Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

...Considering it's 3000 http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/shock.gif points.

Through testing I found out that emotionless populations get a 10% bonus to production, that's the same as Happy. That suprised me a little. I expected no pop bonus, like indifferent.

It's not that hard to keep your own population jubilant all the time. And conqured pop's stay jubilant as long as you keep a few ships in the system. They can even be mothballed if you need the resources.

The production bonus for Jubilant is 120%, so paying the 3000 racial points actually loses you resources.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

The reason I bring it up is because the Borg and the Vulcans in my Startrek mod are going to need to be emotionless, and that kind of limits my flexibility on what other characteristics they can have.

I am thinking about lowering the cost of the emotionless racial trait in my mod. But maybe someone can come up with some reason why that is a bad idea? I don't want to affect play balance.

Geo

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

I think that this is due to the change in starting happiness level from jubilant to happy. I don't know if the racial point cost was considered with that change. So in a previous patch this trait was not quite so expensive.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Didn't Drake say there was a problem with Emotionless? I thought he said that conquered races that started our angry *stayed* angry?

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Conquered races don't start out angry always. Each planets mood carries over from how it was before conquered.

But your own races happiness will increase slightly over time, while conquered races will decrease slightly over time unless you do something to counter act it. Ie, build ships or facilities on planet, Have ships in system, win battles in system, etc.

Geo

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Raynor I think I misunderstood your comment the first time I read it.

I don't play Emotionless that much so I can't really say I have seen that problem.

If Drake is correct that would seem to be a bug. I will have to test and see If I can confirm whether or not that is still true.

It may have been fixed already?

Geo

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

geoschmo:

What I'm about to say might be provocative and controversial - but what the heck, you only live once!

THIS IS JUST MY OPPINION:

SIMPLE:

BORG -> EMOTIONLESS = okay
VULCAN -> EMOTIONLESS = I don't think so...

COMPLEX:

The borg has no emotions - I can buy that.

But the Vulcans are suffering from emotional denial. Captain Kirk has time after time proved that Vulcans DO have emotions, but in a very repressed state.

"Live long and prosper" - with sadness in his eyes, and love in his voice. But it was not MENTAL love or LOGICAL sadness, they were feelings - emotions.

The vulcan emotional repressed states DO affect their community (empire) in a great deal. The vulcans are just TOO intelligent and have realized that they don't need their emotions - and they often forget about them. Maybe their biological evolution some day removes all emotions - but they do have emotions of a small degree.

These repressed emotions are often of a NEGATIVE thematic value, or "kirk was right".
But the "EMOTIONLESS" trait is not of a negative thematic value - not when it costs 3000 points.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Here's the link to Drake's comment. It's down a ways.
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/For...ML/001374.html

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Lucanos, let me first say that your post was very close to being too deep for me to wrap my little brain around. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon10.gif

I think I understand your point after reading it a couple of times. (except for that part about Spock being in love with Kirk. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/shock.gif )

I don't disagree with you that Vulcans have demonstrated several times in Star Trek that they do in fact still have emotions under all that logical veneer.

In the framework of Space Empires though happiness is only used as a modifier to resource production, reproduction rate, and the like. In that regard I think we can agree that Vulcans as a whole do not allow there emotional state to affect them outwardly, and so it should not have an effect on any of these things.

So whether its by choice or by biology, I think they should be classified as emotionles, just like the Borg.

Geo

P.S. my head hurts http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

To answer your initial question Geoschmo: No your are not the only one. I would like to use this racial trait more often, but 3000 points is really to much considering that for this you can get e.g. organic and religious tech together.
I will probably change it to only 1000 points.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

I think it's too pricey but 1000 would be too cheap, the trait is just too useful, with it subject populations never grow unhappy, and your people don't care what you do, you have complete freedom to play in a totally macavellian manner, manipulating the situation in any way you want without worry that going to war or making peace will upset your population or that a recently conquered planet needs a ton of troops to hold down the natives.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

How many points do you get from lowering happiness down to the minimum? Which you can apply towards the 3000 points needed for emotionless trait.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Zodd,

This would be acceptable if I was playing an emotionless race myself, or using an .emp file. But what I am trying to do is setup the racename_ai_general.txt files so that the computer can use these races.

Unfortunatly there is a bug where you can't get points back from reducing the race opt characteristics in this file.

If fact I have done some testing and setting these values below 100 does not seem to work at all, even if you don't have any increased characteristics.

Geo

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

geoschmo wrote:
"below 100 does not seem to work at all"

I heard that too, but then I heard that if you create a *.emp file the "below 100" settings actually work.

BTW, I tried to edit the cultures.txt in the Data directory (really LOWERING all the values) for my "winter mod", but the file didn't load when I executed the game.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

I think 1000 points for emotionless would actually be reasonable.

One of the problem with taking emotionless for strategic reasons is that it doesn't act as 'emotionless' but rather makes your happiness state unchangable (I haven't tested this with 1.30, but no mention of a change to this is made in the history).

Another reason against taking it would be that there are better ways to improve your happiness. If you're seriously concerned about it for production reasons, either spend points on increasing happiness, or better yet pick temporal. I'd personally go with a decrease to about 80%, take temporal, and lose 1000 pts while picking up facilities that are twice as effective at increasing happiness, twice as effective at building things, and more options for weapons. Balance that against 3000(!) points for emotionless, and I just don't see the sense in taking emotionless.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Should it be 1000 points *above* the 800 points you get when you set Happiness down to 50%?

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

I'd rather it force your happiness to 100%, but yeah - only having it at 1000 pts and letting you take -%50 and get 800 back is too inexpensive.

Re: Am I the only person who thinks the Emotionless racial trait is a bit pricey?
 

Drake:
"I just don't see the sense in taking emotionless."

Me neither - there are no emotional senses to be seen in the emotionless.

Seriously,
SEIV attracts lots of roleplayers, and some of them chooses traits that fit their racial description. "Why?" I dunno why...