Proportions Version 2.0 available - Page 8

PsychoTechFreak · #71 April 5th, 2002, 01:23 PM

quote:
Originally posted by PvK:
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.

Is it ? This would not be consistent with ship components to be hit chances. The higher the resistance the more chance to get hit, that is what your changes to the standard and emissive armor is about, isn't it? I have tried to destroy the basic life supports (1kT) in a starliner, it was almost impossible because of the more resistant components which always have been destroyed first.

Mephisto · #72 April 5th, 2002, 04:19 PM

quote:
Originally posted by PsychoTechFreak:
Is it ? This would not be consistent with ship components to be hit chances.

PvK is right, the smallest unit gets destroyed first. Always.

PsychoTechFreak · #73 April 5th, 2002, 06:48 PM

Yes, but Damage Resistance is the important point regarding this issue:

Name := Basic Life Support
Description := Mechanical means to generate a livable atmosphere on a starship. This system is not built for compactness, or to withstand battle damage, but is less difficult to manufacture.
Pic Num := 5
Tonnage Space Taken := 15
Tonnage Structure := 1

This component is extremely hard to hit. And if I carry over this idea to the proportions troops, with an extremely higher damage resistance, they would be easier to hit than they have been before.

oleg · #74 April 5th, 2002, 07:48 PM

QuarianRex has a point. Cultural facilities need some cost adjustments. To keep the spirit of this mod, namely the supreme importance of Homeworld, it would be nice to make some changes to decrease the cost of low level facilities but keep cultural center as it is. It takes only 3-4 turns to research Construction I and make Cities obsolete. At the same times it takes years and years to build even one city on any colony. I don't think it is right. Every unique and important steps in colony development needs some game time window to be useful and worthy to be build. I suggest to increase the research cost of megapolis (construction II ?) and decrease a bit the production cost of cities.

PvK · #75 April 5th, 2002, 08:49 PM

The situation is different with planet cargo under bombardment than it is with ship system damage. Ship system damage is allocated in a far more varied fashion, which is why the armor components in Proportions work so well.

The smallest ship component is only rarely damaged first. A ship with a large proportion of structure in high-strength Proportions armor components (that lack the "always first hit 'Armor'" ability) will tend to get hit in the armor, and frequently absorb the blow until accumulated damage is enough to destroy the entire armor component hit. Sometimes a small ship component will be hit first, though, but it's rare, apparently in proportion to its structure compared to the rest of the components left on the ship.

For planetary cargo, however, the weakest total-damage-capacity cargo items get bLasted first, which is why troops without boosted strength get shot off first. It also means that if you build a "shield base" weapon platform, it won't protect your weaker-damage-capacity, armed weapon platforms! (Small shield platforms combined with larger armed platforms may work out, though - compare their total strengths.) This is on the suggestion list to change, though. At which point, I would take another look at Proportion troop strengths.

PvK

quote:
Originally posted by PsychoTechFreak:
Yes, but Damage Resistance is the important point regarding this issue:

Name := Basic Life Support
Description := Mechanical means to generate a livable atmosphere on a starship. This system is not built for compactness, or to withstand battle damage, but is less difficult to manufacture.
Pic Num := 5
Tonnage Space Taken := 15
Tonnage Structure := 1

This component is extremely hard to hit. And if I carry over this idea to the proportions troops, with an extremely higher damage resistance, they would be easier to hit than they have been before.

ZeroAdunn · #76 April 5th, 2002, 08:58 PM

I had an idea recently to solve the long city build time and make it more realistic at the same time:

Why not create different levels of the city center? Each one could be about a year or two build time difference, with the first taking something like 5 years. Each one would get progressively more advanced, slowly adding the new areas and increasing the already existing abilities.

PvK · #77 April 5th, 2002, 08:59 PM

QR has some good points, which I'll get to here, and I agree it would be good to add more big facilities. However I tend to disagree that the City is made obsolete by the Metropolis, or the Metropolis by the Megalopolis. Cities are better that Metropoli in the same sort of way that facilities are better than Cultural Centers - they take much less time to build, and so start producing much earlier, and tie up the planetary construction queue for much less time. This is why the AI was hopeless in 1.3 - it went straight for CC's on almost every colony. Generally, I think it makes sense to build several facilities on a planet, then build a city or two, then maybe build (or, in later patches, upgrade) to a Metropolis, etc.

BTW, the reason Metropolis and Megalopolis require any research is because of the technological difficulties of establishing space age ones, and everything needed to support them, on another planet that may not even be in the empire's home system. Existing technology for building large cities on the homeworld would be for the homeworld's familiar gravity, atmosphere, weather, and so on. It's not a massive research leap, but it does require some development of new technologies.

However, I'm not completely against re-examining the city build costs. When I've built them in my games, though, I didn't think the time was way off what I'd wanted it to be.

PvK

quote:
Originally posted by oleg:
QuarianRex has a point. Cultural facilities need some cost adjustments. To keep the spirit of this mod, namely the supreme importance of Homeworld, it would be nice to make some changes to decrease the cost of low level facilities but keep cultural center as it is. It takes only 3-4 turns to research Construction I and make Cities obsolete. At the same times it takes years and years to build even one city on any colony. I don't think it is right. Every unique and important steps in colony development needs some game time window to be useful and worthy to be build. I suggest to increase the research cost of megapolis (construction II ?) and decrease a bit the production cost of cities.

