Proportions and Devnull Mod combo

[Mylon]

Would the two of you mind if I made a mod combining the best (in my opinion) of Proportions and Devnull mods? I wanted to get consent before starting some project that might get shot down. I like the minor little changes of Devnull such as minesweeping ability of point defense weapons, the splitting of monolith facilities, systemwide fleet training, ect, and at the same time I enjoy the more building-focused aspect of Proportions, plus the different little support extras scattered around, like the weapon platform control centers.

[ October 23, 2002, 00:45: Message edited by: Mylon ]

[Fyron]

Rollo is in charge of Devnull, not Geo.

[geoschmo]

Yep, I dug it up out of the grave, but Rollo is the one who has brought it back to life. I haven't touched it since the Version released on the Gold CD. Even on that one Rollo did most of the hard work. Since then he's done all of it.

[PvK]

Be my guest, Mylon. I only ask that people mention the use in the readme.

You might want to look at Derek's Mod, which, if I'm not mistaken, does exactly what you propose, but of course with what Derek likes best from both mods.

PvK

[oleg]

Long time since Derek updated his mod. It was base on Proportion 1.5 if I'm not mistaken. It would be good if anyone update it or make a new compilation of Proportion/Devnull

[Mylon]

I do intend on giving full credit to both PVK and Rollo and the original creator of Devnull, Devnull himself. Plagerism is about one of the worst sins a person could commit, in my opinion.

I intend to create a city I, a City II, and a city III based on research, intelligence, mineral extraction, organic extraction, radioactives extraction, and probably industry. This way, while the more specialized facilities increase in usefulness, so will cities. I also plan on modifying the cost of cities somewhat to make them slightly more appealing.

Another change I would like to make is to create a "city foundation" structure which has the production rate of a space yard, and can be upgraded into a spaceport city, which will have a production rate as well. Granted, this will make homeworlds even more powerful, but perhaps they might stand a chance at building an extra Cultural World Center or upgrading the ones they have to the III Version.

I am curious about how I will keep this mod up to date with Proportions and Devnull mods as they are updated (have to go locate changes and copy/paste them), but I'm still waiting on Rollo's okay.

[Rollo]

Mylon, Devnull Mod is public domain and an amalgamation of many mods from many authors.
You are welcome to take as many or as little from it as you like. The only exception would be the artwork for the races (United Flora, Taera, Vikings, and Sonne) as only the artists can give permission for that.

Rollo

[Mylon]

Alright. I already have the two mods, so I'll start working on throwing them together. Like almost anything though, I'll probably take my sweet time doing any of it.

[Mylon]

Well right now I'm focusing on actually playing Proportions to get the feel for everything before I make any changes. I'm considering making two Versions of the mod. One Version is purely a mix of Proportions and Devnull, and the other Version would be my own touches added on.

For my own touches, I'm tossing out the city foundation idea and am considering raising the production bonus for larger populations. I'll probably also remove the upgrading between cities (but nearly halve the cost of them), quite possibly remove arcologies (too expensive!), and also adjust the cost of the I, II, and III Versions of complexes/megaplexes so they have the same costs. I'm at about turn 500 in a game and have a world with 7 megalopolii, mostly due to the constant influx of colonists since the very early stage of the game (3000M at the moment), and this is _only_ because of Hardy Industrialist + 120% spaceyard + temporal space yards. I'd like to see the pace quickened a little. PVK aims for realism, I just like a fun game.

I'm considering lowering the production bonus of successive space yards and raising the production bonus of extra colonists to a pretty high amount. This will hopefully speed in building of infrastructure to some degree and keep the emphasis on population size rather than production facilities. I think being able to apply HI + space yard bonus to non-space yard construction would ease the major jump in production after a space yard is built, if this was possible.

Another change I would like to do is decrease the damage of point defense weapons (and likewise, the damage resistance of many seekers by the same proportion) and allow them to target anything. This would be fun (since there's no reason they couldn't fire on larger objects) but introduces the problem of them firing on ships rather than the more important seekers. Either way, the range of Point Defense Beams needs to be greatly increased to make them worthwhile. Currently PDBs are quite useless except against those fighters which even PD weapons have problems with, but with a much larger range (up to +10) they would be much more effective in swarms, allowing an entire fleet's PD weapons to stack, and thus give them more utility.

[ October 23, 2002, 01:07: Message edited by: Mylon ]

[oleg]

To speed up game consider doubling reproduction rate and halving population mass (there are strings in settings.txt for that). I found it makes even "standard" Proportions more interesting.