No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

I posted this once before the patch, but I see it wasn't fixed?? If you take +20 percent maintainence reduction and merchant you pay NO upkeep at all for ships. If this is a game feature it's unbalanced, as whoever does it can literally pump out new ships every single turn without limits ever! How can you keep up with that in a normal 1 planet start? I have had 300 ships by turn 30-40..... if you were in a multi-player game the guy who does this wins every time, no hope. I can only hope that people either outlow it in multiplay, or it gets patched out.

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I'm an Idiot? Well if that's not the kettle smelling the pot's back!

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Just go into the Settings file and crank up the cost of the Maintenance Trait. That would alleviate the problem in a multiplayer game.

Unfortunately, it can screw up the various AIs 'General' file as they will be spending too many points if their races has the trait. The obvious solution there is to go in and alter their files by the correct ratio of the change that you made. For example, if you doubled the cost of the trait, cut their amount of reduction in their race file by half. If you quadruple the cost of Maint Reduction, simply quarter their ability in the race file.

That will take care of the problem in both Single and Multiplayer games.

Hope it helps!
Talenn

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Also realize that to use this unbalancing feature, you need to spend 2500 racial points + take a specific culture which gives you -% in combat, intel and research. So there is a cost associated with this. Also if the ship limit is working and is set to a low number it may not be as worthwhile to go free maintainence. However with the new limits on colonizable worlds it may increase the usefulness of having low maintainence.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

This is a good example why using no more than 2000 racial points is warranted.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Or, you could go into settings.txt and change the basic maintenance percent to something above 25.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Wow, hadn't noticed that before, JLXC! I'll have to use it against my kids.

(I'm REALLY bad.)

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Wait a sec? You folks really think that I should have to mod it? What about MM? Don't you think this is an error and not a feature? 2000 racial points and I can still do this and flood the galaxy. A few - here and you can have this (what I thought was obvious) error and wreak untold havok in just a few turns.

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I'm an Idiot? Well if that's not the kettle smelling the pot's back!

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by JLXC:
Wait a sec? You folks really think that I should have to mod it? What about MM? Don't you think this is an error and not a feature? 2000 racial points and I can still do this and flood the galaxy. A few - here and you can have this (what I thought was obvious) error and wreak untold havok in just a few turns.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


hardly, first you have to have the resources to build all the stuff, and the tech to build decent stuff. you will most likely have neither since you blew all your racial points on zero maintnance, so you wont have very fast research, you wont have a high resource production, you wont have a high shipyard bonus, and you will probably suck in combat.

the big limiter to the flood-the-galaxy abilitiy (if you started in a low-population large galaxy where you had time to build up in the first place) is the recently fixed ship / unit limits. so no, i dont really think this is a bug. its actually kinda neat that you can choose to sacrifice everything else and not pay maintnance.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

I pretty much agree with Puke. That being said, I think the default culture modifiers should probably be tweaked a little for the merchants and engineers. When maintenance was changed, those two cultures weren't and have a significantly higher benefit than they originally did. (not monsterous or anything, just significant http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif)

I also wish they'd fix the worker culture. It's still not adding in the 5% production bonus. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

[This message has been edited by Drake (edited 22 February 2001).]

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Drake:
I also wish they'd fix the worker culture. It's still not adding in the 5% production bonus. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

gawd darn it, and i keep choosing that culture type too.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Drake:
I also wish they'd fix the worker culture. It's still not adding in the 5% production bonus. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

You guys could report this MM yourselves. It is quite possible that nobody else did (not many people use worker culture).

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

I wish they had changed a lot of the cultures. To many of them give you positive modifiers without any negatives. They make those choices easy to take.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Puke:

hardly, first you have to have the resources to build all the stuff, and the tech to build decent stuff. you will most likely have neither since you blew all your racial points on zero maintnance, so you wont have very fast research, you wont have a high resource production, you wont have a high shipyard bonus, and you will probably suck in combat.

the big limiter to the flood-the-galaxy abilitiy (if you started in a low-population large galaxy where you had time to build up in the first place) is the recently fixed ship / unit limits. so no, i dont really think this is a bug. its actually kinda neat that you can choose to sacrifice everything else and not pay maintnance.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Check my math. It looks like the best combination you can get with your 2000 points w/o getting an advanced attribute and leaving everything at their default value is to set research to 120, mineral prod. to 120 and shipyard rate to 125. Does that sound right?