PvK · #78 April 5th, 2002, 09:00 PM

Yes, I think this is a probably very good idea. Thanks!

PvK

quote:
Originally posted by ZeroAdunn:
I had an idea recently to solve the long city build time and make it more realistic at the same time:

Why not create different levels of the city center? Each one could be about a year or two build time difference, with the first taking something like 5 years. Each one would get progressively more advanced, slowly adding the new areas and increasing the already existing abilities.

PvK · #79 April 5th, 2002, 09:54 PM

QuarianRex, the Proportions test games I've played haven't gone much longer than 200 turns, but that's just for lack of time to spend playing. The game could keep playing probably for 1000 turns or more, and there would still be plenty to develop, plenty to fight over, and probably plenty left to research. Although perhaps not many players will manually play a game 1000 or more turns long, they could, without having the game system break down the way it does in the standard game due to exhaustion of planetary spaces, exhaustion of the tech tree, and/or domination of the empires with the largest number of colonies.

I've never finished building a Cultural Center in a Proportions, but the cost of those was supposed to be prohibitive, or nearly so, within the time of a typical game. With a time scale of ten turns to the year, a game of Proportions that might take 200-300 turns (20-30 years) would and should represent not the complete development and explotation of an entire star cluster, with empires toppling left and right, but simply a period of conflict and expansion between fledgeling alien spacefaring races to determine the future of the qudrant. That future might even be theoretically playable using this mod, to an extent, but yes, at 10 turns to the year, the play time required would be huge/prohibitive... but that seems appropriate to me, for the time scale.

In 20 years in a standard SE4 game, frequently the whole quadrant is pretty much colonized, and more or less the whole tech tree can be learned. That's a better pace for doing everything the game has to offer in a reasonable amount of play time. It doesn't seem true at all to life or fiction, though.

By the way, with the new auto-turn-running program, it could be quite interesting to let the AI (especially, if I tweak it some more) play Proportions for 1000 turns or so, and then start playing, to give a scenario with already established tech and colonies and so on.

Now, before getting into details, I'd like to be clear that I do see what you're saying, and I don't mean to say Proportions' current values are all correct and shouldn't be changed. I think they could probably use a lot of adjustment and development. Mainly, I think players can and should adjust the game to suit their tastes, and in some ways the development pace in Proportions goes from SE4's extremely fast, to an extremely slow one. The game might be more fun for more players if the planetary development scale were accelerated, but I tend to think that going half-way would be a "Proportions (Faster)" variant.

Anyway, back to cultural centers taking 70-100+ years to build new ones. You equated this to industrializing a planet, but that's not how I see a cultural center. If you take Earth in a few hundred, or a thousand, years, when it has hopefully got its act together and is ready to actually try to explore and maybe settle other planets in earnest, each single cultural center on Earth (in Proportions) would represent something like North America, Europe, South America, Japan, China, Russia, Africa, SE Asia, the Middle East, India (let's see that's ten), and maybe two for all of the other nations and cultures. Now imagine that a meteor strike, planetary napalm, or other massively destructive event completely annihilates one of these - only charred dirt is left (or worse, only irradiated blind refugees are left - hundreds of millions of them, pleading for help). What is the effect going to be on world trade, world culture, politics, goods, technology, culture, religion, psychological effects on the surivors, etc? It would be something never before seen in history. How long would it take to "replace" this? I'm not talking about just replacing factories, human bodies, roads and buildings, but about replacing the damage to world culture and the way everything is done. I haven't even mentioned environmental damage, but that's partly because I also mean just to consider what it would take to build a new civilization on an alien world.

I need to interrupt myself at this point, but it suffices to say that I see "industrializing" a planet as filling it with facilities and adding a city or two and maybe a spaceport or other stuff. That doesn't take all that long, relatively speaking, in Proportions.

To build a whole new culture on an alien world, I would equate this to building say, eight cities, two research complexes, a space port, and a distribution center. Especially with transport support to build up population, I expect this would be achievable during a typical game. Note that its abilities would more or less equal or exceed a homeworld colony center. This colony is just much less compact than a CC, and some of the bonuses are less, which to me reflect the difficulty of developing an entire planet, and of trying to duplicate a civilization on an alien world far from the homeland.

To answer your PS, the reason I removed construction ability from CC's was because of SE4's hard-coded limit of one construction facility per planet (after initial placement). Without doing this, a homeworld was unable to build a higher-tech shipyard, or to build urban facilties that included construction, and no more than one of such could be built on a colony. I agree it was a neat effect, but I also didn't mind the reduction in ship building rate.

PvK

geoschmo · #80 April 5th, 2002, 10:24 PM

quote:
Originally posted by ZeroAdunn:
I had an idea recently to solve the long city build time and make it more realistic at the same time:

Why not create different levels of the city center? Each one could be about a year or two build time difference, with the first taking something like 5 years. Each one would get progressively more advanced, slowly adding the new areas and increasing the already existing abilities.

If you do this make them upgradable. Say it takes five years to build a basic city or whatever you call it. At that point it would be producing resources at a certain rate. To build a more advanced city you shouldn't have to scrap the first one and start from scratch. You should be able to upgrade it over time. This should take a certain number of years, depending on population, race, etc. If you make a big enough cost differance between the two it should take a sufficently long time to upgrade.

Geoschmo