets completely. No?) I was not suggesting any change to Proportion settings, wich are currantly great. I was remarking that in v1.78 the AI sent the Star Liners (Pop Transports) too only the closest breathable colony, after that colony was filled to about 300m it would move on to the next breathable colony and so on. NOW in v1.84 the AI sends it to the closest planet to its Home World, fills it up to about 300m and works out from there. This could be a breathable or worse a domed moon. To me the return overall was much higher whan the AI sent the transports to breathables only. |
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I'm with you NAV. I also think it'd be best if the AI's population transport could be specified in the files for each AI, so we could customize it per AI, and to work best with mods that change what makes sense to do.
oleg, I see now, that sounds like it works well, with the only real casualty being that now you can move population with a ship having only 100 kT cargo space, not 1000 kT, which I liked because it kind of made population a different Category from other unit transport. This also of course wouldn't be upgradable for existing games, because their effective population would go down 90%. I'd probably want to add another nine population effect brackets on the low end, to make moving less than ten units to a new colony pretty weak, and I'd want to adjust things like random and intel events, and maybe look at what it does to militia and planetary bombardment. Since it would be for new games, I think I might actually keep population mass at 1000kT, and then make starliners ten or more times cheaper, and/or maybe slower but more capacious... this might make small starliners useful later into the game, and slow enough that people wouldn't be tempted to use them for invasion transports or carriers etc. Hmm. It will take some more thought. I have the feeling 3.0 will look a lot different from 2.5.3 (if I can find time to figure it all out and complete it). PvK |
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Common, we have cars and busses, Cesna and Boeng-747 to carry people. There should be no reson why we can move 1M but not 100K ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif Anyway, starliner modules are still most effective components for transports and that means transports should be huge. Incidently, increasing population ten times takes care of the integer number artifact - no longer 1M colony will jump to 2M in one year, it will be 10M to 11 M !
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But, can you take a ship designed to deploy a single drone or a single satellite or some mines, and use it to transport 100,000 people and all of their possessions and necessities, for several months through space, and keep them alive, without serious amounts of life support equipment? No.
Realistically speaking, cargo should not be completely interchangeable based on equal mass. At the least, units should include the mass and cost required to keep them intact for a long space voyage. Unfortunately, SE4 lacks SE3's restrictions on cargo type. The only way I see to mod in some distinction using SE4, is to make the population units so large that there becomes an incentive to build specialized ships which wouldn't be efficient to use for mundane transport. That is, starliners. If we do as you suggest, except keep the pop mass at 1000kT, then with some changes to starliners and their modules, maybe we can have starliners carrying about 10x as many population units, but remaining relatively slow, so unit transports would more efficiently be built on faster lower-capacity transport hulls, while population transport would more efficiently use starliners. PvK |
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Well, single drone weights 15 000 tons. Obviously the ship capable to carry, service and launch such a device should be able to carry few people instead. Or look at small troop transport. It carries enough troops to conquier whole planet http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/shock.gif
Besides, why are we talking about 2m tall, 70 kg weighting aliens ? Last time I saw UFO crew on TV (in "Taken" I think) were very punny. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif [ February 03, 2003, 15:02: Message edited by: oleg ] |
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I will grant that a drone is very large, and yes you could pack in some civilians and supplies and stuff for them in the same space, maybe, although when you start talking about hundreds of thousands of them, for months, I think you would need major life support systems etc, which would not be present by default on a cargo ship. Quote:
This is also a design goal of the mod. It is supposed to require investment in special transport to move populations around, and those transports are supposed to be relatively slow and vulnerable, so that the concept of escorting infrastructure ships is introduced, and colonizing distant worlds in contested space becomes an interesting challenge, and not something that can be accomplished by single full-speed general-purpose ships in a few turns, as in the unmodded game. I realize there are degrees, and yeah it would still be quite different from the unmodded game even if population only weighs 100 kT. It's just a question of degree, design goals, and personal taste, and of course people can adjust the settings as they please. I'll test out your suggestion in practice and deliberate more. If/when 3.0 comes out, I think it will be different from 2.x in several ways... PvK |
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There is always a possibility that when it comes to space travel, we won't send living humans to stars. The obvious and well explored in S.F. literature suggestion is to send people in cryogenic form. But we can also send just fertilized cells with growth media and equipment programmed to grow humans upon delivery. On the second thought, cells are not necessary either. What we need is just CD with genetic information and some sort of futuristic "incubator". But then, we don't need CD either, just an antenna to receive all the data from Earth...
