Balancing Race Construction

[spoon]

I'm considering making a Balanced Mod, and seek your input on a few topics...

Problem 3: Race Characteristics. There seems to be little balancing given to the point costs of racial characteristics. As far as I can see, unless you are role-playing a race, the following characteristics should always be bought up to their normal-cost maximum (ie, stop buying when the point cost is quadrupled):

Intelligence (research)
Defensiveness
Mining
Construction
Maintenance

and the following should always be dropped to at least 80%:

Farming (unless you are organic, of course)
Refining
Repair

Suggested fix: Double the costs of the 5 top traits. Remove "repair aptitude" from the list of traits

Problem 4: Advanced Traits. The point costs here seem a little off too. What do you think of the following changes:

Advanced Power Conservation: 500
Mechanoids: 250
Lucky: 250
Natural Merchants: 250
Propulsion Experts: 1000
Ancient Race: 1000
Advanced Storage: 1250
Hardy Industrialist: 1250
Psychic: 1000
Religious: 2000
Temporal: 1000
Crystallurgy: 750 (alternately, make their armor-piercing weapon a lot stronger)
Organic: 1500
Emotionless: 250

[Phoenix-D]

Advanced Power Conservation: 500

Maybe..

Mechanoids: 250

Plague bombs are pretty powerful weapons; I'd say 500.

Lucky: 250

Again, this is more important than it might appear. Having your star blow up really, really sucks.. this is more valuble the more events come into play.

Natural Merchants: 250

One free facility per star system, no chance of going broke because you lost a spaceport or three. This is worth more than 250

Advanced Storage: 1250
Not sure what the default point value is; if it's less than the changed value I agree.

Hardy Industrialist: 1250
Remeber that it only affects planet-bound ship yards..

Psychic: 1000
Eep! Two words. Alligance Subverter! This is quite easily worth 1500. Also has training facilities that work anywhere in the system, which means your ships can be training *and* guarding your choke points at the same time.

Religious: 2000
Too expensive for little gain other than the Talisman.

Temporal: 100

Temporal shipyards are quite a nice thing to have, so are the weapons. Compare this to the 1250 point Advanced Construction and remember that temportal gives you more than just fast yards

Crystallurgy: 750 (alternately, make their armor-piercing weapon a lot stronger)

Eep! Check out the Crystalline armor sometime.

Organic: 1500
Good.

Emotionless: 250
heh. This would actually GIVE you points. You get 800 right now for dropping the happyness to min. It needs to be at least 1100 IMO; riots can really ruin your day.

Phoenix-D

[Graeme Dice]

Hardy industrialist should be equal to or less than 1000 because it is less useful than placing 25 points into construction, which gives more benefit.

[Fyron]

The value of HI is dependent upon play style. It is more cost effective than 25 points in construction. If you hardly use any ship or base space yards, and a lot of planetary space yards, HI is rather valuable.

[Suicide Junkie]

Popular Characteristics:
Intelligence (research)
- Don't worry about it.

Defensiveness
- Agressiveness is in the same boat as this. Should probably be pricier

Mining
- See below

Construction
- Don't worry about it.

Maintenance
- Definitely fix it. Currently, taking +10% reduction drops your maintenance from 25% to 15%.
I am changing this to be +10% reduction = 22.5% maintenance.
I can tell you how if you like.

Farming (unless you are organic, of course)
Refining
- The way to fix these is to balance the resource costs. In my mod, I have gone and added rads cost to all components that use energy. Shields and engines are the big ones. I've also widened the use of organics, anything that would involve people or computers can count as organics.

Repair
- making ships more likely to survive with damage would fix abuse of this trait very nicely.

Using the leaky shields from the TNG mod, or the leaky armor from the B5 mod, or some other similar option would do great.

The TNG model allows armor and internal damage to build up before the shields fail, leaving lots of lightly damaged ships after a combat. Every ship that gets hit will suffer some damage.

The B5 model encourages the enemy to NOT finish off your ships; a disabled ship, with most weapons destroyed can likely absorb 2 or 3 times more damage than it already has before it breaks up. Ships need to switch targets to the "live" enemies, or die, leaving the partially crippled ships to run or limp around firing feeble shots from secondary guns.

In P&N, I have armor that is as strong as shields. It comes in 1kt chunks, though, so a single BattleCruiser could easily suffer 100 components destroyed and survive.

[Will]

I'm going to echo a lot of the responses here.

Research isn't so important that you would spend a lot of points to max it out. Slight bonus is feasible... but I usually leave it within 5% of default (95% - 105%).

