Quarian, thanks very much for the very thoughtful feedback! I didn't take it as anything hostile (au contraire), and similarly, this reply isn't meant to retaliate or argue, but to respond with how I see things, and why Proportions is as it is in 2.0.
I don't claim everything's perfect in Proportions, and really welcome all feedback from players. The feedback so far from everyone has been really super!
In the games I've played, I've found that colonies are extremely important to
gaining a decisive advantage in Proportions, but that they are not entirely essential and dominating, the way they are in the standard game. I haven't done huge amounts of testing or analysis, but so far I've liked the effects. By using population transports and a lot of patience, I find that the gains from developing colonies over a few years has a very marked effect on the strength of an empire, just in terms of research, intelligence and production. It is also essential to develop military strength, through defensive ground bases, no-maintenance shipyards, resupply depots, and places to put auxiliary colonies to assist the homeworld (since you wouldn't want to scrap cultural centers).
For cargo capacity, yes I reduced them because I didn't want transports to be able to carry 15 million people per ship, but also to because I like the effect of needing to build a large number of ships in order to move a huge amount of stuff. I don't how in the standard game, a single transport can carry more troops and weapon platforms than you can even fit on a planet. In Proportions, a massive exodus or invasion fleet will hopefully require at least several transports, and not just one high tech one. To me, it increases the interestingness of the problem of moving vast amounts of stuff around, and of concealing and protecting those movements.
It is a bit extreme when there is a crisis such as a core instability or even a plague, and maybe it should be tweaked, but so far I've mainly found it more interesting.
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Lowering the effectiveness of virtually all facilities - double ouch. You've already ensured that colonies will develop at an extremely slow pace with the pop size (reducing the effectiveness of pop transports) and lowered reproduction/construction rate. Why do colonies have to work so hard and so long to produce something so worthless? A huge breathable planet with all 25 facility slots filled with research center I's (a herculean task in and of itself) only produces 2500 research points. That is virtually nothing compared to all of the work that went into it.
I disagree. 2500 research points isn't much in standard SE4, but in Proportions, it is a major advantage. A typical Proportions homeworld starts with about 16,000 research points. 2,500 more is a 15.6% increase, which is a huge advantage over an empire that sits at home. Also, it's not all that Herculean a task - it just takes patience. It doesn't cost much more than doing it in the standard game - it just takes longer, depending on the amount of population and construction facilities you manage to assemble on the colony. Two points about why this makes sense, outside of a balance concept:
1) In Proportions, not all facilities are considered to represent the same size. A Cultural Center represents something like several space-age nations. A research center represents a single major research complex, and whatever infrastructure is necessary to keep it operating on that other planet. Look at the difference in cost between the urban facilities and the quick & dirty standard facilities. A city costs a lot more than a facility, and takes a considerable time to build, but has the output of several facilities. The challenges of building a colony on an undeveloped alien planet, that will have a positive output rather than a massive net expense, are almost not represented in the game - I try to factor them in via the population curve.
2) The SE4 mechanic of research being additive (two labs research the same problem twice as fast as one) and also serial and flexible (players can concentrate an entire empire's research on one project, with no delay to switch projects), seem incorrect to me. The small research output of colony facilities is my abstract way of reducing this effect. It's imperfect, but in most cases I think it works rather well.
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This, more than anything else, seems to nullify the usefullness of colonies. I can understand the core concept of making colonies less important but this can easily be accomplished without completely marginalizing them. Lower the value of facilities, yes. But lowering them by over 80%?
I don't think they're marginal at all. As you showed, a SINGLE colony can give your empire a 16% research advantage, without even bothering to build a single city. Given that Proportions empires start out quite strong, 16% is a lot, and of course, dominating players still probably won't hole up with only one planet - it would be a major disadvantage to do so. Not immediately, but with patience, they can still make themselves several times as strong as empires that don't colonize. It just takes a lot longer.
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I was playing a game with v1.53(I think) that got up to @ 360 turns and there was no appreciable change in score other than for the occasional capture/glassing of a homeworld.
I'd really like to see your saved game, so I can see how it developed and what example you're commenting on. It's seemed to me in my test games that the colonies I developed were, after a few years anyway, making a very signifigant contribution to my production, research, and intelligence, not to mention my ship deployment range, territorial control, and so on.
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There was a reason the British were so powerful in the 19th century, they had many non-useless colonies that reaped actual benefits for their homeland. Also the loss of said colonies (the U.S. comes to mind, those damn anarcy Groups...) dealt a severe blow to the British empire, not as severe as losing Britain itself, but it was important nonetheless.
Yes of course, but when were those colonies established? The 17th century. They didn't start to be a major advantage for quite a while. This sort of thinking went into the numbers in Proportions. I thought - how long should it take to replace the benefits to an enpire of an entire civilization - the combined resources and (physical, intellectual, cultural, etc) of say, a significant part of Europe. 100 years? Sounds quick, to me, but that's where the base rate for a cultural center comes from. Now how long would it take to duplicate that on another uninhabited alien planet, by means of ferrying space ships over there? Quite a while...
