Questions comments and general ramblings from a new player...

[PDF]

Hello,
I started playing SE4 Last week and already feel somewhat addicted, I couldn't resist trying all the mods and new races I saw ... thus I started 4 games but didn't progress very far in either ..

So about the mods, I still wonder what's the difference (races apart...) between what seems the 2 most widely used : TDM and Devnull ? The readme are very brief about the changes.

I read about Proportions (of which I like the ideas) that it was designed for MP, so I'll got a try at a new PBW, thanks Nebula, we'll start today !

Now I must admit that the game is wonderful about how the races, the diplomacy, the tech trees and ship design/combat are implemented, but I've been quite disappointed with the colonization/economy process
Colonizing a new planet up to nearly-full capacity (at a given tech level) is a matter of 5-6 turns, 10 at most : send colony ship, add a pop trans (300 M population per ship, that's the USA whole population moved in amonth !! ), pop up 5 facilities at the rate of 1/turn, and in perhaps 2 game years a whole system has been colonized..
That's overly quick and easy ! And population is mainly useless, as facilities need nearly to noone to operate properly : how in hell can 10 M people produce more than 50% of what 2000 M people can do ???
Same for research : to max out RP the best way is to populate each colony with lots of Research Facilities... That really doesn't sound logical, science should need proper infrastructure, support, all what we on Earth worked for centuries to have here !

I supposed that for a long time my homeworld would give most of the empires economic output, now in a couple of years it's just an overpopulated big colony ... I know Proportion mod changes this but didn't try yet (cf above ).

And so the game tends too much towards "colony race" so as to have more planet "slots" just to put facilities, where it should be more oriented towards making in the long run viable colonies out of harsh places, IMHO that'll be more fun and challenging.

With a better economic model the game would be just *more than great*

Your thoughts ?

[geoschmo]

Two things.

1. You are not alone in your opinions about the eonomic model.

2. You are going to LOVE the proportions mod.

It deals, or attempts to deal directly with almost all the issues you brought up.

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

The difference between TDM and Devnull is that TDM isn't really a mod. What TDM IS is the greatest collection of super-powerfully tweaked AIs available for download.
Devnull goes and changes how the game works (production, components, ships, intel etc), and has relatively little AI changes.

Regarding the economy; that is so very true.
I think that most mods will be including economic tweaks since that issus has been brought to light. It will probably spread faster than my Quasi-newtonian propulsion did

What I did for Pirates&Nomads was write a program to generate new population modifiers.
The P&N settings.txt is 700KB now, but I have a very nice economic model
P&N Starts all new colonies at 10% of normal building rate. It then adds 1% to that for every 25M people that get added.
So, fresh colonies will take 7 turns to build any of the basic facilities, while homeworlds can build monoliths in one turn.
This 1%/25M hold all the way up to Dyson Spheres, which get upto 25x the normal SE4 build rate! (Fear the SphereWorld)
I have resource production follow a sine wave, where it starts at 2% and rapidly rises to 225% of normal when you have roughly 500M people. It then slowly falls until it levels off at 100% for anything over about 2 billion people.

The extremely slow buildup on colonies means that you need to ship lots of people to your borders. Even with lots of population available, the low population limits on domed worlds means you can't throw together defenses or facilities.
Shipping in units of all kinds is highly reccommended.

One setting (in settings.txt) I really like is "Ground Combat Turns :=2"
I've also bumped up the militia strength.
Unless you're stomping a small outpost, ground combat can take multiple years before it is over.

In one game I'm playing, I dumped Five Thousand (tiny size) troops onto one of the enemy's huge developed planets. So far the fighting has dragged on for 7 months.
I suspect that the AI is building troops on those planets as reinforcements, but since this is a simultaneous turn game, only the defender can see what's going on .

settings.zip
This file will get you the settings described above for the improved P&N economics and ground combat. Paste it over top of your P&N settings.txt.

[ 23 April 2002: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[PDF]

Many thanks Geoschmo and Junkie - I love this board, 1 hour after posting two experts give me advice ... but raises other questions :
- about TDM and DevNull : TDM is a super AI SEIV setting, DevNull has "real" gameplay changes - but what are the main ones ?
- And now I heard about P&N ... what has this one to offer ?