Defensiveness... what SJ said. Agressiveness goes in here too, and both should probably be a bit more expensive.

Resource Production (M/O/R), what SJ said. It's better to balance the components than messing around with race creation.

Construction is fine as it is now. Same with Repair (I build my ships to Last).

Maintenance should either be made a lot more expensive, or use whatever SJ said to make it an actual percentage.

For the advanced traits:
- Advanced Power ConVersion, it gives your ships superior range and combat time until QReactor is researched... probably not worth 1000, but I'd say at least 750.
- Mechanoids, ditto on Phoenix. You'll be glad you have it when you don't have to deal with Level 5 plagues. 500 seems more than reasonable.
- Lucky... well, you obviously haven't played High/Catastrophic events very often. Give Lucky a cost of 500, and add some more events for a bit of incentive...
- Natural Merchants, I pay 1000 for this one every game right now. It's worth it, instant production from distant colonies, a bit of extra facility space, and insurance in case of attack... only way to lose production is to have every planet blockaded.
- Propulsion Experts, I think should be a bit lower, 750. One extra movement point just doesn't seem worth 1000.
- Ancient Race, definitely 1000. Especially if someone's anal enough to go through the entire map and figure out where everyone is based on homeworlds
- Advanced Storage, I'd even say 1500. It's one of the best values of the advantages, with +20% population, facilities, and cargo.
- All Racial Techs, keep at 1500, or bump all to 1750. You're greatly over-estimating Religious, and under-estimating Psychic, Temporal, and Crystalline.
- Emotionless... in early beta, this one was worth 1000. It was changed because all the testers said it was greatly unbalanced. Emotionless means no riots, no angry worlds, no matter what. You could have a little tiny colony surrounded by a 100-ship enemy fleet, and they'll still go about their business.

--edit: Ok, bullets don't work for some reason... it is supposed to be[*], right?

[ July 24, 2002, 03:02: Message edited by: Will ]

[Suicide Junkie]

• Bullets do work
• Bullets require a [ LIST] before them.
• Bullets also require a [ /LIST]after them.
  

[Baron Munchausen]

Of the advanced traits, only Hardy Industrialists really sucks. We need something else, like the ability to build ships on ANY planet, without a spaceyard facility, or something else really unique to replace this one. It's so much easier and more effective to just choose additional points of Construction Aptitude that Hardy Industrialists is useless.

The other non-technology racial traits are all pretty much worth 1000 points, and even if they aren't they can be adjusted to be worth 1000 points. Make the 'Propulsion Experts' trait give a +2 movement for example. Now it's a really nice advantage from the early game. As long as you don't fall behind in propulsion research you'll always be the fastest race around -- other than another Propulsion Expert race.

I think all of the racial technology trees are quite valuable, and of these the one you gave the highest value, Religious, is probably the least! It takes a long time for Religious facilities to give substantial benefits. And it takes a long time to get to the Talisman unless you short a lot of other necessary research. You have to take the 'long view' with a Deeply Religious race. Organic and Temporal give nasty weapons very quickly. Crystalline gives some very powerful defense advantages, and Psychic provides the 'system wide' training facilities that make training actually work for an AI, and eventually gives the very powerful Allegience Subverter. These are all valuable fairly quickly. I would not reduce the value of any of them.

I have to agree that Emotionless is too expensive at 3000 or even 2000, but making it less than 1500 or so turns it into a 'bonus' instead of a cost due to the ability to reduce your happiness levels to minimum.

[ July 24, 2002, 03:44: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[geoschmo]

I disagree that H.I. is useless, but I don't have any numbers to support my position. I have played several games where I was H.I. AND pumped the remaining points into construction. Being able to crank out ships so quickly really can make up for deficencies in a lot of other areas.

The thing about emotionless you got to remember is that it actually hurts you to select it. You pop doesn't riot, but they also can't be jubilant, and that makes a big differance empire wide on your production and research generation. And it's so unessecary too because there are so many easier ways to keep your people happy.

Geoschmo

[Pax]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
I disagree that H.I. is useless, but I don't have any numbers to support my position. I have played several games where I was H.I. AND pumped the remaining points into construction. Being able to crank out ships so quickly really can make up for deficencies in a lot of other areas.

And of course, there's Hardy Industrialists and 150% Construction and Temporal Space Yard III, all at once, on a Jubilant planet.

Heh.

Anyone wanna build at ~15K per turn? Sick, isn't it? Now try putting it on a full Sphereworld.

*chortle*