Infinitech Mod Starting

[AstralWanderer]

MrToxin said:
Loads of Tech - The main idea is to make every tech area deeply researchable, like 200 levels or so. Because these branch out into other things, the idea of ever researching every last thing in the game is an impossibility. Though most modules will have a specific technology that changes its overall level, other technologies will give things various bonuses. Think like a Heat Ray that improves by level but gets a damage bonus from Thermodynamics.

Nice idea but having lots of levels plus lots of cross-tech bonuses means that testing your mod for balance is going to be almost impossible. There are some areas that lend themselves to steady progression (weapons, shields, hulls) so focusing on these and limiting cross-tech to new devices only would likely be more manageable.

Vehicle Sizes - The smallest is a Sloop at 200 kT. The biggest, aside from bases, is a World Ship at 22,500 kT. These get bonuses to their kT based on your levels of Naval Architecture. They also receive bonuses or penalties to defense, depending on size. World Ships are nearly impossible to miss, while Corvettes are rather hard. Small ships also get a maneuverability bonus to hit, while bigger ships receive no penalty.

It may be better to require special weapons to damage very large (or very small) ships rather than going by attack/defense bonuses for the reasons given by SJ.

^^ - Every ship size is available from the beginning. However, being able to afford the biggest ones is another thing entirely. I want them to take decades to build for a young empire or have the upkeep be cripplingly huge.

It would make sense to make larger hulls dependent on both Tech Level (e.g. for advanced materials and design) and facilities (orbital ship factories, etc).

Requiring too long a construction time is likely to be counter-productive - who wants to spend decades building a ship that turns out to be 10-15 generations behind on weapons/armour/shields?

Infrastructure - This is the hardest one to implement. The idea is, you get bonuses or penalties to all sorts of things depending on what you built in your empire and on what size of planets.

Maintaining balance is going to be tricky unless you keep this limited to specific technologies (like stock and BM do) and a very few facilities.

Also, the maximum population of a planet is HEAVILY influenced by what was built on it, with habitation modules available for increasing that specifically. The idea is that only small numbers of people can carve out a subsistence living on an undeveloped planet, while a developed planet can support more people.

Having facilities to increase max pop makes sense - but for best effect you would also need to have the option to tie in facility capacity with population size and I don't think that's possible in SEV.

Specialized Crews - Though every ship does require that pesky first unit of Regular Crew, different types of crew are available.

This could be a real micro-management pain if players have to keep pulling ships back to restaff or sending out new crew members all the time to replace losses.

Specialized Societies and Governments - These can drastically alter what your race does, as the effects of some choices have been radically altered from stock SEV.

Being able to vary a choice over time (e.g. moving from a dictatorship to a democracy) would probably be the most obvious improvement but unlikely to be doable within a mod.

Colonies Don't Do Much - Freshly colonized planets don't produce much of anything. However, they can eventually become as good as your homeworld.

Colonies need to be able to produce in order to create defenses if nothing else. Imposing a heavy maintenance cost per colony (making them initially big loss-leaders only able to break even after heavy investment) may be an easier method to slow up things. It would also penalise the colony rush strategy, making players focus on a few good ones rather than go bankrupt with lots of poor ones.

Unlimited Speed - An empire that has spent a million research points developing its engines has every right to have Corvettes with a move of 80.

In that case, I'd suggest counterbalancing high speed with poor maneuverability and greatly increased supply consumption.

I'm obviously going for complexity on this one. I'm planning for a simpler version later, as well as a mod version based on Heighliners from Dune. More on those later, but y'know.

Given all that, I'd suggest you try starting with a simpler version rather than overdoing things and ending up with a mod you can never complete. Look at IRM - the complexity of the AI scripting was what caused the author to pack it in.