Many thanks Junkie for the settings file, is it usable with other mod/plain SE4 or only with P&N ?

BTW I was just browsing mine and figuring how to change the population modifiers ... Was thinking giving 1% per 10 M colonists, with reduced (by 10) pop growth rate !
I've also found a "min pop per facility" parameter at 50 (M I suppose), perhaps upping it up to 100 or even 250 can be a good idea.

Can I make my "RealEconomy mod" so easily ? Will the AI be able to manage the new settings ?
That'll be super cool ! Or perhaps I just have to play Proportions ...

And there is another thing that annoys me : the 300 M pop/transport (light !). This ruins the whole point of having slow colonial growth , and I didn't find how to change that...
I want to have stg like 1000 to 5000 pop / KT cargo, instead of 1 M (that's a decrease !)
Where is the "weight of 1 population" parameter ?

Many thanks anyway !

[dogscoff]

Bonjour PDF,

The economic issues you brought up (ie population weighting) are all included in the proportions mod.

Four major mods (TDM, P&N, Devnull & Proportions) are compared in this recent thread.

S_J's file should work in the standard game. It will probably work in other mods, too, but it could severely disrupt the balance of some mods.

I think that will answer most of your questions, but if it doesn't just keep asking=-)

[ 23 April 2002: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

And there is another thing that annoys me : the 300 M pop/transport (light !). This ruins the whole point of having slow colonial growth , and I didn't find how to change that...
I want to have stg like 1000 to 5000 pop / KT cargo, instead of 1 M (that's a decrease !)
Where is the "weight of 1 population" parameter ?

---

The line:
Population Mass := 5

Will do what you want. This is the size if 1M people. Note that 1M is the smallest unit of population.
Colony modules by default hold 20KT, so if you increase the population mass beyond 20, then you should increase the colony module supply storage to match. Otherwise, you won't get any population on your colonies at all.

quote:

---

BTW I was just browsing mine and figuring how to change the population modifiers ... Was thinking giving 1% per 10 M colonists, with reduced (by 10) pop growth rate !
I've also found a "min pop per facility" parameter at 50 (M I suppose), perhaps upping it up to 100 or even 250 can be a good idea.

---

I can generate those population modifiers for you if you like. Once I get home from work, I'll upload it for you.
So far, it sounds like you want the spaceyard rate to be:
1% at 1M people, 2% at 11M, and so on...
799% at 8 Billion people (Huge Breathable)
5999% at 60 Billion people (Dyson Sphere)
All you have to do is tell me how you want the resource production to change with population.
- Linearly with population? (like the spaceyard)
- Square-root of population? (Or some other exponential)
- Sine wave?
- any other function that can be easily calculated by a computer?

quote:

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- And now I heard about P&N ... what has this one to offer ?

---

Oh, plenty.
At the moment, I am working on a major split with tradition, (in testing on PBW). P&N comes in many flavours.
There is:
- P&N Classic (Non-Gold, with the regular SE4 movement system)
- P&N V2 (Non-Gold, with Quasi-Newtonian Propulsion)
- P&N V2 PBW (Non-Gold, with QNP, and many tweaks impossible for AIs to handle)
- P&N V3 (Gold, with QNP)

Once I've gotten P&N V2 PBW tested a bit, I'll Goldify it and release it as V3 PBW.

There are too many things to list here, so I shall have to link to other files
Modinfo.txt For V2.5 PBW.

The P&N section of my homepage. There you can see a bunch of the changes I'm making for v2.6 PBW, and which will be transferred to the Gold Version.

In addition, there are a few more changes I'm considering in the testing.
- Psychic Races get double the boarding defense ability from crew quarters.
- Civilian Ships for Pirate Races, which can avoid even the highest-tech sensors.
- Racial tech armors are broken into smaller chunks, and organic armor can do a little photosynthesis of supplies.
- Disadvantageous Racial traits (with a negative cost). EG: Endemic wastefulness (everything uses more supplies than normal), and Naturalists, which reduces planetary storage by 30% - 40%.
Theres a couple of more iffy things, possibly for a later Version.

For more background info than you can shake a stick at, seeA Pirate's Life For Me (Shrapnel Forum Thread (38 Pages!))

