Proportions mod: So confusing!

[PvK]

To be clear, Mylon, I'm not saying any of your suggestions aren't good or wouldn't make the mod more fun for many people. And, thanks extremely much for the suggestions and feedback - I love to hear what people think and their experiences with the mod. The feedback is what's inspired me to keep developing the mod.

I'm sure that some severe lightening up of some of my scales could make the game more appealing to many players. And, I invite you or anyone to do variants to suit their own tastes. It's just not quite what I've been trying to do with my Version of it.

PvK

[Mylon]

Sure, it took Earth twice as long to build less than 18 cultural centers, but also consider Earth's population (the 6-7 billion mark we're at now is a pretty recent thing. It wasn't always like that!), our technology level (I assume a world that can build economical space ships would be able to produce more), and the fact that our planet is hardly a single entity of people like the united force a player controls in SEIV. Imagine what we could do if we stopped blowing each other up and built stuff together for a mere two centuries. I'd imagine we'd build those 18 cultural centers pretty quickly. I don't really expect homeworlds to build dreadnauts in one turn, but I would like to see production bonuses for larger populations increased to some degree to make facility building a little faster.

As for population transport... Why not make it more expensive to research level one and level two? The idea is that it still should be cheaper than building a battleship sized population transport in terms of research costs. A counter to the ease of population transport, as I've already suggested, is to decrease population reproduction and likewise increase the point cost of faster reproduction. This way an empire can spread faster, but not necessarily develop faster.

The main reason I like cities is because of their compactness. One idea of making the city variants with much less hassle would be to only make 3 levels or so for each city. Instead of discovering a new city type each time you research applied research, mineral producion, applied intelligence, ect, given a new level of city when one level of every field is researched. Thus, the Metropolis Level 2 wouldn't appear until level 2 was reached in mineral production, applied research, applied intelligence, radioactives extraction, organics exctraction, and possily political science (on the grounds that urban pacification might help a little). Under this system, it might be wise to tone down the level 1 cities a little.

Another idea would be to make a space yard-city combination in addition to the cultural world center that could possibly replace the space-cities that have a resupply depot built into them. This way one can bypass the 1-production limit by having one special production center and the rest of the buildings as other urban-type structures.

[Mylon]

Just a clarification for my enhanced cities idea, since even to me it seems a little confusing the way I said it:

Instead of having a hundred or so city varients that reflect each individual advances, cities could instead reflect these individual advances but at less frequent intervals. These invervals could be marked based on levels in every area. When one level of every applicable field is researched, only then does a new level of a city become available. Thus, to uncover metropolis level two, one must research one level of applied research, one level of all three extractions, one level of applied intelligence _and_ perhaps some other appropriate techs (applied political science?). Thus, the advancement of cities based on other technology could be modelled without designing a hundred or so variants of each city to reflect smaller advancements in the individual areas. It isn't perfect, but it's a nice approximation. I'd also like to see easier upgrading in certain manners (upgrading metropolis level 1 to metropolis level 2 should be much faster than the current 1/2 of the time of building a new one, for example), but this area isn't necessarily a mod issue. I just think SEIV wasn't really designed to handle expensive facilities this way.

[nitey]

Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.

[Mylon]

The idea with proportions is that since everything goes slower, you just generate turns more often. I can easily run through 100 turns before I really get anywhere in the game. This is probably a problem when playing against other players, though, as 100 turns will likely take 100 days.

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by PvK:
[/qb]

18 of them? Well at 100 years a piece, that's only 1800 years. It took Earth more than twice that long to produce substantially fewer than that.[/quote]
Not really. We've gone from pure agricultural to our modern infrastructure in about 200 years.

An advanced space-faring society shouldn't need large populations to create great amounts of resources anyways, as those kinds of things can be automated.

[nitey]

Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.

[PvK]

I've had to work Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but here goes. I'll reply to nitey first, because his are easiest to answer:

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

BTW, thanks for all your work on the proportions mod. I have a few questions though that I didn't seem to find in your read me files:

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Ruins: I've only played two games (whiched ended prematurely) so far, but I don't seem to be getting a technology bump when colonizing ruins. But it does seem that my current projects seem to finish faster. Have you changed the free technology for an amount of research points?