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Well, the unmodded game allows you to replicate a whole homeworld in a year or two, so if you want to play that kind of SF, it's quite easy.
Proportions is about dealing with problems, not hand-waving them with "tech I don't even have to research or build will evaporate the problem". All the things you describe would require major research, and then, if SE4 would let me mod it in, actually constructing the technology. The problem is, SE4 doesn't give me many options for how to include cryogenic storage, that would be any different from the high-tech starliner modules I already have. As for growing clones from CD's and goo, well, I could give organic manipulation's replicant facilities to everyone, though I would say it would be a very high tech, and would also require tech that could raise and educate these people, and probably some population control facilities to control the anger that you want to replace them with clones and robots. PvK |
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The technology level that PvK has assumed the races to have at the beginning of a Proportions game is one that is pretty much where we will be in 50 years, with the caveat that FTL travel is possible in his universe. This is why the mod almost completely lacks high-tech solutions to most problems.
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"Well, if I were designing the game system, [race size] might be something you could specify during race design."
This would actually be really cool! Spend points to decrease your race's size, which could decrease the number (or more likely, size) of B/LS/CQ comps for your ship. Would also affect the space needed for population. Not a bad idea for SE5. |
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Can be sort of done right now, with racial traits. Simply make a racial area that gives the reduced-size components (with the same family as the regular ones) and nothing else. Space can't be affected except by Advanced Storage techniques and the like, so you'd need two traits.
It'd be really difficult to make a "larger" race like that though.. Phoenix-D |
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Hmm, yeah, you could only really do it with a facilities trait (or, a whole range of them - in SE3, wasn't "Advanced Storage Techniques" called "Tiny Race"?), and a mount or racial tech tree that would allow some component size changes.
PvK |
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Pvk: Did you ever experiment with using the "default population" size for colonies in the settings.txt file? (Don't have the game in front of me, but I think you can set a population for when a ship colonizes a planet.)
I've been experimenting with incorporating proportions-like settings into my own personal mod, though in a way that the AI can use w/o massive alterations. (Like creating "city" type Versions of various resource-producing facilities and making them available at higher levels of extraction so it becomes worth researching those techs past level 3.) Basically, I've had troubles giving the colony modules higher cargo capacities than the standard cargo modules. Currently, 1M pop is set at 50kT, w/the cargo modules having multiples of that number in capacity. Would rather it be 500kT (did I mention I'm calling this Proportions-Lite? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ) with growth every 5 turns. Just about ready to set colony module capacity to 0, set that settings.txt flag to 1M (unrealistic, I know) and making the cargo bay capacities divisible into 500. |
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Well, the automatic colony population setting in settings.txt does work. I just don't use it because it creates population from nothing, and I'm trying to make population a valuable resource which is difficult to build up.
I'm confused though why you'd have problems increasing the capacity of colony modules. As you can see in Proportions, it works fine. PvK |
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I guess this is not a proportions issue, but I have captured an abbidon med. transporter with 7 engines, although just 6 are allowed?
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It is sort of a Proportions issue. It is probably because the Abbidon haven't researched ECM fast enough to get an ECM device which gives a better bonus than their best engines. So when the SE4 AI makes a design that calls for a defensive device, it thinks the best one is an engine, and adds that, even though it won't add any defense because it already has engines of the same type, so the effect won't stack. I would rate this as a very minor advantage to the AI, which doesn't compensate for the AI's lack of ability to optimize engine type mixes the way micromanaging perfectionist humans can. Not a big deal.
A side issue for perfectionist AI modders: When making AI files, it's often not worthwhile to put ECM on transports. PvK |
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Well, at least with my AIs this is not a problem. I always use the assigned phony ability for ECM scanners in Design.txt file. Otheres should do the same http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
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In general, yes. I think all mine do. John Sullivan did (a generally excellent job on) the Proportions Abbidon AI. I like having a mix of AI authors (oleg, PvK, John Sullivan, so far) as it adds more variety.
