Ancient Race too powerful?

[tesco samoa]

Perhaps this should change.

There should be an option to turn that stuff off.

Or Ancient race and our maps should not update the new info until you have done some intel on that system or visited it again.

That would make sence. ANd would make that intel alit more important.

But right now that is just too unbalanced. Free knowledge without a price

[PvK]

Again, isn't this true of all system knowledge, not just that gained with Ancient Race?

To have each player keep their own Last seen view of each system would require the program to store that for each empire, and I don't think it does that, does it?

PvK

[Andrés]

That's right. All sytem knowledge is the same.
Selecting ancient race is a waste of points.
Most knoledge of far away systems is completely useles, you normally only care about nearby systems, and exploring them isn't difficult.
Identifying homeworlds is not as easy as you describe, espacially in a large quadrant you'll find too many would be homeworlds.
It would only be a nice advantage if you select the option to make contents of all systems visible.
And you can get all advantages of ancient race without exploring the whole quadrant by signing a partership with someone that has it for only 1 turn.

The "As of 2402.5" exploration memory would need some deep hard code changes but it sounds to me like the best solution.
I had suggested it sometime but don't know if I was the first.
You could make it not only remember the planets and racial points, but even alien colonies, and not sure about ships (keeping track of Last know location of every enemy ship would be too much).
I hate not remembering the location of an alien homeworld I had already found but didn't bother to write down.

The more ruins but fewer with useful tech suggestion sounds good. I would avoind the ruin hunting strategy and give it a more random effect. It should be relatively easy to mod.

[Mark Walton]

A few comments:

Races which choose Ancient Race have spent 1000 on something which everyone will get eventually. Ancient races can't go into higher levels of alliance, without giving their advantage away to other races.

The ability to get extra tech from ruins is part of what they are paying for, and having more tech is part of what makes them an "ancient race" in my view.

You could of course mod your system generation to put more ruins "behind" hidden sectors - as I am doing in my mod as the "research" element. (This mod WILL be finished and released one day, soon, )

[Praetor]

I think everybody has made some good points: Having Ancient Race does confer some big initial advantages, for colonization and strategic defense if for nothing else. I don't think its actually useless; but as Andres pointed out, the rest of the players can achieve the same thing eventually, and then its useless. Basically, the advantages it confers initially are offset by the fact that its a one-off thing. You can save money on explorers, know where to send your colony ships, etc., (as well as using your starmaps as diplomatic bargaining chips) but 500 turns down the road so will everyone else, and they'll still have Organic tech or Advanced Storage while you have bumpkus. I think that's pretty balanced.

[tesco samoa]

and the fact you know about every update to the map.

[geoschmo]

Off on a tangent if I may.

This is a perfect example of a point that many people forget during discussions of balance in SEIV. The fact is that most racial traits and techs have strengths and weaknesses that will change in relation to others over the course of a game. Theese advantages can appear unbalancing in a very specific point in the game, but with a long term view, they are not.

I always like to equate SEIV to a giant, highly detailed game of rock, paper, sizzors. I can imagine from the perspective of someone who plays paper, sizzors would seem highly "unbalanced". I mean, no matter how many times I face sizzors, they always cut right through me!

Many people will hit on a particular tech or racial trait and take the view that it is unbalanced and start calling for changes to the game. The fact is in almost every case it turns out they were missing some key point of view that would have allowed them to see the overall balance. Whether it's research cost, or in this case the limited time value of the ancient race attribute.

This is not to say the game is perfect. Of course problems have come up. But the big ones usually get fixed. If they didn't I doubt we would keep playing and caring.

The great modding flexibilty offered by this game allows for almost unlimited tweaking of these "unbalanced" factors. And yet, more often than not when someone decides to take it upon themselves to balance the game through a mod, they find it wasn't as bad as they thought at first, or they even make it worse.

Getting everybody to agree that a particualar acpect is unbalanced is not easy. Getting everybody to agree how it shold be changed to balance it out is almost impossible.

I don't really have a point here, other than this is a better game than even some of us that play it a lot realize.

Geoschmo