Those values don't seem to provide a decisive advantage over someone who isn't paying maintenance. At some point in the game, you *should* have more ships than the zero maintenance race because you are building faster with more minerals. But then, you'll max out ships vs. minerals. If you can destroy the maintenance empire before you hit that wall, sure, I think you are going to win.

But if you don't, then he is going to keep building ships until he has two or three or four times as many as you. With your faster construction rate, you are expanding faster. But can you build enough new mining facilities bringing in 20% more minerals to match the fact that he isn't paying any maintenance at all?

Your ships are not going to be any better than his. The only thing the zero maintenance race has to sacrifice is 20 pts off of repair aptitude. I don't think that is going to hurt that much since he can afford to maintain infinitely more repair bases/ships. In fact, I think you could drop that all the way down to 50 and use the extra points to buy more research, mineral production or shipyard rate.

I don't buy your argument about the 2000 limit. Sure, in the TG game, they hit that limit. But that is one of about a dozen things that happened in that game that I don't expect to see in the vast majority of games. Certainly, in a game against the AI, you will have won long before you hit that limit. Against human players? I don't think it's going to make much difference.

If zero maintenance means that I can have four times as many ships as you and still be building ships, how can you say that *any* combination of other bonuses is going to beat that?

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Raynor Ex-freakin-Zacktly.

I have played 4 test games and in each one I could wipe out half the galaxy in very few turns before Anyone even thinks about getting Technology. Even with 2000 points, you can have Extra Propulsion and Unlimited Ships, Thats what it equals. I never ran out of minerals or anything else because I have NO costs except the building, big deal. You just have 20 Base Ship Yards pumping away and every 3 - 5 turns you get 20 top of the line "where ever your line is" ships. It don't matter because they cost nothing to maintain. Try this folks, then tell me how balanced it is. It is NOT balanced, after trying it our PBEMail group screamed about no one doing this or we consider them a cheater. It has to be a bug.
In a small or medium galaxy noone has a chance against this kind of thing.

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I'm an Idiot? Well if that's not the kettle smelling the pot's back!

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

I don't know that I'd call it a bug, I think it's just a balance issue. When lower amounts are better, you don't have diminishing returns on adding more points, unlike all the other attributes. We either need more breakpoints, a bigger increase in the cost of maintenance percentage points, or better yet, the option to scale costs instead of using breakpoints, which I think suck as a general rule. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

I also wonder if it'd be better to give more points the lower you set an attribute, not less. If I lower trade from 100% to 80%, I've cut my trade by 20%, and get 500 points. Lower it again from 80% to 50%, and I've now cut trade by 37.5% and get 300 points. Why is this so common in games? All it does is encourage people not to pick the extremes. If people would be picking extremes more without the diminishing returns, then I'd have to say the attributes aren't balanced well enough, or the base costs for an attribute should be changed more. Am I missing some basic concept here? http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...s/confused.gif

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

Why not just define the percentage reduction/increase values as relative instead as absolute ? So if maintenance was 20% as default and sombody took a "-50%" modifier (that could be possible then) he would pay 10% maintenance. Of course, the cost of all modifiers would have to be adjusted and -100% should not be possible.

The advantage is that this approach would be combinable with mods which reduce standard maintenance (like my EMMA mod which I am going to post as soon as I have playtested it with 1.27)

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by jowe01:
Why not just define the percentage reduction/increase values as relative instead as absolute<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

It worked this way in the unpatched Version off the CD, I'm not sure why it was changed...

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

I agree with Drake. I want at least the maintenance attribute changed back. I'd consider it an added bonus if the Reproduction attribute was changed back as well.

This is especially a problem for me since my ship maintenance is only 3%. As things are now, I have to make it impossible to change your maintenance attribute.

Re: No Maintainence a Feature?!?!
 

If there was a way to make all the advanced traits a percentage rather than a number you would eliminate this problem. A 20% reduction may not be as worthwhile as -20 from your maintenance value.