Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

After playing a "ton" of Civ III & SM-Alien Crossfire, increased costs in "settlements" made those games more entertaining (challenging) for a few of my friends & myself. Why not SEIV? Right now "we" are experimenting with ROCK & GAS colonies at M = 4000, O = 2000, R = 2000, & ICE colonies at M = 3000, O = 1000, R = 1000. Reading where ICE colonies seem not to be very popular (playable?); this cost change should change that, maybe!
Any thoughts on this idea would be most appreciated. Thanks, btw, this game is great for lanning.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

That would be interesting but u should have it about equal that is a bit too much change, in minerals and stuff

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

i would equal the cost of the colonies. Or as an alternative... you could tweek the colony mod ( just steal the colony stuff from it ) and have it where your initial colony costs 4000 , 2000 , 2000 and then the two other ones you reseach cost more http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Or even greater in size http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif or something along those lines... A few options for you.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Ice colonies in the standard game are very playable. I always take Ice because most other players are from earth and take Ox-Rock. This lets me get a colony trade in early and use the goodwill from that to build my position and allies.

If Colony trading is forbidden for some reason, ice is still just as good as rock. There is a minor issue I have heard of in that the methane ice worlds have one less picture, so are a bit less common, but this is hard to test without creating multiple maps and doing counts with error bars ect.

Possible have Ice take 1K more rads (to keep warm) Gas take more minerals, and Rock take more organics (while waiting for the first crops to come in)

I like the idea of slowing down colonisation in this way. It will tend to help people that manage existing colonies well verses the fighters out there. IMHO the essence of a strategic game.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Parasite said:
If Colony trading is forbidden for some reason, ice is still just as good as rock. There is a minor issue I have heard of in that the methane ice worlds have one less picture, so are a bit less common, but this is hard to test without creating multiple maps and doing counts with error bars ect.

If you count the entries in SectType.txt, it is readily apparent that Methane has one of its entries set to the wrong type. Alternatively, you can use SJ's Map Analyzer to do the counting for you. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif One of the images that should have been used for Small Ice was instead used for Small Rock. This is the source of the imbalance, thought it is fairly minor in the big picture. If you use the Map Analyzer, you can see what the exact effects of the imbalance are.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr..._imbalance.jpg

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

We kicked around the whole methane ice having one less picture thing a year ago. Yes, they have one less picture so yes, on average the is a sligthly lower chance for methane ice worlds. But it really is meaningless in game terms. The difference isn't significant enough that it shows up noticably in individual games. Probabilities are only useful over a large sample size, and all that matters to us in a game is what's going to happen in this specific game. Even with a huge quadrant with hundreds of systems and thousands of planets, it's not really important the total number of each type. All that matters to you is how many of those planets are near you and that can't be predicted at all. Because of the randomness of placements and whatnot you could easily end up in a start system with a couple ice methane worlds and you'd be kicking youself for not taking it then. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

As far as empire setup goes there is really no basis for choosing between rock or ice over other than personal taste or role play or whatever. The choice between Rock/Ice and Gas Giant does make a difference, but that's not to say one is better than the other. They simpley require slightly different strategies as Gas players will tend to have fewer but larger, and presumably better defended planets, while a rock/ice player will have more planets but be more widely dispersed.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Actually, there is a huge difference. Fyron; change that screenshot to the "Common Max" setting.

You'll see that ice gets only a fraction of the facilities/population/build rate that rock gets.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Certainly, when comparing totals of ice and rock planets, ice loses out significantly. However, this was not the point I was contesting. I was refering to the comparison between methane ice and rock planets as opposed to the comparision between oxygen/hydrogen/carbon dioxide ice and rock planets. The bug with methane planets in SectType.txt does not significantly affect the "balance" between ice and rock planets.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

I know that, and you know that, Fyron.
But Geo just said:
In fact, Ice worlds have between 35% and 40% LESS of EVERYTHING compared to rock.

Compared to rock, gas gets slightly more population, but fewer facilities and even lower construction rate than ice; half what rock gets.

http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...stockstats.png

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

I think hardly the shift of one sector type from methane ice to methane rock would cause that drastic of a change. I'd have to have some more information about how you are calculating your percentages to comment on it. Are there some more factors that aren't generally well known causing such a discrepancy?

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

The rock/ice methane bug in sectortypes.txt does indeed make only a small effect.

The systemtypes.txt is where the huge issues crop up.
Far too many Rock/Any calls, not enough Ice/Any calls.
Rock/None is also far more common than Ice/None in the systemtypes.

The map analyser covers the effects from everything:
- sectortypes.txt
- systemtypes.txt
- quadranttypes.txt (choose one quadrant to analyse)
- settings.txt (the population modifiers to SY rate and resources)
- planetsizes.txt (facilities, population, domed planet modifiers)

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Are we talking about stock SE4 here? I was not aware that there were any system type entries specifying the composition as rock. The only planets specified at all that I am aware of are the tiny/none same as entries for the moons. Those can be any composition, but will always be rock or ice since there are no none/gas giant worlds.

I did a check just now and what I thought was correct. No composition specific entries at all in the system types file. Unless I'm blind SJ? Are you working with something other than stock files there? Maybe that was an anylsis of Fyron's Quadrant mod?

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Hrm. There are no calls there in stock. Must have been thinking of FQM indeed.

However, those stats ARE for stock, and the bugs are indeed in the sectortypes.txt

From the count of entries in sectortypes.txt:
tiny: 0 gas, 27 rock, 18 ice
small: 0 gas, 27 rock, 18 ice
medium: 8 gas, 27 rock, 10 ice
large: 16 gas, 19 rock, 10 ice
huge: 24 gas, 11 rock, 10 ice

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Well I stand corrected. I was not aware the discrepancies were that great. The only one I ever heard of was that one methane ice. I had never heard this mentioned before in any of the conversations we had about this issue.

I wonder if Malfador intended for this discrepancy to exsist? It wouldn't be a problem if the game would pick a composition and a size and then pick a sector type to match that instead of randomly choosing from the list of all sector types. Maybe that's what he intended and so he never bothered to make sure the rock and ice worlds appeared an equal number of times in the sector types file.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Or maybe they aren't -supposed- to be equal, on the assumption that more players will have the Rock planet type than the Ice planet type.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

That only matters if the players allow others to colonize in their space, or if a rock player is willing to triple up an Ice empire for a 50% increase in their own empire.

As the charts show, "Ice + Advanced Storage Racial Trait < Rock" That's Brutal.

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Thanks for all the good responses. I forgot to mention that in addition to increasing the colony costs, "we" are also increasing the facililty space to all planets, to include "domed". Thanks again. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Increased Colony costs for \"flavor\"
 

Be sure to run the map analyser to check for any stat-skewing typos or other bugs http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif