Proportions Version 2.0 available

PvK · #1 April 4th, 2002, 04:06 AM

Thanks for all the feedback, bstripp, ZeroAdunn, and everyone. I'm glad people are enjoying the mod so well. I knew I'd like these sorts of changes myself, but I wasn't sure how many other players would, particularly because it does slow down the speed of development so much.

bstripp, I think I do like to 10-turn population growth settings. You can easily change it for your own games by changing settings.txt, of course. The reasons I prefer 10 to 3-5 are that it's more or less on par with human growth rates, and because I think it's about right from the games I have played in terms of the very intentional goal of the mod to make it take an extremely long time, or an extreme amount of tech and resources, to do what happens way too easily in the standard game: mutliplying like ants and turning every colony into a fully-developed world in a few years' time. Also, by setting the repro rate to 1/10, it doesn't make it impossible to build up a planet quickly; it just makes it take a lot of effort. One thing Proportions makes a lot easier is being able to make cheaper ships with lesser capabilities (instead of it nearly always being best to build maxed-out warships, and auxiliary ships costing as much or more than a warship). In this case, if you build a large fleet of transports (like wr8th suggested, 20 or more) and set them to ferry population out to the colonies, you can get their populations up pretty quickly. By keeping the repro rate at 1/10th though, it means this effort is more or less required to build up an important colony. If you turn the rate back to 1/3 - 1/5, then colonies that you just visit once with a colony ship will develop a lot faster. If you prefer a faster rate of development with less effort required, though, please feel free (of course) to alter any of the settings anywhere in the mod. I do appreciate everyone's suggestions and reports of experiences and so on. You folks have given some terrific feedback.

cascalonginus, no, I don't have a Version for SE4 1.49 (pre-Gold), because I developed this for the Gold edition. There are also a couple of things that would not work so well in pre-Gold, although it could be retrofitted to work in 1.49. For instance, 1.49 doesn't have either of the abilities to change population size or repro rate, so it would be a lot harder to get the same effect on limiting colonies in 1.49. If I had the time to work on that, I'd probably re-do the population effect curves, and so on, to compensate for that weaknesses. Rather though, I really recommend getting the Gold edition of SE4 - I think it's a major improvement over 1.49 and well worth the price.

PvK

Fyron · #2 April 4th, 2002, 04:32 AM

quote:
For instance, 1.49 doesn't have either of the abilities to change population size or repro rate, so it would be a lot harder to get the same effect on limiting colonies in 1.49.

Huh? What exactly are you talking about? Both of those were in 1.49. Organic tech facilities have those abilities.

Tnarg · #3 April 4th, 2002, 08:29 AM

PvK, how easy is it for you to make changes to your mod? You have a great base and I am enjoying it a great deal. Seems very realistic. I have been toying with the idea of wanting to see a new type of tech area along with additional new facilities. See the thread on "How easy is it to add a Tech area to a Mod". Just for curiosity sake mostly, is this something that could be explored. There are a number of areas that need to be fine tuned of course. Especially in the areas of FTL communications. Suicide Junkie has been throwing in some great ideas. Hopefully something feasable can be made of all of this? Or should I stop daydreaming and just play the game.

PvK · #4 April 4th, 2002, 11:30 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Huh? What exactly are you talking about? Both of those were in 1.49. Organic tech facilities have those abilities.

I'm talking about the new (introduced in Gold) entries in Settings.txt, which are not found in 1.49, and which look like this:

Population Mass := 5
Reproduction Check Frequency := 1

I think these were added by MM more or less because I'd been requesting them so I could do the kinds of changes to population found in Proportions. Before Gold, you couldn't really pull this off at all.

PvK

PvK · #5 April 4th, 2002, 12:04 PM

quote:
Originally posted by tnarg:
PvK, how easy is it for you to make changes to your mod? You have a great base and I am enjoying it a great deal. Seems very realistic. I have been toying with the idea of wanting to see a new type of tech area along with additional new facilities. See the thread on "How easy is it to add a Tech area to a Mod". Just for curiosity sake mostly, is this something that could be explored. There are a number of areas that need to be fine tuned of course. Especially in the areas of FTL communications. Suicide Junkie has been throwing in some great ideas. Hopefully something feasable can be made of all of this? Or should I stop daydreaming and just play the game.

It's relatively easy to add tech areas, and I agree that ideally, a lot could be done. In fact, Proportions is actually only part of my original larger mod project, called "Foundations", which has the same sorts of changes that are in Proportions, but also does a major overhaul of the tech tree, and adds a lot of different equipment and weapons and facilities. I didn't have time to add all of the weapon data before the Gold mod submission deadline, so I quickly made a Version that just included the scale changes but left most of the techs unchanged, which is Proportions 1.3. Since people liked that so much, I decided to add a bunch of tweaks to make Proportions a lot better (IMO), but still trying to avoid major alterations to the tech tree.

One hard thing about adding or altering tech areas, though, is that it requires manual (or SJ AI modder assisted) changes to ALL of the AI files

if you want the AI to be able to research and use your new techs levels.

For Proportions, I think the tech side should probably try not to change too much more, so it can keep its original purpose, which was to offer an alternative set of proportions using the same basic game as the original tech set. That will also let me call it more or less "done" at some point.

The tech changes I have added so far to Proportions have been mostly for balance or realism improvements, or to adjust to other changes in the mod.

Having said that, do keep letting me know of any suggestions. Anything easy and neat enough, I may not be able to resist adding.

Also, I hope to get around to finishing Foundations some time, and neat new techs that don't seem to fit in Proportions may end up there.

PvK

wr8th · #6 April 4th, 2002, 04:44 PM

As much as I like this mod, I wanted to include the ST races. A quick (sorta) and dirty method I used was to:

1) note the racial attributes from the unmodded Version of the races I wanted to copy.
2) create respective file folders under races in Prop 2.0 for the races I wanted to add.
3) copied the AI files from a similar race and renamed them (Jraenar = Klingon, Terran = Fed....). This allowed the shipset to be read.
4) "add new". Make the necessary racial attribute modifications. Save empire.

Realize of course that any future modifications to Props by PvK will have to be taken into account in the respective AI files for each race. It's a workaround that may be useful for those who wish to add any non-Prop-vanilla races.

wr8th · #7 April 4th, 2002, 04:55 PM

PvK:

I like the light missile sytems with the quicker reload times you introduced with 2.0.... nice addition that was sorely needed in the missile tech area.

Not sure if this was considered: unstable worm holes that can cause ship damage (possibly a percentage of compartments vs. a flat number) or extra supply expenditure (simulating being caught in a temporal vortex that would make subjective time pass more quickly for the affected ship(s)).