Colony ships, for sale cheap!

geoschmo · #1 March 16th, 2002, 02:34 AM

quote:
Originally posted by PvK:

I thought it was controlled by the AI planet building file, under the Homeworld entry - I was pretty sure that determined it.

Ok, well correct, sort of. The AI_Construction_Facilities does have entries for homeworlds. However it's not looking for specific facilitiy names, but abilities. So I suppose you could play with that to a point and get a different makeup on the homeworlds. I haven't tried it myself. I thought I remembered someone saying they did and it had no effect. But I could be remembering that wrong. Either way I guess it depends on what the goal is.

Also the game does have some hardcode overides I know about for sure. For example in a high tech start it won't build research fac's, even thoguh they are listed in the file.

Geoschmo

PvK · #2 March 16th, 2002, 04:08 AM

Rlaney, don't worry - I'm happy you're enjoying Proportions and are trying new things out! It would be cool if you could get it to work ok with limited resources - I just assumed it wouldn't work.

It sounds to me like you could use the resource improvement abilities to compensate for the drain on homeworlds. I guess ideally, you would want to make the drain just slightly higher than the replenishment, but it will be hard to balance, I think, also if an empire takes advanced storage techniques or reduced planet exploitation, it will throw off your balancing.

I had intended to include resource depletion in the larger Version of the mod (Foundations), by using negative resource improvement abilities while playing an "infinite resources" game. That would give a much more realistic pace to resource depletion than the "finite resources" mechanic, and it wouldn't throw away the extraction rate modifiers the way that "finite resources" does. The only problem is that, at least when I tested it back around 1.57 or so, setting negative values on resource improvement had no effect. I explained this in a report to MM, but I haven't bothered to test to see if he actually made a change - there is no note in the history.txt file about a change, but not all changes appear there. I'd be obliged if you'd like to give it a test. Make a facility with resource improvement at -50 or so and then sit it on a planet for over a year, and see if the resource levels go down at all. If it does... it'll be really cool.

PvK

Rlaney · #3 March 16th, 2002, 04:46 AM

In finite it takes resource from your pool and puts them back into the planet instead of just taking them away. I fixed the cultural thing sort of... I got rid of them. Mostly they duplicated bonuses on the cities. I made the cities about as powerful as equivalent level facilities, i.e. resource I intel I storage I...also I changed the resourece to solar generation and set it pretty high for the cities. One other thing I found it the "damage to kill one pop" in settings. You had it set to 1000. all That does is make all weapons do minimum 1000 damage. I worked around this by adding shields to all facilities. 250 for level I, 500 level II, 750 level III...with some exceptions. Resupply depots are 1000. Yards are 1000, 2000, and 3000 and cities are the same. This means it takes a big fleet to glass a planet and shields go up as infrastructure increases. Now if you can make an AI that will use troops and try to invade planets instead of just throwing ships at them it'll be pretty close to perfect. I tested 10 high tech escorts against a home planet and they couldn't take the shields down with wave motion guns... But this was a homeworld with 8 cities I think so that kind of balances. Remains to be seen how difficult conquering a less developed colony world will be.

I like the propulsion/mass relation. If only we could set ships with no supplies to move every other turn or even every 3rd it would make supplies an important part of the game.

To try and balance the higher cost of colony ship I had to set the solar gen on cities pretty high so it's hard in the begining to field more than maybe 3 escorts and 1 colony ship but that prevents massive expansion in the early game and makes building up a good planet more important

[ 16 March 2002: Message edited by: Rlaney ]

PvK · #4 March 16th, 2002, 04:58 AM

I like your suggestion to add "shield" values to facilities, although I don't think it should be impossible to bLast planets with the right weapons. However I don't understand what you mean by:

"One other thing I found it the "damage to kill one pop" in settings. You had it set to 1000. all That does is make all weapons do minimum 1000 damage."

What do you mean?

The AI will use troops, sometimes.

quote:
If only we could set ships with no supplies to move every other turn or even every 3rd it would make supplies an important part of the game.

I find that supplies are very important in Proportions. A ship with ion engines mark I and no extra supply storage only has a one-way range of 19 sectors! In 1.5 the situation is even more interesting, with some of the suggestions from Dogscoff and others worked in, so that there are two grades of all marks of engines with different output and efficiency - with capital ships you have to trade off range against speed, and the difference in speed between small and large ships is greater.

PvK

Rlaney · #5 March 16th, 2002, 05:15 AM

quote:
Originally posted by PvK:
I like your suggestion to add "shield" values to facilities, although I don't think it should be impossible to bLast planets with the right weapons. However I don't understand what you mean by:

Not impossible, just difficult. I made all planetary weapons (bombs) skip shields. I could tone it down more but I hate the AI just coming in and glassing planet with no attempt at conquest.

"One other thing I found it the "damage to kill one pop" in settings. You had it set to 1000. all That does is make all weapons do minimum 1000 damage."

What do you mean?

damage to kill 1 pop= 100

escort, 1 depleeted uranium cannon= 100 damage against unshielded planet. Oddly enough the anti-planet drone warheads seem to work correctly.

I find that supplies are very important in Proportions. A ship with ion engines mark I and no extra supply storage only has a one-way range of 19 sectors! In 1.5 the situation is even more interesting, with some of the suggestions from Dogscoff and others worked in, so that there are two grades of all marks of engines with different output and efficiency - with capital ships you have to trade off range against speed, and the difference in speed between small and large ships is greater.

Oh it works great at higher tech but low tech-low thrust engines give at least one move supplied or not.

PvK

Rlaney · #6 March 16th, 2002, 05:17 AM

sorry for that mess, still tryin to figure out the quotes thing on here.

Phoenix-D · #7 March 16th, 2002, 05:56 AM

""One other thing I found it the "damage to kill one pop" in settings. You had it set to 1000. all That does is make all weapons do minimum 1000 damage."

What do you mean?"

It means that weapons will always kill at least one population per hit. Setting it to 1000 will prevent any weapon (except mounted napalm) from killing more than ONE pop per hit, but won't prevent them from doing damage.

I think.

Phoenix-D