No, there's no way to mod research points into ruins. What I did do is add more ruins, but make most of them red herrings. Ruins in Proportions just indicate the possibility of something worth analyzing. You don't know if you'll get anything until you go get it.

I also made it so that after acquiring an ancient tech area, you need to reasearch it before you can build anything with it.

2. Starting with 1 planet on your mod, seems very slow, so I bumped a 2nd game to starting with 3 plants. Even with average/bad planets, it feels like overkill. Does the game hard code the starting resources for the 2nd and 3rd planets to be like the first or is there a way to tone down the starting resources on the 2nd and 3rd planets?

Yes, there's no way to change the nature of multiple starting worlds. However, I convinced Malfador to make a change in SE4 1.78 that allows you to set the strength of your homeworld to whatever you like (before 1.78, it used to have a max effective value):

Go to settings.txt in your Proportions/data directory, and edit the lines:

Plr Planet Value Low := 80
Plr Planet Value Medium Percent := 100
Plr Planet Value High := 120

To higher values. If you want twice the homeworld income, double the values, for example. This way homeworlds (only) will have double the resource value (or whatever value you specify).

3. I also think that the amount of engines on the Rock colony ship is a bit low. Movement of only 2 squares until you get to tech 3 on engines (and then it only goes up to 3) is a bit too slow IMO. While I understand you like this, if I wanted to change this to make my colony ships only 1 square faster what would I need to change and where.

You could take Propulsion Experts or research gravitic drives...

To change this in the mod, you'd want to go to the Colony Ship entry in VehicleSize.txt and do one of a few possible things:

Option 1) Change "Engines Per Move := 36" to 20. This breaks the scale of the quasi-Netwonian physics, though, if you care. You could increase the mineral cost of the colony ship hull by about 1400 if you want to be more logical about it (approximates the cost of adding extra engines to account for the increased speed).

Option 2) Change "Requirement Max Engines := 8" to 15. The only problem with this is that the AI will not know about this - you'd have to go change all of the AI's to know how many engines to put on a colony ship, or they'd still build slow ones.

Note: Either of the above will start at max base speed 3 and go up by one for each increase in engine tech. Don't do both...

BTW, while this isn't on the topic of your mod, what victory conditions do you normally choose and why? I don't particularly like the total points because everytime I reach that point all the races declare war on me (not exactly my goal).

Thanks for your time.

I usually don't pick any formal, game-enforced victory conditions, because they might end a game at a point where I was still enjoying it. Usually I like to see each empire set their own goals according to what makes sense for them. On PBW, sometimes it is fun and helpful to invent some interesting victory conditions. However, when one player dominates the whole quadrant, it's usually pretty self-evident.

PvK

[PvK]

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.

The emp files have to be created for Proportions. The ones included with Proportions should work. Ones from the original game, or shipsets not made for Proportions, won't work.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.

I actually did not see this in the few tests I just ran, but I expect that due to your other settings, including un-checking "player homeworlds are all the same size" that they are getting larger planets than the others in your games, probably because they live on Gas Giants, and there are no small Gas Giants. Choosing low value planets will cause this.

PvK

[oleg]

Originally posted by nitey:
Pvk,

Another thing I've noticed. I've been trying to start a new game and if I select an Existing Race template, I get a error (unable to open file). I can create a new race emp file without a problem.

However, when I check all races scores visible to all races and start the game, the ABBIDON and the EEE have ridicuously high research/population and scores compared to all the rest of the races. Any idea why this is happening? It's consistant, you should be able to see it for yourself or I can send you a save game if you wish. I'm using Version 1.78.

What Version of Proportions do you use (the latest is 2.42) ? In older Proportions Versions there was no separate emp directory and SEIV tried to load default (non-moded) emp. files. That of course create error Messages. If you get latest Version, try to load one of my races (pequeninos, soul hunters or nostropholo). If you still have a problem, let know.