New races-maintenance reduction

[Egregius]

Question: is there any new race that doesn't involve maintenance reduction, or a massive research bonus? At least in the TDM-modpack almost all new races and even some of the older ones are given maintenance reduction, non-existant trade, and heaps have enhanced research.

I know everyone wants their race to be the scary overpowering race everybody fears, but be creative will ya?

/disgruntled rant

[Gorgo]

I think the ModPack Piundon guys are rather lazy researchers, in my games they produced very few research points.


As about every custom race now relies on armor for a long time, a a few more good custom crystalline races should be a good thing.

[Suicide Junkie]

Maintenance reduction is just too valuable. For about a thousand points, you can double your maximum sustainable fleet size.

IMO, Maintenance reduction needs to have more price levels, and cost much more for the higher reductions.

I'm also thinking of starting the maintenance at 100%, so +5% maintenance reduction gives you 95% maintenance. The resulting price can then be divided by 4 to get Standard SE4 maintenance of 25%, or in this case (+5%), 23.75%

[Atraikius]

When I was doing up the Orks, I was trying to make them follow the Orks from Warhammer 40K/Battle Fleet Gothic. (as quoted from the Orks codex - We iz gonna stomp da 'ooniverse flat an' kill anyfing that fights back. We iz gonna do this coz' we're Orks an' we was made ta fight an' win. - and - Orkses is never beaten in battle. If we win we win, if we die we die so it don't count as beat. if we runs fer it we don't die neither, so we can always come back for anuvver go, see!) I tried to keep that attitude for them along with thier perferred use of drifting space hulks, so I felt that drastically reducing thier political savvy was fitting with thier ethics, and the drastically boosting thier maitenance to fit with their single minded warlike attitude, and the bizaar mindset of thier engineers. I also greatly increased thier physical strength even befor eI had them invading planets because thier suppose to be big, mean, green, and scary, along with giving them some distinct disadvantages to exploit that fit them.

[Mephisto]

There is some point in your comment about all the TDM-Races using the same traits. There are just certain limitations that leave us modders no choice in order to create a competitive AI: The AI is not that good in handling ships. It just cannot foresee where it will need the ships in the next turns so in essence the AI just needs more ships so at least some of them are near the place the AI needs them. Further, the AI is quite bad in managing resources (in effect, it doesn’t manage them altogether ). All to often the AI cripples itself in the first few turns by running out of resources. Therefore, you are just forced to reduce the maintenance.
Further, a human player can easily train his ships and gains 40% better defense and attack values. The Ai doesn’t do this most of the time. And it can’t use the stealth armor (it will use the cloaking device instead). As a modder you are nearly forced to give them a racial defense bonus.
You see, there are many reasons why we modders do certain things and that these reasons might not be very obvious. Of course we could do completely other races but the would be let by the AI into their graves only.

[Alpha Kodiak]

I try to vary some of the traits in the different AI's that I put together, but the reason I started working on AI's in the first place was because so many were complaining about how easy the AI was to beat. I started analysing what it was that I did as a human player to make my empire strong, and realized that the most important thing was advancing in technology. That is why every race I make tries to generate a lot of research points. That starts with high research bonus.

Beyond that, things vary quite a bit. If you compare the AI's for the Rage, Vaxin, SEOR, Angelican Regency, Vandron and Hevordah, you will see dramatic variations in how they approach the game, but you will see that they are all strong in research and most have bonuses in intelligence and maintenance. Without those, they are fodder for human players. (Actually, they are pretty much fodder, anyway, once you figure out how to deal with them, but at least they put up a bit of a fight.)