Adamant Mod Discussion Thread

[Fyron]

Ok here's the situation in the current dev version of 0.16.00 (which is not quite available due to SEnet having issues, but I have attached the data/ai files to this post)...

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Every facility that is labor intensive promotes unhappiness. Miners, farms, research facilities have -1% planet happiness per turn (which stacks fully). Some other random facilities that you won't be building much of anyways have -2% or -3%.

For happiness facilities, you start the game with a +2% planet happiness facility, the Entertainment Network. Psychology 1 costs 50k and leads to Applied Political Science, which has a cost of 20k. Levels 1-4 improve the Entertainment Network by 2% per level, up to +10% at level 4. Levels 3-5 give the UPC, which has +1% to +3% system happiness.

Troops do not provide any anger management, due to a drastic change in the nature of the ground combat system that makes it trivially easy to build 67 or so 2 kT troops in a single turn from a 2000 build rate planet.

The goal of the UPC is not to replace the Entertainment Network, or to eliminate unhappiness concerns. The way I see it, it provides great benefit because only 1 of a hundred or two facility slots (10 planets with average size being medium for 15 facility slots) in a system is being used up to provide its 1% bonus to all planets. I see it's power in terms of space efficiency.

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The following has been brought to my attention (strung together in a piecemeal fashion from an IRC conversation):

Entertainment Facility IV + 8% happines, Urban Pacification Centre I + 1% happiness across the whole system? Isn't that a bit lame in comparison?

Level 1 of Urban Pac is like 8x as inneffective as 1 entertainment network. Its per planet thats important. If one of my planets it rioting, I want to help as best I can from another planet.

UPC is a very small insignificant supplement after years of research. I think it should be available earlier on if its a supplement.

What I meant was: you research 3 levels of Applied Poltical Science, and you get Entertainment Network III + 6% happiness. You think, wooh, if I research it one more time I get Urban Pacification Center I. So you do, and you get Entertainment Network IV, +8% happiness and Urban Pacification I +1% happiness across a system.

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Discuss.

[Ed Kolis]

I think that the bonus, while small, since it applies to an entire system and not just one planet, is really more than it seems. (In stock, all players HAD was the per-system happiness effect, so they were in a sense spoiled! ) However, since you don't get a stacking effect from building multiple UPC's, I'd think that it might help to do something different with the UPC's - maybe make 5 levels of them, starting at level 1 of Applied Political Science, or increase their effect to 2/3/5, or something like that.

[Fyron]

Nobody else has any thoughts?

[Wolfman77]

I like your ideas for the happiness facilities, but with the other facilities having a negative effect, will this be enough to offset that? Without the troops to aid in this matter, we will need to build empty base hulls or something to increase the happiness, as long as ships in the system still help. But then we pay maintenance every turn for them.

Can a population modifier be added to a component? If it can, maybe make expensive components for troops, so it takes like 5-10 turns to build one. Maybe even making it oversized with a troop to match so you end up with something like a police headquartes or such that is 300kT or something like that.

I don't know if that would work, but you might be able to pull the basic idea from it and make something work.

I was also wonering how the other two races were coming along, the machines and the energy based.

[Captain Kwok]

I think Fyron was going to boost up the happiness amounts for the planetary facilities, which will help to some degree. I think he'll also need to adjust the natural decrease or make other events like ship construction or colonization bring bigger boosts to happiness - to balance out the loss of happiness from troops. Of course, in this case, you might expect to have unrecoverable planets when they start rioting (especially during a large attack etc) since you can't just drop troops and you might not be able to build ships in that system...

One problem I've found using a similar happiness model in my Space Food Empires mod is that the AI planets will tend to drop to a rioting state before the happiness facilities are built. On the other hand, if you queue up happiness facilities before industrial facilities, you'll get a bunch of small planets with just a single happiness facility and stuff ot that sort. So you'll probably need to have the AI build a couple facilities first, than a happiness facility, and then some more industry and so on. Planets with just 2 or 3 industrial facilities will need either a system happiness facility in the system or be able to benefit enough from changes in the happiness.txt file. Lastly, in my mod where troops are treated differently than Adamant, they still provide a boost to happiness. In that case, I have my idle queues build some troops which will help the smaller industrial planets going.

[Fyron]

Wolfman77 said:
I like your ideas for the happiness facilities, but with the other facilities having a negative effect, will this be enough to offset that?

I think so, but only testing will tell. Each point of happiness from a facility is the equivalent of 5 stock troops. The Entertainment Network V counts as 50 troops.

Wolfman77 said:
Can a population modifier be added to a component?

I do not hold out much hope of this working, since abilities on cargo do not generally work for the planet/ship carrying them, but it is something I was meaning to test before my hard drive went belly-up.

Wolfman77 said:
I was also wonering how the other two races were coming along, the machines and the energy based.

All data except for weapons and AI is pretty much done for them. Energy races only have a few weapons, pending ideas for new ones. Machine races currently have the exact same weapons as physical weapons, as I have not yet determined how they should be differentiated.

CaptainKwok said:
I think Fyron was going to boost up the happiness amounts for the planetary facilities...

Only for the first two levels, bringing them to 4/5/6/8/10 instead of 2/4/6/8/10. This is primarily to reduce the amount of scrapping micromanagement necessary. At the start of the game, 20% of facilities will need to be happiness facilities. You can keep this ratio later on and get lots of extra buffering against large negative events, as you would in stock by building 100-120 police troops on every colony. You also get a bit of insurance against an unlucky loss of a happiness facility in a battle.

CaptainKwok said:
So you'll probably need to have the AI build a couple facilities first...

They will have staggered builing of happiness facilities with industrial facilities, once I get around to working on the AI stuff.


There is also the possibility of adding less productive facilities that do not create unhappiness. They would need to be at least 25% less productive to make level 1 of normal facilities worthwhile to build.

[Wolfman77]

How about some nonobot weaponry for the machines?

energy race: EM pulse, Photonic Burst, Charged Tendril, Quantum Resonator

If you want some more I can probably think of some.


I also had an idea for the reproduction on machine races. reducing reproduction to 0 and giving them android construction facilities. It would give them higer growth rates for new colonies but they would slow their growth (percentage wise) as they grew. Maybe have their homesystem start with 50 or 100 per turn. New colonies can effectively build 2-5 per turn at the start of the game, maxing out at around half of the home system increase.

Don't know if you like the idea for this race or not, but it would set them apart from other races.

[Fyron]

Unfortunately, there is no way to set the reproduction rate to 0 for a race based on a racial tech trait. AI machine races could be set up to have 0 reproduction, gaining many points in the process, but human players would not likely wish to comply with this... If required traits worked, I could do this easily and force human players to take a trait which reduces reproduction by 100%.

[Wolfman77]

Does the modiffy reproduction ability work with negative numbers? I'm assuming there is now way to do this in the "RacialTraits" text, but negative reprodution, on all their facilities would give the same effect, if it's possible.

Also, I noticed a couple facilities that seem to be using the wrong pictures. Growth Chamber Facility I (HI), and Growth Chamber Expansion Project (Minerals), in case noone else has mentioned them yet.

[Fyron]

I can probably add a racial trait that lowers reproduction, and state that machine races are supposed to take it... but it would be on honor system.

Negative reproduction modifier facilities do not work, sadly.

Thanks for reporting the buggy pictures. My editor has been slacking off.