PvK |
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I also used PvKs Call tags for ECM and Sensors... Some how I got an extra engine http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif Actually, I think my Support ship is very creative. Take a look… Support Ship: AI has 5+ Launches of 5 fighters per turn with a capacity of 26 small Fighters. Has a Repair Component that repairs with the entire fleet. Has been seen carrying troops and Assaulting when the Capture Planet fleet ordered. Has one shield. Equips with a Psychic Sensor. Will equip armor until it Loads the Sensor. Moves 6 with contra Engines. Has the modified maintenance benefit of being a Medium Transport. In addition, best of all the AI fleets her so she can repair and defend the fleet; which is her (The Support Ships) primary duty assignment. Alas, I should have made room for Self – Destruct. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif Patent is pending on this design. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif I wanted some of the AIs to use Peters New (at that time) traits. The challenge was to make My Abbi AI do well with the Slow Builders, from general file “ The fact that they can build and maintain starships has left many a scholar puzzled”. While another choice could have been unlucky as per its race description “However, a devastating asteroid strike changed their minds. With half of their home world’s population decimated”. However, we were not sure MM had that fixed it at that time. There description also has Abbidon is latently psychic, and that is why I started them off with Phased - Polaron Beam which actually works very well with there Racial Weapons. If you noticed in the research file they will go into Rock Colonizer, Computers etc. Early if they are not in AI; Attack or Defend Long Term STATES… Have trust, that I put a lot of thought into this race and tested this AI extensively… Never the less, it can be better. The Abbidon can hold its own, especially when it gets ROCK Colonization…. John L. Sullivan [ February 08, 2003, 11:13: Message edited by: JLS ] |
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One question, how can i make the small DUC to target CSM?
By the way, I love the Proportions mod. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif |
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Thanks Aloofim!
Small DUC target Capital Ship Missiles? Only point-defense weapons can target seekers, so self-defense cannons, better Versions of which are available from Military Science, the Point-Defense Weapons. PvK |
Re: Proportions....
Well, here is my Proportion 2.5.3 fix for Population Minister problem. If anybody forgot, there is a SE IV feature - AI tries to send 500 population units to one planet, then swith to the next planet. Before 1.84 patch, AI send population to breathable atmosp. planet only. Which was OK since breath. planets are most important in Proportions. But since 1.84, as first reported by NAV, thanks!, AI simply send people to any closest planet. 500 pop. is a HUGE number in Proportions and sometimes AI spend whole game trying to fill one stupid moon http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif
My temporal fix is to scale up population and population modifiers by 10 times. Now, the same 500 units correspond to old 50 and AI spread population quite nicely. The gameplay is identical to unmodified Proportions as long as you remember that 10M can be transported by old 1M transport and are 10 times less productive. 1045337937.ZIP ! WARNING ! It is for new games only. The existing games will be basically ruined. Although you can imagine that there was a cosmic cataclism that killed 90% of your people and surviors are trying to rebuild empire http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif |
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Is the AI trying to achieve 500M population per planet, or 300M? (I thought I rememebed 300M from a previous message - but then, it is 4AM here... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif )
PvK |
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500, i checked it again.
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There is another reason why my adjusting of population size is very beneficial for AI:
I'm working on new AI that mass-produces units. Now, if planet is full but there is any ship with cargo in the sector, new units are transfered to that ship regardless of its class. AI never unload wrong types of cargo http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif For example if you get troops on mine layer, this mine layer will always carry these troops around http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon9.gif With new patch, AI moves population to any tiny domed planets with limited cargo. Very soon I found my population transports completely loaded with assorted selection of troops, fighters, mines, etc. If 1 population unit occupies whole transport, this phenomena ruines them completely. I even tried to add extra cargo but it only pospone the problem. However, if population is made 10 times smaller, transports can still move reduced number of people. Stupid SE AI drives me nuts ! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif [ February 21, 2003, 21:02: Message edited by: oleg ] |
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