[oleg]

Actually, proportions mod is not bad for single player. Just give AI high dific. and high bonus and you will be stuck in the Last place for looong time. The major problem with proportions Ai is a very short range of its ships. PvK is working on this issue and next patch should be superb. In the meantime, edit quadranttype.txt file and increace percentage of systems with planets. It will help AI a little.

[PDF]

Uuuh, actually things are becoming more complicated than anticipated, as usual !

I started with "should I play TDM or DevNull", now it shifted to "Proportions vs P&N", and both seems to fit my preferences, so ...

SJ, thanks for the population weight param... If I make 1 pop weigh more than 20 kt noone will get there but will I still have a colony ? And could I populate here thereafter by sending transport ships (ie if it weights say 100 kT will a transport with 100 kT in 5 cargo comps load 1 pop or none - is the load calculated per component or globally ?)

Only other question left is what mean the "Min pop per facility" param ??

As for p&N Version I only have SE4G, so I'd have to use P&N 3.0, no choice - but it seems fine !

About the production rate, in fact I didn't imagine that pop could get to 60B, and that Spaceyards and Resources have different modifiers...I was only referring to resources in my first post.

So I have to think a little more on what I want : having 7000% increase would be silly, there should be some cap here, as yards and plants can only produce to a certain extent and overpopulation shouldn't be a good thing ...

For resources perhaps a "linear by steps" function : linear increase vs pop first (up to say 100 % for 2B) then less than linear (up to say 250% for 10B), then still smaller increases (300% -40 B) then capped ?
And for SY I really don't have a clear idea if it should follow the same pattern or a different one ..

.... uh, my head aches .. I have to stop !

Thanks for your help, SJ, I'll ask you when I'll have clearer ideas - anyway it's pretty easy to do with Excel.

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

---

Originally posted by PDF:
Hello,
I started playing SE4 Last week and already feel somewhat addicted, I couldn't resist trying all the mods and new races I saw ... thus I started 4 games but didn't progress very far in either ...

Colonizing a new planet up to nearly-full capacity (at a given tech level) is a matter of 5-6 turns, 10 at most : send colony ship, add a pop trans (300 M population per ship, that's the USA whole population moved in amonth !! ), pop up 5 facilities at the rate of 1/turn, and in perhaps 2 game years a whole system has been colonized..
That's overly quick and easy ! And population is mainly useless, as facilities need nearly to noone to operate properly : how in hell can 10 M people produce more than 50% of what 2000 M people can do ???

Same for research : to max out RP the best way is to populate each colony with lots of Research Facilities... That really doesn't sound logical, science should need proper infrastructure, support, all what we on Earth worked for centuries to have here !

I supposed that for a long time my homeworld would give most of the empires economic output, now in a couple of years it's just an overpopulated big colony ... I know Proportion mod changes this but didn't try yet (cf above ).

And so the game tends too much towards "colony race" so as to have more planet "slots" just to put facilities, where it should be more oriented towards making in the long run viable colonies out of harsh places, IMHO that'll be more fun and challenging.

With a better economic model the game would be just *more than great*

Your thoughts ?

---

Some simple changes to settings.txt can reduce these problems. Change population growth rate for example. ANd change default planet build rate to make colony development slow down.

Empire Base Planet Mineral Usage Rate := 1000
Empire Base Planet Organic Usage Rate := 1000
Empire Base Planet Radioactive Usage Rate := 1000

This makes a level III extraction facility (mineral, organic, or radioactive) take THREE turns to build on a new colony. Adding population will speed it up, but not nearly as much as with the original default build rate.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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SJ, thanks for the population weight param... If I make 1 pop weigh more than 20 kt noone will get there but will I still have a colony ? And could I populate here thereafter by sending transport ships (ie if it weights say 100 kT will a transport with 100 kT in 5 cargo comps load 1 pop or none - is the load calculated per component or globally ?)

Only other question left is what mean the "Min pop per facility" param ??

---

Cargo is global. Only the total space vs total size of stuff you're putting in matters.
Your colony ships will plant an empty colony dome, and you can ship people over later, but the AIs might have a bit of trouble with that situation.

The minimum population per KT was disabled back in the SE4 Non-Gold Beta testing days. It has no effect now. (Why thy just didn't set it to zero, and leave it moddable, I don't know)