Colony ships, for sale cheap!

[Fyron]

I said to put the maintenance reducution on the colony ship, not on the colony module.

With a med tech start and a medium homeworld, with no construction bonuses, a colony ship costs 4850 minerals and the homeworld builds at 2600 resources per turn. The colony ship takes 4850/2600 or 1.865 turns to build. The standard colony module costs 2000 minerals. To get a build time of X, we need to increase the cost of the colony module to some amount, as modeled below:

Ex: 3 turns to build
1) Total minerals production of planet/cost needed for X build time: 2600*3=7800
2) Extra cost needed: 7800-4850=2950
3) New mineral cost of colony module: 2000+2950=4950

4 turns to build
1) 2600*4=10400
2) 10400-4850=5550
3) 2000+5550=7550

5 turns to build
1) 2600*5=13000
2) 13000-4850=8150
3) 2000+8150=10150

6 turns to build
1) 2600*6=15600
2) 15600-4850=10750
3) 2000+10750=12750

7 turns to build
1) 2600*=18200
2) 18200-4850=13350
3) 2000+13350=15350

8 turns to build
1) 2600*8=20800
2) 20800-4850=15950
3) 2000+15950=17950

9 turns to build
1) 2600*9=23400
2) 23400-4850=18550
3) 2000+18550=20550

10 turns to build
1) 2600*10=26000
2) 26000-4850=21150
3) 2000+21150=23150

I suggest that we make the colony ship take about 8 turns to build, so the minerals cost of the colony module should be raised to 17950, or maybe 18000 even.

[Edit]
I removed the that appeared where it shouldn't have appeared.
[/Edit]

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Spoo]

But you need to take into account the advantage to players who max out their construction trait. As it stands now, even with +50% construction plus the Engineer (125% base) cultural trait, a colony ship still takes 2 turns to build. If the build time was increased to 8 to 10 turns, those with the advanced constuction traits would be able to expand exponentally faster than those with out (5 or 6 turns per ship then each colony can send out more ships faster and so on).

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: Spoo ]

[Fyron]

A race that takes 150% construction rate and Hardy Industrialists spends 4500 racial points. They'd get their medium sized planet to have 4100 construction points. This would allow the proposed 8 turn colony ship (20800 minerals) to be built in 20800/4100 or 5.07 turns, which rounds up to 6 turns. This would represent a 25% increase in the rate of expansion. If you want to spend 4500 points on something, then you should get an advantage from it. And this option is really only viable in a 5000 point game, which, in my experience, is the exception, not the rule. If this is a big problem for you, then we could increase the cost per point beyond 20 of Construction from 100 to 200. That would make it really expensive to get this fast colonization.

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[dumbluck]

I like this idea. I had been toying with the idea of increasing the cost of the colony module myself, but I don't really have the time right now to do that. (PBW being down right now is actually a blessing for me. Busy, busy, busy!!!)

[Fyron]

quote:

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I was just trying to justify the current costs. I think the problem is more in the speed of building structures than in the speed of establishing colonies.
Example: You establish a colony on a huge world, and start building mines. [Edit: I mean mines as in mining facilities.] In only 30 years, you've covered the entire surface with mines. What??!! Holy Cow! that's a lot of mines!
Another example: In the same turn that you colonize, you can fill up the colony with settlers (from transports) to its max pop. What??!! Where did all that housing come from?
Sooooo, what you really need to do is to make all planets hold 6x as much stuff, decrease the capabilities of all facilities by 4x, get Aaron to add housing facilities to hold pop, and change the pop production bonuses to fit this new model. Then find some people who like to play excruciatingly long games!

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Alternatively, you could double or triple the build times of the basic facilities, thereby making it take 60 or 90 turns to fill up a huge planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

As another alternative, change the construction rate modifiers, so planets with 1M people build at 10% speed, with +1% for every 4M people or so.

I have a program to do that; just specify what settings you want.

[Quikngruvn]

I agree with IF about the racial points. Anyone wiling to spend that many points should get faster builds. Just wondering where you'd sacrifice, and what would happen when you meet other races who don't build as quick, but have nasty combat (and other) bonuses.

Upping facility costs and SJ's contruction-per-population idea are intriguing. I guess it's a matter of where to put the bottleneck: on expansion or on planetary development. Either would completely change the game. Both, and you'll be playing till SEVI comes out!

Quikngruvn

[Suicide Junkie]

Both are almost the same thing, except my method is a littlemore involved/fancy, and adds 5000 lines to settings.txt (I hope SE4 can handle that).

[PvK]

My Proportions mod (see Gold) addresses issues with population trasport, population growth, population effects on both production and construction (different curves) and colony development versus developed homeworlds. Of course, it does make it take years to build up colonies that can add much to the output of a homeworld, but the homeworld itself is enough to field a decent fleet. That is, I like realistically slow development, but probably a lot of players' reactions would be along the lines of "WTF! It takes forever to fully develop a planet!"



PvK

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Tweaking the population bonuses for colonies in favour of well developped worlds would help, as would enhancing the cloak/ sensor system for advanced cat & mouse games in all those empty systems.

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1% SY rate per 25M people would go a long way towards that goal. Homeworlds would get 200% @ 5 Billion, while the colonies would be nearly helpless. A huge transport full of people might be able to jump-start a colony, but every % you add has to come from some other planet.
If anybody ever fills up a Dyson Sphere, they get 2,560 %

What do you think of the cloaking system described in A Pirate's Life?

- Stealth armor gives Passive EM cloak (upto level 4)
- Scattering armor gives Active EM cloak (lev 4)
- Master Computers give Psychic cloak (lev 4)
- Hull Size gives gravitic cloak (upto lev 4)
- E-Security teams give "Hacker" cloak (lev 4)
(using old temporal ability. "Temporal sensors" scan both EM types plus some gravitic.)

That way, a baseship makes a huge blip on your gravitic radar, no matter how good the rest of its stealth is.
An escort or frigate is undetectable by gravitics, but does not have the space on board to carry all of the other cloaking devices plus engines & weapons.
With the numbers I threw out, only the frigates could be completely undetectable, but they would have only 30KT for weapons & engines.
A one-MP plaguebomber, or a 3-MP scout, and very vulnerable to minefields