[PvK]

I've had to work Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but here goes. I'll reply to nitey first, because his are easiest to answer:

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?

No, there's no way to mod research points into ruins. What I did do is add more ruins, but make most of them red herrings. Ruins in Proportions just indicate the possibility of something worth analyzing. You don't know if you'll get anything until you go get it.

I also made it so that after acquiring an ancient tech area, you need to reasearch it before you can build anything with it.

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?

Yes, there's no way to change the nature of multiple starting worlds. However, I convinced Malfador to make a change in SE4 1.78 that allows you to set the strength of your homeworld to whatever you like (before 1.78, it used to have a max effective value):

Go to settings.txt in your Proportions/data directory, and edit the lines:

Plr Planet Value Low := 80
Plr Planet Value Medium Percent := 100
Plr Planet Value High := 120

To higher values. If you want twice the homeworld income, double the values, for example. This way homeworlds (only) will have double the resource value (or whatever value you specify).

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.

You could take Propulsion Experts or research gravitic drives...

To change this in the mod, you'd want to go to the Colony Ship entry in VehicleSize.txt and do one of a few possible things:

Option 1) Change "Engines Per Move := 36" to 20. This breaks the scale of the quasi-Netwonian physics, though, if you care. You could increase the mineral cost of the colony ship hull by about 1400 if you want to be more logical about it (approximates the cost of adding extra engines to account for the increased speed).

Option 2) Change "Requirement Max Engines := 8" to 15. The only problem with this is that the AI will not know about this - you'd have to go change all of the AI's to know how many engines to put on a colony ship, or they'd still build slow ones.

Note: Either of the above will start at max base speed 3 and go up by one for each increase in engine tech. Don't do both...

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.

I usually don't pick any formal, game-enforced victory conditions, because they might end a game at a point where I was still enjoying it. Usually I like to see each empire set their own goals according to what makes sense for them. On PBW, sometimes it is fun and helpful to invent some interesting victory conditions. However, when one player dominates the whole quadrant, it's usually pretty self-evident.

PvK