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The second problem is with units. It seems that fighters have been crippled. You have both lowered the damage that fighter weapons can inflict and lowered the number of fighters that can be put into combat at any given time (by lowering the capacity of cargo components). They might have survived one change but not both. Their only useful purpose now seems to be as planetary defense. Planets are now the only place that enough fighters can be stored to make them effective in combat. Granted, they are hard to hit, but that has always been the case (and is what PD and sensors are for).
I can see how you might think so, but run more tests and give me examples if you still think so after running those tests. In my tests, I discovered the weapon strength changes were pretty much necessary to prevent fighters from being way too strong against ships, in human vs. human play. Fighters in Proportions 2.0 are a lot harder to hit with ships than they are in standard SE4. Most fighter weapons are quite weak, yes, but take a dozen or two fighters against a cruiser or two, and you will see that without some serious PD, the cruisers will have a hard time killing many fighters, and depending on the cruisers' defenses and other specifics, they will probably get hurt, and maybe really shot up or destroyed. There are also several fighter weapons that are specialized for anti-ship attack, and for these, their targets had better have good PD and/or fighter support. Most fighter weapons are good against light targets and other fighters. Fighters with anti-ship weapons will tend to be very vulnerable to fighters with lighter weapons.
Anyway, in the tests I did, I was finally pretty happy with the results. I think fighters now can be very effective, even decisive. They can be countered and defended against, though, without the standard set's problem of getting totally shredded by PDC. The change to make most fighter weapons weak relatively weak against heavy ships is entirely intentional, though. Try a rocket pod or torpedo on your fighters, though, and they are a real threat to ships, but become vulnerable to enemy fighters.
As for troops, there are two main reasons why I made them so tough:
1) To make ground invasion a very useful, and sometimes necessary, course of action to capture a planet. My understanding of the current mechanic is that actually, the weakest unit on a planet is the one that gets destroyed first. With weaker troops, they get shot off before weapon platforms. Also, the whole idea of being able to shoot all defenders off a planet from space in a month, may or may not be wrong depending on your science fiction, but in any case makes defensive troops relatively useless, as the tactical AI can and will shoot until there are no defenders left, and then land troops. That makes land warfare nearly obsolete. The only way I see to make it so that troops can survive a bombardment from space, is to make them tough (since to-hit mods have no effects on planet-based units). Precedent on Earth - artillery and air strikes never conquer ground, or eliminate ground forces completely.
2) Due to the way ground combat currently works, this was the only
workingway I found to achieve my desired state where infantry is generally cheap and takes a lot of time/effort to eliminate, and yes, to prolong combat so that conquering an entire planet would often take more than one quick shoot-out, and could Last for several turns, with players potentially dropping in reinforcements. Precedent on Earth - no army has ever conquered the whole planet, and rarely an entire continent, and such wars generally have taken years. Besides, this is an interesting and different state of affairs, makes troops more interesting and useful, and is something that several players have asked for.
You are right though that the side effect is undesired, that troops end up being a kind of very powerful planetary shield. I blame the current limitations of the SE3 engine, and hope for future patches to make a change possible that will allow me to still achieve my two design goals, above, and yet not have this side effect. Meanwhile, I think the side-effect does have work-arounds, besides invasion, for those genocidal maniacs who refuse to use troops and want to exterminate alien civilians without mercy, or whatever: Planetary weapons, or fighters, or prolonged bombardment. However, after all the planets that are routinely glassed every day by lazy players of the standard game, and all the planets that are "accidentally" glassed by the AI, I don't have a lot of sympathy for those wanting to be able to more easily glass planets.
In defense of the ability of troops to absorb more than weapon platforms, there is a rationalization that weapon plats are large conspicuous installations, while troops aren't literally stronger, but are much better at hiding from bombardment. This frames the problem as more of an AI limitation than anything - the ships always try to soften up troops, rather than massacreing civillians.
In sum, ideally, yes, troops would not have this ability to shield a planet from glassing, but achieving my goals 1 and 2 are worth it to me, and I don't know of another working mechanic to achieve these with the current game. Of course, players are free to mod these things down to suit their own (genocidal
) tastes.
Agh! Thanks for finding the Heavy Ship Mount typo - that's a big one that I'm surprised I didn't notice before. Both the cost and the size are wrong, although actually, the way it was wouldn't be completely bad - it wasn't a good use of space, but it was efficient in price. But it WAS a typo, on both the cost and size lines. It should read:
Long Name := Heavy Ship Mount
Short Name := Heavy Mount
Description := Heavy sized weapon mount which increases damage from the weapon by 3 times. Requires a vehicle size of at least 800kT. Can only be used on Direct Fire weapons. -10 to hit with.
Code := H
Cost Percent := 400
Tonnage Percent := 200
Tonnage Structure Percent := 300
Damage Percent := 300
Supply Percent := 400
Range Modifier := 0
Weapon To Hit Modifier := -10
Vehicle Size Minimum := 800
Weapon Type Requirement := Direct Fire
Vehicle Type := Ship
As for the title of Foundations mod, no, I wasn't thinking of Asimov, but rather of the mod's design goals, which are to make everything require a lot more development of foundations to achieve. You can see this in Proportions for the things it changes - many things require a lot more time and work and prerequisites to build up. Foundations applies that sort of thinking to the tech tree, with a lot of prereqs and multiple requirements and general sciences and basic low-tech equipment and stuff.
PvK
Re: Proportions Version 2.0 available
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